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Speaker’s Statement
Mr Speaker
In February, I announced to the House that Sir John Benger, the current Clerk of the House and Head of the House of Commons service, will be leaving Parliament in the autumn to take up the role of Master of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. I am pleased to announce that, following a competitive recruitment process, Tom Goldsmith, the current Principal Clerk of the Table Office, has been appointed as the 52nd Clerk of the House of Commons, following the approval of His Majesty the King. I am sure that you will join me in congratulating Tom, who has many outstanding qualities to bring to this important role and will be a distinguished successor to Sir John Benger.
Arrangements will be made for a comprehensive handover period before Tom formally takes up the role in October. Until then, Sir John will continue to work hard and diligently as Clerk of the House—he has a lot of work to do! There will also be an opportunity before then for colleagues to recognise more formally Sir John’s historic contribution to the House and to wish him all the very best in the future.
Oral Answers to Questions
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
The Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries (Mark Spencer)
The Department’s farm welfare forum brings together England’s largest farming welfare organisations, many of which provide excellent mental health support. In October last year we opened the third phase of our future farming resilience fund. It provides free expert business advice to farmers and supports mental health and wellbeing where appropriate.
Dr Evans
We know that farmers are among those at the highest risk of suicide. In light of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee inquiry on rural community mental health, and the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution report on mental health in farming, what more can we do to support the mental wellbeing of our rural communities and farmers?
Mark Spencer
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his work in this area. DEFRA supports community action to tackle loneliness in rural areas via our ongoing funding of Action with Communities in Rural England, and initiatives that address the mental health impacts of social isolation. We have worked with the Yellow Wellies charity to provide advice and information to delivery partners on how to identify potential mental health issues, and tools for addressing them. We also regularly bring together rural community organisations to look into issues around transport connectivity and community in a rural context.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Mental illness among farmers is greatly increasing across the whole United Kingdom. Rural Support has revealed that hundreds of farmers in Northern Ireland are suffering from mental health issues. What discussions has the Minister had with the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs back home in relation to additional support for our farmers? We could deal with issue this better together across the whole United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Mark Spencer
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that we always have conversations with our colleagues across devolved Administrations. As he identifies, this is a very important issue. Together, we can encourage conversations and support through various charities. Of course, the Government will play their part in those conversations and in supporting of those charities.
Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Trudy Harrison)
We currently restrict imports of fur and fur products from cats and dogs, fur from wild animals caught using non-compliant trapping methods, and fur from endangered species. We will continue to enforce those restrictions very strongly.
Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)
The Government have boasted of their world-leading record on animal welfare, but they have done nothing to tackle the abhorrent global trade in fur. The last Labour Government banned fur farming in the United Kingdom. Having dropped the planned animals abroad Bill, will the Government commit to introducing legislation to ban the import and sale of fur, and end this country’s involvement in the global fur trade?
Trudy Harrison
The hon. Gentleman is correct: fur farming has been banned since 2000 in England and Wales and since 2002 in Scotland and Northern Ireland. We published a formal call for evidence on the fur trade, and we received around 30,000 responses, which we are currently considering, but we have an incredibly strong record with our plan for animal welfare.
Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
The global trade in fur costs millions of animals their lives every year. The Government’s call for evidence on the fur market in Great Britain closed in June 2021. I thank the Minister for telling us how many responses there were, but since then, there has been no word from the Department on whether the ban on the import and sale of fur will be introduced. Over three quarters of voters support a ban on fur imports. When will the results of the call for evidence be published, so that this country can see what experts really think and we can legislate? Does she agree that fur is best on the back of the animal, not on the back of a human?
Trudy Harrison
We have committed to exploring potential action in relation to animal fur, as set out in the action plan for animal welfare. We have conducted the call for evidence, and we continue to build on our evidence base on the fur sector, which will be used to inform any future action on the fur trade.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dr Thérèse Coffey)
Following a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs-led multi-agency investigation last year, I commissioned a further review, which reported in January, regarding the issue that affected crustaceans. It ruled out some of the prevailing theories, including the role of pyridine, and the view of the independent expert panel was that finding something to which we can attribute the cause with certainty is unlikely. However, we have continued to monitor this. In Hartlepool this month there have been anecdotal reports of sudden drops in the number of prawns and Norway lobster. The scale is unknown, but the Centre for Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science has undertaken precautionary sampling and testing for disease and pathogens.
Alex Cunningham
When 11-year-old Erin-Rose Cawley from Redcar was asked to write a speech for school, she wrote:
“The year is 2019 and our beaches have just received the Blue Flag meaning our beaches are some of the country’s best. Fast forward two years to beaches knee deep in dead, twitching crabs—a die off that was a never before seen phenomenon.”
Will the Minister tell Erin-Rose what the Government are going to do to ensure our dead sea is brought back to good health?
Dr Coffey
CEFAS has not received any reports of similar crab or crustacean mortality events since what happened in 2021, and a significant review—[Interruption.] A significant review has been undertaken already. I really do not think it is in the best interests to continue to challenge expert scientists who have undertaken that review and ruled out the theory that the hon. Gentleman has been pushing for some time now.
Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)
I sat with fishers a few weeks ago, alongside my hon. Friends the Members for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), to hear about the impact that the Teesside crustacean die-off has had on the livelihoods of local fishers. Let me tell the Secretary of State what they said:
“We’re finished. There’s nothing left to catch.”
“No-one listens. We’re just fishermen!”
“We’re not asking for a handout. We’re asking for a roadmap to get back on track.”
“Levelling up? They’ve levelled Teesside down”.
Working people—the grafters of this country and the foundation of our food security—are being ignored. It is wrong that public figures, instead of stepping up like true public servants, are acting like Houchen’s henchmen and pound-shop goons, closing down debate and legitimate challenge. Well, it will not work—this is not going away. Will the Secretary of State take a different course and meet Stan Rennie and the North East Fishing Collective with me to finally get to the bottom of this and give them the answers they deserve?
Dr Coffey
I am really disappointed by that. The shadow Secretary of State has basically impugned the integrity of the chief scientific adviser of DEFRA.
Dr Coffey
The hon. Gentleman has just, with his words, done that, and I am really concerned about that. This issue is very important. That is why we undertook a further independent review. The chief scientific adviser of DEFRA brought in more people.
The shadow Secretary of State talks about the people who are affected, and I understand that. The impact is such that the fishermen are having to go out to about 9 miles compared with the normal 2 to 3 miles. The inshore fisheries and conservation authority has reported to the Department that there is no particular change in the levels in that area. I am conscious that that may not be the impact for those individuals there. I have met other MPs in the area, and there are funding opportunities available, which might be for reinvestment in equipment to help them go further afield more regularly.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)
In July 2022, the Government announced their £100 million frequently flooded fund to support communities that have experienced repeated flooding but have been unable to secure all of the funding necessary to progress their schemes. My hon. Friend will be pleased to hear that his scheme has been approved, and full details will be with him and all those involved in his scheme in Shipley next week.
Philip Davies
I am extremely grateful to the Minister for that. She will know that I lobbied hard for the establishment of this frequently flooded fund for my constituents who regularly get flooded but never met the previous criteria. Clearly, I await next week’s announcement with great anticipation, but if not every part of my constituency has been successful in that bid, can the Minister confirm that this is not a one-off fund but an annual fund, and that any area that misses out this time might have an opportunity to be successful in future rounds?
Rebecca Pow
Yes, my hon. Friend was a doughty campaigner in raising this issue of frequently flooded communities. As I went around the country when communities unfortunately experienced flooding, it was clear that a number of those communities fell out of being able to access the funding, so I assure him that £20 million is going out in this first tranche. Letters will be sent out shortly, with further details next week. This money—this particular £100 million—has been ringfenced, and I give all credit to my hon. Friend for the part he played in highlighting this issue.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
The Minister will know that one way of preventing flooding downstream in urban areas is to try to deal with natural watercourses: rewinding, planting more trees and so on. There are other nature-based solutions that would be appropriate in Somerset, which she is very familiar with. Could she tell us what the Department is doing to try to introduce some of those solutions?
Rebecca Pow
I thank the hon. Lady very much for that question, which touches on so many parts of DEFRA’s portfolio: tackling flooding, water quality, biodiversity—we can get all of that by re-meandering rivers. The Environment Agency has already spent £15 million on natural flood management schemes. There is a lot of work going on, and indeed, natural flood management schemes can be part of applications for the frequently flooded fund.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Ind)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Trudy Harrison)
We want to ensure that rural areas and the people living within them are absolutely given the opportunity to flourish. We are supporting rural businesses in communities with £5 billion of Project Gigabit funding and £1 billion of shared rural network funding. We are improving their connectivity to make sure that rural areas thrive.
Andrew Bridgen
The new national forest has been of huge benefit to both my former coalmining communities and my rural communities in North West Leicestershire, to the point where many of the villages and communities just outside the forest would like to be part of it. Could the Minister give her advice on this matter?
Trudy Harrison
What a tree-mendous question! Trees have transformed that previously scarred landscape, and I assure my hon. Friend that I also appreciate the lungs of Leicestershire, creating 200 square miles of forest. Some 9 million people visit that area and 5,000 jobs have been created, as have 100 km of cycling tracks. My hon. Friend sets me a challenge, which I relish: I will certainly look into how we can continue to expand the National Forest Company.
Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thank you for the email you just sent to us all, which announces that the new Clerk of the House is going to be Tom Goldsmith. I am grateful to have the opportunity to be the first to congratulate him.
Sir Chris Bryant
Oh, I missed the statement—I am terribly sorry. I am useless; resign instantly. Anyway, I am congratulating him.
It is very important that rural communities look like rural communities. One of the things that we did in the 1945 Labour Government was to insist that people could not put advertising hoardings up along motorways outside towns. Unfortunately, lots of farmers these days are wheeling advertising hoardings along by motorways, which is dangerous for drivers on motorways. Is it not time that we put a stop to it?
Trudy Harrison
The hon. Gentleman raises a technical question. I am happy to liaise with my colleagues in the Department for Transport on that particular matter, and I will write to him with a response.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
According to a rural Scottish business panel survey last month, the impact of the cost of living is damaging rural Scottish businesses, with almost nine out of 10 having financial concerns and three quarters postponing investment plans due to cost increases. Despite what the Minister has said earlier, can she tell me what additional support she can provide to support rural communities struggling with higher costs?
Trudy Harrison
There is a plethora of support, particularly around energy with the household support fund and including from my colleagues in the Department for Business and Trade—the artist formerly known as BEIS. Surely the hon. Lady has seen the announcement this morning on how we are supporting the transition to green energy, too, which will benefit constituents not only in Scotland, but right around the UK.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Trudy Harrison)
Connectivity to rural areas is vitally important to us. As I have already set out this morning, we are spending millions on ensuring that rural areas thrive and that people have access to nature.
Caroline Lucas
As the Minister knows, goal 10 of the environmental improvement plan is to enhance engagement with the natural environment. Saving historic footpaths is a vital way of doing that, so it is a bit bizarre, given there is already a backlog of more than 4,000 applications waiting to be processed to save those footpaths, that the Government have reneged on their promise to scrap the deadline in the mapping review, without any plan to address that backlog. Will the Minister rethink that short-sighted decision, so that we do not risk losing 40,000 miles of precious footpaths forever?
Trudy Harrison
Actually, that decision was taken in 2000, and we have extended the date from 2026 to 2031. I remind the hon. Member of the measures that we are taking to improve access to nature with Natural England and the commitment for people to be within 15 minutes of a blue or green area, as well as with the national trails and the designation of the coast to coast as a national trial. The England coastal path is 2,700 miles around England that people can access. In fact, people can access most coastal, common, fell, moorland and heathland areas across the country, but there is a balance between access for the public, the protection of nature and ensuring that the lives of people in rural areas and their livelihoods thrive.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)
Air pollution has fallen significantly since 2010, and our recently published environmental improvement plan sets out the actions that we will continue to take to continue to improve air quality. They include additional measures to tackle domestic burning and agricultural emissions, continued delivery of the £883 million NOx programme and supporting local authorities to improve air quality more quickly with clear guidance and tools.
Jane Hunt
The Minister will know that I am really referring to incinerators in my particular instance. The Government have taken steps to improve air quality through the Environment Act 2021. One of the targets is to have an annual mean concentration for PM2.5 levels of 10 micrograms per cubic metre or below by 2040. When determining these targets, the Government considered the World Health Organisation’s own target, which was 10 micrograms per cubic metre. However, it has recently lowered that to 5 micrograms per cubic metre. Will the Government consider lowering their target, so that it is in line with the WHO?
Rebecca Pow
The simple answer is no. Clearly we look at all the World Health Organisation guidelines, but they are only there to inform the setting of standards; they are not ready-made targets. Being realistic, even without man-made emissions and all the measures we have set forward in our groundbreaking targets, PM2.5 concentrations would still exceed the WHO guidelines—even the lower one—because we get these emissions from natural sources and also from other countries. The WHO guidelines would therefore be unachievable. I was heartened by my recent visit to Sweden to launch the Forum for International Co-operation on Air Quality, which shows we have to work together on this internationally.
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
The chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, has just issued a report, with 15 recommendations, that gives a route map on how to achieve these targets earlier, including on indoor air pollution and wood burners. Will the Minister respond to that now, write in greater detail to me as the chair of the all-party group on air pollution, and come to a meeting to explain what progress the Government can make on these 15 objectives, so that we can make faster progress and save more lives sooner?
Rebecca Pow
I thank the hon. Member for that. I have met him many times on these issues, and I commend him for this work, but I have also met Professor Chris Whitty on this very subject. The hon. Member just needs to look at the forthcoming update of our clean air strategy. We are already working on many of the things that Chris Whitty has raised, and we have to get the Department of Health and Social Care to play its part as well.
Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)
The Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries (Mark Spencer)
Agriculture is a devolved issue, and is the responsibility of the Scottish Government. Our farmers produce some of the best food in the world. In England, our environmental land management schemes are now open for them to access, and we will pay farmers to deliver positive environmental outcomes. We will also support the production of great British food, healthier soils and more pollinators.
Jamie Stone
For the record, may I say how surprised and disappointed I was that the lady who was offered the Rural Affairs job in the Scottish Government turned it down because, as it is reported, it was seen to be a demotion? I was born on a farm. My local farmers and crofters are vital to the economy of my constituency. All over the UK, it is about feeding the nation.
On the subject of feeding the nation, there is increased movement of cattle from Scotland to England. I will not go into the reasons why that is happening, but it is happening, and the Minister will know that. Does he agree that a universal electronic tagging scheme that matches the whole of the UK, perhaps including Northern Ireland, would greatly facilitate this sort of sale of livestock?
Mark Spencer
I thank the hon. Member for his question. Obviously, I work closely with Mairi Gougeon in the Scottish Government. She will probably be disappointed to have been re-offered her job, despite its being offered to somebody else, but we will continue to have a positive working relationship there.
The hon. Member is right to highlight the fact that co-operation across the Union is best for UK agriculture and best for UK food production. I think systems for moving cattle between Scotland and England need to flow as quickly and as easily as possible, so that that marketplace works efficiently for farmers on both sides of the border.
Wendy Chamberlain
I recently visited the Quaker Oats site in my constituency, which works very hard with a number of local farmers who provide the site and, outwith North East Fife, works hard on LEAF—Linking Environment and Farming—accreditation, providing sustainability initiatives for local farmers, but they are frustrated. In his answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), the Minister mentioned the importance of working across the UK and wider sustainability initiatives in the supply chain, such as the extended producer responsibility scheme, so will the Minister provide an update on that scheme and will he commit to re-engaging so that, on a UK basis, we can provide that support?
Mark Spencer
I thank the hon. Member for that question. Again, she highlights how important this is. I think farming is challenging enough, frankly, without our putting false barriers in place across the border between England and Scotland. We need to co-operate across the Union and make sure that farmers and food producers on both sides of the border have the opportunity to access the market without barriers.
Sir Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
As you know, Mr Speaker, the west Pennine moors have a lot of tenant farmers. Does the Minister share my concern that we are seeing an increasing use of mandatory rounds in relation to development, often for solar or tree planting, to break both business farm tenancies and agricultural tenancies that have inheritance attached to them? If he does share that concern, what is the Department going to do about it?
Mark Spencer
I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. We have been working with Baroness Rock, who has been doing a review of farm-based tenancies, and we will respond to that review very soon. We want to support tenants up and down this country, particularly in Cumbria, and I hope to visit that part of the country in the very near future to see at first hand what is happening on those hills.
Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)
My right hon. Friend will recall that my constituents Andy and Lynda Eadon have done tremendous work in raising awareness of the mental health challenges affecting young farmers in particular in rural areas, in memory of their son Len. Can I thank him for agreeing to participate in the Westminster leg of the Len’s Light tractor relay? Mr Speaker, he is perhaps the only Minister you will allow to drive a tractor anywhere near this historic building. Can I urge him to continue to apply pressure to land-based colleges and other educational institutions to make sure that mental health awareness is part of the educational experience of everyone entering agriculture?
Mark Spencer
That, actually, Mr Speaker, is a very important issue: “If it’s not red, leave it in the shed” is what I would say.
I pay tribute to my right hon. and learned Friend’s constituents for their support of mental health charities, particularly in memory of Leonard. He has been a huge inspiration to young farmers, certainly across the east midlands, in talking about mental health challenges in that industry.
Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)
We have asked water companies to deliver their largest ever infrastructure investment, £56 billion over 25 years. Nearly 800 improvements are under way already, and that is dealing with storm sewage overflows. The Secretary of State and I have asked sewage companies to come up with an action plan for every single storm overflow in England, and water companies will face higher penalties, to be enforced and paid more quickly than ever before. Under Labour the monitoring record of storm sewage overflows was woeful, but by the end of this year it will be 100%.
Liz Twist
Labour does have a plan—a much more ambitious plan—to tackle combined sewer overflows, and this would include cutting discharges by 90%, mandatory sewage outlet monitoring, and automatic fines for discharges. Will the Secretary of State enact that plan with immediate effect?
Rebecca Pow
I am glad the hon. Lady has asked me that, because her plan would add £1,000 on to every customer’s bill and we would have to add pipes that would go two and a half times around the world to cope with what Labour is proposing. We are already doing everything that has been called for, and more: we are increasing fines; we are increasing monitoring; we are taking tougher sanctions on businesses; and we have a costed plan and are mindful of the impact on customers.
Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)
Investment has already seen an over-50% reduction in storm overflows in North Devon, resulting in bathing water quality being rated good or excellent along the coast. However, this is only tested between May and September. Will my hon. Friend consider extending the testing season for the increasing number of all year round bathers and surfers, or at least look for waters to be tested after a storm overflow has discharged?
Rebecca Pow
My hon. Friend is a great voice for her constituency in this area and I am very pleased to hear about those figures for the improving water. We are using powers in the Environment Act 2021, and under them we require companies to make discharge data available to the public in near real time if there has been a discharge that could have affected water quality, and to monitor water quality upstream and downstream of their assets. This monitoring will be all year round and will come into force at the end of this year, and all water companies will also have to install new flow monitors on more than 2,000 wastewater treatment works.
Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)
The Tory sewage scandal is a national disgrace. The waters that run through our communities, the seas that millions look out to, and the quality of life and livelihoods have been turned into an open sewer. The Tory plan means discharges will continue to 2050, 27 years away, and even then there is no delivery plan, and we do not know which communities will benefit first and which could be waiting for decades, whereas our plan will see systematic dumping ended by 2030. Over the weekend The Times reported new data showing 800 discharges every day. Is the Secretary of State familiar with those figures, and if so, given that the Environment Agency has said it will publish by midday tomorrow, will she make a statement to the House before it rises for Easter today?
Rebecca Pow
I will honestly say that a lot of the—[Interruption.] Well, I am not sure they are facts. [Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. Let’s carry on with the answer to the question.
Rebecca Pow
Thank you, Mr Speaker. A lot of what we are hearing is disingenuous and misleading the public. The plan, as I have just—
Mr Speaker
Order. We must think about what we say, and I am sure the Minister would love to withdraw what she has just said.
Rebecca Pow
I will definitely withdraw that, Mr Speaker, but we do have to be careful about what we say to the public, and I have pointed out that the so-called plan the Labour party has put forward is thoroughly unworkable in the cost it would put on the public, the time it would take and the amount of pipes that would be required. It would involve digging up the entire nation, whereas we have a completely costed plan: it is very clear, and we have set targets on when these storm overflow monitors have to be in place—by the end of this year—and all the work on the storm overflow plans must be delivered to the Secretary of State and me forthwith. So we are definitely on top of this like never before.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dr Thérèse Coffey)
I am pleased to say that today, alongside the launch of our net zero strategy, we are launching the nature markets framework. We need a healthy and thriving natural environment to meet our net zero goals and build our resilience to climate change. The announcement today on the investment we are seeking, alongside the £4 million we will use to boost that private finance, sends a signal that the opportunities for investing in our farmland, forestry, peatlands and marine areas are great and can offer long-term rewards for both people and nature.
Justin Madders
We are very proud that the Canal & River Trust has its headquarters in Ellesmere Port, but like everyone else it has been struggling with increasing costs relating to covid and energy. It is waiting for an answer from the Government about what will happen with its grant funding, so will the Secretary of State give us a date by which a decision will be made and guarantee there will be no cuts to its grant funding?
Dr Coffey
I am sorry, Mr Speaker, but I missed the name of the company the hon. Gentleman referred to. As he will know, support has been provided in different ways to all businesses with regard to energy costs.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Ind)
The Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries (Mark Spencer)
Food is assessed before it is allowed to be placed on the UK market, and that assessment includes whether it is safe. As with any other food, any producer has to be registered with its local food authority to meet strict food safety requirements. Food derived from or including insect protein must be properly labelled, with ingredients clearly indicated and any warnings, such as the presence of allergens, included on the label.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
Last night, Abi Kay of Farmers Weekly posted a piece detailing allegations of a major fraud in the meat processing sector. Her investigation revealed that
“up until at least the end of 2020, a food manufacturer was passing off huge quantities of foreign pork—sometimes tens of thousands of tonnes a week—as British”,
as well as passing potentially unfit food into the food chain. We had hoped that Ministers might make a statement this morning to reassure the public. In the absence of that, will the Minister tell the House what action he is taking, how often he has met representatives of the meat processing sector in the last month, and whether he is confident that adequate whistleblowing and trade union representation structures are in place to ensure that such malpractices cannot go undetected?
Mark Spencer
As the hon. Gentleman indicates, this is a very important issue. We have not made a statement today because there is an ongoing criminal investigation. I do not want to jeopardise that criminal investigation, because these are very serious allegations. The Food Standards Agency has responsibility in this area. I met the chair of the FSA last week. I continue to meet representatives of the meat industry—I met them this month and do so on a regular basis. We will keep a close eye on the investigation and leave it to the FSA to deliver criminal prosecution.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
Mark Spencer
The fundamental principle of food labelling rules is that information provided to consumers must not mislead. Based on evidence provided from a 2021 call for evidence on food labelling for animal welfare, we are still considering how to move forward.
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
Dr Coffey
My first rescue dog was from the Dogs Trust, which is a very important charity. On animal welfare, the hon. Lady will be aware of our good record, including Bills that have been going through this place. Business managers are aware of the manifesto commitments that we want to fulfil, and they are in charge of scheduling Government business. The Leader of the House will announce business in the usual way.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Trudy Harrison)
Yes, I absolutely will. I understand the proportionality required on this issue to protect nature and improve the lives and livelihoods of people living in protected landscapes.
Simon Lightwood (Wakefield) (Lab/Co-op)
Dr Coffey
The hon. Gentleman is right to be concerned about the quality of rivers. The Environment Agency is funded through its licensing in order to do the necessary inspections. The Government increased the amount of money available to the Environment Agency to undertake criminal investigations. He should be aware that there is a live criminal investigation right now into water companies and what is happening to sewage.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.
Sir Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
I was appalled to read in this week’s Farmers Weekly that food labelled as British has actually come from South America or even Africa, and that meat not fit for human consumption has been going into the food chain. The Food Standards Agency’s report makes it clear that it has been misled and hoodwinked by these operators. Is there a case to bring the FSA within DEFRA rather than the Department of Health and Social Care, where it is now?
Dr Coffey
The Select Committee Chair is right that the Farmers Weekly has provided an interesting investigation.
Dr Coffey
As my right hon. Friend the Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries said, the investigation is under way. It is true that the Food Standards Agency is a non-ministerial Department and is accountable to the Department for Health and Social Care, but as my right hon. Friend said, there is active engagement. The machinery of government change that Select Committee Chair proposes is of interest, and I will consider it with the Prime Minister.
I would like to add that in my comments to the Select Committee the other day, I said that I do not read editorials in some of the magazines. I really enjoyed the article in this week’s Farmers Guardian about Angus herd fuel efficiency gains of 41p per kilo, and in Farmers Weekly about the trials of replacing insecticides, a Scottish pilot that was very interesting indeed.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
Mark Spencer
We have regular conversations across the supply chain. The hon. Gentleman is right to identify that the supply chain needs fairness to be built into it. There needs to be a sharing of risk, responsibility and reward. We have regular conversations with retailers, processors and primary producers to try to encourage fairness across the supply chain.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
Welcome support for farmers in Dorset and across the country would be for the Department and Government as a whole to learn the lessons on trade deals, as pointed out by the Secretary of State’s predecessor but one, my right hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice). Can the Secretary of State set out the discussions that she has with Ministers about trade deals, to ensure that UK farmers’ interests, food production and security are at the heart of the discussions?
Dr Coffey
I assure my hon. Friend that I see my role as Secretary of State as ensuring that we have productive trade agreements, which include exports as well as potential imports. It is important, and it has been a key part of our negotiations, that we not only protect our sanitary and phytosanitary and animal welfare standards but ensure that any impact on the domestic market is sufficient that British farmers continue to grow, and rear, their brilliant British food and livestock.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I know the Government and the Minister, in particular, take a deep interest in fisheries issues, specifically about spurdog fishing; I asked the Minister a question about that some time ago. Will the Minister confirm that the total allowable catch for spurdog will be announced? That will create a significant boost for all local fisheries, especially those in Northern Ireland.
Mark Spencer
The hon. Gentleman demonstrates again how informed he is on this matter. From Saturday, it will be possible to catch spurdog. The statutory instrument has now been laid. That species is now open to fishermen across devolved Administrations and the whole of the United Kingdom to go and catch from Saturday. We will be allocating quota in the very near future.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)
The Attorney General (Victoria Prentis)
With your permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will answer questions 1, 2 and 5 together. By convention, where the law officers have been asked to provide advice, the contents of any such advice is not disclosed outside Government. That protects our ability as legal advisers to give the Government full and frank legal advice.
Mr Carmichael
I somehow suspected that the answer would be something like that. The Attorney General knows that I am one of her admirers, and long have been so, right back to the days of her maiden speech, when I remind the House she said:
“The European convention on human rights is a masterful document, and we must remain a signatory to it...In this country, the courts are unable to quash an Act of Parliament. It seems we need to re-state that, while our courts should have regard to the decisions of the ECHR, these are on the same footing, and Parliament is sovereign.”—[Official Report, 25 June 2015; Vol. 597, c. 1113.]
Will she confirm that that thinking still informs her assessment of these questions? If she can, I think the rest of us can join up the dots for ourselves.
The Attorney General
Well, Madam Deputy Speaker, I assure the right hon. Gentleman that the admiration is entirely mutual. I also assure him that I heard very recently the Prime Minister, from this Dispatch Box, assure the House that it is the Government’s policy to remain a signatory to the ECHR.
Stuart C. McDonald
Articles 12 and 13 of the trafficking convention require states to support a trafficking victim’s physical, psychological and social recovery, including through a rest and recovery period, but clauses 22 and onwards of her Government’s awful Illegal Migration Bill expressly deny trafficking and slavery victims access to such support. I too have a lot of respect for the Attorney General, but she will lose support and respect if she continues to allow that Bill to proceed in blatant breach of the trafficking convention.
The Attorney General
As I have said, all lawyers have a duty of confidentiality to their clients and I am simply not permitted to tell the hon. Gentleman, or indeed anybody else, what legal advice has been shared between our office and that of the Government. The use of the Human Rights Act 1998 section 19(1)(b) statement does not mean that the Bill breaches the ECHR. It just means that the Home Secretary cannot state that the Bill is more likely than not compatible with convention rights. If legal challenges are made, we will take all steps to defend our position in court.
Kirsten Oswald
Can the Attorney General clarify what assessment she has made of the legality of the amendments to the Illegal Migration Bill that are aimed at sidestepping the convention relating to the status of refugees, as well as ignoring the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights? If those amendments were to be accepted by the UK Government, what does she think it would mean? Does she think it could put the UK’s place on the Council of Europe at risk?
The Attorney General
As I have said, I am not able to share my assessment, but perhaps it might be useful for the House to know when a section 19(1)(b) statement has previously been used. It was used in relation to the Communications Act 2003 by Tessa Jowell, who used words very similar to mine just now:
“That does not mean that we believe the Bill to be incompatible…and we would mount a robust defence if it were legally challenged.”—[Official Report, 8 December 2002; Vol. 395, c. 789.]
The Attorney General
It was challenged. It was challenged all the way up to the ECHR, and I understand that in the end the Government won by nine votes to eight.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call the Chair of the Select Committee on Justice.
Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
I have no doubt, and nor has anyone in this House, about the Attorney General’s commitment or that of Conservative Members to the European convention on human rights. Beyond the fact that the section 19(1)(b) statement, while unusual, is not unique, does she agree that it is also important to remember that our whole case law system depends on existing legal precedent being tested from time to time in the light of changing and emerging factual circumstances to which case law or existing statute can be applied? The testing of the legal position is not any kind of illegality or impropriety at all.
The Attorney General
I agree wholeheartedly. I feel it is perfectly proper for lawyers—Government lawyers, in this case—to test a novel idea before the courts. In fact, one reason I very much enjoyed my career in the Government Legal Service is that Government lawyers frequently do so. It is one of the main reasons why people ought to apply to join.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
Thank goodness I am not a lawyer! We have an excellent Minister, who has spent the whole of this question not answering it. Three questions on the Order Paper, about three completely different conventions, have been grouped together; I have no idea why. It seems to me that what we want is the Minister to answer the question.
May I try a question on the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings? It is clear that people who come across in boats are smuggled. That is not part of the convention, but people who are already here who are forced into prostitution or slave labour should be protected by that convention. Will the Attorney General tell us—please answer!—whether the Illegal Migration Bill will be amended so that those people are still protected? A yes or no will do.
The Attorney General
My hon. Friend is a staunch defender of the procedures and the propriety of our activities in this House. I know that he will agree that it is important that the Law Officers convention is upheld. As I have said, I cannot share my advice with this House; I would very much like to do so, but I am unable to. For the Government’s position, I refer the House to the explanatory notes that accompany the Illegal Migration Bill.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Last month, the Attorney General told the Justice Committee:
“It is particularly important that they”—
Government lawyers—
“work to keep the Government acting properly and within the rule of law”.
The House of Lords Constitution Committee found in January that the Government had
“twice knowingly introduced legislation in Parliament which would…undermine the rule of law: the United Kingdom Internal Market Bill and the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill.”
This Illegal Migration Bill, even before the Attorney General’s own Back Benchers are finished with it, is a further example of that. When will her
“first duty…as an officer of the court”—
those are her words—trump her loyalty to a lawbreaking Government?
The Attorney General
My first duty is to the court and to the rule of law. I have absolutely no hesitation about restating that as often as the hon. Gentleman wishes me to; it is something that I believe very deeply, and I know that the Solicitor General agrees. Our advice on the Illegal Migration Bill is not something that we are able to share with the House. The use of the section 19(1)(b) statement is, as I have explained, unusual, but not unprecedented and certainly not improper.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call the Scottish National party spokesperson.
Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
It is no secret that the Attorney General has reservations about the Illegal Migration Bill, and it is also no secret that those on the far right of her party are intent on rebelling to push the Bill further into breaking international law. Will she do the honourable thing today, and confirm that if the Prime Minister concedes on this, she will make a stand and declare the Bill unlawful?
The Attorney General
I am very pleased that the Illegal Migration Bill passed its Committee stage in the House without amendment.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
The Solicitor General (Michael Tomlinson)
Tackling violence against women and girls remains a key priority for the Government. We are doing everything possible to make our streets and homes safer for them, not least through our joint national action plan, which has seen a significant increase in the volume of charges for adult rape since January 2021.
Kerry McCarthy
Government statistics published this morning show that 29% of Crown court cases have been open for more than a year, and Rape Crisis reports that, according to the response to a freedom of information request, there is a record backlog of sexual assault and rape cases, with trials frequently postponed. What impact does the Solicitor General think that that backlog—the situation in the courts—is having on the ability of the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute rape cases?
The Solicitor General
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising an important issue. It is correct to say that the time between charge and completion is being reduced, but she is right: it is still too long. One factor that will encourage victims to stay within the criminal justice process, which is what we all want to see, is the provision of support by independent sexual violence advisers, and guidance is being put on a statutory footing in that regard.
The hon. Lady may be interested to know that I spoke to her local chief Crown prosecutor in person yesterday, in a neighbouring Bristol constituency, and she is doing an excellent job. Last year, the number of suspects charged for adult rape in the CPS south-west area more than doubled.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
I am sure that the whole House wants to see much higher prosecution rates for people who commit the appalling crime of raping women and girls. What impact does the Solicitor General think that the brilliant Operation Soteria will have on the current prosecution rates?
The Solicitor General
My hon. Friend is right to mention Operation Soteria. There is, in fact, a link with the question from the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), because Operation Soteria was founded in her area. It is making a significant difference, and the volume of adult rape suspects charged has more than doubled in the last year.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
The Solicitor General (Michael Tomlinson)
We are determined to strengthen our response to all forms of economic crime, including fraud, and the Government will soon publish a new fraud strategy to address this threat. Both the Crown Prosecution Service and the Serious Fraud Office play an important role in bringing fraudsters to justice.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
As the Solicitor General will know, each September the Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime, organised by Professor Barry Rider, meets at Jesus College Cambridge, and the issue of establishing a dedicated anti-fraud or economic crime agency is frequently raised. What consideration has been given to that proposal, and what is the Solicitor General doing to promote education about fraud, and prevention and discouragement of it, through effective early compliance?
The Solicitor General
I am indeed aware of that symposium, because I have been invited to speak at it this year, and I very much hope to see the hon. Gentleman there so that we can discuss this subject even further. As he will know, the National Economic Crime Centre, which was launched in 2018, leads the UK’s operational response to economic crime. As for his wider question, he will be aware of the Government’s fraud strategy, which will be released soon.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
Every day that passes, more lives are destroyed by fraud. We urgently need a Government who understand the scale of that crisis and have a plan to tackle it. Five months ago, the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box and told us that
“the Government will shortly publish our fraud strategy…to block more scams and better protect the public.”—[Official Report, 2 November 2022; Vol. 721, c. 859.]
The Solicitor General has told us again today that the strategy will come shortly. Do the Government have a different concept of time? What do they mean by “shortly”, and how much longer are we going to need to wait—or is this just another example of the Government making big promises on crucial issues and delivering absolutely nothing?
The Solicitor General
The shadow Attorney General is not right about that. The fraud strategy will be published. In terms of delivery, she will be pleased to hear that last year the CPS prosecuted over 6,000 defendants where fraud and forgery was the principal offence, and the conviction rate was over 80%. This is a Government that have delivered and will continue to deliver in this area.
Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)
The Attorney General (Victoria Prentis)
Last week I met the Minister for Immigration to discuss how we can increase the prosecution rate further for those who engage in this dangerous offending. I am pleased to report that there has been a significant increase in all immigration prosecutions since the end of June last year, with the CPS bringing 260 prosecutions and so far securing 164 convictions.
Wendy Chamberlain
Increasing prosecution rates is an important way of tackling people trafficking, but another is ensuring safe and legal routes for people seeking asylum. The all-party parliamentary group on Afghan women and girls, which I co-chair, has written to the Government looking for support for those very vulnerable groups. Does the Attorney General accept that her assessment for the Government of the Illegal Migration Bill might be better if safe and legal routes were progressed at the same time?
The Attorney General
I thank the hon. Lady for her work on that important APPG; she will have heard my answer to the previous question. The Government need to use every tool available to us to stop these dangerous crossings. One of those tools is prosecution, which is going well. Another tool is working closely with the French Government, and it is important to note that the French have prevented 31,000 crossings this year, which is nearly 50% up on this time last year.
Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)
The Government are working flat out to stop people smugglers from continuing their evil trade and to ensure that they are brought to justice. What assistance is the Crown Prosecution Service providing to investigators on small boat pilots and other people traffickers?
The Attorney General
The Crown Prosecution Service is working hard on these prosecutions and will not hesitate where people are suspected of immigration offences whenever the legal test is met. It is focusing on the pilots of small boats and also on disrupting the supply chains of people traffickers and organised crime gangs.
Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)
The Solicitor General (Michael Tomlinson)
The Attorney General and I meet the Secretary of State for Justice regularly and discuss numerous issues. Where they touch on legal issues and advice, the hon. Lady will know, and will have heard the Attorney General clearly set out, that the Law Officers’ convention applies.
Jessica Morden
Imprisonment for public protection sentences were abolished in 2012, but that did not apply retrospectively. A constituent of mine whose son is serving an IPP sentence dating from before then has told me how this causes continued uncertainty and disruption for the whole family, and concern about their son’s mental health deteriorating. Can the Minister commit to working to reach a consensus on how best to address these long-standing IPP cases?
The Solicitor General
The hon. Lady raises a very serious point, and I am grateful to her. IPP sentences were first introduced in 2003, and she is right that they were abolished in 2012, but not retrospectively, nor properly could they have been. Further reforms were introduced last year, but it is right that, by definition, those in prison on IPP sentences have not been assessed as safe to release. However, I will certainly put her in touch with the Prisons Minister to discuss the matter further.
Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
The Solicitor General (Michael Tomlinson)
The CPS runs an award-winning and highly competitive legal training scheme, which has seen hundreds of trainees undertake a training contract and/or pupillage across England and Wales with the CPS since 2012.
Stephen Metcalfe
I thank my hon. and learned Friend for his answer. Building on that, can he tell the House what steps he is taking to encourage people from a more diverse background to consider the law as a career?
The Solicitor General
I am very grateful indeed to my hon. Friend for raising this important issue. The CPS has extended its postgraduate qualification requirements to include new solicitors qualification examinations, which opens up the career to a more diverse audience. Madam Deputy Speaker, you will be pleased to know that for the last three years the CPS was ranked No. 1 in the Universum rankings as a highly attractive employer to law students. I commend to my hon. Friend, and indeed to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, a visit to your local chief Crown prosecutors to find out more and to encourage law students to sign up to the CPS. I addressed the CPS leaders conference in Bristol yesterday, and they are very keen to meet us all.
Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
The Attorney General (Victoria Prentis)
We know the serious impact that persistent antisocial behaviour can have on both individuals and the wider community. Those who commit antisocial behaviour will face swift and visible justice, increased fines and enhanced drug testing as part of the Government’s new action plan.
Liz Twist
As the Attorney General says, antisocial behaviour has a terrible impact on communities such as Winlaton in my constituency, so I am glad that the Government have finally seen the light and increased sentences. Does she regret that the Government allowed the use of community sentences to fall by 62% between 2010 and 2021, and that the sentences became so much weaker?
The Attorney General
I know there has been a particular problem with antisocial behaviour in the hon. Lady’s constituency. As a result, Northumbria police will receive trailblazer funding for both immediate justice and hotspot policing. I think it is important that the courts are able to use the wide range of sentences available to them.
Virginia Crosbie (Ynys Môn) (Con)
Ynys Môn has received more than £695,000 from the safer streets fund, and I am delighted that some of the money is being used by Môn Communities Forward for first aid courses and by North Wales police for free boxing sessions for women and girls at the canolfan in Holyhead, which the Attorney General is welcome to attend. Can she confirm to my Ynys Môn constituents that, in addition to making Anglesey’s streets safer, this Government are committed to cracking down on antisocial behaviour?
The Attorney General
My hon. Friend is a great champion for her constituency. The plan unveiled this week will have a real and visible impact on antisocial behaviour around the country. It will be interesting to see the learning we get from the areas that have been targeted because there are particular problems. I think the impact will be swift.
Junior Doctors’ Strikes
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)
(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care if he will make a statement on the impact of the junior doctors’ strikes and what steps he is taking to prevent further strike action.
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Barclay)
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) for his question. I know that colleagues and constituents will be concerned about the planned 96-hour walkout organised by unions representing junior doctors.
The hon. Gentleman asks about the impact, and we know that during the previous walkout by junior doctors earlier this month, 181,000 appointments had to be rescheduled. The disruption and risk will be far greater with this four-day walkout, not only because it lasts longer but because it coincides with extended public holidays and Ramadan, with knock-on effects on services before and after the strike action itself, and because a significant proportion of junior doctors will already be on planned absence due to the holiday period.
NHS England has stated that it will prioritise a number of areas, including emergency treatment, critical care, maternity care, neonatal care and trauma, but—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman asked the urgent question, so he might want to hear the answer. NHS England has been clear that it cannot fully mitigate the risk of patient harm at this time, which is concerning and disappointing. Patients should not have to face such disruption again, and I have invited the British Medical Association and the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association to enter formal talks on pay, with the condition that they cancel strike action.
The BMA’s junior doctors committee’s refusal to engage in conversations unless we commit to delivering a 35% pay increase is unacceptable at a time of considerable economic pressure and suggests a leadership that is adopting a militant position, rather than working constructively with the Government in the interests of patients. None the less, we remain determined to find a settlement that not only prevents further strike action but, equally, recognises the important work of junior doctors within the NHS, just as we have done with the “Agenda for Change” trade unions in their dispute. We will continue to work in good faith, in the interest of everyone who uses the NHS.
Wes Streeting
More than 300,000 operations and appointments have been cancelled due to industrial action in the NHS since December. The strikes planned for next month will be longer than any previous ones, with no derogations planned and they will be coming off the back of the bank holiday weekend. Patients are worried sick and consultants have written to me to say they are terrified for patients’ safety—they fear that patients will die as a result. So when is the Health Secretary going to get junior doctors back in for talks, take them seriously and stop these catastrophic strikes from wreaking havoc on patient care?
First, the Government failed to learn the lessons of the nurses’ strikes and refused to speak to junior doctors until the last minute. Then, instead of treating junior doctors with respect and sitting down for proper negotiations, Ministers took to Twitter for a mud-slinging match. The British Medical Association accused the Secretary of State of misrepresenting the truth when he tweeted that its pay demand was a “pre-condition”. The BMA has since said that it is a “starting point” for negotiations. Will he today clarify which side is correct and who was spreading fake news?
Since the beginning of these disputes, the Government have acted like a bystander when patients needed action. Never was that clearer than when the Prime Minister said that he did not want to “get in the middle” of them. We have a Prime Minister whose idea of leadership looks more like cowardice. He talks about delivery, but the NHS is still waiting. These strikes come at a time when the Government are failing to cut the NHS backlog. But it is not only the backlog that they have built up—a plethora of plans were trailed in the press in recent weeks but on the final sitting day before recess none has emerged. There is no sign of the NHS workforce plan, when the NHS is short of more than 150,000 staff. There is no sign of the general practice plan, when patients are finding it impossible to see their GP. There is no sign either of the review of integrated care services or the social care update, which reports suggest contains a stealth cut of £250 million to the social care workforce. So can the Secretary of State say whether the Government are planning to get the bad news out over recess and avoid scrutiny in this House, or is it less sinister and they just do not know what they are doing?
Steve Barclay
The urgent question was on the junior doctors—[Interruption.] I am sure I will quote—[Interruption.] There is a rare point of agreement between us. The hon. Gentleman is chuntering, but let me go through the list of things that he did raise pertaining to the junior doctors’ dispute. He said that the Government should get the junior doctors committee in for talks; we have done so—his third question made reference to the fact that we have. We have had the junior doctors in for discussions—[Interruptions.] I will run through the questions.
The hon. Gentleman questions whether there are preconditions attached to those discussions. I have checked the minutes of the meeting and there was a list of conditions —a pay restoration of 35%, and a range of other factors that were put on the table— that were preconditions that the Government had to commit to. The point is that he has said in the media that he does not support those preconditions. He says that 35% is unaffordable, so what is his position? One minute he says that he supports the junior doctors and that they should not go on strike, yet the next minute he says that he does not actually support the precondition that the junior doctors have said is the requirement for them to enter into discussion.
The reality is that the Government have taken a constructive and meaningful approach to trade union negotiations. That is why we have reached agreement with the “Agenda for Change” trade unions. It is why the Royal College of Nursing, Unison, the GMB and the Royal College of Midwives are all recommending the agreement that has been reached, covering more than 1 million staff across the NHS, to their members. The junior doctors have set a precondition on those talks which the hon. Gentleman does not agree—[Interruption.] That is a precondition. He does not seem to understand the terms the junior doctors—[Interruption.] He asked the question, he is getting the answer and the fact that it points to the contradiction in his own position is one that he seems to be having trouble with. Conservative Members are used to contradictions from those on the Opposition Front Bench. He supports the use of the independent sector, whereas his deputy does not. He wants to nationalise the GP estate, but his shadow Chancellor does not. The Opposition are full of contradictions. The reality is that there is a position in terms of the—[Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) chunters again. There is a position in terms of precondition. The shadow Secretary of State asked me to confirm at the Dispatch Box whether it was a precondition of the junior doctors. Ahead of the urgent question, I checked the minutes—[Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. We cannot have this constant chuntering.
Steve Barclay
The Opposition do not seem to like their question being answered. The shadow Secretary of State asked me to confirm the position, for the avoidance of doubt, at the Dispatch Box. That is exactly what I am doing. I have checked the minutes. I have spoken this morning with officials to confirm, before I made the statement to the House, that it was a precondition of the talks. We were told, in terms of the pay erosion of 26.1%, that that needed to be restored at 35%, alongside other things. The reality is that he does not support that. He is facing both ways, wanting to support the junior doctors, but not actually willing to support the pay that they are demanding.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
What does it do for a respected profession that, when one visits a hospital, one is confronted by a rabble chanting like a schump of rudies, particularly when they have not co-operated with hospital authorities to minimise the impact of their absence?
Steve Barclay
I would draw an important distinction between a militant group that appears to have taken over the junior doctors committee and the vast majority of junior doctors who do a hugely important job within the NHS. We recognise in Government that they have faced considerable pressures from the pandemic, and we stand ready to work constructively with them. There are, on the other hand, some within the BMA junior doctors committee who appear to have a more political agenda. Indeed, I refer hon. Members to the statements of members of that committee, who have said that they want to move the BMA to more traditional trade union activity and to pursue a more overt political agenda.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
This is an urgent question, but I do not get a sense of urgency from the Secretary of State that he wants to resolve the dispute. I am afraid that standing at the Dispatch Box and traducing the junior doctors for their approach will not help to resolve this matter. I urge him to drop any preconditions on any future meetings, because the only way that this can be resolved is through negotiation. Will he do that now?
Steve Barclay
First, there is absolutely no traducing going on. In my last answer, I praised the junior doctors and recognised the fact that they have faced huge pressure from the pandemic, which is why we stand ready to work with them. Some on the BMA junior doctors committee have a different agenda, but we stand ready to work very constructively with that committee. The hon. Gentleman suggested that I drop the precondition. It is not I who set the precondition; it is the junior doctors committee that did so. I remind the House that it includes restoration to 2008 levels of all elements of pay, not just basic pay; parking fees and exam fees; and “radical” reform of the Review Body on Doctors’ and Dentists’ Remuneration. It is the junior doctors committee that set those preconditions, not the Government.
Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
I commend my right hon. Friend for the way in which he and his team have worked to find solutions with other trade unions, particularly the nurses. None the less, the 96-hour walkout is a significant period of disruption. Can he confirm that he is doing everything he can to ensure that those needing urgent healthcare in Warrington will be able to access it despite the industrial action by the BMA?
Steve Barclay
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. Yes, the Department is working very closely with colleagues in NHS England and across the NHS to mitigate as best we can the impact of the junior doctors’ strike. He is right that we had meaningful and constructive talks with the staff council representing “Agenda for Change” staff. I am very pleased that, as a result of the constructive engagement we had, the NHS staff council was able to recommend that pay award to its members. He is right that that points to the constructive approach that we have taken. We stand ready to have that constructive engagement with junior doctors, recognising the real pressures that the profession has been under. We will mitigate as best we can, but, given the timing over the Easter period, obviously, there is a risk in terms of patient harm. We will do all we can to mitigate that.
Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)
The latest figures from January 2023 showed 7.21 million people waiting for NHS treatment. What impact does the Secretary of State think this strike will have on the extremely hard work that has been done across the NHS to reduce those waiting lists, and what plans does he have to address the impact that the strike will have on waiting lists, if he does not plan to take any action to avoid it?
Steve Barclay
I think we can see what sort of impact it will have from the previous strike, which was over three days and impacted 181,049 appointments. We can see there will be a significant impact. On mitigations, as part of our electives recovery plan, we are doing a range of things, including expanding community diagnostic hubs and the fast-tracking of surgical hubs. The NHS is responding brilliantly with things such as super Saturdays, where teams process higher volumes of treatments, particularly in certain areas. We have the Getting It Right First Time programme, led by Sir Jim Mackey and Professor Tim Briggs, which is looking at how we embed best practice. Having hit the first interim milestone of our recovery plan in the summer, the two-year wait, we are now focused on the 78-week wait target and working our way through that.
Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)
The British Medical Association’s pay demands are more than four times the size of the private sector average pay increase. Does my right hon. Friend agree that inflation is the enemy, making everyone poorer, and that public sector pay rises of over 25% will only drive inflation even higher?
Steve Barclay
I agree with my hon. Friend that we need to do both: we need to get inflation down, recognising that has an impact across the whole workforce, including for those working within the NHS itself, and we need to recognise the real pressure that junior doctors and others within the NHS have faced. That is why we stand ready to have meaningful and constructive talks with junior doctors, in exactly the same way as we have had with midwives, nurses and others within “Agenda for Change”. We must balance the wider issue of inflation and what is affordable to the economy against recognising the real pressures the NHS has faced and responding to that, including for junior doctors.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
The Secretary of State cannot blame the Opposition for his mess. Nearly every day I retweet ads from the local NHS trust, which is trying desperately to recruit doctors and other staff. Does he accept that pay is a key factor in the large number of vacancies within the NHS, and will he do something to sort that out?
Steve Barclay
I accept that pay is an important factor. It is not the only factor—the estate and technology are also important. There is a range of issues. That is exactly the conversation I had with the trade unions representing “Agenda for Change”. We discussed with them both changes to pay and the non-pay measures. There are a range of factors, and we stand ready to have those discussions with junior doctors. However, they have chosen to take a more political, militant stance, in contrast with the approach that other trade unions have pursued.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
I also feel that the Secretary of State’s attitude and language from the Dispatch Box this morning are not very helpful in negotiating with such a key group of people. The BMA accused the Secretary of State of misrepresenting the truth when he tweeted that its pay demand was a precondition. Does he now accept that the BMA has said its 35% demand is a starting point? Will he therefore sit down and negotiate an affordable settlement, without delay, and can he clarify which side is correct?
Steve Barclay
I have already answered that question twice, but I am very happy to repeat at the Dispatch Box the fact that I checked with my officials in the Department this morning—with people who were in the room—and have also checked the minutes. That was the position that the junior doctors set out in terms of a precondition. Indeed, they have repeatedly stated in the media that they expect a 35% pay restoration—and not simply that, but additional things such as exam fees, parking fees, reform of the DDRB and so forth. That is the position the junior doctors have set out. I repeat that we want to work constructively with junior doctors. We recognise that the profession has faced huge pressure through the pandemic and we stand ready to work constructively with them in the same way that we have with the GMB, the RCN, Unison and many other trade unions.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Junior doctors are the backbone of the NHS. I would never describe those whom I have met as “militant”; they are hard-working and of all ages. Somehow, this is the second strike that junior doctors have staged in the last 13 years—there was none in the previous 13 years, under a Labour Government. Will the Secretary of State confirm: has he not set out his own precondition, and that is that he will not meet them until they call off the strikes?
Steve Barclay
There are two different things there—one on which the hon. Gentleman is correct and one on which he is not. He is correct that we have said that a precondition for meaningful and constructive talks is that the trade union suspends strikes. That is a precondition that the other trade unions were more than willing to accept, and it is applied in other sectors such as education. We have been clear on that.
The hon. Gentleman is not correct on my point about militancy, which referred to the junior doctors committee specifically. We stand ready and recognise the real pressure that many within the junior doctors community have faced. The NHS has been under significant pressure coming out of the pandemic. We recognise that there are issues on which we want to work and have constructive engagement with them. It is just regrettable that some in the junior doctors committee of the BMA want, as they have said in media interviews, to take a more overt political agenda, rather than work with us to focus on the real issues that many junior doctors are concerned about.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I note that the Secretary of State is trying extremely hard to try to find settlements. The settlement with the Royal College of Nursing and the nurses is an example of just that, although it took a bit of time—I would have liked to see it happen sooner. Will the Secretary of State outline what support is available for junior doctors who need greater support from registrars and consultants to restore confidence—that is the whole point of the F1 and F2 process—so that they are not left to drown under the pressure of handling entire wards on the worst shift patterns possible, wondering, when they go home, whether the decisions that they have made are the wrong ones? Will the Secretary of State ensure that financial and wage negotiations will be constructive, as he did when it came to the RCN and the nurses?
Steve Barclay
I am very happy to give the hon. Gentleman reassurance about our desire to have that constructive engagement, exactly as we had with colleagues on the NHS staff council. There are a number of issues on which we are keen to work with junior doctors: rostering; which he mentioned; holidays, which are sometimes cancelled at short notice—a range of issues have been raised with me. When I go on visits to hospitals, as I do frequently, staff raise a range of issues, and I am very keen to work through them with junior doctors. I think that people can see from the approach that we took not just with “Agenda for Change”, but with the pension changes that were announced in the Budget, that the Government are working constructively with the NHS to address those issues. We stand ready to have exactly that meaningful and constructive engagement with junior doctors.
Business of the House
(1 year, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?
The Leader of the House of Commons (Penny Mordaunt)
The business for the week commencing 17 April will include:
Monday 17 April—Second Reading of the Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill.
Tuesday 18 April—Consideration in Committee of the Finance (No. 2) Bill (day 1).
Wednesday 19 April—Consideration in Committee of the Finance (No. 2) Bill (day 2).
Thursday 20 April—General debate on international trade and geopolitics, followed by general debate on human rights protections for Palestinians. The subjects for these debates were determined by the Backbench Business Committee.
Friday 21 April—The House will not be sitting.
The provisional business for the week commencing 24 April includes:
Monday 24 April—Second Reading of the Non-Domestic Rating Bill.
Tuesday 25 April—Remaining stages of the Illegal Migration Bill.
Wednesday 26 April—Opposition day (14th allotted day). Debate in the name of the official Opposition, subject to be announced.
Thursday 27 April—Business to be determined by the Backbench Business Committee.
Friday 28 April—The House will not be sitting.
Jessica Morden
I thank the Leader of the House for the forthcoming business. It is good to be stepping in for the shadow Leader of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), this week. I want to start by wishing everybody across the House a very happy Easter, or Pasg hapus in Welsh, including all our staff who work so hard not just for us but for the people we represent and all those in the House service who help us and allow us to get on with our jobs every day.
I congratulate the Government on making it through a full term with the same Prime Minister. He is just about still standing, seemingly with a full set of Ministers too—what an achievement for the Government! It is a true triumph for the Tories, given their recent track record.
Easter is the perfect time for a spring clean. The Government clearly agree, because today they have dusted off 17 written ministerial statements, but are the Government planning to allow MPs to ask Ministers questions in the House on any of them? I note the Prime Minister’s statement on the machinery of government. Will the Leader of the House tell us whether that includes plans to publish an updated list of ministerial responsibilities? It is essential that MPs’ staff and our constituents have a clear understanding of who is responsible for what and how best to contact them.
I wonder whether the Department of Health and Social Care is also planning a clear-out this recess. Perhaps it could go in search of the NHS workforce plan. After repeatedly calling for it from the Back Benches, the Chancellor finally promised that he would deliver it in the autumn statement. Then he said at the Budget that it would be published “shortly”. Where is it? Do they actually have a plan at all? Can the Leader of the House tell us whether Ministers plan to publish their missing plan in recess, when Parliament is not sitting? Perhaps they think that that way, they will not be held to account.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) highlighted in a point of order this week, the UK Statistics Authority has debunked the claim made by the Minister for Immigration that the asylum backlog when Labour left office was in the hundreds of thousands. It was in fact 18,954. Under the Tories, it is 166,261—eight times higher than in 2010. The shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), has called out claims that the Government are recruiting extra police officers. In recent years they have hollowed out neighbourhood policing, as we have all seen. In the spirit of Easter and new beginnings, could the Leader of the House get the appropriate Ministers to correct the record? Will they wipe the slate clean and commit to sticking to accurate figures in future?
The Leader of the House has announced the remaining stages of her Illegal Migration Bill. Perhaps she could learn some lessons from the year 5s at Lliswerry Primary School in my constituency who I met last week, who have been studying the Bill and shared their wise insights on it with me. Of course, we must stop these dangerous boat crossings that are putting lives at risk, but the people of Newport East know that this is not the way to do it. They support Labour’s plan to crack down on criminal gangs instead.
Why is the Leader of the House happy with such a poorly worded Bill? It has a number of inconsistencies, meaning that it will not even work as the Government say it will. It is not just morally wrong; it is impractical too. Can she explain what the Government will do with someone who, after appeal, cannot legally be deported but would still be barred from claiming asylum? They would be in legal limbo, would they not?
Finally, the shadow Leader of the House has tried three times in a row to get the Leader of the House to tell us when the Government’s impact assessment on the Illegal Migration Bill will be published. The Government failed to provide one on Second Reading or in Committee. Will we get it before the remaining stages? What are they hiding? What is the cost of the Bill, and what is the Government’s current detention capacity? The Leader of the House is clearly unwilling to tell the shadow Leader of the House when the impact assessment will be published, so today, can I have a go too?
Penny Mordaunt
I start by joining the hon. Lady in wishing everyone in this House and all of our staff a very happy Easter recess. I will pass on her kind words to the Prime Minister—I thank her for mentioning that—and I also place on record my congratulations and thanks to not just our new Clerk of the House, who will be taking over later this year, but all the excellent candidates who put themselves forward for that post.
Of course, there are plenty of opportunities for questions: standard Department Question Times, the ability to ask for urgent questions, and of course Ministers make statements to this House on a regular basis. We always publish the list of ministerial responsibilities. It is an incredibly important tool to enable Members of this House to address any concerns they have to the appropriate Minister, and I will certainly make sure that that is done in a timely way.
Turning to the hon. Lady’s questions about the impact assessment on the Illegal Migration Bill, I am the Government’s representative in Parliament, but I am also Parliament’s representative in Government. Members have made very reasonable requests about impact assessments and having sight of them. I take those responsibilities very seriously, and I have made representations to the Home Office, both to the Home Secretary and through my officials speaking to the permanent secretary. It is very important that we send this Bill to the Lords in a good state, and I have heard what Members of this House have said about the level of scrutiny of the Bill.
We are producing this legislation at pace: it is a priority for the Prime Minister that we get the statute book to give us some powers to tackle this very serious problem. The hon. Lady knows the reason why we are facing increased illegal migration: it is a global phenomenon. That trend will continue, which is why it is really important that we have these new powers to deal with it, and to ensure that the international rules are able to deal with these new challenges. I urge the Opposition to support us in those efforts to modernise the rules and processes, so that we can direct resource to the people who really need that support.
I am very pleased to welcome the hon. Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden) to her place today, although we miss the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire). We understand that she is launching Labour’s local government campaign today. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see the central plank of that campaign being the brilliant idea of saving taxpayers money off their council tax bills by subsidising them with taxpayers’ money. That perfectly illustrates Labour’s approach: since 2010, council tax has risen by 36%. Under Labour in the same time period, it rose by 110%, and what was true then is true now: Labour’s councils deliver poorer services for more of your money. If your council is Labour, on average, you will be paying £80 more for those services. If your police and crime commissioner is Labour, your chances of being burgled double, and you are 44% more likely to be a victim of knife crime.
Labour-run Slough is increasing council tax by 10%, having bankrupted the local authority. Sandwell is raising its council tax by a mere 5%, but is hiking additional waste collection services, and Westminster has decided that in a time of public sector pay restraint, its councillors ought to have a 45% pay increase—10 times what its hard- working staff will get. In contrast, Conservative councils keep tax low while maintaining and increasing services, and some are even reducing council tax bills for vulnerable families: North Lincolnshire is doing so for 7,000 households. That is public service to be proud of.
Further business will be announced in the usual way.
Sir Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
It is high time that we had a debate about parental choice in education. Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council is holding a consultation on withdrawing the funding for parents who choose to send their kids to school outside the borough, particularly those whose children attend Walton-le-Dale, Turton or Canon Slade schools. This is deeply distressing for those parents who are having to consider pulling their kids out of school and making alternative plans. Does the Leader of the House agree with me, Councillor Rick Moore, Councillor Lilian Salton and Councillor Jean Rigby that, with the spending power of its budget having gone up by 33% in the past five years, Blackburn council should back local parents who want to make a choice to send their children to faith schools outside the borough?
Penny Mordaunt
My right hon. Friend raises a depressing situation. I think sometimes people look at numbers on a spreadsheet and they forget about the impact that cuts to such services have on families. It will affect education and where people go to school, and people really rely on those services. That is why we have committed £3 billion for bus transformation. Why that local authority would target these basic services, particularly against the backdrop of its budget increasing, is beyond me. I urge it to reconsider, and I congratulate him and his council colleagues on what they are doing to try to retain the service.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call the Scottish National party spokesperson.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
May I start by congratulating our new SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister, Humza Yousaf? Very movingly, he paid tribute in his victory speech to his grandparents, who emigrated from Punjab 60 years ago. It is such a strong message that neither the colour of someone’s skin nor their faith should be a barrier to reaching the highest office.
Was it not therefore ironic and deeply sad that in the same week, this place was debating the so-called Illegal Migration Bill? We were told that people seeking refuge and asylum were “breaking into Britain”, as if they were thieves. That line no doubt played well with Conservative party focus groups, and it was regurgitated by the Government’s Minister for Immigration. No doubt as the Government rev up their culture wars, we will hear it again.
The Leader of the House describes herself as Parliament’s representative in Government, but this House was not given the opportunity for line-by-line scrutiny of this rushed Bill, as would have occurred in a Committee Room upstairs. It is feast or famine with this lot. It is either weeks of filler debates or frantically pushing through controversial Bills such as this without time for proper scrutiny or debate. Is it not part of the Leader of the House’s job to organise the business of this House? As Parliament’s representative in Government, what is her excuse for this latest boorach?
Shamefully, we still have no real detail on what measures are being put in place to safeguard children and young people, despite so many of them still being missing from existing hotel arrangements. Can we have a debate examining the protections for these minors before the Bill returns to the House?
Lastly, we expect a veritable avalanche of written statements on green issues today, most of which will be, fittingly enough, recycled announcements. It is clear that after decades of Westminster Governments squandering Scotland’s immense energy resources, both Labour and the Tories are once again greedily eyeing up our potential, this time as a clean energy superpower, and even lecturing the Scottish Government for their supposed failure on renewables while visiting a wind farm operated by that very same Government.
We are being told that the UK’s energy revolution is being made in Scotland, powering up Britain with Scotland’s clean, green energy—funny, I thought Scotland was a basket case that was too poor to survive without the UK. Plus ça change. When will there be a debate finally in this place on Scotland’s green energy revolution, so that we can see how the track record and future plans of the different parties truly measure up?
Penny Mordaunt
I will start with the hon. Lady’s last point. I am sorry she does not welcome the announcements today on energy security. Our track record over the past decade on increasing renewables, strengthening the diversity of our energy sources and decreasing our reliance on other nations is very important, and I want to see that commitment matched by the Scottish Government. They have still not made the investments they said they would in this area, and I encourage them to do so. I cannot keep up with the changes to the SNP’s energy policy, but I think roughly it is against all forms of energy, except perhaps hot air. It is not Scotland that is the basket case; it is the SNP.
The second point the hon. Lady raises is one I personally take seriously, which is in regard to illegal migration. Like many Members from all parts of the House, I am hosting a Ukrainian refugee. Prior to that, I offered my home for Afghan refugees, and prior to getting into this place, I was an aid worker. I take these matters very seriously. That is why this Bill is needed, because unless safe nations such as the UK can have the powers they need to run effective systems—systems that do not just rely on someone’s ability to get into a country illegally in order to get a chance of help—we will not be able to continue the generous history we have in this nation of being somewhere that people can gain sanctuary. I urge her, in all seriousness, to reflect on that and to engage with the Illegal Migration Bill as it makes its passage through this House.
Finally, I want to welcome the First Minister. It is, as the hon. Lady points out, an historic moment. It will be an inspiration to many and send a strong message that, if people have the skills and the will, high office is open to everyone. I wish him and his new team well. Along with the rest of my Government, I want to work constructively with him. I am sorry to see that, on day one, we had a cancellation of the South Uist ferry service. It is going to be unavailable in April and May, due to the fragility of the service and the lack of substitute vessels. I know the First Minister wanted to build on his predecessor’s record, but I had hoped it would not be quite like that. I hope he will focus on the issues that matter to the people of Scotland and be a First Minister who fights for causes that matter, not just causes fights.
Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)
Can we have a debate on the expansion of the ultra low emission zone, so that I can explain how unfair it is for the Mayor to say that public transport is a viable alternative to his £12.50 a day driving charge, when he is doing nothing to restore the routes of the 84 bus and the 384 bus for the people from whom they have recently been removed?
Penny Mordaunt
I thank my right hon. Friend for continuing to raise this issue. This tax is having a devastating impact not just on people in London, but on those from the surrounding area and trades from further afield. It is vital that we have actual genuine options for people to make good environmental choices, and that includes public transport, by ensuring that bus services are maintained and that people can rely on public transport because it is not on strike all the time. It also means investing in the technology needed to make that transition. This is not working. The growing volume of dissent about this approach, which is just adding to businesses’ and households’ bills, has to cease and the issue has to be re-evaluated.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee.
Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)
I thank the Leader of the House for the business statement and for announcing the Back-Bench business for the week after the Easter recess. I give her advance notice that we intend to put on two debates on Thursday 27 April—one on NHS dentistry and the second on reducing plastic pollution in our seas and oceans.
Could I remind Members across the House that they can apply for BackBench Business debates? They can pick up a form in the Table Office or email our Backbench Business Committee Clerks. Quite often, Members like to put in applications for commemorative days. If they are interested in any of these subjects, a number of commemorative days are coming up in May and June, such as United Nations Global Road Safety Week, World Bee Day, World No Tobacco Day, World Blood Donor Day and International Asteroid Day. If Members are interested in any of those subjects, I ask them please to pick up a form and send in an application to the Backbench Business Committee.
Speaking as the Chair of the Committee, I do not like to get overtly party political, but having spent 27 years in local government as a councillor prior to coming into this House, I was struck by the Leader of the House’s comments on council tax. I would just point out to her that Labour councils, particularly those in the north of England, on average have a much lower council tax base than the national average, and the band D national median is totally meaningless. Having a low council tax base means that they rely much more heavily on the revenue support grant, and when that revenue support grant is unilaterally withdrawn but nothing is done to compensate for it by reforming council tax, it leaves local authorities in dire straits. My local authority in Gateshead has lost £170 million per year since I was deputy leader of the council in 2010. I am afraid to say that we really do need a debate in Government time about the reform of council tax.
With that, Madam Deputy Speaker, can I wish you a happy Easter? I wish the Leader of the House, Members and staff across the House a happy Easter. I hope they have a very restful recess.
Penny Mordaunt
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his very helpful advertisement for forthcoming Backbench Business debates and for encouraging Members to apply for them. I also have some good news for him with regard to a previous matter he and other Members have raised on the complexity of the many energy support schemes that the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is overseeing. These are complex schemes, and he has had some casework related to them. I am pleased to be able to tell the House that that Department will commence weekly surgeries for Members and their case- work teams on energy schemes. They will begin from the first week back after recess, either on a Tuesday or a Wednesday to maximise the chance of Members being able to attend. They will be in person in Portcullis House and officials will be on hand to deal with the complex areas of the schemes with which Members need help.
I shall not get into a further fight about local government efficiencies and who I would rather have running my local authority, except to say that those who have a Conservative council are likely to be paying £80 less for the services they receive.
David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) (Con)
Was the Leader of the House as appalled as I was about the scenes of celebration in the Ugandan Parliament when legislation was passed to further criminalise LGBT members of the community and those who support them? Will she ensure that, when the House returns, the Foreign Secretary makes a statement on what representations this Government are making to the President of Uganda on that legislation, which further undermines human rights, and on what steps we are taking to support those brave people who promote the rights of the LGBT community in Uganda?
Penny Mordaunt
I thank my right hon. Friend for raising this incredibly important matter, which I know many Members will be concerned about. As he knows, there will be Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office questions on 2 May, but given that that is a little way off, I shall make sure that the Foreign Secretary has heard his concerns today. I know the Foreign Secretary and his Ministers and our network overseas take many opportunities to raise their concerns about these matters and other human rights abuses, which is what this legislation is. We also recognise the impact it has on other areas for that country, including its economic development. It will stifle investment in that nation; companies will not want to invest or set up businesses there under that kind of environment. It is an incredibly serious matter.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
I am glad the Leader of the House has pledged to publish the list of Ministers, but there is no point in publishing it if they do not reply to correspondence. I wrote to the Culture Secretary on 7 September last year as chair of the all-party group on music about our report “Let the music move” and never got a reply. After much prompting, I finally tabled a written parliamentary question on 8 February asking when Ministers would reply to my letter. The answer came on 20 February saying that they would reply to the correspondence “as soon as possible.” Does the Leader of the House think there is any chance I might get a substantive answer—even now I still have not had one—some time this decade?
Penny Mordaunt
I have no argument with the hon. Gentleman’s point. Correspondence should be timely; sometimes on rare occasions there are reasons why it is slightly delayed—most Members want substantive answers as opposed to just timely ones—but the situation he has described is not appropriate. I will be very happy to follow up on his behalf in getting the answers he needs.
Nickie Aiken (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)
Will the Leader of the House consider providing Government time for a debate on the importance of local crime and antisocial behaviour plans? In the week the Government launched their own action plan for England, I published my own crime and antisocial behaviour plan for the Westminster part of my constituency, with five points including more police on the street and a zero-tolerance approach to drug dealing and drug taking. Thousands of people responded to my survey. It is really important that we debate local crime and antisocial behaviour plans in this place.
Penny Mordaunt
I congratulate my hon. Friend on her work, which is a clear example of her wanting to respond to the concerns of her constituents. The report she published is timely, given that we have just published our antisocial behaviour plan. It will introduce tougher punishments, cracking down in particular on illegal drugs; increase police and uniformed presence; and introduce higher fines and some new tools to enable law enforcement to have a good programme to crack down on antisocial behaviour. She is right that there are additional challenges in London, with crimes rates higher under the Mayor of London’s scheme, but I am certain that her plan will help her constituents.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
I, too, wish everybody across the House a happy Easter recess, including those who have local elections in their patch. Happy door-knocking!
Opening a new oilfield at Rosebank would fly in the face of the UK’s climate commitments. It would produce 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and most of the oil will be destined for export, so it would not even contribute to the UK’s energy security. Despite that, The Times reports today that Rosebank will clear a major regulatory hurdle today. Can the Government please be open and transparent about this? Will the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero make a statement to the House about the progress of the application, including how it would sit alongside the UK’s climate commitments?
Penny Mordaunt
I encourage the hon. Lady to make use of the next available questions, which are on 18 April. She will know that we have published a new strategy on energy security. We are looking to meet our net zero commitments as well as to ensure that the nation is as resilient as possible. That includes a greater focus on nuclear power. I encourage her to look at that very detailed document, which sets out how we will achieve those twin objectives.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Ind)
I have been requesting a debate on the World Health Organisation post-pandemic treaty for several months, so I am delighted that we will be having one on 17 April. It was secured only after a successful public petition obtained more than 156,000 signatures. Even more concerning than the treaty itself, which requires a vote of both Houses to be binding, are proposed changes to the WHO international health regulations, which will not require a vote. May we therefore urgently have a Government statement on the proposed changes, which look set to hand over huge powers to an unelected, unaccountable and discredited supranational body, which is hugely funded by the same people who fund big pharma?
Penny Mordaunt
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. A debate has been secured and he will know how to raise concerns about such matters with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and other Departments. It is incredibly important that we have the facts in the public domain—whether on such treaties or about vaccines and so forth. I would just again caution the hon. Gentleman, who this week has been inviting us to “join the dots”, promoting that Anthony Fauci created covid in the United States and then offshored that operation to Wuhan. Also, in Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions prior to this session, he started a new campaign to tell the public that the Government and their international network of World Economic Forum stooges are encouraging everyone to eat insects. Those are outrageous conspiracy theories that the hon. Gentleman is promoting on his social media and, more frequently, on the Floor of the House. I urge him to check his behaviour.
Navendu Mishra (Stockport) (Lab)
Parkinson’s UK estimates that 5,360 people live with Parkinson’s in the Greater Manchester health and social care partnership area, and 630 people a year are expected to be diagnosed. Shockingly, there is only one nurse supporting people in my constituency with Parkinson’s, and one left some time ago. The post has been advertised several times over the past few months, but has yet to be filled. This is deeply concerning, given the ageing population and the increase in the prevalence of progressive conditions such as Parkinson’s, the fastest-growing neurological condition in the world. We were promised an NHS workforce plan in the autumn statement but it is now long overdue. World Parkinson’s Day is on 11 April this year. As such, will the Leader of the House grant a debate in Government time on how the forthcoming NHS workforce plan will meet the needs of people with complex progressive conditions such as Parkinson's? Will she urge the Health Secretary to finally publish the long-awaited NHS workforce plan?
Penny Mordaunt
I thank the hon. Gentleman for shining a spotlight on this important disease. He will know how to secure a debate in the usual way, such as an Adjournment debate, and I am sure that the Backbench Business Committee would be interested in what he has to say, given the forthcoming awareness day. Although I will make sure that the Health Secretary has heard his remarks, I urge him to talk to his local care board about what it is doing to ensure that his constituents have the support and services that they need.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
Yesterday, Jennie in my Wellingborough office had a telephone call from a lady whose son, very unfortunately, was killed in a car crash in South Africa on Monday and is being buried tomorrow. Unfortunately, she had a problem with her visa, having applied for indefinite leave to remain. Jennie rang Izzy in my office, and they started to talk to the Home Office. They had me intervene; I spoke to Emily in the Home Office, who found out who I should talk to. We got the duty officer Mark involved, who worked with my office late into the night and arranged the visa so that my constituent could travel this morning. In this House, by nature, we concentrate on things that go wrong with our system. This case clearly shows the benefit of MPs, their staff and the way that government works. Could we, for a change, have a debate in Government time about how our democracy actually works?
Penny Mordaunt
I thank my hon. Friend for giving his thanks and for name-checking those officials. Whether it is the officials in the particular services that he spoke about or the consular services that I am sure all Members have used, even in the dead of night, to assist constituents in difficulty, they do a tremendous job, as do our staff in our offices. Although I am not anticipating further examples in business questions, it is nice to hear that occasionally.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
After my constituent CarolAnn suffered a stroke, her husband updated the Department for Work and Pensions about her condition, which then issued a letter stating that her benefit was going to migrate to Social Security Scotland in May. Since then, it has done absolutely nothing to try to address her needs given her current condition, trying to palm her off to Social Security Scotland, even though it is the DWP’s responsibility until May. Can the Leader of the House outline what the Government will do to make sure that the DWP treats cases with care and dignity until they migrate to Social Security Scotland?
Penny Mordaunt
As always, I will be happy to look at any case that the hon. Gentleman has not been able to resolve by other means. It is true that Scotland will be looking after more welfare services. I am pleased that it is taking up the powers that have been available to it for some time, but if any Member is having difficulty getting their situation resolved, I will be happy to assist them.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
I warmly welcome the release of the Government’s action plan to combat antisocial behaviour. In Harrow, more than 5,000 cases of antisocial behaviour have been reported to the council this year alone. It is the second most important crime issue that people experience and suffer. Will the Leader of the House arrange for a debate in Government time on what we as MPs and local authorities can do to combat this problem? In Harrow, we have a consultation on a public spaces protection order to cover the whole borough, for instant action against those who commit these crimes, which would reassure people.
While I am on my feet, I remind the House that we are we celebrating not only Easter but Passover, Ramadan, Rama Navami, and Vaisakhi at the end of the recess period. All religions are included in the Easter recess.
Penny Mordaunt
I thank my hon. Friend for his final remarks wishing everyone well during this incredibly important period in religious calendars, and I congratulate him on his focus on antisocial behaviour. In the year ending September 2022, there was a 35% increase in police recorded incidents of antisocial behaviour, but we want that number to continue to go down. That is why we have announced the new antisocial behaviour plan. We look forward to working with my hon. Friend to ensure his constituents are safe and feel safe.
Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)
In Transport questions on 2 March, I raised a question with the Rail Minister about an issue of great importance to my constituents, who are trapped in homes they urgently need to sell but cannot because they are on or near the current line of route for East West Rail. In response to my question, the Minister offered a meeting. Unfortunately, I have had no response to a request I made the same day by email. As the recess is about to start, I am unlikely to be granted a meeting before mid-April, if I am lucky, which is a month and a half after making my request. Will the Leader of the House advise me how long I am expected to wait to hear back from the Minister, who is ignoring my desperate constituents?
Penny Mordaunt
I am sorry to hear that and I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising the issue. I would be happy to talk to the Department and, unless he needs a physical meeting, I am sure a telephone call or a Teams meeting with the Minister could be arranged in a much shorter space of time. I will certainly make those representations to the Minister.
Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)
I start by wishing the House, its staff and, in particular, our hard-working teams a very happy Easter.
As a global maritime power, the UK has a rich and exceptional underwater cultural heritage, including the 17th century flagship the London, which sank this month 358 years ago with the loss of over 300 souls. Our rich cultural hidden heritage has the power to regenerate our coastal towns and cities, generate new jobs and contribute to the local economy. In this 50th year of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, please could we have a debate in Government time on how we can better protect and enhance our rich underwater cultural heritage?
Penny Mordaunt
My hon. Friend is speaking to a Member of Parliament for Portsmouth, which is the home to the Mary Rose Museum, so she is preaching to the choir. The subject is incredibly important, and underwater cultural heritage can be an important source of economic regeneration to areas. I would be interested to hear about my hon. Friend’s plans for the London. Many wreck sites are protected and many are grave sites as well, so raising the wrecks is not necessarily the right thing to do. I will make sure the Minister has heard her ambitions in this area; the next Department for Culture, Media and Sport questions will be on 27 April.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
Many of us in this place and in my constituency of Edinburgh West get a little tired of Scotland’s economic and other issues always being addressed through the narrow, negative prism of the Scottish National party. We would like to discuss the benefits and the positives of the Union, not just for Scotland but for all four nations of the United Kingdom. Will the Leader of the House consider setting aside Government time to have a debate on the benefits of the Union and how it can be used positively to address the issues of all four constituent nations?
Penny Mordaunt
That is a wonderful idea. I think it would be supported by almost all Members of this House, and our constituents would value it greatly. The overwhelming sentiment in the letters that I am sent is how passionately many people from all four nations of the United Kingdom feel about our joint history, our heritage and our family traditions and rivalries across the United Kingdom. It is not just about arguments that appeal to the head, but about arguments that appeal to the heart. It is a very good idea for a debate and would be strongly supported, I am sure.
Nick Fletcher (Don Valley) (Con)
As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, this year Doncaster celebrates the centenary of the Flying Scotsman. You will also know that it will not be long until our dilapidated hospital reaches the same anniversary. With a brownfield site ready to go, Doncaster could benefit from a new hospital before the Flying Scotsman turns 105. Could we therefore have a debate on hospital infrastructure? I believe that that would be a great use of time in this Chamber, not least for the people of Doncaster.
Penny Mordaunt
I thank my hon. Friend for his tireless campaigning on the issue. He will know that we have received many expressions of interest for the next eight new hospitals from trusts across the country; I understand that there is one for Doncaster, his area. Those expressions of interest have now been assessed and the Government will make an announcement in due course. I am not able to give my hon. Friend any further information on that today, but I shall certainly make sure that the Secretary of State hears his championing, yet again, of his constituency.
Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The register of Ministers’ interests says that the right hon. Lady is the Minister of State at the Department for International Trade, but she is self-evidently the Leader of the House, and has been for 205 days. Indeed, the Department for International Trade was abolished 51 days ago. The register is not even an accurate list of Ministers now. No Department has published transparency returns on anything after the end of September, so it has been 180 days. An ordinary MP would have to register everything within 28 days.
The Leader of the House has been saying for some time that she will get this sorted—she promised the House before Christmas. So far as I can see, we are going in the wrong direction, not the right direction. Why can we not have Ministers’ interests published within a week or a fortnight of their being incurred? Why can we not have it done immediately?
Penny Mordaunt
The hon. Gentleman will know that we are moving to a system that will put the ministerial registration of interests, hospitality, gifts and so forth on the same footing as Parliament’s. [Interruption.] I know that because I regularly meet the officials who are doing this work. They are still on schedule to deliver it, as the hon. Gentleman knows, by this summer.
Once those systems are created, they will enable us immediately to link through so that members of the public, our constituents and others who are searching to see what we need to register should find that a lot easier than under the current system. The hon. Gentleman will understand that it requires a system to be built. That is ongoing. The propriety and ethics team are doing this, and I will keep him updated.
Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)
Aylesbury has some absolutely fantastic places to visit this Easter. I highlighted some of them during English Tourism Week: we have a historic quarter, some great museums and even a statue of David Bowie that sings on the hour. But we also face some serious challenges, with worrying health and education inequalities and a town centre that urgently needs regeneration. Could my right hon. Friend find Government time for a debate on the need for support—whether that is levelling-up support or another means of support—for Aylesbury and towns like it across the south-east of England?
Penny Mordaunt
I thank my hon. Friend for that wonderful advert for so many things in his constituency. I know that his area will benefit from nearly £8 million of the UK’s shared prosperity fund allocation. He makes an excellent suggestion for a debate; he will know how to apply for one in the usual way.
Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
As we head into the Easter recess, prices continue to rise and the Government have still failed to put a decent pay rise on the table for hard-working civil servants. Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union in passport offices around the country will be taking weeks of continuous strike action throughout April. Strikes are also set to take place at the Animal and Plant Health Agency, Ofgem, the British Museum, the British Library and the Government Digital Service, with further national action due at the end of April. May we have a debate in Government time on what the Government are doing to negotiate a settlement to this dispute and end poverty pay in the civil service?
Penny Mordaunt
As the hon. Lady will know, Ministers give the House frequent updates about all the pay negotiations and discussions that are taking place across many sectors. For example, the Health Secretary answered an urgent question on the subject this morning. I shall make sure that those in the Cabinet Office have heard what the hon. Lady has said today as their next questions is not until 11 May.
Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)
I have already highlighted the record-breaking achievements of my constituents who have raised funds for our excellent North Devon Hospice. May I now ask my right hon. Friend to congratulate both Jade Kingdom, the first person with Down syndrome to complete a sprint triathlon, and Max Woosey, the boy in the tent who has raised the most money ever raised by anyone camping outside? While it is marvellous that so much money is being raised for our wonderful hospice, will my right hon. Friend also help to secure a debate in Government time to ensure that the current increases in hospice energy costs do not undermine their core caring work?
Penny Mordaunt
I am sure all Members will want to join in the congratulations and admiration for both Jade and Max and all that they have achieved. They have done a tremendous amount, not just through their personal achievements but in inspiring other people to step up and try things, and raise money to support good causes. As my hon. Friend will know, our energy bill relief schemes are intended to help not just businesses but organisations in the public, voluntary and charitable sectors and other non-domestic energy users, including hospices, but we will keep this under review. Hospices do a tremendous job for everyone in our community. We all appreciate and support their work, and we will do everything we can to see them through what are very difficult times.
Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)
As the country looks forward to the coronation, and given the focus on volunteering with the Big Help Out on 8 May, may I ask the Leader of the House to join me in congratulating the team at Treharris Boys & Girls Club, who will celebrate their centenary in a few days’ time? Treharris is reportedly the oldest boys’ and girls’ club in Wales, and the passion and commitment of its volunteers has made it a huge asset to the community for generations. May we therefore have a debate in Government time on volunteering and its contribution to our community life?
Penny Mordaunt
I am very pleased to join the hon. Gentleman in sending my congratulations to his local girls’ and boys’ club. Let me also thank him for his advertisement for the tremendous coronation weekend that lies ahead, and, in particular, that day of civic renewal and volunteering. I hope all Members will use it to promote the incredible organisations in their constituencies, to raise money and do some good things for the community, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for speaking about it today.
James Wild (North West Norfolk) (Con)
On Sunday I will be part of the Birkin’s Boys team taking part in the Hunstanton soap box race to raise money for the local RNLI lifeboat station. Will my right hon. Friend wish all the participants good luck, and, as people come to the stunning north Norfolk coast for their Easter holidays, will she find time for a debate about the importance of respecting water and being safe on the beach?
Penny Mordaunt
I wish my hon. Friend good luck for the adventure that lies ahead. It sounds slightly dangerous, but I wish him well, along with all the other people who will be raising money for such a good cause. He will know that we have a national water safety forum and work with many partners to ensure that those who are enjoying the tremendous facilities that exist throughout the country, including my hon. Friend’s constituency, are safe, and also know what to do if things go badly wrong. I pay tribute to all those organisations, including the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which do such fantastic work to keep us all safe.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
Despite concerns raised by the Scottish Government, the Budget allocation from Westminster saw a fall in the capital budget of 3% and a miserly 0.6% uplift, based on GDP deflator assumptions of inflation at 3.2%, when of course in reality it is much higher. Will the Leader of the House make a statement to explain in what world this could be called levelling up? What it shows is that the true way to level up Scotland is for Scotland to have full fiscal control as an independent country.
Penny Mordaunt
The facts as I understand them are that Scotland has received the largest ever settlement in its history. The dividend to taxpayers in Scotland from being part of the Union is £2,000 per head and, according to Audit Scotland, the Scottish Government have had to raid capital budgets to meet shortfalls in their revenue budget and day-to-day spending, so I think a debate on this subject is a very good idea.
Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
As well as wishing you a happy Easter, Madam Deputy Speaker, may I wish you a happy Cheshire day, on 30 March, when we celebrate the great people, businesses and traditions of a wonderful county in the north-west of England?
More than 6,000 people have signed a petition calling on Warrington Labour councillors to scrap the low-traffic neighbourhood in Latchford and reopen Grange Avenue to through traffic. The council, I am afraid, has dug its heels in and even today has launched another consultation, simply kicking the can down the road. Local residents are clear: the scheme has created longer drive times and increased congestion in Warrington town centre. Will the Leader of House grant a debate in Government time on how councils can encourage local people to be more active, and perhaps walk and cycle more? Instead of spending money on planters in the middle of the road, perhaps councils could spend that money on resurfacing pavements, so that local people can walk safely in their local neighbourhoods.
Penny Mordaunt
I think my hon. Friend has achieved his ambition by giving that advice with both barrels to his local authority. The responsibility lies with the local authority, and it is disappointing that it is not able to deal with the things that would really make a difference to people’s lives by helping them to be more active and to walk and cycle more, and to ensure that those local services are protected. I also join him in wishing everyone a very happy Cheshire day. For an even happier Cheshire day next year, I think the conclusion is: vote Conservative.
Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
Feeding Families is a great organisation in my constituency that gives support to families who just do not have enough to get by on. Today I heard that it is moving to much larger and much better premises in Blaydon. While that is great for Feeding Families, the volunteers and their work, it is sad that that is necessary, due to demand increasing by 100% in the last year. Can we have a debate in Government time on the measures we can take to end the need for food banks and organisations such as Feeding Families?
Penny Mordaunt
I join the hon. Lady in congratulating and thanking these incredibly important local community groups, which do so much to support our communities, particularly vulnerable and financially fragile families. She will know that we have put in place a £93 billion cost of living package and done many other things, including agreeing the largest ever uplift to the national living wage and modernising our welfare system to support families through this. However, we must also support those organisations that are often best placed to reach those who fall through the cracks, which is why we have always ensured that local authorities have leeway and particular budgets to help those local community groups.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
I understand that for the last two years Dementia UK has funded the important work of Admiral nurses across Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. That funding is due to end tomorrow. Although the local integrated care board and the local primary care networks have agreed to fund the service in some areas, I am told that that does not include Charnwood, which has Loughborough within it. Without that funding, the service covering my constituency will close immediately. Given that there are more than 2,500 people living with dementia locally, the loss of the Admiral nurse service will have a huge knock-on impact. I am keen to understand why some parts of an integrated care board area can receive services while others cannot. I would also welcome the Leader of the House’s advice on the best and quickest way to bring this matter to the Government’s attention, to find a solution.
Penny Mordaunt
I thank my hon. Friend for raising this important point. She knows it is the integrated care board’s responsibility to ensure that needs are met, and that the right services are commissioned. Having raised the matter today, she is exhausting all the avenues open to her in this place. She can obviously apply for a debate, too, but the integrated care board needs to change its mind, and I hope it is listening to what she has had to say today.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
The Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary has told Channel 4 FactCheck that he intends to correct the record, following his use at yesterday’s Prime Minister’s questions of an incorrectly low figure for rape convictions. Given the prominence and significance of the error, it would surely be inadequate were this to be done through a written ministerial correction squirrelled away at the back of Hansard. Will the Leader of the House persuade her Cabinet colleague to do the decent thing and come to this House, speedily and in person, to rectify his error?
Penny Mordaunt
If a Member needs to correct the record, it is right that they do so in a timely way, and there are established procedures for doing that. The Justice Secretary is a man of his word and, if he has said that he will do something, he will do it. I will leave it up to him how he does that.
Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)
Chelsea football club was sold under special exemption in May 2022, and at least £2.3 billion of the proceeds was placed in Roman Abramovich’s frozen UK bank account, with the expectation that the funds will be sent to support Ukrainians. In November, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty), said the funds would soon be on their way. In January, there were news reports that the Government were close to handing over this money to a new foundation for Ukrainians, but earlier this month the Minister said
“Setting up an organisation of this scale rightly takes time.”
We have no update. Given that we are almost a year on from the sale, and given that a third of the UK’s aid budget is being used in the UK to support refugees, including Ukrainians, can we have a ministerial statement to clarify the timescale so that the money can go to those who need it as soon as possible?
Penny Mordaunt
I thank the hon. Lady for raising this important issue. It is clear what needs to happen. Given that the next Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office questions are not until 2 May, I will make sure the Foreign Secretary has heard what she said. The Treasury will also have an interest, as it needs to make sure everything is done correctly. I will make sure both Departments have heard what she said today.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
Many of my most vulnerable and unwell constituents are seeing their personal independence payment renewals turned down after just a telephone interview. The latest case will see a very unwell and isolated woman lose her car tomorrow, while she waits months for her appeal to be heard. Given her condition, I suspect her appeal will be upheld. Can the Leader of the House help?
Penny Mordaunt
I am sorry to hear of this case. When hon. and right hon. Members have exhausted all the usual routes, I am happy to intervene to ensure that cases are addressed. I may have saved myself the price of a stamp, as the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is here on the Treasury Bench. Having worked in the Department for Work and Pensions, I know its staff are very keen to ensure that such situations are addressed.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Last year, there was a net loss of 14,000 social-rent properties in this country. Locally, the Conservative-led Warwick District Council promised to build a development of 42 social-rent properties, which has never happened. There was also the development of Warwick Place as a site for social-rent housing. Can we therefore have a debate in Government time on the much-needed supply of social-rent housing in this country, given the housing crisis we face?
Penny Mordaunt
Annual housing supply is up by 10% on previous years, with more than 232,000 net additional homes delivered in 2021-22. That is the third highest yearly rate for the past 30 years. We have had an unprecedented amount of investment in social housing, but I shall make sure that the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has heard the hon. Gentleman’s concerns and will ask him to contact his office.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
May I just caution the Leader of the House that the Home Office has form when it comes to impact assessments? It made all the same promises in relation to the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, but no assessment was ever published. The Home Office has now turned down my freedom of information request for the impact assessment on the new Bill, acknowledging that it exists but saying, yet again, that it will be published in due course. When she spoke to the Home Office, was she given a reason why the impact assessment had not been published prior to this week’s Committee proceedings? Was she given a cast-iron assurance that it will be published before we consider the final stages of the Bill later this month?
Penny Mordaunt
The hon. Gentleman will perhaps have heard my right hon. Friend the Immigration Minister say in Tuesday’s debate that the Home Office’s intention is to publish an impact assessment on the Bill. So it is clear from the Home Office that it intends to do that. I completely accept that it is of more use if that is done earlier rather than later. As I say, we have made representations to Ministers and my officials have spoken to the permanent secretary of that Department.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
I am grateful to the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee for announcing that there is going to be a debate on NHS dentistry, because clearly a lot of Members are concerned about that issue, but may we also please have a statement on children’s access to orthodontic services? In the past couple of weeks, a couple of constituents have contacted me with concerning issues that they have raised regarding their children. One has been told that there is a three-year wait for a referral to an orthodontist, when their dentist has told them that action needs to be taken within 12 months otherwise it will not work. Another has been told that they cannot have the work required because sedation is no longer available for children. So may we have a statement from the relevant Minister on what is going to happen to improve access for children to orthodontic services?
Penny Mordaunt
The hon. Gentleman raises a matter that is particularly important after the backlog that has built up in such services during covid and the absence of such services during covid, particularly for children in care and other vulnerable children. Services are improving across the country, and certainly services for those children should be in place. He will know that the Department is looking at what more it can do to bolster the workforce and increase access to provision, and he can raise this issue at the next questions, which will be on 25 April.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
The Royal Oak in Isleworth is a popular pub that is run by a family, but it is being put under huge financial pressure because of the high cost of its gas and electricity bills. Having been forced to sign a new energy contract last autumn, they are stuck paying four times what they were paying last year for energy and they cannot afford it. Despite energy prices tumbling since they signed, British Gas has refused even to review their fixed-term contract. They are now facing closure because of the actions of British Gas, which will not get anything if a small business such as this one goes under. Does the Leader of the House agree that the actions of British Gas are unacceptable and harmful to small businesses? Will she find time for a debate about how we can support our pubs and other small businesses that are stuck with these exorbitant new fixed-term contracts?
Penny Mordaunt
I thank the hon. Lady for raising this important case. It does sound extremely unfair that British Gas will not engage with that business, as she describes—it sounds very un-British of British Gas to do that. I hope that British Gas will have heard what she has said, look at this case and see whether it can find a way through to ensure that that business can continue operating. I congratulate her on raising this matter this afternoon.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
May I take this opportunity, Madam Deputy Speaker, to wish you and all Members of the House a very happy Easter?
I know that I raise these issues every week, and the Leader of the House always responds in a positive and respectful manner, which I appreciate on behalf of all those people whom we may never meet, but who we think of here every week. I think of the 27 Christians who were killed in northern Nigeria and the hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in arbitrary detention in China.
Today, I wish to focus on a prominent Afghan campaigner for female education, Matiullah Wesa, who was arrested by the Taliban. The denial of education to women and girls in the country is abhorrent to us here and to people across the world and has a devastating effect on everyone, including on Afghanistan’s threatened religious minorities. Will the Leader of the House join me in urging the Taliban to release Matiullah Wesa and fulfil a promise of reopening schools and universities to women and girls?
Penny Mordaunt
I thank the hon. Member not just for his kind remarks, but, again, for giving a voice to those people whom many Members of this House will be concerned about—whether they are in China, Nigeria, or Afghanistan or are organisations that are working to support those people. They are very much in our minds, and we will continue to focus on their plight. I will just add that, yesterday, a number of parliamentarians joined me in meeting advocates and organisations that are working to protect democracy and women’s rights around the world, with a particular focus on Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere. We did a workshop together to see what more we can do to provide Members of this House with opportunities to support those organisations in a much more profound way—how we can organise ourselves better here. It is not just about networks globally, but about organisations working in the UK to protect vulnerable women, too. I plan to update the House on some new initiatives later this year, which I hope Members will welcome.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I thank the Leader of the House for answering the business questions.
State Pension Age: Review
(1 year, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mel Stride)
With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will make a statement on the second review of the state pension age, which I am publishing today.
The purpose of this review has been to determine whether the existing rules about pensionable age remain appropriate, as required by the Pensions Act 2014. Two reports commissioned by the Government have formed part of the evidence base: one from the Government Actuary and an independent report led by Baroness Neville-Rolfe, both of which I am publishing alongside this review.
l am grateful to both the Government Actuary and to Baroness Neville-Rolfe for their thoughtful and valuable reports. I would also like to thank those who responded to the call for evidence that informed the independent report.
As today’s review underlines, this Government are committed to providing dignity and security in retirement and to delivering the certainty that people need to plan for later life. It also highlights the importance of ensuring that we have the best available evidence before making decisions about the course of the state pension age that impacts millions of people.
It is thanks to the measures that this Conservative Government have taken that there are now 200,000 fewer pensioners in absolute poverty than there were in 2009-10. This year, we are projected to spend around £117 billion on state pension-related expenditure. Next month will see the state pension’s biggest ever increase, and, as a result, the new state pension will surpass £10,000 a year for the first time.
I want to make sure that the state pension in this country continues to be the foundation of income in retirement for future generations, while also being sustainable and fair. I welcome Baroness Neville-Rolfe’s independent report. It highlights an important challenge: a growing pensioner-age population and the affordability and fiscal sustainability of the state pension. It also looks at how we can balance that with our commitment to providing fairness between the generations.
As a society, we should celebrate improvements in life expectancy, which has risen rapidly over the past century and is projected to continue to increase. Since the first state pension age review was undertaken in 2017, however, the increase in life expectancy has slowed. In fact, the rapid rises in life expectancy seen over the last century have slowed over the past decade, a trend seen to a varying degree across much of the developed world. For most people and communities, people alive today are expected to live longer than their predecessors. Life expectancy is still projected to improve over time but, compared with the last review of state pension age, those improvements are expected to be achieved at a slower rate.
Having had regard to the relevant factors, I agree with the independent report’s conclusion that the planned rise in the state pension age from 66 to 67 should occur between 2026 and 2028 and that that rise is appropriate. It has been in legislation since 2014 and will continue to give certainty to those planning their retirement.
I have noted the independent report’s recommendations that the rise from 67 to 68 should take place between 2041 and 2043. That is four years later than the first independent reviewer, John Cridland, proposed in 2017—a proposal that the Government accepted, subject to a further review—but three years ahead of what is provided for in legislation. However, Baroness Neville-Rolfe was not able to take into account the long-term impact of recent significant external challenges, including the covid-19 pandemic and global inflation caused by Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine.
The Government Actuary also notes the challenges of assessing long-term mortality trends, particularly in the context of the covid-19 pandemic. He states that,
“relatively minor changes in the mortality assumptions can result in fairly large changes to the calculated State Pension age timetable”.
Given the level of uncertainty about the data on life expectancy, labour markets and the public finances, and the significance of these decisions on the lives of millions of people, I am mindful that a different decision might be more appropriate once those factors are clearer.
I therefore plan for a further review to be undertaken within two years of the next Parliament to consider the rise to age 68 again. That will ensure that the Government are able to consider the latest information, including life expectancy and population projections that reflect the findings of the 2021 census data, the latest demographic trends and the current economic situation. We will also be able to consider the impact on the labour market of the measures we have announced to increase workforce participation and of any other relevant factors.
The current rules for the rise from 67 to 68 therefore remain appropriate and the Government do not intend to change the existing legislation prior to the conclusion of the next review. All options that meet the 10-year notice period will be in scope at the next review. The Government remain committed to the principle of 10 years’ notice of changes to state pension age and will ensure that any legislation can be brought forward in a timely manner.
The approach I am setting out today is a responsible and reasonable one—one that continues to provide certainty for those planning for retirement, while ensuring that we take the time to get this right for the longer term so that the state pension can continue to provide security in retirement and is sustainable and fair across the generations.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call the shadow Secretary of State.
Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement and thank Baroness Neville-Rolfe and the Government Actuary for their reports.
The Opposition agree that it is not the right time to accelerate a rise in the state pension age, although I note that five years or so ago the then Secretary of State announced that it was explicit Government policy to bring forward the increase in the state pension age to 68 between 2037 and 2039. When objections were raised on the grounds of life expectancy trends, the Government said that such objections were irresponsible and reckless. They told us that bringing forward an increase was necessary for the long-term sustainability of the public finances. Now it turns out that, with a general election only a year or so away and the Government trailing so badly in the polls, abandoning the accelerated rise in the state pension age is not so reckless and irresponsible after all.
Can the Secretary of State confirm whether the review he has announced will still consider bringing forward an increase in the state retirement age to 2037? Does that remain the Government’s policy ambition, or is that now abandoned?
The Secretary of State cites life expectancy trends. It is certainly true that our trends were hit hard by the pandemic, but that is because life expectancy improvements were slowing before the pandemic. The life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest communities was widening before the pandemic, and—disgracefully and shamefully—in around one in five of the poorest areas for women and one in nine of the poorest areas for men, life expectancy went backwards from 2014 to 2019. He should have acknowledged that today.
The ongoing stalling of life expectancy is out of kilter with many of our European competitors. It is much more dramatic and it means that, in a city such as Manchester, Middlesbrough or Liverpool or a town such as Blackpool, life expectancy for men is nine to 10 years lower and for women eight years lower than in the wealthiest parts of Chelsea or Westminster. In Glasgow, as The Sunday Post recently warned, one in four men will die before their 65th birthday. That is a quite shameful record.
Why do the Government think, after 13 years, life expectancy trends have become so dismal in the United Kingdom? It is not just because so many more people are waiting for treatment in the NHS, or cannot access health check-ups for blood pressure, cardiovascular disease or cancers. It is not simply because smoking cessation services have been so cut under this Government. It is not simply because mental health services are overwhelmed, addiction services have been cut back and we are now seeing the phenomena of deaths of despair in the UK. It is not simply because social care provision has been so savaged. It is also because poverty makes people ill quicker and it means people die sooner.
After 13 years, wages are stagnant and jobs insecure. Too much housing in the private rented sector is damp and squalid. Today, there are 400,000 more pensioners in relative poverty, 1 million more children in poverty and half a million children destitute, without a bed to sleep in tonight or a hot dinner in their stomach, after 13 years of the Conservatives.
Today’s announcement that the Government are not going ahead with accelerating the state pension age rise is welcome, and it is the right decision, but it is the clearest admission yet that a rising tide of poverty is dragging life expectancy down for so many. Life expectancy that is stalling—even going backwards in some of the poorest communities—is a damning indictment of 13 years of failure, which the Minister should have acknowledged and apologised for today.
Mel Stride
I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman has broadly welcomed the decisions that I set out in my statement. I will address a couple of the points he raises. On poverty and, as we are particularly focused on pensioners, pensioner poverty, the situation has improved. The poverty situation has improved right across the board since 2009-10, with some dramatic reductions to both absolute and relative poverty levels across that period, not least because of the policies pursued by this Government. He suggests we are something of an outlier in terms of the flattening of the increase in the expectations of length of life in future. That is simply not the case; as I said earlier, it is an international phenomenon.
The right hon. Gentleman raised a couple of questions I would like to address. First, he asked whether a move of the rise of the pension age to 68 was possible, along the lines of the Cridland recommendations of 2037 to 2039. Given we have made a commitment to a 10-year notice period, that would suggest that, if the next review —and I say if, because that is for others to decide in the course of time—were in, say, 2026, that would indeed make those dates possible. Of course, it would not preclude decisions being taken for dates further out than 2037 to 2039.
Secondly, the right hon. Gentleman asks what our policy is at the moment. We are very clear what our policy is: the current legislative position is appropriate, but there will be a review within the first two years of the next Parliament.
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Unlike the Labour party, I do not welcome this decision. From the 1940s to today, life expectancy from retirement has increased by seven years, which would indicate a retirement age of 72 rather than of 67 or 68. The benefit of long-term decision making is that it gives everybody the chance to plan well in advance. Delaying the decision is a decision in itself, and it is not exactly a sign of strength.
Mel Stride
I hear what my right hon. Friend says. As I set out in my statement, there are a number of uncertainties, some of which are in the fiscal sphere. In fact, if he reads pages 13 and 14 of the Office for Budget Responsibility economic and fiscal outlook, he will see what the OBR has to say about the uncertainty of the public finances around labour supply, energy prices and, indeed, interest rates. For that reason, among others, I believe it appropriate to wait until we are more certain about what the future holds.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. The Work and Pensions Committee called on the Government to publish the reports by Baroness Neville-Rolfe and the Government Actuary, which have been used to inform the review of the state pension age, and it is regrettable that that did not happen in good time. I am sure that many of us are left wondering why the Government did not publish those reports earlier to allow proper parliamentary scrutiny and a more informed decision. Is it not the case that this is a political decision because this Government, who are at the end of their days, do not want another fight before the next general election?
We in the SNP oppose further increases to the state pension age. We are glad that life expectancy is now finally being factored into the wider consideration of what is an appropriate state pension. The reality is that Tory austerity, followed by covid, has caused an overall reduction in average life expectancy figures. The UK has one of the worst state pensions in western Europe; too many pensioners in Scotland live in poverty, which is a damning indictment in what is supposed to be the sixth largest economy on the planet. Is the Secretary of State not embarrassed that pensioners on these islands have to choose between heating and eating in 21st century Britain? He talks about a reduction in poverty rates, but that is because the Government are using lagged data to analyse poverty rates and ignoring the cost of living crisis that is on us now. With 7 million households in fuel poverty, the Government cannot talk about poverty rates decreasing.
There is evidence that increasing the state pension age from 65 to 66 caused absolute poverty rates to rise. Has the Secretary of State seen the Institute for Fiscal Studies report on that and, if so, has it been part of the decision-making process? What lessons has he learned from the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign about raising the state pension age for women born in the ’50s? When will they see some compensation?
Finally, we look forward to an independent Scotland being the best place to grow old in prosperity, not in poverty with a Westminster Government we did not vote for.
Mel Stride
The hon. Gentleman raises several points. First, on the publication of Baroness Neville-Rolfe’s report, I have always been clear that we would publish that at or around the time that my report of the review was released, and that is precisely what we have done, including by giving advance sight of my report and her report to the Opposition.
I believe that the hon. Gentleman’s remarks about pensioner poverty are misplaced. Pensioner poverty has fallen since 2009-10, as has poverty across other cohorts of the economy. He will, of course, be aware of the huge amount that this Government have been doing by way of intervention to ensure that we support low-income households, and pensioners up and down this country—many millions of them—with billions of pounds of targeted transfer payments, which will be going out over the coming months.
Finally, the hon. Gentleman mentioned the WASPI women. He will know that I am not able to comment on that matter as it is subject to a current inquiry by the parliamentary ombudsman.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
What would be the saving were the Government to raise the age by one year to 68?
Mel Stride
That is a beautiful question because it is precise; it requires an answer that one cannot duck. I will write to my right hon. Friend with that information.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee.
Sir Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
I am grateful for early sight of the statement. I understand why the Secretary of State has chosen to defer the key decision. Like John Cridland’s independent review six years ago, Baroness Neville-Rolfe’s report should have been published soon after the Department received it six months ago, rather than kept needlessly under wraps until today. John Cridland proposed early access to pension credit. Will the Secretary of State consider leaving access to pension credit at age 66 when the state pension age rises to 67 in three years’ time?
Mel Stride
The right hon. Gentleman raises the issue of when Baroness Neville-Rolfe’s report was published. We had a fairly detailed discussion about that when I appeared before his Committee yesterday, so he knows my arguments around that. It is something that I certainly would not rule out for future reviews as a perfectly reasonable practice, but he knows the reasons it did not happen on this occasion. In terms of early access to pension credit, that is not something that the Government are currently planning—nor was it something that previous Governments planned to do at any stage—but of course, as with all matters around pensions, we will keep that under review.
David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) (Con)
Is my right hon. Friend aware of the various spurious claims that have been made by those who support Scottish independence not just about the amount that would be paid in future for pensions but about who would pay it? Does he agree that the best way to achieve long-term security for Scottish pensioners is for Scotland to remain at the heart of the United Kingdom?
Mel Stride
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. What matters for sustaining a fair and just pension system is a strong economy. We are stronger together, and if we continue to work together—all the nations of the United Kingdom—we can continue to afford decent pensions for our pensioners.
Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)
The statement has provided clarity on when somebody will receive their state pension—the age of 67—but we also need to focus on what people will receive. The Government’s response to the Future Pension Centre backlogs, and people’s absolute inability to get through for advice on whether to top up their national insurance credits before the 5 April deadline, was just to move the deadline back by four months. That remains woefully inadequate, and it is clear that that will have to be extended again. Will the Secretary of State commit to extending the deadline to April 2025, as I asked for in the first place?
Mel Stride
The hon. Lady raises an important point. As she acknowledges, there has been an extension to the deadline, and the reasons for that were in the very point she made about waiting times and so on. We are keeping that under review—I can say no more than that—and we are also increasing the amount of resources going into telephony to resolve the issues.
Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that there are real complexities in understanding life expectancy? From listening to the right hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), one would think that it was very easy to understand. The Secretary of State is my constituency neighbour, and the difference in life expectancy between the north and south of our county is over 10 years, with the lowest being in my patch—it is incredibly complex. Does he agree that setting the state pension age is also a complex process, and that it should be set through data-led decision making rather than political point scoring by the Opposition?
Mel Stride
I agree with my hon. Friend and neighbour. She is absolutely right that we need to use the best possible data that we have, which is precisely why we have taken the decision that we have, and I am pleased that the Opposition have welcomed it.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
I am sure that it is always a relief for a member of this Government to postpone an unpopular decision, especially in the light of what we have seen in France. Like the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), I am curious about the likely impact on Treasury calculations and whether it has been factored into recent projections.
Mel Stride
The hon. Gentleman will know that fiscal sustainability is one of the key issues that we examine in coming to these conclusions and in the work carried out by the independent assessor of these matters. If he has further specific questions about the impact of one particular set of decisions on the fiscal outlook over and above any other, I am happy to discuss those with him outside the Chamber.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s announcement, because we are trying to encourage people to save for their old age and retirement, and it is important that people get as much notice as possible. However, there is a dilemma right now. One of my constituents contacted me to say that she had been saving £1,500 a month for her retirement, which was fixed for September 2022 when she was 67, but by the time she came to realise her pension, it had dropped by £25,000, so she was no longer able to retire. Worse still, she wanted to replace her car so that she could be compliant with the ultra low emission zone because of the Mayor of London’s ULEZ extension, but she can no longer afford to do so.
Mel Stride
My hon. Friend has landed a very important point, as I think he knows, and I will leave it there.
Amy Callaghan (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
Some 31% of pre-state pension age households have no savings at all. Will the Government finally establish an independent pensions and savings commission to ensure that pension policies are fit for purpose, and if not, why not?
Mel Stride
I have already identified that we have been bearing down on pensioner poverty. We have stuck with our manifesto commitment to the triple lock, which has seen pensions rise to historically high levels. This is the party that stands firmly behind pensioners.
Scott Benton (Blackpool South) (Con)
Blackpool has the lowest life expectancy in England, with men on average living five years less than the national average. Shockingly, in some wards in my constituency, male life expectancy is 13 years lower than the national average. So that people in all parts of the UK can enjoy a broadly similar retirement period and the state pension remains fair for all, does the Secretary of State agree that we must redouble our efforts to reduce such large inequalities in health across this country?
Mel Stride
My hon. Friend is right, and that is why the Government are majoring so hard on the levelling-up agenda. He is right to point to the different life expectancies between regions and, indeed, within regions; there are sometimes stark differences between cities and towns. That is the kind of element that will need to be looked at again when the next review occurs.
Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)
My right hon. Friend knows well that pensioners are much more susceptible to rises in the cost of living because they are often on fixed incomes. On behalf of the more than 18,000 pensioners in Southend West, I simply thank my right hon. Friend and this Government for delivering the biggest ever increase in the state pension, which is going up by over 10% in just a few days’ time.
Mel Stride
I thank my hon. Friend for that observation. She is quite right: we have stood by our pensioners. There will be a further £300 cost of living payment to pensioners alongside the winter fuel allowance. We are encouraging as many pensioners as possible who qualify to apply for pension credit, which is worth £3,500 on average. That, in turn, passports pensioners on to £900 of payments in three instalments over the coming year.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
People in France are taking to the streets to protest against proposals to raise the state pension age to 64, yet in the UK people are expected to simply accept, despite today’s announcement, that the pension age should continue to rise, perhaps even to 70 or older by the mid-2050s. Given the poverty into which women born in the 1950s were thrown when their pension age was raised with little or no notice, and the fact that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has warned of a “pensioner poverty time bomb”, can the Secretary of State explain what consideration is given to rising levels of pensioner poverty—it is currently at 2.1 million, although he is seeking to deny that—when decisions are made about raising the state pension age?
Mel Stride
I set out in my previous response a number of the measures the Government have taken to make sure we look after our pensioners. I have also made it clear that since 2009-10, pensioner poverty has decreased.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. A number of people in my constituency work in the construction sector and manual labour. To expect someone in their late 60s to work in a manual labour job is simply impractical and unworkable, so I support the Government’s temporary stay of execution on this increase, so that people can retire when they have some semblance of health and strength to enjoy life. However, this again underlines the unfair treatment of the WASPI women born in the ’50s. I noted the Secretary of State’s response on that issue, but it would be unfair of me not to make that comment on behalf of the many constituents who have contacted me. May I gently ask him to act on their behalf, to ensure that there is fairness and parity?
Mel Stride
As the hon. Gentleman recognised, I am not in a position to comment on the matter he raised, as it is before the ombudsman at the moment, but his comments will have been heard.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I thank the Minister for his statement and for responding to questions for just short of half an hour.
Powering Up Britain
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero (Graham Stuart)
For much of the past 50 years, since the oil crises of the 1970s, we have taken cheap, plentiful energy for granted. Indeed, one of the catalysts for Britain’s economic transformation over that period has been affordable, abundant energy powering our homes, infrastructure, businesses and industry. Yet today, this cornerstone of our prosperity is under threat. Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine and decades of overreliance on imported fossil fuels have combined to push up energy prices. Even though we have very little exposure to Russian gas, we have suffered the consequences of volatile international energy markets. That is why the Government have stepped in this winter to pay around half of the typical household energy bill, and I am pleased to say that that support was extended in the Chancellor’s recent Budget.
The much bigger challenge long term is to bolster our energy resilience as a nation, so that a tyrant like Putin can never again hit the pockets of every family and business in Britain. We must diversify, decarbonise and domesticate our energy supplies to secure the cheap, clean power that Britain needs to prosper in the future. That is why last month the Prime Minister created the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to give these two closely entwined objectives—energy security and net zero—the full and dedicated attention within Government that they clearly merit. It was a statement of intent to put energy security among the Government’s top priorities. By doing so, we will bring wholesale electricity prices down to among the cheapest in Europe by 2035, drastically reduce carbon emissions and deliver the long-term boost that our economy needs, using Britain’s unique talents and assets to drive the energy transition.
Following the Department’s launch just 50 days ago, I am pleased to announce how the Government will be powering up Britain, including through our energy security plan, which sets out the steps we are taking to become more energy independent by powering Britain from Britain, and through our net zero growth plan, which builds on the measures laid out in the net zero strategy to keep us on track to achieve our carbon budgets. That plan meets our statutory obligations under the Climate Change Act 2008 to respond to the Climate Change Committee’s annual progress report from 2022, and sets out a package of proposals and policies that will enable carbon budgets to be met, to ensure that Britain remains the leader among the fastest decarbonising nations in the world.
Before starting on the announcements, I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) for his excellent work in this area, investigating how to deliver net zero in a way that is both pro-growth and pro-business. In January, he submitted his detailed report and recommendations to Government. I can confirm that we are partly or fully acting on 23 recommendations of the independent review of net zero report’s 25 recommendations for 2025. On behalf of the whole House, I thank my right hon. Friend again for his work.
Let me start on the announcements, if I may. As part of powering up Britain, the Government are launching Great British Nuclear, to put clean nuclear power at the heart of Britain’s energy security and spearhead a busy programme of new nuclear projects, starting with a competitive down-selection this year to choose the best small modular reactor technologies. We are launching the floating offshore wind manufacturing investment scheme, providing up to £160 million to kick-start funding in port infrastructure so that we can move forward with that exciting new technology, and we are publishing plans for investing in carbon capture and storage, a key area for cleaning up energy and one in which Britain can lead the world.
To drive our hydrogen ambitions, we are announcing a shortlist and funding for the first round of electrolytic hydrogen allocation, with a second round to come, and setting out our longer-term hydrogen plans. We are providing an extra £1 billion for energy efficiency upgrades through the new great British insulation scheme, and we are investing to speed up the market for heat pump installation to decarbonise home heating and leverage up to £300 million of overall funding, including private funding.
This country is already ahead of the game when it comes to decarbonising its economy. We are a global leader in offshore wind power and currently have the world’s largest operational offshore wind farm project, named after a town in my constituency: Hornsea 2. We also have the second, third and fourth largest offshore wind farm projects, but the measures we are unveiling today will accelerate our transition, rolling out existing technologies and bringing transformative new technologies to market.
We are truly on the verge of a new industrial revolution, but just like the first industrial revolution, investment will be key to our success, delivering not just energy security and ambitious reductions in carbon but the jobs, exports and productivity gains of the future. With that in mind, we are publishing today a new green finance strategy, which sets out a range of measures to mobilise private investment into net zero. That will support the UK in maintaining its position as a world-leading centre for green finance, and it sets us on a pathway to becoming the world’s first net zero-aligned financial centre.
It is imperative that we do not just focus on reducing emissions at home. The UK will work with international partners through the green transition to share the benefits of an improved environment that is good for business, because all economies need to take decisive steps to reduce their emissions. Indeed, increased investment in net zero technologies globally will unlock innovation and drive costs down, as well as create opportunities for green UK exports—in carbon capture and hydrogen, for example.
As such, today we are publishing two additional documents. The first is the 2030 strategic framework for international climate and nature action, which outlines our vision to halve global emissions, halt and reverse nature loss, and build resilience to climate impacts this decade. The second is the international climate finance strategy, which details our commitment to £11.6 billion of international climate finance up to 2025-26, after we pledged to double it. Both reinforce our climate leadership during what is a critical decade for delivery, showing that Britain is credible and committed to meeting its promises.
It is no exaggeration to say that Britain’s prospects as a nation, our ability to compete as an economy, and our capacity to decarbonise and tackle climate change all depend on energy security. Now, with a dedicated Department to deliver that vital objective, we will not only wean ourselves off fossil fuel imports but deliver cheaper, cleaner energy from domestic renewables and nuclear, protecting British households from turbulent international energy markets and creating hundreds of thousands of green jobs to level up Britain in the process. Making Britain an energy secure, net zero nation is one of the greatest opportunities of our time. Today, we have shown how we will grasp that opportunity for the benefit of everyone in this country for generations to come.
Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for his statement, but let me tell him that although there may have been thousands of pages published this morning, this is not the green day that the Government promised, but a groundhog day of reannouncements, reheated policy and no new investment. The documents are most notable for their glaring omissions: there is no removal of the onshore wind ban that is costing families hundreds of pounds on bills a year. There is no new money for energy efficiency to insulate homes and cut bills, just a reannouncement of a feeble offer made last year. There is no net zero mandate for Ofgem, as recommended by the right hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore)—to whom I too pay tribute—and as demanded by industry. There is no proper response to the Inflation Reduction Act, even as the rest of the world speeds ahead.
The biggest indictment of all, buried in the fine print and not mentioned by the Minister, is the admission that the policies announced today do not deliver the promise, solemnly made in front of the world at COP26 in Glasgow barely a year ago, to meet the UK’s 2030 climate target. The Government waited until noon, five hours after all the other documents were published, to release the carbon budget delivery plan—which is more like the failure to deliver the carbon budget plan. This is what it says:
“We have quantified emissions savings to deliver…92% of the NDC.”
A target for less than seven years’ time, and now almost 10% off—what an indictment of all the verbiage we have heard today. All the policies and all the hot air do not meet the promise that the Government made on the world stage under the presidency of the right hon. Member for Reading West (Sir Alok Sharma), to whom I also pay tribute. That means higher bills, energy insecurity, fewer jobs and climate failure.
Let me ask the Minister five questions. First, if the Government really wanted a sprint for clean power, they would go for onshore wind. They even promised to lift the ban last December, but the proposals in their consultation have been written off by industry as doing
“almost nothing to lift the draconian ban”.
The previous Business Secretary, the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg)—hardly an eco-warrior—promised to bring the planning regime for onshore wind into line with other infrastructure. Why will the Minister not take that step?
Secondly, there is no new investment in hydrogen. Germany is investing €9 billion in hydrogen, compared with £240 million from the UK. Does the Minister recognise the failure of ambition? Thirdly, it is good that the Government have finally allocated some resources to CCS, although I am old enough to remember the £1 billion CCS competition announced in 2008, 15 years ago, which they cancelled. However, they still appear to have no clue where the up to £20 billion of support is coming from, and it was not in the Budget documents. Can the Minister clear that up?
Fourthly, on the response to the Inflation Reduction Act, British businesses are crying out for action now, yet the Minister’s own documents published today show that the UK is investing less than France and less than Germany, and once the Inflation Reduction Act kicks in, we will be investing less than the USA. Is that not a clear admission that we are falling behind? Finally, can the Minister confirm from the Dispatch Box that as I said, the Government’s 2030 target announced at COP26 will not be met by these policies, and can he tell us how the UK can possibly claim the mantle of delivering on climate leadership when it is way off track to deliver the promise it made at the COP we hosted?
At the same time, the Government pursue their “every last drop” strategy on oil and gas. Let me tell the House what that means: it means funnelling £11.4 billion to the oil and gas companies making record profits, and ignoring what 700 leading scientists told the Government yesterday, which is that new exploration will not cut bills, will not deliver energy security and will severely undermine UK climate leadership. [Interruption.] I think the hon. Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) should listen to the scientists.
We know what a proper plan looks like: in 2030, zero carbon power; insulating 19 million cold, draughty homes in a decade; GB Energy to invest in all forms of low-carbon generation; and a national wealth fund investing in everything from clean steel to ports and electric vehicles to win the global race for Britain. [Interruption.] Yes, and nuclear power, too. This may be the fifth energy relaunch in two and a half years, but it is more of the same from this Government. They can relaunch their policies as many times as they like, but they fail and fail again.
Graham Stuart
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his response, but Members on the Government Benches will have been listening with a certain degree of incredulity, because we remember that in 2010 he left the people of this country in the worst housing stock in Europe. They were cold, their bills were unmanageable and just 14% of houses were properly insulated. Now it is half, and we need to go further and faster, which is why we have the energy efficiency taskforce. It is why we have announced £6.5 billion in this Parliament, and it is why we are announcing today our new initiative on insulation. It is why there is another £6 billion to be spent between 2025 and 2028. The Labour party failed absolutely on the most basic thing: looking after people in their homes so they could pay their bills.
That is not all, however, because on renewables the Labour party now talks about this transformation by 2030, which no one other than the Labour party—it is not involved, I fear, in an entirely open, transparent, and possibly even honest exercise—believes can be delivered by 2030. What was Labour’s record on power? In 2010, 7% of our electricity came from renewables. If Labour in government had unleashed renewables the way we did, families this last winter would not have needed the Government to step in, because we would not have been so reliant on gas. It was Labour’s failure. It was 7% of electricity then, but it is nearly half today. This Government have transformed our performance, while the Labour party failed in power.
What are Labour’s ideas going forward? What do they consist of? While we have unlocked £200 billion of investment since we came into power, the Labour party, led by the hard left, with whom the right hon. Gentleman has always had more than a passing association, want through its GB Energy to nationalise an industry in which we have brought in global investment. Instead of unlocking renewables, Labour will, if it gets back into power, do exactly what it did in power last time: fail to deliver renewables, reverse the green transformation, fail to meet our carbon budget targets and let down Britain and every family, who will be back in cold, freezing homes with overly expensive bills to boot. That is what the Labour party offers.
We are internationally competitive. It is great that other countries, such as America with the Inflation Reduction Act, are seeking to catch up with us on things such as offshore wind. We support that. On onshore wind, which the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, as I have said, we are committed to reviewing it and ensuring that we can take it forward in a way that runs with the support and consent of local people.
In response to what the right hon. Gentleman said at the end of his words, three quarters of the power of this country today comes from fossil fuels, and we are the most decarbonised country in the G7. The right hon. Gentleman, the Labour party and the Scottish National party do not have a plan to stop using fossil fuels. What they have a plan for—this is unbelievable—is to make sure that we do not produce our own, that we import energy from abroad at the cost of billions and billions, that we make ourselves less energy secure, that we lose the 120,000 jobs, most of which are in Scotland, in the oil and gas industry and that we lose their capability to help deliver the hydrogen and carbon capture and storage industries upon which our decarbonisation path depends. The Labour party failed when it was in power. Its analysis of what it needs to do now is failing, too, and the British people will not be fooled.
Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)
May I thank the Minister for his kind words about the net zero review, and indeed the Government’s full response so soon after the review was submitted? I hope that the UK’s net zero pathway is now in a better place as a result of the recommendations. I should say that they are not my recommendations, but those of all the sectors I went to speak to and thousands of individuals, businesses and companies that want to get on with delivering decarbonisation, because they see the economic opportunity for the UK.
Does the Minister agree that we now need to slay this myth that somehow net zero will make us colder and poorer? Net zero will make us warmer and richer, and it is the economic opportunity of the decade, if not this century, to create a new economy, just as other countries such as the United States have recognised. Will he also accept that rather than talk down what the US has done, we need to work with our allies and democratic partners in creating a new special relationship around green energy?
Lastly, just to reflect on the comments made by the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), net zero is not just about 2050. We cannot keep kicking the can down the road. We do not have 28 years; we have seven years to deliver on the most ambitious nationally determined contribution of a 68% emissions reduction. If the UK achieves that, it is an economic prize that every single country across the world will look to us on how to achieve, and it will deliver further growth. There are economic consequences to not meeting that 2030 target, just as there will be severe economic consequences to not delivering net zero. I hope the Minister will urge both this party and any other climate delayers, who become the new deniers, that ultimately net zero is the future for the UK.
Graham Stuart
I thank my right hon. Friend and again pay tribute to him for all his work. This is the economic opportunity. If we look at a map of Europe, we can see the opportunity around the British Isles, and we will capture that energy. We are also blessed with around a third of all carbon storage in Europe. We can operationalise that to decarbonise the UK and provide a service to Europe, and we will do so. It will lead to the reindustrialisation of the north-west, north-east, Wales and Scotland. The opportunities are immense, and colleagues have been fighting hard.
On the NDC, we have set that ambitious world-leading 2030 target, and we are committed to delivering our commitments, including the 2030 NDC. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Doncaster North is a little out of touch. Countries are not due to start reporting to the United Nations framework convention on climate change on progress towards meeting NDCs until 2024, but we have quantified proposals and policies already to cover 92%, and we will go further. Just as we have done with our carbon budgets, we will exceed, not fall short. It was the Labour party that fell short on insulation and renewables; this party has a record of delivery, and our policies are supplemented by others that we have not quantified yet as we work hard to roll out these things. We will meet that 2030 target. We will continue our leadership role as arguably the only major economy in the world that is on that net zero pathway to 2050.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I call the Scottish National party spokesperson.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
I think the greenest aspect of these announcements is the level of recycling in them without the actual funding to back them up. Starting with nuclear, there is no successful European pressurised water reactor project anywhere in the world. Hinkley has almost doubled in price to £33 billion, so we know that Sizewell C will cost something like £35 billion. That is a huge, scandalous waste of money that could be better utilised elsewhere. On SMRs, there is not even an approved design with the regulator yet. At £2 billion a pop, SMRs are not cheap either, and it is a myth that they will lower energy bills and provide security. Nuclear is the only energy technology to get more expensive rather than cheaper over the years.
We need more storage. I keep asking about pumped storage hydro. Please will the Government agree a carbon floor mechanism so that SSE can get on with Coire Glas and Drax can get on with the Cruachan extension? While the United States has the Inflation Reduction Act, when we look at the budget for allocation round 5, funding has been cut by a third from £285 million to £205 million, while we have inflationary pressures of 30%. The reality is that it will not deliver what we need it to deliver. Has the Minister looked at the lessons from the Spanish auction, which failed miserably and did not deliver on allocations?
The Minister knows that we need a greater ringfenced pot for tidal. At the moment, tidal stream energy has a 80% to 90% UK supply chain. If the Government do not increase the ringfenced budget, we risk offshoring manufacturing again. If he is talking about being powered by Britain, he needs to increase that funding for tidal stream so that we are building the UK supply chain.
On CCS, Acorn was not even mentioned in the statement. It was promised to us in 2014, and now it is not even mentioned. Is there going to be a definitive funding allocation for Acorn and are there going to be timescales for that funding, or is it a further betrayal when the Government are taking in £60-odd billion in additional oil and gas revenues? The reality is clear: Scotland has the energy, but Westminster keeps the powers.
Graham Stuart
The hon. Gentleman’s party of course opposes nuclear, despite the opportunity it provides to this country, and it means that Scotland does not benefit as it should. He talked about pumped hydro, and I would be happy to meet him to discuss that further.
We are the world leader in tidal energy, although we would be hard pushed to understand that from the hon. Gentleman. We have put a ringfenced number on that, and budgets can be changed. The budgets were set on the basis of those projects that were ready and were coming forward. As that changes through this year, as I very much hope it will, we have the flexibility to change those budgets upwards appropriately. Like him, I believe that tidal has a great future, and I love the fact that we are the global leader. There are many jobs in Scotland and around the rest of the country from it.
On carbon capture and storage, this is a major announcement today. I am delighted about the eight projects for carbon capture that have come forward as part of track 1. Today, we have launched track 2, and we have said in the papers, as the hon. Gentleman will be delighted to hear, that we think the Scottish cluster—and Acorn—and Viking in the Humber are the two best placed at the moment to go ahead, although there will be a competition and we are opening that now. We will be having an extension of track 1, we will be having track 2 and we are cracking on with it. I very much look forward to seeing what the Scottish cluster has to offer, because I know it is particularly well prepared, and that is why it was not a reserve, but the reserve in our track 1 process.
Sir Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)
Mr Deputy Speaker, thank you for calling me. Could I start by saying that I welcome the announcements that have been made? I think this does move us forward on the road to decarbonising our economy. I want to thank the Minister and particularly his officials for all of the work that has gone into this and the thousands of pages that have now been published. He made a really important point when he talked about how
“investment will be key to our success”.
I could not agree more. I agree with him that, over the last 10 or 12 years, we have managed to attract tens of billions of pounds of private sector investment, but we have to deal with the world as we find it now. The reality is that the US, the EU and other nations are speeding up and attracting billions and billions of private sector investment right now. Why are we waiting until the autumn to respond to that? Do we not need to speed up and respond now to the Inflation Reduction Act and measures by other nations?
Graham Stuart
I thank my right hon. Friend, and I pay tribute to him for his role as COP President and all the leadership he has given in this area. He is absolutely right to highlight the investment competition, but as I think The Economist mentioned last week, the US approach, with its direct subsidy regime, is not as effective—not as cost-effective—as the UK regime. I am confident in our system, and we are rolling this forward. We have attracted £50 billion of green investment from 2021 to 2022. [Interruption.] Since 2010—when the right hon. Member for Doncaster North, who does not stop chuntering, left power, fortunately—we have had 50% more expenditure per share of GDP in this country than in the US, and we are opening up today the policies to ensure that that continues. My right hon. Friend will be delighted to learn that the CBI has said:
“The package of measures announced by the government represents a gear shift to boost energy security, reduce household bills and re-establish the UK’s credentials as a leader in green technologies.”
That is the CBI speaking for British business, and I believe that the policies today will deliver implementation, which is our main aim as we go forward.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
After more than eight years championing carbon capture and storage, I welcome today’s positive news, even the repeated bits, but particularly the projects for Teesside. That said, the Government’s ambition falls short of the industry’s, and the Department’s website shows that projects for CF Fertilisers, Alfanar and Kellas Midstream have not made it. Why is that, and what impact will the decision to ditch the Humber projects, in the Minister’s own backyard, have on the innovative, collaborative and excellent Humber-Tees carbon capture, utilisation and storage project?
Graham Stuart
I think there was some recognition of good news in there from the hon. Gentleman. He and, unfortunately, all the Labour MPs in his area seem endlessly to talk down Teesside, as it goes from success to success under its excellent Mayor. Today is fantastic news for Teesside, and as I have said, this is just the beginning. We are starting projects now, we are accelerating track 2 and we are promising an extension this year to track 1. We are doing it. The hon. Gentleman, of whom I am a friend and admirer, should stop talking down the success of his area, get behind the development and look at how we have moved from the dire situation in 2010 to the world leadership position we hold today.
Nigel Adams (Selby and Ainsty) (Con)
There is much to be welcomed in the Minister’s statement, but excluding Drax from the track 1 CCS projects will come as a surprise to many and a blow to the company’s employees in my constituency and the wider region. I do not think there are any projects in the Humber region that have got through on track 1. The management at Drax will now have to urgently consider what to do with their UK operations, especially when we consider the challenging economics of biomass operations post March 2027. Could the Minister clear something up for me? The Yorkshire Post reported last August that the Prime Minister backed Drax’s BECCS—bioenergy with carbon capture and storage—plans. Can my right hon. Friend confirm that The Yorkshire Post reporting was accurate, and if so, why has the Government’s position now changed?
Graham Stuart
I thank my right hon. Friend for his question, and for being such an active campaigner for Drax and probably the foremost champion of power BECCS in this place. He is absolutely right that power BECCS and Drax are critically important to this country and the future of our net zero strategy. There are no power BECCS projects going ahead in the first phase of the track 1 process due to infrastructure constraints. We remain committed to our ambitious CCUS targets, which include 5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas removals by 2030, and power BECCS has a key role to play in that. That is why we have put so much emphasis on track 1 expansion and track 2, both of which will get further CCUS projects operationalised by 2030. To respond to the specific point my right hon. Friend made, the Department totally understands that we need to work with Drax on a bridging option between 2027 and 2030, and the Secretary of State has charged our officials with working with Drax on what those options look like.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
Just a week ago, the UN Secretary-General said we needed a “quantum leap” when it comes to climate action. This Government have laboured and, frankly, brought forth a mouse. There is no new funding, no street-by-street home insulation plan, no mandatory rooftop solar and no unblocking of onshore wind. Instead, Ministers are gambling with technologies that are slow and costly at best, and unproven at worst. While some CCS might have a role for carbon-intensive industry, will the Minister accept that—given its very high cost, high life-cycle emissions and appalling record of delivery, and since it cannot achieve energy security because fossil fuels will simply be sold on global markets at global prices—CCS cannot be used as an excuse for licensing new oil and gas in the middle of a climate emergency?
Graham Stuart
I thank the hon. Lady for her question. [Interruption.] I think I was disappearing like a mouse underneath the Dispatch Box there. We of course made major announcements in the Budget. What today is all about is giving the detail of how we are going to unlock that. She raises the question of carbon capture and storage. There is not a way for us to get to net zero without using carbon capture and storage. I remember that it was said by the Labour Government in 2003, if I recall correctly, that it was urgent. Here we are, 20 years later, but I am delighted to say—[Interruption.] I am delighted to say that, having had to come into government with nobody insulated and practically no renewables, and a note on a piece of paper saying there was no money left, we are coming forward with proposals to put that right.
Greg Clark (Tunbridge Wells) (Con)
I had the great pleasure of opening the Siemens wind turbine blade factory in Hull, very close to my right hon. Friend’s constituency, which is living proof that net zero, low-cost energy, energy security and jobs and prosperity can go hand in hand. Does my right hon. Friend recognise the export opportunities for the next generation of offshore wind—floating offshore wind—working with countries including Japan? On nuclear, will he consider accelerating the national planning statement so that developers of small modular reactors do not have to wait until 2025 to plan deployment? And on hydrogen, will the road map include a target date for phasing out polluting grey hydrogen, as recommended in a recent Science and Technology Committee report?
Graham Stuart
I share my right hon. Friend’s enthusiasm for the export opportunities that lie ahead of us. By leaning in ahead of others, as we have done and are doing, we can develop technologies and solutions which can then be exported all around the world, to the good of those other countries and ourselves. It is great to see us brokering support for just energy transition partnerships with the likes of Indonesia and Vietnam, who are great partners for us going forward. We are setting out today our vision for hydrogen and our commissioning of electrolytic hydrogen projects as part of our effort to transform the situation and move to a position where we have no unabated hydrogen as soon as that can possibly be delivered.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
I am not sure what the Minister had for breakfast but it is probably best avoided because his aggressive and belligerent approach has undermined much of the good cross-party consensus that there is on this important issue. No one can look at the home insulation schemes of the last decade and imagine they are anything other than a painful failure, so for cities such as mine that have historical housing and need an insulation scheme, how will the new schemes be different from the failures of the last few years?
Graham Stuart
The hon. Gentleman talked about getting the tone right; perhaps I responded in the appropriate tone to the way that the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) addressed me. When I consider that he was a Minister in the Government who so spectacularly failed, it is all the more likely that I might be a little spikey. [Interruption.] If he stops barracking for a moment, I will respond to the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), who asked about insulation over the last 10 or so years: we have gone from 14% of homes effectively insulated to half of all homes, and we have set up the energy efficiency taskforce. We are driving forward and putting a budget in place precisely to take this forward and improve it further. With our support for heat pumps, we are looking to green our houses and lower costs for families, as well as meeting the climate challenge, on which the last Government singularly failed and I am pleased to say that this Government are making progress.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Who will pay for CCS as it does not generate any direct revenue from retail customers?
Graham Stuart
To decarbonise industry, we will need CCS and hydrogen. We are socialising the funding requirements across the piece to ensure that we deliver what is necessary to meet our carbon targets, at the lowest possible cost to consumers. This year we are also consulting on measures to prevent carbon leakage, ensure that we do not drive UK industry abroad, which I know my right hon. Friend is concerned about, and instead maintain our competitiveness as we move towards net zero.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
If the Government were so serious about climate action why did they need to be dragged into court and told by the High Court that their existing plans are not sufficient? Now we have a new strategy, but there is not very much new in it and still a de facto ban on onshore wind. Will the Minister commit to cancel the planned expansion of fossil fuel subsidies and instead commit to a significant increase in onshore wind?
Graham Stuart
I am afraid the hon. Lady may want to correct the record because she misled the House. The courts did not say our policies were insufficient; they said they wished to have more detail on them. We are responding to that technical point today, providing further detail. [Interruption.] Absolutely, it was not a reflection on the quality of those policies. We have met all our carbon budgets to date and have set out today the way we will meet our carbon budget 6, and, even though it is far ahead, we have already set out policies to cover 97% of it. As I have also said, we are looking to make sure that we come forward with more opportunities for onshore wind, but with the consent of local communities.
Sir John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement and strongly welcome the Government’s commitment to a new generation of nuclear power stations, which are going to play an essential part in delivering both energy security and net zero. Can he confirm that, while a new Chinese-designed reactor may no longer be in prospect, Bradwell-on-Sea in my constituency remains a designated site for new nuclear investment?
Graham Stuart
The current nuclear policy statement identified Bradwell as a site for nuclear electricity, as my right hon. Friend rightly says, until the end of 2025. That statement continues to have effect for any nuclear infrastructure deployable before the end of that year, and of course with the launch today of Great British Nuclear, its first job is to look at the process for down-selecting technologies for small modular reactors, but it will also be involved in a renewed siting policy that will look at both gigawatt and SMR-scale nuclear projects.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
The Minister talks up energy security but fails to prioritise onshore wind, the best value renewable energy. By when will the Government remove the ban on onshore wind?
Graham Stuart
I have set out our position on onshore wind. The great thing about the CfD system we have set up is that it has helped to reveal costs. Ground-mounted solar might actually prove to be the lowest cost generator, but thanks to the system this Government have set up, we have competition between the various types of energy, and we are continuing with that. Having led the world on offshore wind and transformed the parlous situation we inherited, with just 7% of electricity coming from renewables in 2010, I am delighted to say that wind, both onshore and offshore, has a brilliant future under this Conservative Government.
Sir Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
I am sure the Minister will have read reports this morning that his Department intends to bring forward a code that will initially be voluntary but will then become mandatory saying that mortgage lenders should ensure that their loan book only includes properties that have an energy performance certificate of C or above. Does the Minister accept that for those who live in an older property, a doer-upper, a national park or a listed property, the net effect of this policy is that they will have zero chance of a mortgage?
Graham Stuart
No policy decision has been made in this area. We have consulted and gone out and found ideas about the best way of doing this. My right hon. Friend is right to identify that any system needs to take account of the particularities of certain property types, and we will ensure we do that so that we both align with net zero and align with the reality of existing properties.
Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)
I am pleased the statement mentioned the importance of energy efficiency schemes, both for their contribution to our net zero ambitions and the help they can offer households. The New Economics Foundation estimates that had all homes across England and Wales been upgraded to EPC rating C over the past decade, energy bills would on average have been £530 cheaper per household. I take it that the £1 billion allocated for the great British insulation scheme is in addition to the £6 billion committed at the autumn statement for expenditure post-2025. Is the Minister considering ways of bringing forward some of this spending so that even greater progress can be made?
Graham Stuart
We would be in a very different and much better situation if, instead of inheriting such a tiny—derisory—number of properly insulated homes when we came into power, we had had the 50% we are at today. With the energy efficiency taskforce and my colleague Lord Callanan, we are bringing industry and other stakeholders together, working with the Welsh Government and others to make sure that we have all the right policies, because the best form of energy is energy we do not use: it is demand that we can remove and destroy. That is the cheapest, and it can help us be a lean and efficient economy, and with fewer people in fuel poverty.
Virginia Crosbie (Ynys Môn) (Con)
Anglesey is known as energy island. We have wind, wave, solar, tidal, hydrogen and, hopefully, new nuclear at Wylfa, and we have projects like Morlais, Minesto, bp Mona, the Holyhead hydrogen hub and Lightsource bp, so I welcome the statement to power up Britain. Will the Minister confirm to me and my Ynys Môn constituents, particularly those in Cemlyn, Cemaes and Amlwch, that the UK Government are committed to new nuclear at Wylfa, and will he accept my invitation to visit Wylfa, one of the best new nuclear sites in the UK?
Graham Stuart
My hon. Friend will understand that I cannot make policy commitments to Wylfa on the hoof. What I can tell her is that it has already been assessed as one of the best nuclear sites in the UK and that if the energy focus, determination and sheer drive of the Member of Parliament has anything to do with it, Wylfa has a very positive and strong nuclear future ahead of it. I look forward to working with her. I am sure that if he has not visited already, the new Minister for Nuclear and Networks—the first time this country has ever had a Minister with “nuclear” in their title—the Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, my hon. Friend the Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie), will visit her in her constituency.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
The way to deliver energy security, tackle the climate crisis and lower bills as quickly as possible is through renewables, yet the Government are hooked on ever more oil and gas production, and on handing massive subsidies to polluting companies. Over 700 scientists have written to the Prime Minister to ask him to grant no new oil and gas licences, a call backed by the United Nations Secretary-General. Is it not time that the Minister used his powers to prevent the development of the Rosebank oilfield?
Graham Stuart
We are accelerating renewables as quickly as we possibly can. As I say, we have transformed the dire situation we inherited and we are moving as fast as we can on that, but we are going to need, and be dependent on, oil and gas for decades to come. Under net zero, we will still be using a quarter of the gas we use today. The hon. Gentleman is saying to his constituents, “Let’s pay billions to foreign, sometimes hostile, states, rather than producing our own.” That is economic madness. The gas we bring in on tankers has two and a half times the emissions of our domestically produced gas. On what planet would any rational and reasonable constituency MP want to propose that, unless they had some strange affinity with somewhere like Russia?
Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
The Minister is exactly right that we are on the cusp of a new industrial revolution. Floating offshore wind will be a key part of that picture, so I welcome the confirmation he has given today of the £160 million FLOMIS—floating offshore wind manufacturing investment scheme—port infrastructure package. Will he confirm when he is likely to start awarding that funding? Does he agree with me that it needs to be used in a really targeted way to unlock private sector investment and ensure we capture first mover advantage with floating offshore wind? Will he visit the port of Milford Haven to see the really exciting things happening in the energy sector there?
Graham Stuart
I thank my right hon. Friend who, like my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie), is relentless in promoting and pursuing these interests. He can see that moving towards net zero and capitalising on the huge natural assets around Wales, can contribute to jobs, prosperity and industrial renaissance, as well as help us to deliver the transition. I would be delighted to visit him. In answer to his earlier question, we want to do that as soon as possible. We announced the opening of it today. We want to move forward. We have to accelerate everything we can do right across the piece.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
RenewableUK commented that the budget and parameters set for the most recent contract for difference auction are currently too low and too tight to unlock all the potential investment in wind, solar and tidal stream. Tidal alone could produce huge amounts—up to 11 GW —of reliable clean electricity for far less than the cost of nuclear. The Minister claims he supports tidal, so why have the Government cut their funding commitments to it?
Graham Stuart
We have not cut our funding commitments; we have moved to a one-year allocation. The budgets are set based on our assessment of projects and where they are in the planning and permissions process. Those budgets, if projects can come forward and put themselves in a different position, can be altered by Ministers. I think we are in a fantastic position. We are the world leader and we have put in a ring-fenced pot specifically for tidal, so I suggest to the hon. Lady and her constituents that they should be celebrating Government support for tidal. We are the world leader, we are going further and our support continues. I look forward to visiting Scotland, and indeed Orkney, next week with a view to learning more about tidal potential, an enthusiasm for which I share with her.
David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) (Con)
I commend my right hon. Friend not just on his statement, but on his long-standing passion for this subject. Perhaps he can expand on something he referenced a moment ago: the fact that liquid gas imported in tankers creates two and a half times as many emissions as domestically produced gas in the North sea. Does he not agree with me that it is incomprehensible that the SNP and now Labour oppose domestic production, which is not only bad for jobs, but bad for the environment?
Graham Stuart
My right hon. Friend is, of course, absolutely right. The hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) talked about growing our oil and gas. We are net importers of oil and gas, and production in the mature basin of the North sea is falling. Only new investment can unlock the greening and electrification of production, with even lower emissions in sight from the North sea than from tankered gas coming in from abroad. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we did as the leader of the Labour party, the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), said at Davos and had no new oil and gas licences, we would not stop using gas; we would just import more of it from abroad with higher emissions attached, with no jobs, no tax and no long-term benefit to the United Kingdom. That is not a tenable policy. I hope that, apart from their far-left colleagues on the far Labour Back Benches, everyone else in the Labour party recognises that is a crazy position and it needs to change.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
I take the Minister’s recent comments to be a notification that I will be having a constituency visit from him. I look forward to that.
However, can I take him back to the question of energy security and just remind him that there is more to energy security than what we produce and where? It is also about the protection of infrastructure and the assets around it. All this week, we have had a Russian tug, the Nikolay Chiker, steaming up and down to the east of Shetland in the vicinity of the pipeline servicing Brent and Ninian. This morning, the tug has gone around to the north-west of Shetland and is now doing the same thing in the vicinity of the pipeline servicing the Laggan field to the west of Shetland. It is a merchant vessel, but we know that the Russian military often purpose merchant vessels in this way. Will the Minister speak to his colleagues in the Ministry of Defence to see, first, if they know what is going on? Secondly, if they do not, will they find out? Thirdly, what will we be doing in the long term to protect these vital national assets?
Graham Stuart
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question. Perhaps we can follow up offline on that. As appropriate, I would certainly be happy to engage with my colleagues in the MOD. As a Minister for energy security, I keep all that under advisement. We will formally notify him of my intention to come to his constituency and, whether next week or another time, we can discuss this matter further and make sure I can reassure him on what are very well expressed concerns.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
I love the energy the Government are putting behind energy, particularly nuclear. I hope that Berkeley and Oldbury will get a small modular reactor, because the western gateway is working really hard. Supersmart Stroud businesses are still coming up against things like planning barriers for solar rooftop and tracking, and Competition and Markets Authority problems for financing options for renewables. The UK also needs to look really lively to win the race on the hydrogen ICE—internal combustion engine. I welcome the big announcements today, but will the Government move the machine to resolve a raft of smaller daily frustrations, so we can unleash some amazing British businesses, many of which are in the Stroud district?
Graham Stuart
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If there was one priority above all else in the Department, it would be ensuring that we get the grid sorted and the infrastructure in place to allow that transformation. We will publish an action plan this year in response to the Electricity Networks Commissioner Nick Winser’s recommendations, when he reports in June on halving the development time for transmission network projects. However, across the piece, we need to speed up connections, and sort out the queue and perverse incentives in that system. We have a lot to do and we are working at it. Only last week in No. 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister hosted an event looking at the networks piece. The offshore wind acceleration taskforce had its final meeting this week, which looked at grids, among other things.
I thank the offshore wind champion Tim Pick for all his work, as well as Nick Winser. I also take the opportunity to thank officials in the new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, who have put a huge amount of work into producing all these policies and are working hard to ensure that implementation can follow as fast as possible. Officials in my new Department have absolutely shone and I look forward to taking forward our work with their help.
Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
Too many homes in places such as Chopwell in my constituency urgently need insulation and energy efficiency. They, and people across the country, face additional charges of up to £1,000. How will the Government take active steps to address issues such as those in Chopwell, to ensure that they are energy efficient and that people can benefit from better homes?
Graham Stuart
The hon. Lady is absolutely right to highlight the issue. That is why we have set up the energy efficiency taskforce. We are putting in £6.5 billion in this Parliament, as well as announcing the major insulation scheme today. We have another £6 billion between 2025 and 2028. We are absolutely committed to ensuring that homes are insulated. I am pleased that today’s announcements will see 300,000 of the most energy-inefficient homes in the country tackled, reducing families’ bills by hundreds of pounds a year as a result.
Marco Longhi (Dudley North) (Con)
With energy security a key strategic imperative for our Union, I thank the Minister not only for this statement but for his common-sense approach to investments in oil and gas as we transition to a greener economy. Building on other Members’ comments about investment in British nuclear, such projects are notoriously slow at being delivered. Can we look at how to very quickly get spades in the ground and invest in small nuclear reactors for the benefit of the country?
Graham Stuart
The reason for setting up Great British Nuclear is precisely to de-risk, roll the pitch and accelerate technologies. One of the benefits of small modular reactors as opposed to gigawatt scale is quicker replicability. The hope is that it can move to a factory-like process, eliminate errors iteratively and then deliver nuclear energy safely, cheaply and more quickly than previous technologies have allowed.
Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)
In relation to the Acorn project, I get a feeling of déjà vu. It was promised in 2008 and ahead of the 2014 referendum, which to some of us feels like a generation ago. Can the Minister do something that none of his predecessors has ever been able to do: tell us exactly the difference between a track 1 reserve project and a track 2 project? Can he tell us what difference that will make to the timescale for funding and delivery, should the Acorn project finally be favoured by his colleagues?
Graham Stuart
The hon. Gentleman is a little unfair. If one of the two selected track 1 projects were to come off track, the reserve would move up—that was the point. It was an indicator of the maturity and viability of the Scottish cluster. We are moving fast. We have announced the launch of track 2 now. We believe that the Scottish cluster and the Viking cluster in the Humber are the two leading contenders best placed to do it, and we will move forward with speed. I look forward to working with him and colleagues to make sure that the Scottish cluster can play a full part in our future.
Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)
I thank my right hon. Friend for today’s announcements and for his ongoing engagement on the new Department’s work. Will he reaffirm his commitment to rapid delivery of floating offshore wind in the Celtic sea, along with the vital UK-based supply chain and port infrastructure right around the Celtic sea coast?
Graham Stuart
My hon. Friend is a member of a small, elite group of colleagues who are relentlessly focused on ensuring that the energy transition is done in the right way, leading to jobs and prosperity for her constituents and others. I can confirm that. Having announced the launch of FLOWMIS today, we look forward rapidly to supporting the port infrastructure that is critical to the delivery of floating offshore wind, and the maintenance of the UK as the world leader on this vital technology. Estimates show that only about 8% of potential offshore wind capacity globally is on a fixed bed. For those who have a shallow continental shelf like us, 92% is floating. There is enormous opportunity for the UK if we unlock the infrastructure and the jobs, because then we can export that capability all around the world.
Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)
The Minister spoke of making policy on the hoof, so I wonder why the Government’s policy seems to be chasing a unicorn. What happens if the unicorn of carbon capture and storage turns out to be a donkey with an ice cream on its head? Would it not be better to unlock the stables of the reliable horses of home insulation, solar and onshore wind?
Graham Stuart
So can I take it that the hon. Lady’s party is opposed? It failed to support the regulated asset base regulations in Committee to allow new nuclear to go ahead, despite its protestations to the contrary. Now, she seems to be opposed to carbon capture and storage, which offers enormous opportunities for all sorts of industrial parts of the United Kingdom—another failure. On solar, I am delighted to announce the launch of a solar taskforce precisely to accelerate the take-up.
I cannot believe the gall of the Opposition party, which left Government with just 11% of our electricity from renewables, when it is around half now. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) failed in government, and now he chunters from a sedentary position. We will drive forward the solar taskforce. Having transformed our solar base, which is greater than that of France—despite the larger area—and about equivalent to the radiated country of Spain, we will increase it fivefold by 2035. That is why we have the taskforce—because we deliver. We do not just talk or chunter from a sedentary position. We transform the UK’s energy system.
Scott Benton (Blackpool South) (Con)
If we are truly serious about speeding up the planning process for energy production, the Minister’s new Department needs exclusive planning control over all matters. Is that Government policy? If it is, when is it likely to happen?
Graham Stuart
Talking of making policy on the hoof, my announcement today that the Department would take over the entirety of the planning system would cause something of a Whitehall ruckus. At least twice this week I have met colleagues from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to ensure a joined-up approach across Government. That Department is alive to these issues, as is the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my Department and the Ministry of Defence, which has equities here. Joining up and working across Government so that this is as seamless as possible—it is never entirely seamless—is at the heart of delivering the changes in the system that we need. My hon. Friend is right that planning is vital to that.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Minister for his statement. I have listened attentively to him, I have read the Government publication and, unfortunately, I did not see any reference to tidal energy. In Strangford lough we have a ready-made project. I was pleased to have the Minister over to visit the Queens University biology station. The scientists there were very happy to see him there and to have his input on the projects that we feel can make a difference. Will he outline whether the potential of tidal energy is getting the appropriate attention it deserves?
Graham Stuart
It was my great pleasure to be hosted by the hon. Gentleman at Strangford lough and to hear all about the potential strengths of the tides. I am delighted to see the growth of tidal energy. For offshore wind, it took quite a while to build up what was a nascent market. People said that we would never be able to lower costs offshore, yet we did. I think that tidal is on that pathway. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will welcome the ringfence, our continued support and our flexibility on budget as and when projects come through. We seek to drive the cost curves down so that, ultimately, we are technology neutral but support and nurse new technologies such as that, which have great potential.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
There is much to welcome in my right hon. Friend’s statement, particularly in the Humber region, as he will recognise. He referenced a £160 million fund for port infrastructure. Clearly, improvements will be needed to cope with many of these projects. Can he indicate when that is likely to come forward? I presume there will be a bidding process. Will that be open fairly soon?
Graham Stuart
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. Let me follow up with him to talk about more of the details, but I welcome, as he does, the success of the Gigastack Phillips 66 project, the initial hydrogen project. We are leading the world and, having met with Phillips 66, I know that that type of refinery of the future has a real opportunity to play an important part in delivering the green transition on a number of fronts. It is fantastic to see it successful in today’s announcements.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. This strategy rightly focuses on security of energy, its cost and decarbonisation. I would be grateful if he could confirm that the Government will also concentrate on the enormous opportunity to create jobs, and that they will come forward quickly with both a skills strategy and a plan for investment in infrastructure, which should include both the grid and ports such as Lowestoft?
Graham Stuart
I thank my hon. Friend for his constructive contribution, as ever. I co-chair the green jobs delivery group. We are working closely with industry to ensure that we get the signals from them across multiple trades, and engaging with the Department for Education to ensure that it can use those inputs to construct various courses to support that. We are absolutely focused. The reason we have a Minister for nuclear and networks is that we recognise that we have to get that infrastructure right. If we get it right—look at the success we have already had and at our investability going forward—it will be a tremendous transition, generating lower-cost energy and making us one of the most competitive economies in the world.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I thank the Minister for his statement and for responding to questions for over an hour. Could he stay in his place a little longer, as this point of order relates to him?
Wera Hobhouse
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. The Minister has accused me of misleading the House and asked me to correct the record. I am happy to do that. My question should read: “If the Government were serious about climate action, why did the Government need to be dragged into court and told by the High Court that their existing policies are lacking detail?” I apologise to the House that I used the word “insufficient” rather than “lacking detail.”
Graham Stuart
Further to that point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. The Court asked for more detail and I am delighted to say that is precisely what we have provided today. There was no suggestion from the Court that our policies were not adequate. It wished for more detail and we have been delighted to share that.
Belfast/Good Friday Agreement: 25th Anniversary
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Chris Heaton-Harris)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the 25th anniversary of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement.
It gives me great pleasure to open today’s debate on the 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. This is an historic occasion, not just for the people of Northern Ireland, who have benefited directly from the peace, prosperity and host of other benefits the agreement has brought, but for the entire United Kingdom and for all of us in this House. I know that right hon. and hon. Members will have their own unique reflections on this momentous occasion.
The agreement ended almost 30 years of armed conflict in Northern Ireland. That will always remain its most profound and important legacy. The generation that has grown up since its signing has only known relative peace and increasing reconciliation. That in itself is a remarkable achievement.
As many of us know, the agreement comprises three closely interrelated strands, all of which underpin the peace and prosperity that Northern Ireland enjoys to this day. Strand 1 established the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly, enabling decisions on health, education, employment and much more to be undertaken locally for the benefit of everyone in Northern Ireland. These institutions provide an important guarantee on inclusive decision making on governance, representative of all communities in Northern Ireland.
Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)
Does the Secretary of State agree that one of the most important elements under discussion is the role of education in creating the necessary conditions for having more united communities in the future?
Chris Heaton-Harris
Yes, indeed. I think that is even more vital now that we have a generation of people across our United Kingdom who did not experience the troubles at first hand. It is very important that knowledge is transferred to them, so that they can learn from the mistakes of the past and rebuild the foundation and network the hon. Lady identifies.
Strand 2 of the agreement provided for co-operation between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and established the North South Ministerial Council. Strand 3 included the establishment of the British-Irish Council and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, which are conduits for the important and enduring friendship and dialogue we enjoy with the Irish Government and with jurisdictions across these islands today. The Government are steadfastly committed to upholding each of the three strands, which balance the aspirations of all communities in Northern Ireland and remain vital elements in Northern Ireland’s constitutional settlement.
The Belfast/Good Friday agreement is also based on guarantees of rights. It recognises the crucial birth right of all people of Northern Ireland to identify and be accepted as Irish, British or both, and confirms that the right to hold one or both citizenships is accepted. The Government delivered the powerful new institutions set up by the agreement to secure and protect the rights of the whole community. The agreement enshrines the principle of consent—an important principle that safe- guards Northern Ireland’s place in the Union and means that Northern Ireland will remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as the majority of its people want it to be.
We must credit the agreement with helping to set Northern Ireland on a path to permanently ending armed conflict. That achievement was delivered with the support of many other countries, including the United States, Finland, South Africa and Canada.
One of the most important and most tangible aspects of the agreement was the return to devolved Government in Northern Ireland after nearly 30 years. There has been a long history of devolved decision making in Northern Ireland since its foundation 101 years ago. The agreement recognised that previous devolved Governments had not been inclusive of the whole community, and the agreement established important guarantees and principles setting out that a devolved Government should work for all parts of the community in Northern Ireland.
With a functioning Executive, Northern Ireland enjoys the best of all worlds—a strong Northern Ireland Assembly and a strong United Kingdom Government. Regardless of which part of the community people are from, the importance of locally accountable decision making in the interests of Northern Ireland is something that everyone should be able to agree with.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
I thank the Minister for giving way in what is a significant debate to all of us, marking an important milestone for peace in Northern Ireland. Does he agree with me that we need to be very careful that we do not take that peace for granted? We have seen the threat level increase recently and increased tension. It is as incumbent on all of us now as it was 25 years ago to do whatever we can to protect what is an ongoing process in the peace agreement.
Chris Heaton-Harris
The hon. Lady utters very wise words. It falls on all our shoulders and on those of all politicians across the United Kingdom, especially in Northern Ireland, to continue to build on the peace process and the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and what it stands for today, and to do so deep into the future, because it is so important. As we have seen this week, with the rise in the threat level of Northern Ireland-related terrorism in Northern Ireland, we cannot take anything for granted.
Stephen Farry (North Down) (Alliance)
The Secretary of State rightly comments on the change in the security threat assessment; I note in particular the threat relating to dissident republicans. He will also be acutely aware of the rise of activity within loyalism, with a spate of attacks in recent days in my constituency and that of my colleague the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). Will the Secretary of State tell us a little more about the Government’s commitment to crack down on continuing loyalist activities and ensure that those people who are involved in illegality face the full rigours of the law?
Chris Heaton-Harris
Yes. This is probably not the appropriate time or space to do that, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that there has been an increase in loyalist paramilitarism. The Government are supporting the Police Service of Northern Ireland in clamping down on it; we are well aware of it, and are working with politicians across the piece in Northern Ireland. With the Police Service of Northern Ireland, there is a lot that we can do both to decrease tensions in those communities and to make sure that those who are using criminal activity at the expense of their neighbours in their communities face the appropriate penalties.
Let me return to the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. For our part, the UK Government have continually supported and invested in Northern Ireland, its place in the Union and the Belfast/Good Friday agreement framework. We are committed to making it better still, as we have shown through the investment, support and commitment that we have provided as a UK Government to the Northern Ireland institutions through numerous successor agreements. Those agreements prove that the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement 25 years ago was not the end of a journey, but a new beginning. Each of them has helped to pave the way to the Northern Ireland that we see today, whether it be the progress on policing and justice at St Andrews that enabled those matters to be devolved in the Hillsborough Castle agreement; the substantial capital funding that we provided for new shared and integrated schools in Fresh Start and Stormont House; or the investment that we provided in public services in New Decade, New Approach.
It is precisely because of the UK Government’s steadfast commitment both to the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and to Northern Ireland’s place in our Union that we have, through listening to and heeding the concerns among the people of Northern Ireland about the protocol, replaced it with the new Windsor framework, which makes fundamental amendments to it. The framework restores the delicate balance struck by the agreement and addresses problems with the protocol by removing the Irish sea border for UK goods, with a new green lane and UK internal market scheme for businesses trading from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, removing costs, paperwork and checks. Just as importantly, it gives the people of Northern Ireland a veto over new laws that apply there, in the form of the Stormont brake.
Northern Ireland has changed beyond recognition over the past 25 years, thanks to the peace and prosperity that the Belfast/Good Friday agreement has brought. Upon that foundation, Northern Ireland has built a dynamic and vibrant economy, as can be seen across the whole of the nation. Its world-leading screen and film production industry, which produced “Game of Thrones” and “The Northman” among others, has already contributed £1 billion to the Northern Irish economy. There is a fintech sector, a cyber-security sector and an engineering sector going from strength to strength in the Northern Ireland of today. Those sectors are creating thousands of highly skilled jobs, with Belfast now ranked as one of the top 25 tech cities in the world.
In the years since the agreement was signed, Northern Ireland has also taken positive steps towards greater reconciliation. I pay tribute to the work of community organisations, faith groups and individuals, and to all who have tried to foster that reconciliation, respect and mutual understanding in Northern Ireland in the journey to the agreement and over the past 25 years.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
In the list that he is rightly setting out, will the Secretary of State recognise the particular contribution that very many women in Northern Ireland, across the communities, have made in leading the dialogue, repairing their communities and building relationships of trust?
Chris Heaton-Harris
Yes, I will. Further into my speech, I might well mention just one or two of the remarkable women who have done exactly as the Chairman of the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs says.
The fact that Northern Ireland now has a locally accountable police force demonstrates the huge progress that Northern Ireland has made. However, events such as the abhorrent shooting of DCI John Caldwell illustrate a point that hon. Members have already raised in interventions: that the peace that Northern Ireland now enjoys and that we have all worked so hard for cannot and must not be taken for granted. Yesterday, I made the announcement that the Northern Ireland-related terrorism threat level has been increased by MI5 from substantial to severe. Coming ahead of the agreement’s 25th anniversary, that news is particularly disappointing. However, it does not detract from the fact that Northern Ireland remains markedly more peaceful and reconciled than it was in 1998. That is a testament to the people of Northern Ireland, as well as to the PSNI and the security services that do so much to keep us all safe.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
May I put on the record my thanks to the Secretary of State for what he says about the PSNI? In the past two weeks, my constituency and that of the hon. Member for North Down (Stephen Farry) have been subjected to a lot of violence, including attacks on houses, discrimination and the intimidation of people who have had to move out. It is only a matter of time before that level of violence spills over into injury or death. The PSNI are the people in the middle who are keeping us safe. Our special thanks should go to the officer in charge of our area, Superintendent Johnston McDowell, and to all his police officers, who are doing a grand job of policing to the best of their ability. We should all be supporting them, because they are the people who are filling the gap.
Chris Heaton-Harris
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right; I completely concur with his statement. We should also pay tribute to Chief Constable Simon Byrne, who has introduced community policing across Northern Ireland. Community policing is something that we are all used to in England, Scotland and Wales, but it is a different way of policing—a better way of policing—in Northern Ireland, and it is definitely helping across all communities. I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman’s words and would add to them.
As we approach the agreement’s anniversary, we must acknowledge that there is more to be done to realise other aspects of the agreement’s ambition for a society that is reconciled with the past and able to look to the future. We must never let the progress that we have seen allow us to be complacent about the challenges of the future. We are investing in the development of integrated education so that more children can be educated together. We look forward, rather than back to a divided past.
It is also our duty to tell the agreement’s story so that the next generation may appreciate Northern Ireland’s remarkable journey and build a more prosperous future. That is why, as part of our programme to mark the anniversary, we have launched the first phase of a pioneering educational package. The package has been developed by the National Archives for parents and teachers across the United Kingdom to use in assemblies and the classroom, thereby enabling this vital story to be told.
I would like to acknowledge the contribution that Members across this House, Members of the other place and those elsewhere made to the journey to the Belfast/Good Friday agreement 25 years ago and have made to Northern Ireland. No single party, Government, individual or organisation owned the journey to that agreement or owns the journey of Northern Ireland since. From the famous speech by the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, in November 1990 that announced that the United Kingdom had
“no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”,
to the 1993 Downing Street declaration between John Major and Albert Reynolds that provided a pathway to a negotiated settlement on the basis of the principle of consent, it is clear that the agreement was unlocked through the achievement, bravery and dedication of a great many people in politics, public life, religion, civil society and community over many, many years.
Last week I was privileged, along with other Members, to attend a reception at Speaker’s House where I met three inspirational Members of the Youth Parliament in Northern Ireland: Izzy Fitzpatrick, Ryan Kearney and Lauren Bond. I think that all who heard Lauren will agree that she made a barnstorming speech. She spoke powerfully about her future in her nation and, notably, about the forgotten role of women in the peace process, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare). I hope I can begin to put that right today.
From one of my predecessors as Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, who enabled the Tony Blair Government to secure the Belfast agreement in April 1998 through an unrelenting bravery, a disarming personal touch and an unstoppable belief in the potential of peace, to the Women’s Coalition and people such as Monica McWilliams—a signatory to the multi-party agreement—women played a pioneering role, and rightly insisted that their voices be heard in the peace process. Pat Hume, a consummate diplomat, endured risks and threats to get people talking, and established warm relations with families of Unionist politicians, including Daphne Trimble, who later served in the two human rights bodies created by the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. It is clear that the full story of the agreement cannot be told without acknowledging the contributions of those and other brave and visionary women.
As we approach the 25th anniversary of that agreement, I am also aware that we will do so without some of its other architects—not least Lord Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist party and the first of Northern Ireland’s First Ministers, and John Hume, the long-time advocate of civil rights through dialogue, campaigning and peaceful protest, alongside whom I had the pleasure of serving for five years in the European Parliament. They succeeded not just because they worked tirelessly, but because they took risks. In the face of opposition and, at times, threats, they pursued their vision of what they thought Northern Ireland could be. Northern Ireland is poorer without their leadership, but they serve as examples to generations of political leaders now and to come of what politics can do.
Others, too, took risks along the way to secure the gains of the past 25 years. The leadership of Sinn Féin, particularly Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, persuaded republicanism that its future lay in the ballot box, and in 2007 the late Reverend Ian Paisley—with whom, again, I served for five years in the European Parliament —led his party into power sharing. I note the contribution of Lord Alderdice—whose party provided a powerful voice for those who were not part of either of Northern Ireland’s two traditions—to the securing of widespread engagement with the peace process; and, obviously, we recognise the role of the Progressive Unionist party, and particularly the late David Ervine, in providing clear representation for loyalism. I know that I have omitted many other names involved in the journey to the agreement, but I also know that the whole House, including the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle), will join me today in recognising their collective achievement.
If this anniversary can remind us all of one thing, it should be that progress did not come easily. It took decades of tireless work, leadership and steadfast commitment. Most important, it required the willingness of people to work across divides, sometimes with others with whom it had hitherto been unimaginable to work. The lessons from the leaders of 1998 will, I hope, prove instructive for all of us who have the honour of following in their footsteps. I know that Northern Ireland is on a path to a better, brighter and more prosperous future over the coming 25 years, thanks to the foundation of peace and stability that the Belfast/Good Friday agreement provides.
We are creating a platform for that more prosperous future by investing in the people of Northern Ireland, giving them the skills that they need to succeed and harnessing their entrepreneurial spirit. Only last month the Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) announced £18.9 million of funding to boost the fantastic cyber-security sector in Northern Ireland. Together with more than £600 million of UK Government investment in city and growth deals for every part of Northern Ireland, those funds will ensure that the Northern Ireland of the next 25 years will be a byword for the cutting-edge technology and innovation for which it is already becoming known. We have addressed the issues caused by the Northern Ireland protocol by agreeing the Windsor framework, which fundamentally amends the old protocol. It protects the economic rights of the people of Northern Ireland, and provides us with the basis to move forward together as one United Kingdom. We, as the UK Government, will continue to support and invest in Northern Ireland to make it an even better place in which to live, work and start a business in the years to come.
The 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement is an historic moment for Northern Ireland, for the whole United Kingdom, and for Ireland. It is a milestone that will be heralded in this country, and in the countries whose contribution to the peace process made the agreement’s success possible. Today’s debate affords us all an opportunity to recognise this remarkable achievement, and to reaffirm our commitment to protecting and upholding the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and supporting Northern Ireland’s journey in the 25 years to come in order to build a more perfect peace. I commend the motion to the House.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I call the shadow Secretary of State.
Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the Secretary of State, who made a thoughtful, considered and important speech from which we can all benefit. Let me also thank him for putting forward the debate in Government time: that is much appreciated by Members throughout the House.
Issues that affect Northern Ireland are often bipartisan, and I think the spirit of today’s debate should reflect that approach. Tony Blair, for example, was always keen —and still is—to stress the extraordinary work done by John Major before him to provide a platform for the peace process that was to follow. This debate should allow us time to recognise them, and the other giants who worked on the agreement. There are many lessons we can learn from them today.
Twenty-five years is a very significant milestone. An entire generation has grown up since the people of Northern Ireland chose an end to violence. The Secretary of State referred to the event in Speaker’s House attended by representatives of the Youth Parliament from across Northern Ireland: they were not just a credit to young people in Northern Ireland, or to the Youth Parliament; they were a credit to all of us.
As the conflict recedes into the distance, it might be easy to forget how much real progress has been made in that time. This is a real blessing. Children growing up today in Northern Ireland have not experienced and will not experience the routine violence that scarred communities for so long. However, we can never forget that more than 3,500 people lost their lives in that part of our United Kingdom. People and communities were exhausted by the conflict. It is one of the Labour party’s proudest legacies that we, in government, were able to seize the moment and find a way forward. In April 1998, leaders from across political divides and communities decided that a new future was possible. That future was only there to grasp because a generation believed in their hearts that radical change was not just possible, but was deliverable in that moment.
We believe that the agreement, and the agreements that followed, have made Northern Ireland a better place, and we stand by them. A quarter of a century has gone by, and while the agreement has challenges, they should not distract from what it has delivered. As a result of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, people in Northern Ireland are now masters of their own destiny. The fact that that achievement was delivered through democratic means, not violence, partly explains why it endures and inspires reverence to this day. The rights and identities of all parts of communities are protected, whether they choose to define themselves as British, Irish or both. People overwhelmingly voted for the agreement, giving it a lasting democratic legitimacy.
The peace that the agreement has brought is possible only thanks to the work of the police and security services, which defend it every single day. I pay tribute to the work of the PSNI in particular. We have all seen the news this week that the terror threat in Northern Ireland has been raised. What we must acknowledge is that police officers have been the focus of recent attacks by dissident republicans. Those groups are opposed to the Good Friday agreement. They attack the police because they want to intimidate those who protect its achievements, institutions and legacy. Those who carry out that violence are disgusted by the peace and stability achieved since 1998, because signs of a healthy, forward-moving society are also markers of their irrelevance to the better, prosperous future that Northern Irish people desire for themselves. They do not have any political or public support and they will not succeed. I hope the Secretary of State will give the PSNI all the support it needs as it faces down those who want to turn back the clock on this era of peace and progress.
Looking back on the agreement also offers us a guide for how to keep progress moving forward into the future. There are key lessons to be learnt that will make Northern Ireland more prosperous and make its politics work better. In reflecting on the lessons from the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, there are five key principles that we can apply today.
First, leadership matters. Tony Blair made Northern Ireland a priority in opposition and from day one as premier. It was no accident that the first visit he took as Prime Minister was to Belfast. The destination he wanted to reach was clear. It was, in his words:
“to see in place a fair political settlement in Northern Ireland—one that lasts, because it is based on the will and consent of the people”.
That leadership from the then Prime Minister would not have made a difference if there were not so many others ready to lead their communities, too. All of them had to say uncomfortable things to their followers. In many cases, people did not want to hear what the path forwards was. John Hume and David Trimble deserved the Nobel peace prize for guiding their movements towards peace, but there were countless others who took risks for the reward of the agreement.
In the days after my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), the leader of my party, appointed me as shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, I was inundated with messages from people wishing me the best in a position that they considered to be very special. Almost all those well-wishers ended their messages by telling me that they were the person who did something to make the Good Friday agreement possible. In the 15 to 16 months since then, I have had the chance to reflect on the Good Friday agreement, grow into the job, meet people and gain experience. I can now say that each and every person who felt that they were the one who made peace possible was correct, because without every one of them making an enormous contribution in their own way, peace would not have been possible. It could not have been done by one person; it had to be done by legions of people, all acting together.
In our party, we are deeply proud of Mo Mowlam for the personal lengths to which she would go to nudge people forward towards peace. With the strength of her character, the uniqueness of her personality, she disrupted in a good way—only Mo could have weaponised a wig—and when she did, it pierced intransigence and could energise a room that was sinking towards stalemate.
Secondly, we should treat Northern Ireland and its people as a valued part of our Union. Our ambitions for Northern Ireland should match those that we have for the rest of the United Kingdom. When devolution is up and running again, it should not mean disengagement from Westminster. It is deeply worrying that power sharing has collapsed for so much of the last 25 years. The solution is to ensure that parties always have, and feel that they have, more agency from participating in Stormont than from being outside of it. No party should ever have to collapse it to get noticed.
One of the last things the Executive agreed was an ambitious energy strategy, which would see Northern Ireland make huge strides towards net zero. In the Labour party, we have a vision for a future where Northern Ireland is a key part of our green prosperity plan. For example, 50% of electricity in Northern Ireland already comes from renewables. There is the potential for much more after offshore wind farms are introduced, and much more sustainable energy production. The gains from the green transition will be felt across our country, and Northern Ireland is uniquely situated to be a place of pioneers. I talked to American businesses recently, and their eyes lit up when I mentioned the hydrogen buses that run in Belfast and are exported to other cities across Europe and beyond. All those green opportunities in Northern Ireland can be seized only if there is a stable devolved Government in place.
The third principle is to nurture a strong, trusting, instinctive relationship between the UK and Irish Governments. The relationship between the UK and Ireland reached a point where Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern were comfortable constantly working together in 1998. They could compromise without the fear that either would collapse the process for political gain. As guarantors, the UK and Irish Governments will always have to be in dialogue over how the agreement is functioning.
The fourth principle is to build respect among all communities. Westminster must be a voice for all of Northern Ireland, not just one part geographically, culturally or politically. The last Labour Government made progress because they positioned the UK as an honest broker for Northern Ireland. The aspirations of the Unionist and nationalist communities are both legitimate. Of course, one of the biggest changes since the agreement is the number of people who do not identify as either community.
There are also the victims of the troubles, who in many ways were left out of the agreement at the time. The UK Government owe them a great deal for the dignity they have shown in accepting a peace process that came too late for their loved ones. We can only move forward in reconciliation with their support.
The final lesson is to always persevere when talks stalls. Despite moments of extreme challenge and difficulty throughout the peace process, the UK Government never walked away. I recently read a brilliant article by Jonathan Stephens, who was an official in the Northern Ireland Office at the time of the peace talks and later became permanent secretary at the Department. In it, he highlighted the importance of process in Northern Ireland, and how the process of the Good Friday negotiations could be applied to the recent framework negotiations on the protocol:
“A better process should involve…Northern Ireland parties as core participants alongside the UK government and the EU. Exclusively bilateral negotiations which keep out…representatives of the people of Northern Ireland will not deliver an outcome which is owned within Northern Ireland. However sensible, any outcome from such a narrow process risks being seen as an external solution imposed on Northern Ireland.”
Of course, the framework is not going to be renegotiated, but the Government can clearly work with the Northern Ireland parties to help them to have a sense of ownership of it.
I have spoken about what we can learn from the agreement, but there are also contradictions in the current Northern Ireland policy that I would like the Secretary of State to address, if at all possible, because we need to learn the lessons of the last 25 years and apply them going forward. All the actions that the Government have taken on the protocol have been based on the argument that they listen to communities in Northern Ireland and address their concerns. That is an obligation as a sovereign Government for Northern Ireland. However, when it comes to the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill, the Government seem happy to ignore that very same obligation. If the legacy Bill is passed into UK law while being opposed by all Northern Ireland parties and all victims groups, from all communities, it will damage the settlement created by the Good Friday agreement.
In summing up, I want to mention the influence that the Good Friday agreement has way beyond our country, too. It carries huge weight with our allies, especially those in the United States of America, who feel a personal connection to it. Unionists, nationalists and non-aligned parties were all present at a White House reception just a couple of weeks ago, which simply does not happen for any other devolved Administration in the world. Communities in conflict across the globe still look to the Good Friday agreement as proof and inspiration that peace is possible. I am hopeful that, in the next 25 years, people around the world will look to this agreement and see that it has led to prosperity, too.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
On this important anniversary, we have heard two wonderfully warm and heartfelt speeches from the Front Benches. It is sometimes not said but, as anybody who knows a shadow Secretary of State or a Secretary of State will know, these jobs always take a toll on people’s lives, and the Northern Ireland jobs certainly do. The passion and commitment to Northern Ireland of the Secretary of State and the shadow Secretary of State have shone through this afternoon, as they do in the work of the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) and the Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker). This House and the country owe the four of them an enormous debt of thanks and gratitude.
I have often wondered whether it was by chance—by happenstance, if you will—that the Belfast/Good Friday agreement was concluded, after so many false starts, attempts, negotiations and tries, at the end of Holy Week and on the cusp of the joy of the Easter story. I actually think not, but I think the timing of the conclusion of those discussions had an impact. The days of Lent 1998, like any day of any Lent, reminded us of the hard graft, of the promises made and broken, of the hopes dashed and then revived.
Although the Good Friday agreement is seen as an early triumph of Sir Tony Blair, and rightly so, the seeds were planted and much of the heavy ploughing was undertaken, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State reminded the House, by Sir John Major’s Government in the relationship he struck with the Taoiseach. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee has heard from both former premiers in our inquiry on the Good Friday agreement, and their deep understanding and enduring affection for the people of Northern Ireland, and their commitment to that process, again shone through.
Returning to my Lenten theme, without turning my speech into some sort of homily, the horror of the Passion reminds us of the horror of the troubles and the bloody history that those working on the agreement were striving to bring to a conclusion. The horror of the Passion, represented by the troubles, was replaced with the joy of the Easter story, serving as a monument to the triumph of good over evil and light over darkness, transfiguring Northern Irish society through the agreement itself.
We know that there are many in Northern Ireland who sincerely and proudly profess a faith. I pray that this year’s Easter story, against the backdrop of a non-functioning Stormont, will lead them to move forward with delivery, just as they did in the Lent and Easter of 1998.
We need to remind ourselves that there was nothing inevitable about success. Up until the 59th minute of the 11th hour, it could all have collapsed. As the Secretary of State said, the political bravery, courage and leadership of the parties in Northern Ireland, in the Republic and in this place combined to get the agreement over the line.
It is a worrying learning point from the Committee’s inquiry that former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Tony Blair and John Major all said that they very much doubt that the Good Friday agreement would have come to pass had social media existed in 1998. It is worrying that, as people retreat to their self-built echo chambers on social media, the bravery and leadership of politicians is being curtailed. I think, as does anybody who follows it, that brave political leadership and courage are as vital today as they were back in 1998.
We need to remind ourselves that this is not just an island of Ireland story or commemoration but is relevant to all our islands. The troubles that were unleashed brought mayhem and death that also shattered lives on the mainland, and we should never forget Brighton, Manchester, Warrington and the Baltic Exchange, to name just a few. This is such an important story in our nation’s history.
I am pleased to hear what the Secretary of State said about education. We now have, thank God, several generations who learned about the troubles as history. John Major told a funny story at the end of our session. He had been in a lift in the States, and some young female students were nudging each other. One of them plucked up enough courage to say, “Excuse me, is it you?” Of course, there is only one answer to that question, and Sir John Major said, “Yes, it is.” They said, “Yes, we thought it was. We are learning about you in history.” We must make sure that today’s young understand not just the what of the Good Friday agreement and the hope that it brings, but the why. Why did so many people go to so much trouble to bring a period of bloody history on these islands to a conclusion? We must make sure everyone understands that because, if we do not, people will not understand the price of peace.
Peace is a process, not an event. It is iterative and organic, not set in tablets of stone. As the Stormont House and St Andrews agreements indicate, it is capable of change and adaptation. But let us never forget that the Good Friday agreement is always the foundation stone on which any subsequent agreement and evolution is built. If we forget, we take it for granted. And if we take it for granted, we devalue the massive political and personal contributions made by so many people to get Northern Ireland to where it is today.
Let us look at the strands. I think east-west is going well. We had a shaky, testing time, but Dublin-Westminster relations are improving, and the Committee’s visit to Dublin last week is testament to that. The Secretary of State and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister are held in high regard and growing affection by our Irish friends, which can only point to good things for future dialogue between the two premiers, which the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) mentioned. In the absence of the side conversations that often take place at Commission meetings and other EU gatherings, such dialogue is of ever greater importance.
It is unfortunate that north-south relations have atrophied and need to be resurrected. While respecting and recognising the two distinct geopolitical entities that make up the island of Ireland, we all know there is so much that can be done collaboratively, north-south, on the economy, the environment, tourism and energy—the shadow Secretary of State mentioned energy—to name but a few, to make life better for everyone. There is no weakness, no giving ground, if women and men of good will who want to see their communities do well, irrespective of whether they live in Northern Ireland or the Republic, are coming together, in this multilateral, international world in which we live, pulling in the same direction, in a common endeavour. It was always an aspiration, but an aspiration box that was opened as a result of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement.
Let me say a word or two about devolution. It is probably wise to say that, for the Government of Tony Blair—I entirely take the point the shadow Minister made about an ongoing commitment—international events that came shortly thereafter meant there was a bit of a temptation to devolve and forget. The taproots of devolution are deeply sunk, Mr Deputy Speaker, in your and my native Wales, and very deeply sunk in Edinburgh. The devolution plant in a Northern Ireland context is still a very tender specimen. It needs the guarantors—I am not saying that they should come in as a sort of domineering mothership—to be actively engaged in helping the parties to evolve and develop devolution. Direct rule has wisely been taken off the table by the Secretary of State, as has joint authority. Those are not options on the table, which can leave only devolution and Stormont.
I mentioned that this is a process. The ability to collapse the Assembly by veto or fiat needs to be calmly looked at an appropriate time, but I do not think that time is very far down the track. Sinn Féin collapsed it; it was wrong to do so. The DUP has collapsed it; it was wrong to do so, too. “Whataboutery” and two wrongs still do not make a right when it comes to the functioning of devolution. There has never been a good time to collapse the Assembly by veto, but to do so now is most certainly unjustifiable, in a post-covid, Ukraine-affected, cost of living crisis period. We need to see the same level of courage and commitment to wider public service—rather than narrow political service—that we saw in 1998 come to the fore. We need that to be resurrected.
We all understand the pivotal underpinning importance of consent in order to maintain that fine balance. We must continue in that tradition, but we need to reflect, in a grown-up, political way, across the parties, on how we deal with the growing of “the other” across the communities. We need to think about that. The approach of collapsing institutions is not within our UK tradition of public service. We need to see our Northern Irish political leaders recommit to and reaffirm the prospect of hope that the Good Friday agreement delivered. The public are no longer interested in political process; they want outcomes and they deserve them.
We meet to mark, reflect on and, yes, celebrate the Good Friday agreement, notwithstanding the circumstances of the increase in the security warning, the absence of Stormont and the shooting of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell. We all wish we were doing so with everything functioning and more progress on the process. Some of the keyboard warriors, the scared agitators, those who feel threatened by the Good Friday agreement, and those who demanded the hardest Brexit in a vague hope that it would restore some tension between north and south and some sense of difference, are going to be frustrated. Doubtless they will be asking why all the fuss is being made here and in the coming weeks on the island of Ireland to celebrate this important event. To do so is to fundamentally miss the point, as they always do. The celebrations here today and across the island in the coming weeks mark and cherish what the human spirit, even when scarred by decades of mistrust and hatred, can achieve. They applaud the leadership, courage and vision of those men and women who said, “Enough is enough. No more. We can’t go on like this.” They came together and committed to drain the hearts of bitterness and refresh their souls with hope and determination to create better days ahead.
Let those who need to do so, as we approach the end of the Lenten season of 2023, resurrect that spirit and recommit to do the same. As we prepare to light a new Paschal candle, let us also relight the spirit of courage and determination. Let us reaffirm the progress that has been made and that still needs to be made. Let us never take it for granted. Let us always commemorate, celebrate and rejoice in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement.
Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)
This is the second debate in which I have participated in Westminster this week on the theme of the 25th anniversary of events. A debate was held a couple of days ago in Westminster Hall on the 25th anniversary of Welsh devolution, and it has been something of start for me to realise that I no longer measure my involvement in party politics in years or decades, but do so in increments of quarter centuries and even more.
However, it has been an incredible privilege to listen to the contributions we have heard so far today and I very much look forward to those to come. It was also a great privilege to attend the last session of the British- Irish Parliamentary Assembly in Belfast just a few weeks ago. It was a special session convened to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement.
As part of that session, which was held in the magnificent debating Chamber at Stormont, it was fantastic to hear from some of the figures who played a key role in bringing about the agreement. We heard from the former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern; Sir John Holmes, who served as the principal private secretary to the then Prime Minister Tony Blair; Baron Murphy of Torfaen, who was a Minister of State when the Good Friday agreement was signed and went on to serve as Secretary of State.
We were also party to a fantastic panel discussion involving members of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition—Kate Fearon, Bronagh Hinds, Dr Avila Kilmurray and Jane Morrice, who were all ably chaired by the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth). Hearing their insights about the work that was done individually and collectively in communities to bring people to a space where, irrespective of the tradition people had come from, they could sign up to the principles of this and move forward to put Northern Ireland on a better path was truly inspirational. It was fascinating to hear that and to hear about the work that was done to make sure that the Good Friday agreement could not only come about, but take root and take effect. I found that a very valuable transfusion of knowledge from the generation of politicians and officials who had been there on the ground at the time to the cohort of politicians who have been charged with taking an interest, moving things on and creating the political environment in which we hope relations can continue to move forward in a positive direction in our own time.
We know what the key parts of the agreement were and all that flowed from them. We saw the establishment of new institutions, such as the Northern Irish Assembly, the Northern Ireland Executive and the North South Ministerial Council. It led the way to the decommissioning under the supervision of General de Chastelain. Much to the angst, anxiety and pain of many, it saw prisoner release as part of that process. It also saw the British Government committing to incorporating the European convention on human rights into the law of Northern Ireland and established the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. I have no doubt that, all through that, a number of untidy compromises needed to be made and there were a lot of concessions that must have tasted quite bitter at the time. It required tremendous movement on all sides, from historical, and perhaps even established and comfortable, positions. I certainly do not underestimate the personal toll that the leadership that was required to effect those positional changes must have taken on the participants.
It is also very difficult to overestimate the wider importance of the Good Friday agreement and the role that it played not only in the peace process in Northern Ireland, but in inspiring others in contested polities and areas around the world in providing an example of how progress can be made. The DNA underpinning the agreement is that of a recognition of the need for equality and depolarisation, mutual respect, and respect for the civil rights and religious liberties of everyone in the community.
Jim Shannon
The hon. Gentleman is right to recognise the contribution that politicians from all sides made in Northern Ireland, but some of the good qualities that were shown then were also exercised in South Africa, with the beginnings of a peace that brought together divided communities that were so far apart. That was also an example for South Africa as it moved forward, as it has been for other countries, some of which have been more successful than others. South Africa is an example of where Northern Ireland’s specific knowledge was used to its benefit.
Richard Thomson
I thank the hon. Member for sharing that insight. South Africa is indeed one of the examples that we could have chosen, but I am sure that Northern Ireland serves as an inspiration elsewhere and to many others in terms of how contested political status can be worked through. Perhaps most important of all, it reinforced the principle of consent—that the UK had no selfish or strategic interest in Northern Ireland and that the people of Northern Ireland had the absolute right to choose their own constitutional future, which in turn was recognised by the Irish Government removing their territorial claim on Northern Ireland from the Republic’s constitution. It represented a stepping back from some of the comforting certainties and absolutes that had dominated the discussion on the future of Northern Ireland to open up a space where, yes, identity still mattered—how could it not?—but where that political space could be shared more easily and where people’s birthright to identify and to be accepted as British or Irish, or even both, and to hold citizenship for both states could be a reality. As the late great John Hume said, it also allowed Northern Ireland the chance to take the gun out of Irish politics.
In this 25th anniversary year, it is inevitable that there will be a focus on the strand 1 institutions. Certainly, I have expressed on more than one occasion my own disappointment that the North South Ministerial Council remains in abeyance, that Stormont is not sitting at a time when political direction from that Government and from politicians directly elected by the people of Northern Ireland is needed, arguably, more than it has ever been, given some of the challenges that are faced by the people of Northern Ireland on day-to-day issues of public sector delivery. But there are still many positives to take from the place that we are at.
Although I have lived through the history of the Good Friday agreement in my lifetime, it is inevitably from the prism of a viewpoint from Scotland, rather than from the perspective of somebody who has lived in Northern Ireland. Although I am wary of making too many comparisons and observations, on my visits to Northern Ireland since taking up the spokespersonship, I have been struck by the differences between what we used to see in grainy television footage from years gone by and the reality of modern Northern Ireland on the ground, the prosperity and vibrancy across Northern Ireland.
That prosperity is undeniable, both on the ground and in the statistics. Again, how could it not be? The reason for this is well captured in a report by the Irish Business and Employers Confederation, which noted that the Good Friday agreement had brought about
“a growing impact on stability and certainty, both in Ireland and in Britain, and a positive impact on economic growth and investment.”
OCO Global noted in a recent report:
“Exports have more than doubled since 1998, with GDP per capita growth exceeding most other parts of the UK.”
So there is little doubt that the peace dividend has brought a prosperity dividend. As we have heard from earlier contributions and interventions, it is perhaps easy, particularly for those who have not lived through the past quarter century and have no direct memory of the troubles, to take some of the advances of that period for granted.
For all the prosperity, we still see signs of a divided society today—a society that is more divided that we would wish it to be, whatever strides forward have been taken. We can see it from the prosperity of central Belfast: the peace walls that still snake their way out through the communities around the centre. We can see that physical segregation. We can see the segregation that continues in schools and in housing. For all that Northern Ireland has firmly embraced peace, we have had a salutary reminder this week, with the raising of the level of the terrorist threat, that there are elements in Northern Irish society that remain and prosper in the shadows of criminality, who would not hesitate to return to violence and intimidation to advance their agendas, given the opportunity.
The future is very much better now than it was 25 years ago. There was optimism then. Perhaps in the 25 years, the optimism has not lived up to the levels of optimism we had, but there can be absolutely no doubt that Northern Ireland is a society transformed from then. The future is still something to be written. Agreements evolve and develop and circumstances change. There is no bigger circumstance than Brexit, which has caused significant turbulence in British-Irish relationships, particularly in Northern Ireland. It damaged trust, and much needs to be done to restore that trust. That requires mature leadership, and the effective operation of the strand 1 institutions can very much play a part in that.
It was inevitable that the circumstance of Brexit would force a reappraisal among people of these islands, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland, about the political relationships that they would wish to have and the future to which they aspire. As that happens, it is very important to go back to the key element of the Good Friday agreement and to respect the principle of consent—just as those who brought the Good Friday agreement into existence a quarter of a century ago recognised that it had to be at the heart of progress in Northern Ireland.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
My friend and colleague, the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris), said that I might be called first. I did not expect to be called first, but this is pretty near the beginning, so thank you for that, Mr Deputy Speaker.
First, may I say a big thank you to all right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions? They have been measured and careful. Mine will be the same, although there are some things that I need to say in relation to where we were at that time, and where we got to as the process moved forward.
The hon. Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson) referred to his 25 years of experience. I have a confession to make: I started out in 1985 as a councillor. I did 26 years as a councillor and 12 years as an MLA, and I have done 13 years as an MP. I think it is the start of my 39th year as an elected representative in May. When the hon. Gentleman gets to that point, he will have met his target. Have I matched the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn)? I suspect that I may not be anywhere near his achievements—but that is by the way.
Simon Hoare
Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting we should have a debate to commemorate those years of service as well?
Jim Shannon
Definitely not. I would not ask the hon. Gentleman to endure that—that would be too much of a challenge.
I say this very gently: I never cease to be amazed by people suggesting that the DUP is or was opposed to the Good Friday agreement. I want put that on the record, because it is important to do so. The reason for that suggestion is undoubtedly the fact that we did not support the Good Friday agreement in 1998. The events of the last 25 years cannot be collapsed into an appreciation of a world frozen in time in 1998. Not one year but 25 years have passed, and if we want to build on the Good Friday agreement to promote peace for the next 25 years, we must never lose sight of that fact.
Although that suggestion no doubt fits the caricatures through which many prefer to operate, the truth is that the DUP was never completely opposed to the Good Friday agreement. The agreement always contained significant elements that we supported, such as power sharing and cross-community consent. I understand exactly how the communities came together and brought that forward: two completely opposing traditions had to find a methodology through which we could agree on a democratic process and move forward.
Before I go into any more detail, I want to put on the record my thanks to all those people who served. The Secretary of State rightly referred to the contribution and service of the police officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the PSNI, and the soldiers of the Ulster Defence Regiment. I declare an interest, since I served in that regiment for three years and served 11 and a half years as a territorial soldier, so I was a part-timer for 14 and a half years. Their sacrifices and contributions were so significant to moving the peace process forward so that we could find a future that we can, hopefully, agree on for our children and our grandchildren. I have three boys, all married, and six grandchildren. I want my legacy to my six grandchildren to be a future where they can get on together, live in harmony and have equal rights with everyone. That is my choice.
The Good Friday agreement always contained significant elements that we supported, and I have referred to power sharing and cross-community consent. The reason the DUP could not support the Good Friday agreement in 1998 was that it involved the release of murderers from prison back into the community, where they could live alongside the families of those they had murdered. I know there are MPs in this House—I am one of them—who represent constituencies where people have been released from prison, causing great angst to people in the community, and those MPs have reflected that in the House. The Home Secretary has responded many times to questions that I and others have asked about that, so hon. Members can understand why we suffered angst over it at the time.
The Good Friday agreement also involved welcoming the political wing of the IRA into government at a time when the IRA had not decommissioned its weapons. Those were two critical issues for us at the time—two things to which the Democratic Unionist party could not and would not reconcile itself—and a large proportion of the population of Northern Ireland shared those concerns.
However, let me make it clear now that that did not mean we did not support the rest of the Good Friday agreement. Nor did it mean that we were unwilling to fight for the rest of the agreement. That commitment resulted in the seminal St Andrews agreement process, which we in the DUP thought—and I think the Government accepted—made the Good Friday agreement process even better, because it addressed the issue of decommissioning, which helped the democratic process to move forward.
The truth is that the Good Friday agreement, amended by the St Andrews agreement, lays a foundation for a stronger and better future. I believe that very strongly and so does our party. It forms the foundation for everything we have done in government since 2007 when, for the first time, we agreed to power sharing—an agreement that opened the door to a period of relative stability in the governance of Northern Ireland until 2017.
I was an MLA at the time, and I was very pleased to support my leader, Dr Paisley. I am glad that the Secretary of State referred to him, by the way, because we need to remember all the architects who made the process move forward, and he was one of them. Perhaps not everybody in our party had the same confidence that we had in 2007, but we went ahead with the process and, as it went forward, those who perhaps were not 100% convinced began to feel that the process was one to pursue and support.
The lesson that we can take from the 10-year period of relative stability from 2007 to 2017 is that it is only possible to make progress when we fashion an environment that both Unionists and nationalists can buy into. That is the whole secret of this process; it is the secret of where we are going and what we need to aim for. The journey from 1998 to 2007 was worth it because it created an arrangement that rose to that challenge.
If we want to secure a positive future from the vantage point of today—we can always look back with great knowledge, because we know what happened—we must recognise that, tragically, the delicate balance of our politics has been destabilised by the EU creating an imperative for the construction of a new arrangement that Unionists cannot buy into. Yet as I look to the future, I am very clear that the greatest threat to peace arises from the threat to the Good Friday agreement. We should be in no doubt that the threat is now acute.
If the United Kingdom is to honour its treaty obligations in the Good Friday agreement, they must be respected in domestic legislation. How, then, are the key commitments in that agreement given expression in UK law? I will refer to three Good Friday agreement commitments that are particularly important for Unionists. I want to put them on the record in a constructive fashion to lay out the scene and make a case.
The first is the principle of consent. That is given effect by the following text in the treaty:
“While a substantial section of the people in Northern Ireland share the legitimate wish of a majority of the people of the island of Ireland for a united Ireland, the present wish of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, freely exercised and legitimate, is to maintain the Union and, accordingly…Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom reflects and relies upon that wish; and…it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people”.
That is as clear as can be, and there should not be any issue. That commitment is clear and prohibits any change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland that involves a shift away from government by the UK towards more government by the Republic of Ireland, save with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland.
People say that national opinion polls are not always entirely accurate. Well, there can be a variation of 3% either way. I will quote two polls just to put on the record the feelings of the people of Northern Ireland today. A national opinion poll in The Times in August last year indicated that about 50% of people in Northern Ireland wanted to stay in the United Kingdom and 27% wanted to go with a united Ireland, while the other 23% were non-aligned voters. The Belfast Telegraph did a similar poll on the non-aligned voters, and it found that 53% of those people wanted to stay within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The point that I am making is that the vast majority of people—be they big “U” Unionists or small “u” unionists —want to stay within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We believe that that is very important.
It was understood by the Unionist community that that protection was translated into domestic law—in section 1 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998—and it was on that basis that we signed up to the Good Friday agreement, including the DUP from 2007. When the protocol was introduced, it effected a significant change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, partly suspending article VI of the Act of Union to protect the integrity of a new legal regime in Northern Ireland, made for and by a polity of which Northern Ireland is not a part and in whose legislature it has no representation. Specifically, the people of Northern Ireland found themselves subject to laws in 300 areas that would be made for them by a legislature representing the Republic of Ireland, in which they had no representation. Unionists went to court to get that struck down on the basis of the consent protection in the Good Friday agreement, as a significant change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, involving a shift in governance for some purposes from the UK towards the Republic of Ireland, had been effected without any attempt to secure prior sanction from the majority of the population. That was a significant change, and one that concerns us.
Government lawyers responded by arguing that the relevant domestic legislation had not given effect to the Good Friday agreement consent provision that prevents any change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, save with the consent of the majority of the population. Instead, they argued that the relevant legislation—section 1 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998—prevents one specific change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, save with the consent of the majority of the population: the complete departure of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom to join the Republic of Ireland. The Court agreed with the Government lawyers.
The second protection that has now been ignored is the principle of cross-community consent. The relevant cross-community consent provisions in the Good Friday agreement commit the state parties to
“arrangements to ensure key decisions are taken on a cross-community basis”.
That was translated effectively into section 42 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998. However, the Supreme Court has ruled that these protections no longer apply in relation to article 18 votes on the protocol by the Assembly because section 42 has to be read subject to section 7A of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. There have been completely disingenuous attempts to argue that this is acceptable because the agreement only requires cross-community consent for Stormont decisions if they pertain to devolved matters. That makes no sense at all and is terribly disappointing.
The principle that there can be no majority votes in Stormont when one community objects is not an innovation of the Good Friday agreement—it is a basic convention of Stormont politics of the past that goes back way beyond 1998 to 1972. The Parliament of Northern Ireland that operated from 1921 until 1971 did so on a majority basis, which was believed to have been a contributing factor to the outbreak of the troubles from 1969. I would subscribe that some of the ways that politics were done in those days contributed to the problems. When the UK Government intervened to terminate the Parliament of Northern Ireland in 1972, they sought to replace it with a power-sharing arrangement, and from 31 March 1972, it has been a principle of Northern Ireland governance that governance through Stormont must operate on the basis of non-majoritarianism.
The Good Friday agreement is not significant for limiting the application of that convention, to say that henceforth, from 1998, it is okay for majority decisions to be made from Stormont so long as they are not on devolved matters. Instead, its significance arises from its affirmation of the central importance of the convention that decisions from Stormont must be made on a cross-community basis if either community requires it.
The political problems flowing from the Supreme Court judgment are huge, and I want to put them on record. I welcome the fact that we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the agreement, but our reasons for being objective at that time were the two conditions that we sought relating to our concern over the release of prisoners and the holding of arms, as decommissioning had not taken place. One can only begin to appreciate the difficulty when one has regard for the nature of the majority decision that is proposed by article 18 of the protocol. The provision on cross-community consent is not invoked all the time; many votes at Stormont are on a majority basis. The point of the cross-community provision is that if ever either community feels that a measure brought before Stormont constitutes an existential threat to it, that community can be protected by invoking its right to use the cross-community consent mechanism. Mindful of that, we must ask, does the removal of the cross-community consent of article 18 matter that much?
The article 18 vote, which could happen any time from 1 November 2024, will not just be controversial but will be more controversial that any majority vote of the Parliament of Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1971. It brings a constitutional change not within Northern Ireland but between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, effecting a transfer of governance from the UK towards the Republic of Ireland, as laws that were once made by the UK are made in a context that does not involve the United Kingdom but does involve the Republic of Ireland. The proposal is that next year, rather than moving forward, we will unfortunately move back not simply to the early 1970s, which would be bad enough, but to an even more difficult time that has not yet been experienced. That would be catastrophic and cannot be allowed to happen.
The third protection of the Good Friday agreement that is of particular importance for Unionists is the commitment by the state parties to uphold the right of the people of Northern Ireland to
“pursue democratically national and political aspirations”.
That right has to be understood from the point when it was embraced in 1998-99, when the people of Northern Ireland had the right to pursue democratically national and political aspirations by standing for election to make all the laws to which they were subject. The protocol and the Windsor framework terminate this because they create a situation in which the people of Northern Ireland can no longer pursue democratically national and political aspirations in relation to 300 areas of law to which we are subject. So far, 640 laws have been imposed in relation to which our Good Friday agreement right to pursue democratically national and political aspirations has been taken away. These are now made for us by a polity of which we are not a member and in whose legislature we have no representation.
It is very striking that as we approach the 25th anniversary of the agreement, with the desire of many to celebrate— and it is right to celebrate it—the greatest attacks on the agreement are taking place right now. Some of the parties that were fully supportive of it seem to be pointing their fingers and asking questions. Going forward, these matters cannot be papered over. We must remember that progress in Northern Ireland has only ever occurred when it has been possible to fashion a framework that both Unionists and nationalists can buy into. I say it again: that was the secret of the process in 1998. That was the secret of the process in 2007, and it is the secret of the process today in 2023. It was the secret behind the 10 years of stability between 2007 and 2017, and its demise—especially since 2021—is entirely the result of ignoring the reality.
I finish with this: the UK Government now have a choice. I for one hope that they will learn the lessons of the 2007 to 2017 period, and will ensure going forward that the Good Friday agreement, amended by the St Andrews agreement, is upheld and not ignored. If they do not, then for many in Northern Ireland and for myself, I fear for the future of Northern Ireland.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
It is a privilege to take part in this debate: what we may lack in numbers has been more than made up for by the quality of all the speeches we have heard thus far. Maybe it is a sign that we have taken what was achieved 25 years ago for granted, but I agree with at least two speakers who have said that we should never, ever, ever do that.
It is an occasion to say thank you, and many people have been thanked. There are two people who have not been mentioned so far: Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald. The 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement was hugely significant in the series of events that led up to what happened 25 years ago, because it embraced the legacy of the history that has bound Ireland and Britain together. It put to rest the idea that what was happening in Northern Ireland was a trouble in just a part of the United Kingdom that had no relationship to what had gone on over 800 years, from the original Norman invasion and the claim of the English kings to the land of Ireland, and the way in which the Irish people were denied their land, their voice, their language, their culture and their political representation during the course of those 800 bloody years.
John Major, of course, also helped to lay the foundation, and Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern and Mo Mowlam have been mentioned already. We should add George Mitchell, as well as Jonathan Powell, who probably spent more time than anyone else on the shuttle from London to Belfast, back and forth to help lay the groundwork. As the Secretary of State said, countless other people—many others, some of whom have been mentioned—contributed to this unique moment.
I grew up in London. I watched the reporting of the troubles on the television and I read about it in the newspapers, and I will be frank: like many people, I despaired at what I was seeing. If you lived in London during the 1970s and 1980s and you got on the underground, you would look around the carriage to try to see if there were any bags that did not appear to belong to anyone who was travelling. For as long as I live, I will never forget the only time that I have heard a bomb go off. I was in bed, and it was this sound—you might think it is a bang, but as I heard it, it was a kind of deep thump. It appeared to be so close that I got out of bed, got dressed and went down to Kensington High Street, which is where I was living at the time. I thought that it must have been there; it turned out that it was two and a half miles away, but the sound had travelled through the night air.
If someone had said to me at that precise moment, “I know you may be despairing, Hilary, and look at all of this violence, but at some point in the future, the man who in opposition to the agreement that Margaret Thatcher signed famously stood up and said, ‘Never! Never! Never! Never!’ and a former leader of the provisional IRA will sit side by side with each other as the First Minister and Deputy First Minister of a power-sharing Government”, I would probably have said to that person, “I would love to live to see that, but I do not suppose I will.” But I did—we did. That tells us how extraordinary that moment was.
What was achieved in the run-up to the event we are celebrating was astonishing. It was inspirational and full of hope. I trust there is nobody in the country who has not watched the last episode of “Derry Girls”. I think the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) has referred to it in a previous speech. I watched that episode—anyone who did was profoundly moved—and I wept, I will be frank, because it conveyed the sense of hope that that process had brought to pass. For those who have not watched it, it is set against the background of the run-up to the referendum that took place in May in Northern Ireland and in the Republic. The episode just crystallised that sense of hope that the agreement gave to the people of both those places.
Having taken that step, those entrusted with political responsibility in Northern Ireland have a duty—I use that word advisedly—to make the institutions work. We have seen how one side and then the other has walked away, because they are capable of doing so, collapsing the institutions. I understand the reasons, perhaps more so in the latter case than in the former, in what began I think as a row over the renewable heat incentive in Northern Ireland. It was actually about other things—the Irish language Act, the honouring of agreements that had been entered into and so on—but there is a great responsibility from the legacy to make those institutions work, because the agreement has given something so precious to the people of Northern Ireland, which is not absolute peace, but peace that is so much better than what had happened before.
As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made reference to service, I was sitting here calculating. I served 20 years as a councillor and have served nearly 24 years here in this House, so I am heading for 44 years as an elected representative. We get elected, and I think the public expects us to turn up and do our job. Why do we work so hard to get elected if we are not going to turn up and do our job? There is also a responsibility on others not to do anything that will undermine what was achieved 25 years ago. That is why the Windsor framework was so important. The parties to the negotiations finally realised that as well as dealing with relations between Britain and the EU going forward, something very special was at stake.
The last point I want to make is about the lessons. My hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) made a terrific contribution from the Front Bench and reflected on some of those lessons. The first is that peace is built step by step. In thanking a whole load of people, one is going back in history over a long time. There are so many stages one could mention, but one is the sheer brilliance of the decommissioning process. If we think about it, the Provisional IRA was not under any circumstances going to hand over its weapons to the British Army it had been fighting. So great minds thought, “How the hell are we going to deal with this?” Someone came up with a brilliant idea: “What if we get someone independent and trusted, such as General de Chastelain?”—he has been referred to and should also be thanked—“and he will go to the places where the weapons have been put beyond use? He will come back and tell all of us, ‘Yes, I have seen them, they are there. They are not capable of being used any more.’” That was true for the weapons of the provisionals and of the loyalists.
When we are trying to build confidence step-by-step, the side that has experienced the violence of the other says, “They say they have given up, but how do I know?” There was a deep well of distrust, pain and bitterness because of all the lives that had been lost as a result of violence on all sides, yet that is how that part of the process was achieved.
The second lesson is persistence. All of those who did their bit over the years did not give up. I say to the Chair of the Select Committee, who reflected on what I think Tony Blair said about if Twitter had existed, that Twitter is not the real world, although we sometimes think it is. When we are looking for feedback on what we have been saying and we go on Twitter, there are plenty of people who will give us their opinion, but it is not the real world. Holding to a belief you have and your determination to achieve it is very important.
The third lesson is courage, which has been touched on. In conflicts and when people feel a wrong has been done, it is actually much easier to sit there and say, “I’m the victim, and you are my oppressor”, but then go around to the other side of the table—the mythical table—and the person there says, “No, no. I am the victim, and you are the oppressor.” We should reflect on the degree of courage that was required on the Unionist side—David Trimble and others—to say to the Unionist community, “You know what, they’re nearly half of the population, and we’re going to have to share power with them.” We should also reflect on the courage it took on the Provisional IRA side—Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams—to say, “You know what, lads, we cannot bomb Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom.” Those were two very courageous things to have said and steps to have taken at great personal risk, but without them, this would not have happened. The other lesson there is that nobody can want peace more than the parties to the conflict themselves—nobody. The outside involvement, with the efforts of the Americans and others, was hugely important, but in the end the parties to the conflict have to recognise that the game is up and that they have to compromise in the interests of peace. Of course, there is also leadership, because it is leadership that enables courage to turn into achievement.
This is one of the legacies of the Good Friday agreement. There is a wonderful organisation called Forward Thinking, which some Members in the House may know. It works in the middle east to try to build discussion and relationships between the parties to the conflict there. One of the things it does is bring people to Northern Ireland and the Republic; it says, “Sit down and listen to what people who were in effect fighting each other 25 years and more ago can tell you about how they transformed the lives of the people in their community by showing persistence, courage and political leadership.”
The final thing I want to say is that it is in many ways easy to say no, and it is sometimes really difficult to say yes, yet when we do so, just look at what can be achieved. That, I think for all of us, is the true legacy of that miraculous Good Friday 25 years ago.
Stephen Farry (North Down) (Alliance)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). Following on from the two previous speakers, I can offer only 30 years of continuous service in elected office. [Interruption.] I am on a slippery slope.
I may be the only person in this debate who was actually present in the room when the Good Friday agreement was concluded, so perhaps I can give some of the inside track on what happened. I suppose the most relevant thing to say is that we have named this agreement the Good Friday agreement. Officially, it is the Belfast agreement, but around the world it is known as the Good Friday agreement. That largely came about by accident, because the deadline was set for 5 o’clock on the previous day—the Thursday. Members know what we are like with deadlines in Northern Ireland, but if everything had gone to time, this would have been called the Holy Thursday or the Maundy Thursday agreement, which perhaps does not have quite the same ring to it. Given some of the narrative we have had over the past 25 years, I am not quite sure whether the Julius Iscariot moment would have added to the notions of betrayal we have had from some limited quarters in those 25 years.
What happened was that the officials essentially stopped the clock for 24 hours and pretended everything was going to plan. With true civil service efficiency, however, the catering contract was only booked until 5 o’clock on the Thursday, so the delegates were deprived of food and water for the final 24 hours, although I believe some people did sneak out. At that time we were just starting to benefit from the introduction of 24 hour supermarkets in Northern Ireland, and some people did smuggle in supplies at 4 o’clock in the morning. That was the final drive towards getting this over the line, but of course, as has been alluded to, there are many other people who did the hard graft in getting us to that point. I thank the Secretary of State for commenting on my party’s role, in particular that of Lord Allardyce, our leader then.
Mention has rightly been made of those from the various Governments, but I will single out one person who made an enormous personal sacrifice in that week: the then Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. It is not widely known that his mother died at the start of that week, but he stuck with the negotiations, given their importance, and only briefly went back down to Dublin for her funeral before returning to ensure that the talks got over the line.
I will try to be measured in my comments as today is not an occasion to get into some of the deep political discussions we are currently having, although I will allude to them, I hope in a calm way. It is important to acknowledge our successes. The agreement was essentially about the three-stranded process—the internal governance of Northern Ireland and the north-south and east-west aspects—alongside the principle of consent, which is crucial for the constitutional issue, equality and human rights, and reform of policing and criminal justice. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned, some people had to accept some difficult things, while others, I say with respect, decided to take a different view around issues such as the early release of prisoners.
The agreement is now the de facto constitution of Northern Ireland. When Northern Ireland was founded in 1921 there was a certain degree of controversy, and there were difficult periods during most of the existence of the previous Stormont Parliament. There was lack of equality in Northern Ireland; equally, Northern Ireland was not recognised by large sections of the nationalist community. The trade-off was, for the first time, in effect, that the nationalist section of the community accepted the legitimacy of Northern Ireland, alongside the Irish Government removing articles 2 and 3 of their constitution, in return for power sharing and equality. There was recognition of the principle of consent that Northern Ireland will remain part of the UK until and unless the majority decide otherwise. That is in essence the Good Friday agreement.
Considerable progress has been made over the past 25 years. We have a much more peaceful society now, but it is important that we recognise that that is now qualified because of the threat from both dissident republicans and loyalist paramilitaries. There is also continued paramilitary organised crime activity and control of communities. We are also a much more prosperous society than in the 1990s and earlier. If anyone who visited Northern Ireland in the ’70s and ’80s were to return now, they would be struck by the huge transformation, but that must also be qualified: while many have had new, life-changing opportunities, large sections of the population have still been left behind, with a lack of opportunity to transform their lives, and we must be seized of that.
We have also seen huge diversity in two key respects. First, a lot of people have come to Northern Ireland from other parts of the world. They have made it their home and been made very welcome. Secondly, there has been a change in conceptions of identity—a number of speakers have alluded to that—and how people see themselves. People have moved away from traditional notions of identity, in particular the two communities model. That has been seen through the growth of my party, but there are many other factors as well. It is particularly notable among young people.
There is unfinished business around victims and legacy— I will not dwell on that point today; we will debate it in due course in this Chamber—and on what needs to be done to address the Bill of Rights aspect of the agreement. We have seen large steps forward on reconciliation and moves towards a shared and integrated society, but we are not there entirely just yet. We still have large patterns of segregation in our society. Our children are still largely educated separately and too many people live in what are deemed to be single-identity areas. We have seen some progress on integrated schools and mixed housing in recent years, but there is a lot more to do. And of course, we have the current political instability, with the absence of the institutions. It is worth noting that over the past 25 years the institutions have been operational for only 60% of the time. They have been down for 40% of that time, which is not really tenable in what we would like to see as a functioning, stable democracy.
I will not dwell too much on Brexit, but it is relevant to the debate. I often say that Northern Ireland can only really work through sharing and interdependence. For that, we have needed open free borders to balance north-south and east-west flows, alongside internal power sharing. Brexit poses a challenge in that regard. There is no perfect solution to mitigating its impact, but I believe that the original protocol provided a soft landing for us. I welcome the Windsor framework in providing an even softer landing for Northern Ireland from those particular challenges. There are still no guarantees that it will work for Northern Ireland. We have to keep ploughing on and address ongoing issues as they come along, but I believe we are now in a much better place.
We need to be very conscious of the impact of what the Government may do in due course on the European convention on human rights. Even if they remain a party to the Council of Europe in that respect, if barriers are put up to people accessing their rights under the convention, that will run contrary to the agreement itself. It is worth stressing that human rights have been crucial to the reform of policing and criminal justice.
Sadly, as we approach the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement we do not have functioning institutions. My party has consistently called for reform. When I say consistently, I am going right back to 1998. We strongly supported the Good Friday agreement as a new start for Northern Ireland, but even at the time we were conscious of the, shall we say, rather rigorous form of power sharing—or consociationism, to give it its formal academic term—and the system of designations, whereby people had to sign in as either a Unionist or nationalist, or by default become “another”. My identity, according to the agreement, is “another”, rather than any positive affirmation.
The agreement does allow for reform. It can and should evolve to take account of changed circumstances. Reform can take place in any context, but it is particularly vital now, with the institutions down. It remains to be seen if and when they will be restored over the coming weeks or months, or ever, depending on how we analyse the current situation. Some people will make the case that reform cannot take place in the absence of stable functioning institutions. I would say that, instead, we perhaps need to have reform first in order to get stable functioning political institutions. We can return to that tension on another occasion. In a similar way, people talk about the need to take forward reform by consensus, but if we are talking about trying to challenge the current vetoes that certain parties have and we give them a veto over the process of removing their vetoes, how likely are they to give up those vetoes? There has to be a role for the two Governments to try to drive that process forward.
There are three areas of reform that I wish to highlight. The first is on the system of designations. We need to move away from that towards a system of weighted majority on key decision making that still provides cross-community protection, but without locking ourselves into the rigorous notion of identity, which sometimes can become a bit of a straitjacket. We should move towards some form of voluntary coalition, or a coalition of the willing, where parties move in and out of government. Again, putting in place a threshold of support to ensure that any Government are cross-community in their nature would be more in keeping with how coalition Governments are formed in other places around the world. Before we even get to that type of governance, in the event of a blockage on the current restoration of the Executive, a much more limited reform could be put in place if a party decides not to take up the place of either First Minister or Deputy First Minister, to let the next party—at present my own party, but that is not the motivation—take office and see if they can establish a Government of sorts. Northern Ireland badly needs its Government restored.
Finally, I want to talk about a quarter of a century of prosperity. People have rightly said that the past 25 years have been about the consolidation of peace. We have made huge strides in that regard, but Northern Ireland is still not living up to its potential in respect of prosperity. We first need to ensure that we have political stability. We must also make sure that we invest in the various drivers of the economy and in particular skills. We have the potential, under the Windsor framework, to become a focal point of inward investment, given our advantages of dual market access. We need to make sure that that becomes a reality. I do not envy the Secretary of State’s job in that regard. A budget has to be struck for Northern Ireland in the very near future to give certainty to Government Departments. But at present, we are talking about a burning platform, and a cycle of cuts. If that is not arrested, we will look towards decline.
In that context, my party is keen to have a conversation with the Government about some form of public service transformation fund or prosperity fund for Northern Ireland, to try to break this vicious cycle. There has been a history of generous packages from the UK Government that have not been, shall we say, fully taken advantage of or have been squandered in different ways. We must learn why that has happened. We must recognise that any generosity from the Treasury to give Northern Ireland the chance to build on the past 25 years will need to come with quite strict conditions.
At present, I do not see any way forward to break through that cycle, to do proper investment, to save and transform public services, to invest in skills and to take advantage of opportunities, unless we have that particular helping hand. I appreciate that that is difficult, particularly in the current public expenditure climate, but I encourage the Government to give that serious consideration. That is difficult if there is no clear indication among the parties that they are on the brink of restoring the Assembly, but as and when that move begins, I hope that the Government will be a willing partner. The ball should be in the court of the parties to come up with a coherent plan. I am up for that challenge, along with my colleagues.
Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
The Good Friday agreement is one of the greatest achievements of a Labour Government. I am proud to stand here today to celebrate the 25th anniversary of that historic moment when communities came together and took a leap of faith for a better future.
I would like to reflect on the particular role that women played in the peace process. For centuries, women in Northern Ireland have been crossing divides and coming together for the greater good. Nowhere was that more prevalent than during the troubles. During that time, extraordinary women stood up for peace. Those women came from fundamentally different backgrounds, but their aim was always clear.
Among the titans of the Northern Ireland women’s movement is May Blood, Baroness Blood of Blackwatertown, who sadly passed away last autumn. May left a huge legacy, from her tireless campaigning for workers’ rights to her work in building peace in Northern Ireland. She helped to set up the cross-community Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition in 1996 and was a tireless campaigner for integrated education. May went on to become the first woman from Northern Ireland to be appointed to the House of Lords, and my party was honoured that May sat as a Labour peer.
Another significant figure in the peace process is Pat Hume, who over decades worked side by side with her husband, John Hume, one of the architects of the peace process. Pat ran John’s constituency office from the early days of the civil rights movement, through the troubles and the Good Friday agreement, until John retired in 2005. Pat was his backbone and his trusted adviser. Today, the John and Pat Hume Foundation recognises the critical role that Pat played alongside John, and reflects their legacy by working to support and inspire leadership for peaceful change.
As a woman in the Labour party, and as a north-east MP, I could not stand here without paying tribute to the former Member of Parliament for Redcar and one of the Secretary of State’s predecessors, my friend and colleague Mo Mowlam. Mo was a giant of the Labour movement and a friend to everyone on the island of Ireland who stands on the side of peace. I am so glad to be able to say that I had the privilege of meeting and working with Mo as one of our north-east MPs. I remember well her inimitable, no-nonsense style when she met Unison members in the north-east.
Appointed Secretary of State on Labour’s victory in 1997, she would go on to play a fundamental role in bringing about the agreement, with a no-nonsense approach that brought everyone into the discussion, regardless of belief. She managed to break through in a way that none of her predecessors, all of them men, had been able to do.
Of course, to say that Mo made such progress simply because she was a woman would be to downplay the tremendous skills and determination that she brought to the role. However, as a woman, her actions had greater reverberations. When she walked into the notorious Maze prison in 1998, just by stepping through the door, she showed how serious she was about bringing peace to Northern Ireland. On that visit, she was able to achieve exactly what she had gone in to do.
Mo managed to achieve all of that while living with her illness. It is a testament to her that her name is still so deeply associated with the Good Friday agreement, 25 years after it was signed and 18 years since she died. It is quite right that that is the case.
The greatest legacy of Mo, Pat Hume, May Blood and the countless other women who fought for peace is not simply peace itself. It is the prosperity, progress and confidence of Northern Ireland today. Mo once said:
“People working together can overcome many obstacles, often within themselves, and together can make the world a better place.”
I hope that in this place and in Northern Ireland all communities will continue to channel that to deliver the bright future Northern Ireland deserves. I was so glad to hear from the Secretary of State and the shadow Secretary of State about Lauren Bond, a Member of the Youth Parliament, who will continue the role of women in the contribution to peace in Northern Ireland in the future.
Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)
It is a real honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist). I would like to read out something that Mo Mowlam said about another civic group that was instrumental in the peace process, the Quakers. In a speech at Friends House in London in 2002, she said:
“They did an incredible amount in a house where everyone knew they could be trusted. I wouldn’t have been able to talk to such a cross-section of people except for being able to meet in that house. They told me who to listen to. Without them my life would have been much tougher than it was.”
We have heard so many contributions today from Members across the House. Success has many fathers, but I think we all remember where we were at that moment in history: the Good Friday agreement in 1998. That was the period when I joined the Labour party, because it was a very exciting time for us on the progressive side of politics. It was a time of great hope, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) said. We all remember that sense, as the weather warmed up and the spring came, of moving towards something positive. After that came the decommissioning process—it was exciting to see strong men handing in weapons—followed by the investment in public services, the good-quality policing and then the private investment coming in.
As many hon. Members have mentioned, we know that there is also a certain fragility, so it is quite pleasing that this debate comes just one week after we walked through the Division Lobby to support the Windsor framework. It also comes just before the April anniversary and the visit by President Biden, which will perhaps echo the phone calls that President Clinton made to encourage the parties and recall that momentous occasion.
Senator Mitchell, whom my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central mentioned, said:
“I believe there’s no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended. They’re created and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings. No matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful, peace can prevail.”
It is down to the people of Northern Ireland that that has happened, so this is a very special anniversary. Those of us who watched the agreement happen and wanted it to happen hope that we also played a role.
I want to touch on a point that has been very present in today’s debate, which is about process. There is a sense —as you will recognise, Mr Deputy Speaker, as a great supporter of the peace process in Cyprus—that it is never concluded. Hon. Members have spoken today of ongoing fears. The security threat assessment is “severe”. The legacies remain. Certain individuals in a conflict situation will always be invested in non-peaceful survival. Some people will want to go back to the period of the troubles. We think of the tragic death of the journalist, Lyra: when such a young person is affected, it really brings it home that we are not there yet.
I want also to speak briefly about the local environment, having come through local government myself. I will not go through how many years I was in local government—it is not as many as for some colleagues—but we know the importance of the local. I was pleased in 2019 to be part of the decriminalisation of abortion for women in Northern Ireland, but I also recognise that that can only be truly meaningful in a public services context when legislators in Stormont make it a 100% reality. There is still so much work to be getting on with.
I commend the work of educationists to bring in a truly integrated education service. It will be in future generations that we see the fruits of the labour of this generation. I ask the Secretary of State to set out his views on whether a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland, which has been discussed over the years, will be taken forward in the near future. Does he think that there is a future for that idea? What is his personal assessment?
What is the Secretary of State’s view on clashes on the European convention on human rights, given that that is a live debate in our own Chamber, and given that the convention is an integral part of the Good Friday agreement? I think that in both parts of Ireland, there is a sense that a modernisation is occurring, and I would say that some of that is due to the influence of friends in Europe. European friends have often asked me what is happening to people in Ireland, and much of their negotiation with the UK has been about their desire to see progress on securing the peace in the two bits of Ireland.
I hope that the Secretary of State will reflect on those questions. It is always good to have an anniversary, but it is also always good to be forward-looking and to issue challenges for progress towards a more peaceful and rights-based future for the people in the wonderful place that is Northern Ireland.
Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)
I welcome the opportunity to speak in the debate. I also welcome the comments of the Secretary of State, as well as those of the respective Front Benchers and the many other Members, from both traditions and from none, who have put their points so thoughtfully and succinctly.
I would hope that this House is united in wanting to protect the legacy of the Northern Ireland peace process. A return to sectarian violence is surely unthinkable, although I heed the warnings of the Secretary of State and others that we ought not to take peace for granted. We should not be complacent. I hope we can recommit ourselves to ensuring that the institutions established under the Good Friday agreement are able to work, but to protect the legacy of the agreement we must ensure not only that the political institutions work, but that they uphold civil rights, justice and essential freedoms.
I will focus my remarks on the issues faced by journalists and the free press in Northern Ireland. Let me first refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and also mention that I am honoured to be the co-chair of the National Union of Journalists parliamentary group. The NUJ represents journalists, photographers and other media professionals in both the UK and the Republic.
The democratic process in Northern Ireland, like that in all democratic nations, depends on the ability of local and national media to report what is going on in our communities. We have seen that recently following the BBC’s threat to undermine Radio Foyle’s much-loved breakfast show—an issue that has been raised in previous debates by the hon. Members for North Down (Stephen Farry) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon). The outcry from listeners led to journalists’ balloting for strike action. That strength of feeling, along with the local connection, is a particular feature of local radio, which makes it one of our most trusted news sources.
I was interested by what the Secretary of State said about the discussion he had with John Major. John Major had, I think, suggested that if social media had existed 25 years ago, the Good Friday agreement might not have been possible. Honest, locally sourced and locally relevant news matters more than ever. While journalists everywhere are called on to report fairly, without fear or favour, to be a news journalist in Northern Ireland still requires real courage. That is an attribute that several Members have referred to, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). Every journalist who does this work deserves the admiration of the House.
The Good Friday agreement has not stopped the continued violence or serious threats that journalists sadly experience for simply doing their jobs. Often, the threats come from paramilitaries or associated criminal gangs. One of the most egregious examples was the killing of Sunday World journalist Martin O’Hagan, who was shot and murdered in cold blood in 2001 while walking back from a night out in Lurgan with his wife, who sadly passed away just last year, some 21 years later, with the killers still not having been brought to justice. This is despite a former soldier—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. I am terribly sorry to have to interrupt the hon. Gentleman. I am advised that this is the subject of an ongoing legal case and should not be referred to in the Chamber.
Grahame Morris
I am grateful for your advice, Mr Deputy Speaker. I did seek advice from the Speaker’s Office in relation to the references that I was going to make, but I will adhere to your updated advice.
I am not going to comment on the case but, from speaking to BBC Northern Ireland’s “Spotlight” programme, it is clear that there are indications that the police service has more than a good idea of those who are responsible. Despite more than two decades having elapsed, the family, friends and colleagues of Martin O’Hagan are still waiting and calling for justice to be served. In my view—and, I think, in the view of the majority of right hon. and hon. Members—we cannot allow journalists in Northern Ireland, or anywhere in our country, to be intimidated and murdered with impunity. To date, the British Government have sadly resisted calls from the National Union of Journalists and others to launch a fresh, independent inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the killing. I would like, respectfully, to reiterate that request to the Secretary of State today, because it is the only way that the disturbing questions raised by the case can be answered.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) referred to the case of Lyra McKee, who was shot dead in 2019 while reporting on the Creggan riots. Our thoughts and prayers remain with her partner, family and colleagues, who continue to mourn her loss. I will not mention the details of the case, because I understand that the sub judice rules preclude me from doing that, and as you rightly point out, Mr Deputy Speaker, it is an ongoing case and two individuals are currently on trial charged with murder. However, I think it will be in order if I quote the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, Michelle Stanistreet, and join her in paying tribute to Lyra’s life:
“Whilst Lyra’s life and career was cruelly cut short, her legacy lives on. Lyra’s spirit and passion for journalism inspires our collective campaigning to thwart those who seek to undermine the vital function that journalism plays in our society, and through our commitment to ensure that journalists are able to go about their work safely, free from attack, intimidation and harassment.”
The NUJ has welcomed the British Government’s initiative in setting up the National Committee for the Safety of Journalists, which brings together representatives of the Government, journalism, policing, prosecution services and civil society to work in collaboration to ensure that journalists in the UK can operate free from threats and violence. However, we must also call out the intimidation of journalists by the state and the police. I am speaking here about the wrongful arrest of investigative journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey. Disappointingly, those arrests were carried out by officers from my force, Durham police. Trevor and Barry produced an award-winning documentary, “No Stone Unturned”, about the Loughinisland massacre towards the end of the troubles. The two journalists brought a successful judicial review challenging the legality of the search warrants that were issued. This led to the Police Service of Northern Ireland deleting copies of the records obtained from their mobile phones and laptops, as well as to a substantial award in damages.
The police’s investigation of Trevor and Barry was flawed. I recall meeting Trevor and Barry here in the Palace of Westminster. A photograph was taken of our meeting, which led to an unprofessional and abusive call to my constituency office by a senior Durham police officer involved in the investigation, who would go on to discredit himself further with emails attacking the courts and the Lord Chief Justice.
Finally, the journalist Patricia Devlin, who has written for the Sunday World and other publications, was subjected to a vile campaign of intimidation and abuse, including a social media message threatening her baby. Her name was later chillingly spray-painted on a wall, along with graffiti depicting the crosshairs of a gun target. Following a manifestly inadequate investigation, Patricia made a complaint to the police ombudsman, after which the PSNI reinvestigated the crime and tracked down the identity of the social media user responsible. However, the prosecuting authorities decided not to proceed to trial. Although I cannot make any inferences about the specific circumstances of this case, I express the concern of journalists, particularly those in Northern Ireland, and their trade union that there are far too many incidents in which the perpetrator is known to the authorities but, to protect undercover intelligence assets, victims are denied justice and protection.
I hope we can protect the legacy of the Good Friday agreement by recommitting ourselves to both its terms and its spirit. I ask the House and the Government to do everything possible to uphold the civil rights, justice and essential freedoms that all our communities deserve to enjoy.
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
It gives me great pleasure to wind up this debate for the official Opposition as a Labour MP, as we acknowledge the Belfast/Good Friday agreement—one of the greatest achievements of any Labour Government and perhaps one of the greatest achievements of any British Government during the second half of the 20th century.
Voices from both sides of the House have recognised the work of our predecessors. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle), the shadow Secretary of State, said, this place must be a voice for all of Northern Ireland, which is why it is so important that all our voices have come together today.
As a female voice in the shadow Northern Ireland team, I associate myself with the eloquent remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) about the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and former Member for Redcar, Mo Mowlam. Whenever I have discussed the Belfast/Good Friday agreement on my visits to Northern Ireland, Mo’s name has been quick to come up, and always in a positive light. Eighteen years since her passing, she continues to define Labour’s commitment to the agreement and to Northern Ireland as a whole.
During my visits to Northern Ireland, I have met people who well remember the darkest days of the troubles, as well as the young adults and children who never had to live through them. I have spoken to people from both communities and all walks of life, but the common denominator is that none takes peace for granted. That is testament to the hard work and strength of everyone who played a role in securing the agreement, whether or not their signature is at the bottom of the page. The troubles may be in the past, but the significance of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement is still shaping lives today.
The hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), the Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, spoke about the “bravery” of politicians being needed today as much as it was 25 years ago. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) spoke about “persistence”. Those two words have shone through today, as we have heard about the bravery and persistence of our leaders in the past and their brilliance in bringing together communities.
I want to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist), who highlighted the women of the peace process. It made me think back to the anniversary celebrations at Speaker’s House, which many of us have spoken about today. The finest contribution of that evening, as we have all agreed—I know that the present company will not mind my saying this—came from its only female speaker, Lauren Bond, the Member of the Youth Parliament for North Antrim. She said she was shocked to find out during her school history lessons that women “didn’t exist” until the 2000s. I hope that as we look to the next 25 years that can and will change.
Over the next 25 years, I hope we can change the narrative on Northern Ireland. Too often, it is seen as a place over the sea that we do not learn about or care about, but we should and we have to. The Belfast/Good Friday agreement provides so much that the rest of us can learn from, in how we got from the troubles to that historic day in 1998. Northern Ireland has so much to offer—what an absolutely brilliant place it is. It has the friendliest people I have met, present company excepted—[Laughter.] I have seen some of the most spectacular scenery there and heard some of the most fascinating and amazing stories there, as shadow Minister—I am not just talking about those from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his 39 years as an elected representative, as well as for his love of his wife, his family and his grandchildren, and of Dolly Parton!
I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for North Down (Stephen Farry), who has also been there to see at first hand the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast agreement. I pay tribute to his 30 years in politics. As he has said, it would be naive to pretend that there are not issues that still need addressing in Northern Ireland. As a result of some of today’s contributions, I do not think any of us are under the illusion that this agreement fixed everything. However, the Belfast/Good Friday agreement was about more than just the issues that were there before 10 April 1998. The agreement looks to the future and legacy is a huge part of it. It was never there just to draw a line under years of fighting and forget about them. Those involved in securing it recognised that this would be an ongoing process.
An embodiment of that legacy aspect is shown in what I have seen in the integrated schools I have visited. Those establishments are enacting change just by existing. I made a recent visit to Oakgrove Integrated College, where I met the then acting principal, now principal, John Harkin. He is an incredible man, and the young people I met there were also incredible. They asked me to light the peace candle. When I did so, I spoke to him about the impact of the troubles outside Northern Ireland. I spoke about my constituent Robert Davies and the impact of his death; he was shot at Lichfield City station while he was training in the Army. Having those conversations and talking about the impact on the community of Pontarddulais, and on his parents, family and friends, was very important for me, as the local Member of Parliament, but it was also important for those at the college to hear about the family. So I welcome the commitment the Secretary of State made in his opening speech to invest in the expansion of integrated education, because I believe it is the way forward.
All of us here today, those of us who have a political connection to Northern Ireland, those who are from Northern Ireland or those who simply have a love for it, have a responsibility to keep the Belfast/Good Friday agreement moving forward. We need to support those who live with the trauma of their experiences of the troubles. We need to promote cross-community engagement. We need to ensure that the children of today and of the future know what it took to bring peace, and that they know that further progress and change are within their grasp. It is the Government’s duty to invest in the young people, because they are the future of Northern Ireland.
I wish to end my contribution with a quote from Mo Mowlam’s book, which has already been used by my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist). It is a quote that aptly sums up the peace process and one that we should also apply to our work today.
“People working together can overcome many obstacles, often within themselves, and by doing so can make the world a better place.”
Chris Heaton-Harris
With the leave of the House, I will take this opportunity to say thank you to right hon. and hon. Members for their many and varied contributions to this debate. Indeed, I feel blessed to have listened to them. This House is at its best when it comes together in a spirit of bipartisanship, and, today, we have seen so much support, so many good speeches and so much experience—113 years’ experience in three speakers alone. I wish to thank them all for their contributions.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), the Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, reminded us about the all-island nature of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. I can say to him that we do remain committed to that and to all its three strands. Indeed, one of the Prime Minister’s first engagements as Prime Minister was in Blackpool at the British Irish Council, which was established under the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. I think he was the first British Prime Minister to attend that summit for well over a decade to demonstrate how seriously this Government are taking all the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement.
The hon. Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson) reminded us how the Belfast/Good Friday agreement has been instructive and, to this day, continues to have value to those involved in peace processes across the globe. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) gave us the benefits of his experience—he might just have passed his apprenticeship. I thank him for his speech, its contents and the way that he delivered it. I know that we need to have a long conversation, but I am absolutely sure that we will get there in the end.
The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) spoke with true emotion and sincerity. I have learned many a lesson from him in my time in this place. Indeed, he was the speaker immediately after my maiden speech in this House, and I have always tried to take his advice from that speech—well, at least some of it. It was a pleasure to listen to him today. The elements of the lessons that he distilled about the step-by-step nature of peace and not giving up were unbelievably wise words.
The hon. Member for North Down (Stephen Farry) knows that we are involved in negotiations to get Stormont up and running, but I am not convinced that starving people in the last 24 hours of that is the right way forward this time. But he has experience of the negotiations, and he is a wise man; he knows what he is talking about. He, too, gave an excellent speech, and I will talk a bit about reform in a moment. The hon. Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) talked about the women, especially Mo Mowlam, behind the peace process. I thank her for her excellent speech and I am so glad that other Members also raised the women behind the agreement. The hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) mentioned that success has many fathers. I think the complete quote ends, “but failure is an orphan”, although we should add to it that success, especially in this case, also has many mothers. It was good to be reminded of that in her speech.
The hon. Lady asked me a couple of questions, and I will certainly try to answer at least one of them. I completely understand that the ECHR is integral to the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. The Prime Minister has said that we will honour the international obligations that we have made. I hope the hon. Lady and the House will see, as the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill travels through its remaining stages in the other place and when it gets here, that my overall aim is to ensure that that Bill, whose compliance with the ECHR is currently questionable, will be compliant. The proof will be in the pudding as those amendments come forward.
The hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) brought a different angle to the debate. I know Northern Ireland is a very difficult place to operate as a journalist, but it has a brilliant tradition of journalism; some of the greatest have come from Northern Ireland and, indeed, I believe it has a vibrant journalistic democracy in itself. I welcome what he said about the National Committee for the Safety of Journalists and I understand the points that he made about the case.
I wish to say thank you in particular to the hon. Members for Hove (Peter Kyle) and for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), not only for their thoughtful remarks about the agreement, the journey to it and the importance of protecting it and upholding it, but equally for their wise counsel and advice and the way that we can work across the Chamber. I hope we demonstrate that we do that, because we have the same ambition here: to honour this agreement, to mark it well and to ensure that we learn and move forward positively with it.
As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the agreement was unlocked through the achievement, bravery and dedication of a great many people over many years. We managed to name some of them, but there are many that we failed to name. I would like to think that over the course of the next few weeks, as we go to many different occasions to mark 10 April 1998, they will all get a mention—or at least that we can bow our heads in deference to those who travelled that journey to get to peace and sign that agreement.
The hon. Member for North Down talked about the need for reform of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and some of its institutions. I can quite understand where he is coming from, and why voices in Northern Ireland and his party are reflecting on the current institutional arrangements and how they work, but he will forgive me if my primary focus at this time is the restoration of those institutions.
The hon. Gentleman knows that I believe the Windsor framework delivers stability for the people of Northern Ireland, protects Northern Ireland’s place in the Union and preserves the balance in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. It also provides the Northern Ireland Assembly with a powerful say. It is now up to the parties in Northern Ireland to decide how they want to move forward together to create a better future for the nation. The Government remain open to hearing reform proposals that are consistent with the core principles in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and command support across the communities.
The hon. Member for Strangford would expect me to say this, but he raised some points relating to Northern Ireland’s place in the Union, and I am very clear that the United Kingdom Government are proud of Northern Ireland and its place in our Union, and we will do all we can to support it. Northern Ireland will remain part of the UK as long as its people wish it to be, on the basis of the principle of consent, which he quite rightly highlighted in his speech.
I am delighted that we all, right hon. and hon. Members of this House, have had the opportunity today to share reflections on and recollections of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, so close to its 25th anniversary on 10 April. This is a truly historic moment in Northern Ireland’s story. It is not hyperbole to say that the Belfast/Good Friday agreement has had a transformational impact on Northern Ireland, ending 30 years of armed conflict, ushering in an era of stability and prosperity, supporting progress towards reconciliation and so much more.
As we look forward to the coming 25 years, the UK Government are committed to the agreement in all respects, to marking this anniversary sensitively and to ensuring that Northern Ireland benefits from an even more prosperous and more reconciled future. I know that ambition is shared by all sides of the House, as we have seen very clearly in this debate.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the 25th anniversary of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement.
Cerebral Palsy: Adult Care Transition
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)
It is a pleasure to have the chance to participate in a debate on cerebral palsy. I tend to be quite sparing in the opportunities I take to discuss this matter in this Chamber. I restrict myself to one opportunity per Parliament, so this is my effort for this particular part of the decade. So many and varied are the issues that could be covered that I could hold a debate on cerebral palsy every week of the year.
Cerebral palsy is one of the least well-understood conditions around—the incidence among the general population is the same as for Parkinson’s or motor neurone disease—and I think that it is partly because of that, and partly because of its broad spectrum of impairment, that it does not have the same profile in the public consciousness. Nor did it have, until recently, a condition-specific charity. Now, at least, I can thank Action Cerebral Palsy and the Adult Cerebral Palsy Hub for their actions and support for the all-party parliamentary group on cerebral palsy, which I chair, as well as the Cauldwell Children charity, which not only sponsors our APPG but, perhaps more importantly, supports tens of thousands of families up and down the country whose children often have quite complex special educational needs.
In this place, we often discuss issues around the transition from childhood into adulthood, so the Government recognise what a crucial stage that is in someone’s personal development. We consider it with regard to care leavers, for whom support has been extended to the age of 25, as well as to the introduction of education, health and care plans, which have also been extended to the age of 25. I think that we need to apply the same philosophy to cerebral palsy.
I mentioned earlier the broad spectrum of impairment, which is, I think, part of the problem in the way in which both Government and society as a whole deal with the condition. Eighty per cent. of those with cerebral palsy have some form of spastic motor impairment, but that is so broad that it ranges from the likes of me, who can function fine 98% or 99% of the time, to those with dyskinetic forms such as the twisting and repetitive movements known as dystonia, the slower movements known as athetosis, and irregular, unpredictable movements known as chorea, so planning for the inclusion of those with cerebral palsy in the adult world has to be, by definition, an individualised process.
The existing legislative framework is disconnected and fragmentary, and does not account for cerebral palsy as a condition in its own right. Indeed, all too often, I feel that it is bedevilled by ignorance on the part even of medical experts at times, and by a lack of common sense from providers. As those of us with cerebral palsy leave full-time education, we encounter a much less structured world where preconceptions about our abilities seem to be so much greater and, invariably, utterly misguided.
People watching the debate on their TVs will assume that I am drunk. That always happens; every time I stand up in this place and appear on TV, I get an email saying, “Why were you drunk when you appeared in the Chamber?” I personally find that quite ironic because I am actually allergic to alcohol as it is a trigger for my epilepsy. It is perhaps a good thing to have a Member of Parliament who is allergic to alcohol and can always speak and, indeed, vote with a clear mind—if only we could all manage that. Preconceptions about cerebral palsy are rife, day in, day out. I stress once again for the record that cerebral palsy is not an intellectual disability—it never has been; it never will be.
Help and advice for individuals during their transition into adulthood are all too scarce. During the course of the APPG’s inquiry into this issue, I have been consistently struck and, indeed, depressed by how policy and practice, as well as day-to-day experience, have not moved on since my own passage through education and early adult life. Indeed, the online community Cerebral Palsy Adult Advice UK made the following submission to the APPG’s inquiry:
“We have been totally overwhelmed by the number of adults joining our group looking for help because they have no idea where to start… we have been inundated by members seeking help—help that we are not equipped to direct them to, because it simply doesn’t exist.”
One young person with CP told us:
“I have to be the educator and adviser—there is still too much ignorance at every turn and an immediate assumption of my mental incapacity”.
This all leads to thwarted ambitions. The all-too-human desire to make the best of ourselves can be very hard to fulfil, given the hurdles that so many with CP face. People often ask me how I feel about what I must be missing out on in life. I get that question so often, and it really angers me. How could I have any conception of what I am missing out on? This is my lived reality day in, day out; I do not know any different. I do not feel I am missing out. I do not feel that there is any detriment to my life experience, but people always make that assumption.
There has to be a fundamental re-design of the services, rights and processes involved in the transition to adulthood. The consequence of not doing so is a failing at both an individual and systemic level of what is needed to support, equip and prepare young people with cerebral palsy as they move into adulthood and a lack of understanding of the day-to-day challenges that they will experience. Every young person with cerebral palsy must have in place a road map for their transition to adulthood that includes their education, health and care needs.
Like any good APPG report, mine has come up with a 10-point plan—I often wish we had 11 points or nine, just for a bit of variety, but there we are. As we have a Minister from the Department of Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately), here today, I will restrict myself to the health points. I recognise that a special educational needs and disabilities review is under way, which will consider the other points that I will not raise today.
The APPG recommends that each child and young person with cerebral palsy and their family must have a dedicated lead professional to act as an advocate, co-ordinator and support from the point of diagnosis through to the completion of their transition to adulthood. Each integrated care system must enhance the empowerment of young people living with CP by creating dedicated budgets for the individual to access the necessary resources and services from the public, independent and voluntary sectors to prevent the deterioration of their health and wellbeing in adulthood.
Every integrated care system in England should create new regional hubs of specialisms for those living with CP hosting multidisciplinary teams, bringing together experts from the public, independent and voluntary sectors. These hubs would have a specific focus on upskilling, training and recruiting specialist therapists and clinical practitioners.
The Government should make available investment in high-quality healthcare, therapy and education to unleash the potential of young people with CP, which, in turn, will reduce future costs in adulthood incurred by those living with the condition.
Dedicated healthcare transition care pathways for young people with cerebral palsy, alongside a dedicated adult service for the condition, should be in place in all nations of the UK. I have always been struck that I had no medical follow-up after the age of about 13, with no more physio and no intervention, yet that was the point at which my body was growing the fastest and my muscles and limbs were outgrowing the ability of my brain to develop them properly. Right when I needed it most, I had the least intervention of all. I only began returning to a proper form of physio three years ago, which has made an immense difference, not necessarily visibly but to my core body strength and my ability to do things that we need to do in daily life. That is why it is really important that we do a much better job at identifying people with CP, to monitor their development throughout their lives. I welcome the fact that the cerebral palsy integrated pathway is being upscaled to create cerebral palsy registers in every part of the UK. That has to be a good thing, but we must build on it and utilise that information now that it is being collected.
An estimated one in four children and young people with cerebral palsy will be non-verbal and require the use of assistive technology and alternative and augmentative communication strategies throughout their life. Preliminary research findings from Ireland have found that, while assistive technology—or ATech, as it is called—is valued, it also carries a “challenging and lengthy” funding process and high rates of abandonment without proper assessment or training. This is an issue that I have done a great deal of work on with Ministers during my time in this place, and I recognise that ATech is something that is now really embedded in the Government’s approach. I welcome the work done in the UK by bodies such as the Ace Centre to make us a world leader when it comes to ATech; I am pleased to also chair that APPG, but I will save that for what I suspect will be a future Adjournment debate. I am grateful to the disability Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove), for his engagement and support and for recognising the role ATech can play in the workplace.
All the strategies I have outlined are lifelines for young people with cerebral palsy who have challenges with motor function and verbal communication. Effective and timely access to appropriate equipment and training in the use of technology, which should start in infancy for all those who will require it, will enable the young person to engage fully within their social environment, home and school or further education community, and in the workplace. Families with young people with cerebral palsy have given testimonials to the APPG that they require expertise and support from professionals who understand how the interrelated comorbidities of cerebral palsy impact on each area of their son or daughter’s life. Parents have described the sense of exhaustion that they are driven to by having to explain their child’s condition to multiple agencies over and over again, and facing long delays for decisions to be taken and funding agreed on.
The most common proposed solution from parents and carers of young people with cerebral palsy is the creation of one-stop-shop regional centres, bringing together expert professionals: doctors, therapists, orthotists and dieticians, dentists, nurses, educationalists, and indeed anyone we can think of to collaborate and meet the holistic needs of the individual with cerebral palsy. For example, changes or deterioration in tone and postural stability related to growth may result in orthopaedic issues. Those may in turn lead to a need for changes in seating, wheelchairs and hoists, which may in turn affect access to augmentative and alternative communication or AT devices.
In its submission to the APPG, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust called for inequalities in health services for those living with cerebral palsy throughout the UK to be addressed by making it a statutory obligation for each integrated care board to provide a multidisciplinary service for people with cerebral palsy living in their area. I concur with that suggestion—indeed, I desperately await being drawn out of the hat for a private Member’s Bill one year, which I will use to put that suggestion forward as a Bill, because it sounds like just the sort of thing that would have a chance at going through. In the meantime, policymakers must put in place urgent and ongoing measurements of the capacity of local areas and integrated care boards to deliver the level of support that young people with complex cerebral palsy within their areas require, including appropriate access to doctors, healthcare and therapists.
I recognise that I have read out a very long shopping list today, but that is partly because we are starting from a much lower point than so many other conditions. Therefore, perhaps predictably in an Adjournment debate, I ask the Minister to please meet me and Action Cerebral Palsy to discuss all those issues—and more, I have no doubt. Cerebral palsy should not be seen as a condition where the prognosis is gloomy and the existence is depressing, but rather as a condition, however severe, where the individual living with it can, with help, live a productive and fulfilling life. That is what we anticipate and aim for for all our children; it should be no different for those children living with cerebral palsy. I thank the Minister for listening today, and look forward to hearing her response.
The Minister for Social Care (Helen Whately)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) for his speech this afternoon. We all draw on our own experiences in this House, and rightly so—in fact, I believe that this House is all the better for its diversity, whatever form that is in—but drawing on experience takes courage, as does doing a job in the public eye. My hon. Friend demonstrated his double courage this afternoon by telling us, as he has told me before, how he has—among other things—been mocked for his own cerebral palsy and asked, for instance, “Why are you drunk?” when he is allergic to alcohol. As I think he suggested, the Whips might wish that more of us were in that boat and always clear-minded when voting, although maybe not. I thank him very much for facing down the mockery that he might sometimes experience. It is completely wrong that he faces that, and I have huge respect for what he does in standing up to that—I wish that he did not have to. I thank him, because I see what he does in his work for his constituents and in the many areas of interest that he campaigns on. Specifically today, he has drawn on his personal experience in his once-a-Parliament speech on cerebral palsy.
I also praise and thank the APPG on cerebral palsy for its excellent report, which includes a clear set of 10 recommendations for us in Health and for other Departments, including the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions, on the transition from childhood to adulthood for young people with cerebral palsy. A number of the recommendations that my hon. Friend referred to are specifically relevant to health, including the importance of having a roadmap for young people with cerebral palsy; the need for a dedicated lead professional looking out for them; the importance of empowering young people and their families to become self-advocates for what they need; the call for dedicated budgets; the call for regional hubs in integrated care systems bringing together multi-disciplinary teams of professionals; and the need for healthcare transition pathways and for upscaling cerebral palsy registers. Those are the ones that sprung out to me from that list. On some of those I can assure him we are making good progress; for others, the best thing I can do is take them away and make sure I get him a fuller response than I am able to give today.
My hon. Friend and the report argue compellingly for further action and focus on supporting young people with cerebral palsy on their transition from childhood into adulthood. I say that because we know that that transition can be very challenging for those of 100% fitness. The transition from childhood into adulthood is a mixture of exciting and daunting. The extent to which it may be exciting or daunting very much depends on someone’s circumstances, but it can be particularly daunting if they have disabilities. As my hon. Friend said, one of the challenges with cerebral palsy is the extent to which it is understood, including among experts, and the huge range of impairments that people might experience. Some can live their life completely to the full, as he demonstrates, and others face far greater challenges in their lives. In those circumstances, it is all the more important for us to make sure that, across all public services that are there to support us through our lives, there is the right support for that crucial transition from young person support into adult services, so that somebody with cerebral palsy, whatever the level of impairment of what they can do their lives, can truly fulfil their potential and lead a full and satisfying life.
I will touch on a couple of things that are specific to the healthcare side of the support for people with cerebral palsy. As I am sure my hon. Friend will know, there is National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidance on the transition from child to adult services and specific guidance for young people with cerebral palsy. The NICE recommendations include developing clear pathways for transition and providing a named support worker for individuals. Those two things align closely with some of the recommendations in his report.
However, an obvious question follows the fact there is NICE guidance, which is, as my hon. Friend might well ask, “Is it being implemented, and to what extent? Where have these recommendations been followed?” I, too, want to know the answer to that and to be able to give it to him. I was not able to get that answer before I came to the Dispatch Box. I am therefore seeking an answer from NHS England, and I will write to him as soon as I have it. That answer will tell him the extent to which those recommendations have been followed and are in place. I anticipate that we may see variation around the country. Where we have variation, the important thing is to know where practice is good, and recognise that, but, where there is a gap in services or provision, to ensure that that is also known about and to step in.
The NHS long-term plan, published in 2019, recognised the problem of transition from children’s to adult services. That plan set out the aim of moving towards
“service models for young people that offer person-centred and age appropriate care for mental and physical health needs, rather than an arbitrary transition to adult services based on age not need.”
NHS England has updated me on this work. It has assured my Department that it is working to ensure that no child or young person will be lost in the gaps between children’s and adult services. Its children and young people transformation programme is developing resources to this end, including guidance that supports the design of transition pathways.
Again, we hear that NHS England appreciates the problems and is working to improve the transition, given the risk of there being gaps between children’s and adult services, and that further guidance is being developed. We are talking about transition pathways, but, again, it would be perfectly reasonable for my hon. Friend to ask where that has got to: where is that guidance, and to what extent is it being followed in practice? On that, again, I will write to him to give him a full answer, because as far as I am concerned it is no good that we should say there is guidance and recommendations. What is also—in fact, even more—important is what is happening in practice.
Specifically, one of the things in the APPG’s report was about personal health budgets and the need for people to have their own dedicated budget. On that, I believe we are making good progress. This applies not just to people with cerebral palsy, but to those with other health conditions. Across the country, there is access to personal health budgets and, more broadly, to personalised care approaches, which is an important way of giving people choice and control over their care.
I have spoken directly to people who have told me what a difference having a personal health budget is making to their lives. We are on target to reach our commitment of 200,000 personal health budgets by March 2024. That said, I have no doubt that we have further to go, as we work towards that target and beyond, in making sure that everybody who could benefit from having a personal health budget does indeed have one. Again, I know there is variation across the country on the extent to which people have them. Where there may be bureaucratic barriers to people having a personal health budget, that is something we should continue to look into, because they can make such a difference to people being able to get the care that they feel they personally need.
Talking about the importance of knowing who has cerebral palsy and knowing who needs that support, my hon. Friend mentioned how he did not receive any follow-up care after he was 13-years-old until very recently. He said how valuable that has been, but there was clearly a great big gap when he might have benefited. As he mentioned, we have the cerebral palsy integrated pathway database, which since 2019 has been supporting the development and extension of registers across all regions in England. That database is included in the NHS England plans for ongoing central funding of clinical databases. It is therefore important that we continue to build up the records, particularly of young people with cerebral palsy, and make the most of that database; as my hon. Friend said, we must not only have the database but make use of the data in it, because when we know who has cerebral palsy we can make sure they get the support they need. I am going to look into that to make sure we follow through on our aspirations.
I will take away the other points in the clear list of recommendations relating to health in the all-party group’s report and the areas I have covered in terms of the long-term plan and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidance, and will get back to my hon. Friend with more details on the progress being made. The all-party group report is clear and compelling, and it deserves a full response on the actions being taken against the recommendations and the commitments already made to improve the transition for people with cerebral palsy and other health conditions as they transfer from childhood into adulthood. I want to express my gratitude to all involved in the work of the all-party group, and I specifically want to thank charities, including Action Cerebral Palsy, that work tirelessly to support and advocate for those living with cerebral palsy.
I want us to make sure the transition from childhood to adulthood is exciting for those living with cerebral palsy, rather than daunting. I do not want health conditions and disabilities to hold anyone back. I want to make sure the right health, educational and professional support is available to unlock the abilities of everyone so they can lead a fulfilling life to the full.
I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate, for making his compelling arguments, and for bringing his own experience so powerfully into this Chamber to motivate all those listening, including me at the Dispatch Box, to do more and do better. I will of course be delighted to meet him, as he asked, to talk about this further. By the time we meet, I look forward to being able to give him more comprehensive responses to the excellent points he raised.
Question put and agreed to.
Ministerial Correction
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Prime Minister
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Angela Rayner
The right hon. Gentleman says that rape conviction has gone up. What he really means is that 300 women will be raped today while he boasts about an increase of 0.5%. He has not answered my question, because he is too ashamed of the answer: 1.6% of rapists face being charged for their crime—1.6%. Let that sink in. A woman goes through the worst experience of her life. She summons up the courage to relive that horrendous experience to tell the police in detail about her assault, but she only has a 1.6% chance of action being taken. Over 98% of rapists will never see the inside of a courtroom, let alone a prison. And the rest of those brave women? They keep looking over their shoulders and hope the perpetrator does not choose tonight to take their revenge for reporting the incident to the police.
In the last 13 years of the Tory Government, more than half a million cases of rape have been recorded by the police, but the charge rate for those attacks has collapsed. He has served under five Tory Prime Ministers and had three years as Justice Minister, and on his watch rapists are left to roam the streets. Will he apologise to those victims who will never get justice because of his failures?
The Deputy Prime Minister
First of all, the conviction rate measured by the Crown Prosecution Service—the leader of the Labour party used to be in charge of the CPS, so he might want to point this out—has gone up. It is now at 69%. We are doing much more to support victims of rape when they come forward.
[Official Report, 29 March 2023, Vol. 730, c. 1008.]
Letter of correction from the Deputy Prime Minister:
An error has been identified in my response to the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner).
The correct response should have been:
The Deputy Prime Minister
First of all, the conviction rate measured by the Crown Prosecution Service—the leader of the Labour party used to be in charge of the CPS, so he might want to point this out—has gone up. It is now at 67.8%. We are doing much more to support victims of rape when they come forward.
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Christianity in Society
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Nick Fletcher (Don Valley) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Christianity in society.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell.
The Church and Christianity, and the interpretation of the Bible, have been in the news more than normal as of late. Recently, the census showed that fewer people identify as Christian. The Church of England has been debating well-known ethical teaching that is now considered controversial in a liberal, modern United Kingdom. Many institutions seem to want to erase any references to their Christian heritage. The London School of Economics recently stated that it would be dropping Easter, Christmas and Michaelmas from its academic calendar. This Easter, the giant bunny will no doubt return to my Westminster hotel lobby, but I am sure there will be no sign of a cross.
In conversations everywhere, the Lord’s name is taken in vain and no one bats an eyelid. Rainbows were long understood to represent God’s promise to never again flood the Earth, but I wonder how many people are even aware of that now. Religious literacy has been declining for decades. Every Christmas and Easter, the newspapers will report some new poll showing that fewer and fewer people understand even the most basic claims of the Christian faith, and the basic historical and legal facts about our Christian heritage and constitution are receding from our collective cultural understanding. The question is, does it matter? I want to suggest two reasons why it does: first, for constitutional and cultural reasons; and secondly, from a faith point of view.
Throughout British history, the Christian Church has pioneered some of the most profound and positive social changes ever to bless these islands. Here, as in many other parts of the world, Christians led the way with universal education and healthcare. As the historian Tom Holland and many others have recognised, so many of the laws and values that we now take for granted have their roots firmly in the Christian faith. It was the biblical idea of God as the ultimate law giver that underpinned the Magna Carta, providing the foundation stone of individual freedom and establishing the principle that no one—not even the King—is above the law.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, and I commend him for bringing this subject to the House, especially at Easter time. He speaks of our Christian heritage. We stand here in the House of Commons, where, for many of us, William Wilberforce is the most esteemed parliamentarian to have graced these Benches. Does my hon. Friend agree that it was Wilberforce’s Christian faith that motivated him to battle for years—even decades—to challenge the heinous industry of individual slavery and to see the abolition of that trade in his generation?
Nick Fletcher
I thank my hon. Friend for her contribution and for her continued support; I was actually going to mention William Wilberforce in my next sentence.
It was the Christian faith that moved John Locke to develop our understanding of religious toleration. It was the Christian faith that compelled William Wilberforce, who my hon. Friend has just mentioned, to fight the slave trade, set up homes for the elderly and establish the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It was the Christian faith that moved Lord Shaftesbury to campaign for better working conditions and provisions for the mentally ill. It was Christianity that inspired Hannah More to set up free schools for the poor. Again, it was Christianity that prompted Josiah Wedgwood to revolutionise working conditions in his factories. It was the Christian faith that led Elizabeth Fry to campaign for prison reform.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
I commend the hon. Member for bringing this debate to the House. There is no doubt that it was people motivated by Christian beliefs who achieved all those social advances. It was also people who claimed to be Christians who introduced all those evils into the United Kingdom’s society in the first place.
Nick Fletcher
I thank the hon. Member for his contribution. Obviously, lots of people throughout the entirety of history may not have used their faith or interpretation of the Bible in the way that I and many Christians today believe they should have. However, the list of people I just read out did some wonderful things.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
My hon. Friend is to be commended for bringing forward this debate, and I support everything he says. This building, the bastion of democracy, is full of Christian iconography, particularly at the other end near the House of Lords—perhaps they are closer to God than we are.
I want to ask my hon. Friend one question. There will inevitably be pressure for us to disestablish the Church of England. I am not an Anglican, but the fact that we have an established Church is an important symbol of our commitment to Christianity. Will my hon. Friend say a word about the importance of keeping the established Church established?
Nick Fletcher
I thank my right hon. Friend for his contribution. As my speech goes on, I will of course make that point.
Many of our laws are based around the tablets given to Moses on Mount Sinai and the ethical teaching of the Old and New Testaments. The great biblical institution of marriage is recognised by social science for the emotional and material blessing it brings to spouses and their children. The Christian faith is woven into the social and physical fabric of the United Kingdom. The beautiful and symbolic church buildings across this land, with their tall steeples reaching for the heavens, are part of our history and culture, not just our skyline.
The place in which we stand took its name from the noble abbey church of St Peter’s—the minster in the west. The bishops play their part in the House of Lords, reflecting hundreds of years of having an established Church. Prayers are said every day in the Chambers of both Houses. Above each entrance to Central Lobby, the patron saints from all four parts of our United Kingdom are celebrated in murals. The tiled floor contains the words of psalm 127:
“Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain.”
At the coronation, His Majesty the King will be anointed in the name of God as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, as well as Head of State. St Edward’s crown, which will be placed on his head, contains a cross and orb symbolising the King and our world under the authority of God. Many people who do not have a personal faith in Christ still value this history and the benefits it has given us.
Of course, some want to rewrite history, but everywhere we look we see our Christian heritage, and nowhere more than in this place. It matters to our national life; it is the air we breathe. Although many deride and misrepresent it, the reality is that it has been a source of great benefit. Much of what makes Britain great stems from that heritage, and many others from around the world recognise that. Why do we not? We should be proud of our Christian history and values. It would be a constitutional disaster to try to erase it—even worse, it would be a spiritual disaster.
That brings me to the main reason why we should cherish the Christian faith, because I, like many others, believe it is true. Let me speak of the basics of Christianity. The foundational premise of the gospel is that we are all sinners. We do wrong: wrong against God and wrong against one another, and we know it—I know it. I am not proud of it, but it is true. If we were all really truthful with ourselves, we would all admit that we are not the good people we like to think we are. We might not all be out stealing and assaulting people; however, I am sure we have all said things that we wish we had not said and done things we wish we had not done. We have been unkind instead of kind and greedy instead of generous. We have broken promises instead of keeping them. We have told lies instead of telling the truth. We have done the things as parents or partners that we know we should not have.
People in the Old Testament covered their sins with sacrifices—their prized lamb or goat sacrificed to God. However, God knew we would never be able to meet his hopes for our lives, which is why the events of Easter happened. John 3:16, probably the most famous verse in the Bible, says:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his…only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
At Christmas, we celebrate Christ’s birth. He came into the world as a unique person—one who was fully human like us, but also divine and therefore perfect and sinless. On Good Friday, we remember the cross where Jesus was sacrificed to cover our sins. On Easter Sunday, we celebrate the fact that he rose from the dead to sit at the right-hand side of God, defeating death for the sake of everyone who believes in him. The Christians who have had such a great influence on the life of this nation knew those things to be true because they are written in the pages of the world’s best-selling book, the Holy Bible. Those of us who believe in that book might not perfectly understand it—sadly, we might even sometimes misuse it—but it is still true and still perfect, and with the help of God’s Holy Spirit, anyone can understand it.
Christianity is not a religion only open to clever people. In fact, one reason why the Christian faith is sometimes derided and rejected is that it is disproportionately a religion for the kind of people that elites look down on—the poor, the weak, the uneducated. But as the Bible itself says, God uses the weak “to shame the strong”. The Bible is a book of truth, love and grace—a book written by God through his chosen people; a book that gives someone like me the promise of eternal life and wise guidance about how to be a better person.
I became a Christian in my mid-30s. I knew of Christ many years before, but never thought I was good enough, and I was right—I wasn’t. The Bible is shockingly plain that we cannot make ourselves good enough for God, no matter how many good deeds we try to do. But that is the beauty of Christianity and the Easter story. Forgiveness is given to us by God, by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. This good news is offered to everyone, everywhere. All our sins past and present are forgiven once we make that decision.
It is a wonderful feeling to be forgiven, blessed and certain of the promise of eternal life. It is wonderful knowing that my maker is with me at all times, right here, right now. He is with me in my triumphs—there have been a few—but, more importantly, in the dark times too. I could not do this job without my faith. I would have had some lonely walks over Westminster bridge to my hotel after a long and difficult day without God at my side.
I am not sure how this speech will be received. Some people are very hostile to the idea of Christian politicians, so let me try to reassure them. The two greatest instructions are taught in Luke 10:27. Jesus said:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and love your neighbour as yourself.”
He said that my neighbour is everyone in here, from all parties, and everyone out there too. That does not mean that I have to agree with them—thank goodness for that—but it does mean that I must love them.
Fiona Bruce
My hon. Friend says that he is not sure how his speech will be received. I have been in this House for about 13 years and I have never been more moved when listening to a speech. He echoes so much of my own experience. I became a Christian when I was 27, and it changed my life. It gave my life meaning and purpose. As he says, it is wonderful to know that we are so loved by someone who was willing even to send his son to die on a cross, and would have done so had we been the only person in the world.
I want to put on the record my appreciation of my hon. Friend’s bravery in speaking so boldly and clearly about his faith. I believe it echoes the faith of many others in this place and across this country. It humbles me to consider that perhaps over 13 years I should have been bolder and braver, but I thank him for what he has done and said today.
Nick Fletcher
My hon. Friend is one of the boldest and bravest people I know here. I thank her very much.
Sir Edward Leigh
I echo my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce). My hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) is making a very moving and beautifully written speech, which we never normally hear in this place. I think that a lot of politicians who may have religious belief are frightened of talking about it because they think that they will put themselves on a pedestal and that, when inevitably they fail—or, if the worst comes to the worst, there is some scandal—they will be doubly denounced. However, I am not sure that that is a good reason for not talking up about one’s faith. In talking about his faith, my hon. Friend admits that he constantly fails—that he is a sinner and all those sorts of things—so, even if he does fail in the future, that is absolutely no reason for not talking about his faith publicly.
Nick Fletcher
I thank my right hon. Friend. I have known about Christianity all my life—I was brought up in a Christian home—but I did not want to make the commitment, because I never thought that I was good enough. I thought that the mistakes I made would be too many and that a Christian person should be this wonderful person with a halo. As one learns about the Bible, one realises that that is not true. It is because I make mistakes that I became a Christian.
I hope that I have not offended anybody. I hope that I have given a true account of the need for Christianity as a nation and as individuals. The west as a whole is under threat from many foreign aggressors, and many a commentator is saying that the west is under threat from itself. Whether we see Christianity as part of our history, or whether we embrace it as our own personal faith, it matters to all of us. Whether or not we are believers, our way of life is built on Christianity, and I believe that to let it fall by the wayside, thinking that it does not matter, would be a terrible mistake.
I thank hon. Members for listening. I hope that some of those watching and listening have learned something new about the great history of our nation, but most of all I hope that they have heard the Christian message of faith, hope and love, and that some of them might start on the same wondrous journey as I did, with God at their side. I look forward to hearing colleagues’ thoughts.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) for my late arrival; I was delayed in the Chamber. I congratulate him on securing a debate on this subject, which is extremely important and too often neglected. His efforts to highlight the value to our society of faith, and Christian faith in particular, are to be commended.
It can often seem that the Christian faith is in retreat, and certainly recent statistics about church attendance seem to support that, but that is nothing new for the Christian Church. Particularly concerning is the lack of knowledge about the Christian faith, which was in part why, along with my hon. Friend, I recently held a debate in this Chamber about religious education. I hope that the House will allow me to reflect on my upbringing.
Being a child of the 1950s, like many I attended Sunday school. Thinking back to my school days at Welholme Junior School in Grimsby, I would say that around half our class, which at that time had about 35 pupils, regularly attended Sunday school—many of them at my church, All Saints’ in Grimsby, or the neighbouring Methodist church, which at that time had a thriving congregation. At Sunday school, we were of course introduced to the basic tenets of the faith. Importantly, that continued with daily assemblies at school, and I still recall some of the prayers used by my headteacher at Welholme and, later, at Havelock School in Grimsby.
Sadly, too many schools these days neglect the religious aspect of education. Of course, the approach taken by schools, and indeed by our churches, has had to evolve, but I wonder how many headteachers take the approach of the head at my daughter’s school. I recall attending a parents evening in what would have been the mid-1990s where, when questioned about religious education, he said that he did not regard the school’s role as to indoctrinate children, but to bring them to the threshold of faith—if only that were the case today.
Without knowledge of the Christian faith—a faith whose teachings form the basis of our laws and so many other foundations of our society—it is not possible to appreciate our history, culture and so much more. It is part of the glue that holds our society together. So many of our schools have their roots in the churches that established schools and charitable institutions.
I am a worshipping member of the Church of England. Like many in its congregation up and down the country, I am often frustrated and feel that it has lost its way. Of course, it should do good works—supporting schools and so on, as I mentioned—but I sometimes think that it is neglecting what must surely be its core job: spreading the gospel. It needs to kick into touch the endless, tortuous debates about sexuality and comments on the minutiae of Government policy and start getting people into its churches to hear a clear Christian message.
Fiona Bruce
I absolutely agree that the core message of the Church has to be sharing the gospel of Christ and the good news, as we have heard today. Does my hon. Friend agree that many Christians across the country are worried about sharing their faith and even publicly quoting from the Bible because of what the law says? In fact, by law, religion or belief is a protected characteristic, as acknowledged by the Equality Act 2010. An expression of faith should not be given any less respect than any other protected characteristic. There is not a hierarchy, but does my hon. Friend agree that that is often how Christians feel? Christians are not asking for any special privilege when expressing their faith—they are just asking not to be at a disadvantage when they express their views and beliefs compared with other groups in society.
Martin Vickers
I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention, and I entirely agree. There is a reluctance among the public to be open about their faith because they genuinely fear potential repercussions.
Sir Edward Leigh
My hon. Friend was talking about the way that Church leaders speak up. I remember asking for a meeting of MPs with the Bishop of Lincoln, and at the top of a long list of subjects he wanted to talk to us about was the widening of the A15. I just wonder whether our Churches—whether we are talking about Catholics or bishops—should concentrate more on talking about spirituality. Although Christians might be in a minority in this country, people of faith are still in a very big majority—that includes Muslims, Hindus and many others. Does my hon. Friend agree that we want to hear more from our bishops about the deep value and well of spirituality, in addition to all the good causes they talk about, which are perfectly valuable in themselves?
Martin Vickers
I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend. I can recall many of those meetings from when I acted as his constituency agent in years gone by, and it would have been rather nice had they concentrated on spiritual matters. Having said that, I believe that, on the whole, the Church of England does speak for the decent silent majority who recognise that the Church plays an important part in society and, although they may not attend church regularly, like to think that it is there.
I am reading a book called “God in Number 10”; other Members may have obtained a copy when it was launched here in the House a few months ago. Its author is Mark Vickers—I emphasise that he is, to the best of my knowledge, no relation.
Martin Vickers
Yes, indeed. In the section on Stanley Baldwin, I was struck by a reference that he made. The former Prime Minister reportedly said to King George VI that the average working man—I am sure he would say woman, as well, if he were alive today—might not go to church him or herself, but was glad to know that his monarch did. I suggest to colleagues that the average working man and woman probably think the same about their Member of Parliament. We should not be afraid to “do God”, as Alastair Campbell didn’t say. I certainly get more criticism for being a Conservative than for being a Christian.
Incidentally, another extract from the book refers to a comment by Charles Gore, who was Bishop of Oxford between 1911 and 1919. Apparently, he said in a letter to The Times that he doubted that
“the cohesion of the Church of England was ever more seriously threatened than it is now.”
Well, he could have said that yesterday, rather than a century ago.
We are blessed in this country in that we can—despite the thoughts of some keyboard warriors and others—practise our faith in safety, with few exceptions. As we know, that is not the case in many parts of the world. I praise the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) in her role as the Prime Minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief. We should welcome the fact that the Prime Minister, and indeed his predecessor, made such an appointment. I also commend the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for all his work with his all-party parliamentary group for international freedom of religion or belief.
Faith plays an important part in the lives of billions of people across the globe, and we must do all we can to ensure that they can practise their faith in safety. Here in the UK, I sincerely hope that the Christian faith lasts for very many more centuries to come.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell, and thank you for getting me in at the last moment. I also thank the hon. Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) for bringing forward this debate.
Today’s debate is timely, given the approach of Easter. We are also now in the holy month of Ramadan, and Passover and Vaisakhi will soon be upon us as well. I declare an interest as somebody who was brought up in the Church of England, although I was told off by a local vicar last year for not attending regularly. He has a good memory, because I think the last time I went was some years ago.
I pay tribute to the role of churches in my community, and it is timely to reflect on the wider values of faith communities in British history. Certainly in Reading, and in Woodley, which is the other town I represent, there is an enormous contribution from our local faith community. That includes churches and many other faiths. I am grateful for this opportunity to thank them for their outstanding community work at this time. I will give the example of the Whitley Community Development Association, which has benefited enormously. That group, which is led by residents in a very disadvantaged part of our community, regularly receives donations of food and other support from local churches and other faith communities. They have had support from a gurdwara as far away as Slough, which is certainly far away from a Reading perspective, although perhaps not for people outside Berkshire. I thank all those churches and other faith communities for getting involved. Other food bank support in our area includes the Trussell Trust and ReadiFood, which is heavily involved with local churches, and I thank them, as many families and pensioners are suffering enormously in the cost of living crisis.
Other notable community organisations that have a religious link include CommuniCare, which carries out very useful advice work for many residents. It has been a privilege to visit its office on a number of occasions. There are literally queues of people waiting outside in the morning to be helped by that charity. Once again, I thank local church members for supporting it. Indeed, I thank other faith communities and people of no faith for their work in community organisations.
I also pay tribute to a practical demonstration of people’s faith that is truly humbling. In our town, as in many parts of the country, there is a terrific problem with homelessness. I have been privileged to visit New Beginnings, which is a wonderful community organisation that takes in people who are street homeless, and offers them a warm meal and a place to stay. It has converted a former pub, turning it into a place of refuge for people who are in deep trouble, and it offers them practical help. That was set up by a number of practising Christians, and there is a strong church element to it.
Sadaka is a similar organisation that has Muslim heritage. Equally, a number of practising Muslims wanted to show their support to the wider community. In a truly amazing demonstration of that support, they offer food regularly on a Saturday morning. It has no property of its own and is looking for one, so if anybody has a spare property in Reading to give them, we would be delighted to accept that.
I appreciate that time is limited, but two other forms of help are worth mentioning as practical demonstrations of peoples’ faith in my area and across the country. The first is wider help for the vulnerable—I mention Street Pastors in particular—and the second is the long-standing work of church and faith communities in supporting international development. I particularly want to thank CAFOD—the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development. I am not a Catholic, but I am hugely supportive of its work, and it has reached out to me since I became an MP in 2017. There are many other groups, such as the charities that make up the Disasters Emergency Committee, including Oxfam, Islamic Relief and a number of others, that do incredible work. That is motivated by people’s faith and belief in supporting other human beings at a time of great need. Those charities deserve huge support and appreciation for their incredibly valuable work.
There are many other groups that I have not been able to mention. I appreciate this opportunity to say some words of thanks and encouragement to the faith communities —particularly Christians, as they are the subject of the debate—that play such an important role across many fields. I also thank Support U, a charity that supports LGBT people in our area; I have had the privilege of working with that absolutely fantastic organisation.
Thank you for allowing me to take part in today’s debate, Mr Mundell, and I again thank the hon. Member for Don Valley for securing it. It has been a wonderful opportunity to thank many hard-working and motivated people whose faith is at the heart of what they do.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
It is a real pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Mundell. I am pleased to begin today’s summing up, which will not be politically based, as it often is in Westminster Hall debates, because this has not been the usual type of debate and there has been a significant degree of consensus.
I want to present a slightly different view, and I say this as a lifelong committed Christian who shares many of the values that have been expressed. We need to be careful about how we talk about the history and future of Christianity in our nations and elsewhere. As I indicated in my intervention, although there is no doubt that people motivated by Christianity have been responsible for extraordinary acts of kindness, courage, bravery and selflessness, from the days of Christ himself, we cannot hide from the fact that people who claim to be acting in accordance with Christian teaching have been responsible for some of the most heinous acts ever committed on God’s earth.
Slavery was set up by people who claimed that it was God’s will. Apartheid was set up and maintained by people who claimed that it was God’s will. We have seen acts of cruelty and barbarity during wars and crusades throughout the Christian era on earth. They were carried out by so-called Christians, but I find that impossible to reconcile with any of the teachings of Jesus, or indeed anything else among the teachings of the Church.
I had the good fortune to spend five years on the court of governors of the University of St Andrews. On the day that it had its annual chapel service in memory of the founders and current benefactors, we would go outside as soon as that was done. Just outside St Salvator’s chapel, the initials “PH” are built into the pavement, and we would have a memorial service there. Patrick Hamilton was a devout Christian, and the stones mark the spot where he was slowly roasted alive by another group of devout Christians because he was devoutly the wrong kind of Christian. Later in the history of St Andrews, the tables were turned, and the other form of devout Christians were starved to death and thrown out the windows of St Andrews castle.
Tales of such barbarity between Christians have been going on for almost as long as Christianity has existed. I say that not to suggest that Christianity has been an evil influence on the world, as some people suggest, but when we talk about all the good that it has brought, we also have to be willing to recognise that it has not been a one-sided story. We have to recognise that many people across the world still find it difficult to break the bond between Christianity and slavery, colonisation, persecution and empire building—the exploitation of other lands and their people. The people responsible for those crimes were not acting in a Christian way, but in the minds of a lot of our brothers and sisters across the world, there is still an association between Christianity and the darker side of their history.
I do not accept the concept of anywhere being a Christian country. It is a matter of fact, certainly for most of our recent recorded history, that all our countries have been led by people who purported to be Christians, but that is not the same thing as being a Christian country. I point out to the hon. Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) that while he is rightly proud of a lot of the history and heritage to which he referred, a lot of it is not the heritage of all of us who attend this place; it is a heritage of one nation in the United Kingdom.
Magna Carta, for example, is an exclusively English document. We should not mention Magna Carta without recognising that, by today’s standards, anyone who published it would be arrested because it was one of the most antisemitic documents that has ever been produced. It was very much of its day. While we might celebrate the liberties that it gave to some people, we have to recognise that for Jewish people in England at that time, Magna Carta was not going to liberate them from anywhere. The same is true, coincidentally, for the Claim of Right for Scotland because, by today’s standards, that is an extraordinarily anti-Catholic document.
Much of the heritage that the hon. Member spoke about is, indeed, a rich heritage that anyone is entitled to be proud of. It is also not the heritage of this Parliament. It might be part of the heritage of many of the buildings in which this Parliament sits, but it is a heritage of one of its predecessor Parliaments: the English Parliament, which, with the Scottish Parliament, was combined by the union of the Parliaments. In fact, technically, the United Kingdom Parliament has been going since only the early 1800s. While we can talk about the heritage of the building, we should not make the mistake of thinking that the institution that now uses this building necessarily inherits all that heritage.
As one example, the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) mentioned the religious iconography that we see in many places around here, and that is absolutely correct. However, the legacy of John Knox in my country was to destroy hundreds of years-worth of religious iconography. When we talk about Christian heritage as it is applied in this place, if this place had been in Scotland, a lot of the treasured iconography would have been destroyed. Again, it would have been Christian iconography being destroyed by people who said it was a Christian thing to do.
I certainly agree with one of the most poignant parts of the speech by the hon. Member for Don Valley, when he said he could not do this job without his faith. That is one thing with which I can wholeheartedly agree. I could not do anything that I have done in my life without my faith, and anybody of genuine belief in any of the faith traditions would say that.
I want to put on the record that, in almost 31 years as an elected politician, I have never felt under any pressure from anybody to speak or vote in a way that went against my Christian conscience. I know some of my colleagues have found it very difficult, but I have never found it difficult to separate what my faith tells me I should do in the way that I run my life and thinking that it then gives me the right to legislate over how other people run their lives. I remember the difficulties that some of my family and friends had when I supported the scrapping of section 28 many years ago, because the Catholic Church at that point was against scrapping section 28. I took the view that the Catholic Church tells me and I try to follow the teaching about how I practise my own sexuality, but it does not give me a right to legislate as to how anyone else practises theirs, any more than it would give me the right to legislate to say, “You have to go to mass on a Sunday, and you are not allowed to eat meat on Good Friday or Ash Wednesday.”
In fact, I find that my Christian beliefs attract not nearly as much animosity on social media as some people’s do, but any abuse I get on account of my faith on social media tends to come from other people who claim to be Christians. I do not think I have ever had any kind of religious-based abuse from anybody who did not make it clear that they claim to be a Christian of some kind.
Hon. Members have spoken about, for example, the decline in respect for not only Christianity generally, but the displaying of recognition of the great feasts. It saddens me that most Christians do not realise that we are coming up to the most important day of the year. Easter in the Christian tradition is significantly more important than Christmas, but we would not think it from looking at the way it is celebrated, or not. The decline in respect for Easter, and, indeed, for the true spirit of Christmas, started long before there was any noticeable number of people in these islands who professed other faiths. It probably started in days when 80% to 90% of the population would have described themselves as being Christian.
Essentially, although this is maybe too deep a subject to go into just now, the decline in Christianity that we see in the United Kingdom has been caused by Christians giving up, losing interest or just stopping being particularly concerned about it. It has not been caused by outside influences. It is a problem that has been created here within our own Christian faiths, and it can be addressed only from within Christian faiths.
There was some discussion during this debate that perhaps Church leaders should focus on the spiritual and religious message and not be talking so much about other things. I cannot speak for people of other faiths, but as a Catholic living in Scotland, I certainly have not noticed a shortage of statements from the leaders of the Catholic Church in Scotland in which they extol the essential spirituality of our faith or in which they continue to remind us what Easter, Christmas and a number of other days are really about, for example.
I have to wonder whether people who get uncomfortable when church leaders comment on social matters are uncomfortable really about the fact that their church leaders are telling them that what they are doing, the way they are acting, is not in keeping with the teaching of their faith. Certainly when I look at the principles of Catholic social teaching—it is one of the things that drive me in this place—I find it difficult. I would not challenge people’s sincerity for a minute; I can only assume that those who promote some of the things that I see in this place feel that they can reconcile that to Christian social teaching and to Catholic social teaching. But—I am sorry—I find it very difficult to make that reconciliation.
Perhaps what we need to do is to recognise that how people promote their Christianity can draw people into the Church or push people away. If people speak of Christianity in one way and act in a different way, that is always going to give us a problem. I have never found a passage anywhere, in any part, of the Bible where these words appear: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, unless they came here in a small boat.”
Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Mundell. I thank the hon. Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) for his efforts in securing the debate. As I am shadow Minister for local Government and faith, it is my joy and privilege to praise and talk up the vital, meaningful work of the countless religious groups that we have across the UK, especially during this time of year, which is, as has been mentioned, a special, holy time for many religions. Easter is upon us. Last night, I joined the other members of the all-party parliamentary group on British Muslims as they broke fast in the Speaker’s House. I look forward next week to hearing more about and seeing Jewish traditions around the marking of Passover in the UK and across the world.
In my constituency of Luton North, the interfaith community is long established and a source of cohesion and strength. The Luton Council of Faiths received an award from the late Queen for its important—vital—work on faith but, importantly, community cohesion as well. I mention this interfaith work because everybody has talked about their background and I grew up in not just a mixed ethnicity, race and heritage household, but a mixed faith household, both Buddhist and Christian. When I see scenes such as those that we saw last night at Manchester Cathedral, with more than 1,000 people of all faiths and none breaking fast and coming together, welcoming each other into the cathedral in much the same way as the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) talked about— opening the doors—it is to be welcomed and celebrated.
As we approach Holy Week, when Christians across the UK and the world will reflect on both the sombre and the celebratory nature of the Easter story, it is right that we reflect, too, on their value in our society. They are moral guides, whether they are bishops leading on pressing ethical issues in the House of Lords or peacekeepers in struggling communities. Particular examples come to mind: the former Bishop of Kensington providing comfort to the traumatised survivors and relatives following the Grenfell tragedy, and providing leadership in challenging the injustices and continued injustices that have been exposed; the retired Bishop of Liverpool, who did not leave the side of those affected by the Hillsborough disaster throughout endless let-downs, setbacks and injustices; and Pastor Mick, who has used his life experiences of violence and addiction to set up the Church on the Street and serve vulnerable people in Burnley.
We all know that, beneath those who make the headlines, many more Christians are working quietly and thanklessly on the ground, in all our constituencies, to support those who have fallen through the gaps of poverty and misfortune. Their generosity and compassion became most evident during the pandemic, when, alongside all people of faith and those of none, people relied on churches, mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras, mandirs and temples to get the message of public health and public safety out, to keep their communities fed and to meet a variety of other needs.
Peter Grant
The hon. Member is giving a very powerful speech. Does she agree that the circumstances she is describing, whereby people of a variety of faiths and people of no particular faith have all come together for the common good, are a reminder that although many of us would hold fast to what we regard as Christian values, those values are not exclusively Christian? If we recognised that a lot of those values are shared worldwide by people of many different faiths, maybe we would get on better than we do just now.
Sarah Owen
I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. It is always important to note where we share values—and that always plays to our strengths.
My hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) made a powerful point about the vital support that churches and charities provide on a non-judgmental basis not just to Christians, but to their wider communities and everybody who needs support. Churches and Christian organisations have been stepping forward where the state has largely stepped back for over a decade, and I see examples of that in my constituency. When we had fires in tower blocks, St Luke’s in Leagrave provided warm banks, despite the fact that its bills are going through the roof. Christchurch Bushmead, which is at the centre of our community, has provided support for those in need. We all know about the food banks in our constituencies that are run from churches by Christian charities. As food prices climb, energy costs soar and wages fall, we cannot expect the need for food banks to diminish any time soon.
There are also the night shelters. They are less typical at this time of year, but every winter Christian organisations go above and beyond to provide warmth and shelter for homeless people. They do so not because they have an abundance of money, space or resources, but because their faith compels them to do and give what they can. I note that hon. Members have mentioned and recommended books throughout the debate, and I would love to take the opportunity to recommend a book co-written by my dear friend and the chief executive of the Christian charity Jubilee+, Natalie Williams, entitled “The Myth of the Undeserving Poor”. We can add that to our reading list for the Easter recess.
Vital support, including the debt services provided by organisations such as Christians Against Poverty, is long standing but has never been so needed as it is now. CAP partners with churches of all denominations around the UK to offer personal budgeting courses and employment support, helping people to break free from the paralysing chains of debt. I will never forget the personal testimony that I heard from CAP when it came to Parliament to speak to parliamentarians about the vital work it does.
That is just a brief selection of Christian charities working domestically. Globally, there are organisations fighting bravely for religious freedoms and human rights, and tackling poverty and famine. Colleagues will be aware of the fearless work of Open Doors, which works in some of the most dangerous regions of the world to serve persecuted Christians. Over Easter, we must keep in mind worshippers and believers in places such as North Korea, Nigeria, China, Hong Kong, Afghanistan and many more, who will risk their lives to worship God at this time.
I pay tribute to International Justice Mission, which works internationally to end modern slavery; Tearfund, which has been providing disaster relief for over 50 years; and Christian Aid, which continues to lead progressive and powerful campaigns on the climate emergency. Despite how needed and important their campaigns are, such organisations are struggling. The cost of living crisis has meant that, while demand is higher than ever for food, shelter and financial support, the public’s capacity to donate has declined. The fact that wages are falling far beneath inflation is forcing ordinary working people to cut back where they can. For many, that means reducing or ending charitable giving. This is where we need Government action.
I ask the Minister to go back to her team and other Government Departments, and look at what more can be done to protect our churches and charities from further financial struggle. Stronger interventions on energy costs and business rates would be a very good place to start. After 13 years of Conservative Government, where does the Minister think our country would be without the safety net provided by Christians and other faith groups? If families, children, and those out of work or struggling with addiction had only the Government to rely on, what state would our economic and social health be in? She should ask herself, honestly, whether the Government have allowed themselves to become complacent in presuming that faith groups will always be able to step forward and make up for state neglect and failure. On the contributions of Christians to fighting global issues of injustice, will the Minister update us on efforts to return the level of overseas aid to 0.7%?
This Easter, I will be celebrating the inspiring Christians around me in Luton North; the church leaders, their congregations and communities across the UK; and the charities working here and abroad to serve humanity. We can all be inspired and grateful for the hugely powerful impact that Christians have in our society, but we must never be ignorant of what they need from Government or overconfident that they will always be able to clean up our mistakes.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Felicity Buchan)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) on securing this debate on Christianity in society and on his very personal and passionate speech. My hon. Friend is a committed champion for his area and a committed advocate of the role of Christianity in our communities. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) and for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) and the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) for their thoughtful and reflective contributions. I also thank the Front-Bench spokesmen, the hon. Members for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) and for Luton North (Sarah Owen), for their profound reflections.
To begin with, let me emphasise the importance of the Church as an essential pillar of society. It has been, and will always be, a bedrock of support for Christians, and it will always be an important institution in Britain. Our country has been built on Christian values, and the Church of England and the Church of Scotland are the two established Churches in the UK. As we break for Easter recess, it is important to remember and celebrate the role of the Christian Church in our history, culture and values. It not only plays an important constitutional role in our national life, but has been instrumental in fostering our values as a society—values of compassion, tolerance and respect. As my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley alluded to, love thy neighbour.
At Easter time, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection signifies the promise of redemption and rebirth and the forgiveness of sin. In my constituency of Kensington, I have the great privilege of having a very active Christian community. My constituency has some of the major iconic churches in London: the Brompton Oratory; Holy Trinity Brompton; St Columba’s, Church of Scotland; St Mary Abbots; the Notting Hill Methodist Church; and Kensington United Reform Church. I am proud to have that vibrant community.
Faith in general is a vital part of people’s identities and communities. The Government fully support the invaluable work being done by people around the country who are inspired by their faith. Values such as democracy, respect for others and regard for the rule of law are supported by the overwhelming majority of people in this country. They have evolved over time to become an integral part of life in Britain today. Faith can guide the moral outlook of many. It inspires great numbers of people to public service and to helping those in greatest need. Christian values, like values found in other great faiths, are those of humanity and service to others.
The Church of England, as has been mentioned, holds a unique place in our society. As senior members of the established Church of England, 26 bishops sit as individual Lords Spiritual and are impartial Members of the House of Lords. The monarchy also plays an important constitutional and religious role in the UK, with the sovereign acting as Head of State and Supreme Governor of the Church of England. As we approach the coronation of His Majesty King Charles III, there are a number of statutes that govern the declarations and oaths that must be made by a new monarch. The oaths represent an important part of our history and traditions, symbolising the role and duties of the sovereign. Bishops provide an important independent voice and spiritual insight into the work of the upper House. While they make no claims to direct representation, they seek to be a voice for people of all faiths.
Fiona Bruce
The Minister has spoken about the monarch publicly declaring his faith on oath. Can the Government give some clear guidance on the rights and freedoms of others in our society—Christians and those of other faiths—to publicly express their faith? That right exists, but there is an enormous amount of confusion about it—indeed, in some cases, even fear. The right clearly exists, subject to some limited caveats, such as not inciting violence.
Can we also see a review of the guidelines that the police work to when they arrest or charge people on the grounds, for example, of an alleged hate crime? Again, there is a lot of confusion there. Often, the cases we hear of seem to progress and then there is clearly no case to answer. Finally, can we make it absolutely clear that no one should be arrested simply for silently praying?
Felicity Buchan
Let me address the first question. No one should be in fear of professing their faith, regardless of which faith they belong to. That is very important. I am afraid guidance to the police falls outside my jurisdiction—it is a matter for the Home Office—so I will defer on that point, but I feel strongly that everyone should be able to declare their faith.
Fiona Bruce
Perhaps the Minister will pass that request on, because it is a very real one, particularly following the recent passage of the clause in the Public Order Bill on buffer zones.
Felicity Buchan
I am happy to pass on my hon. Friend’s comments.
The latest census tells us that the number of Christians living in this country has decreased; however, Christianity remains the most prominent religion. Christianity has shaped this country’s history, and we should recognise and celebrate that. We can all be proud of our Christian heritage and values. My hon. Friends the Members for Congleton and for Don Valley both mentioned William Wilberforce. It was his Christian faith that led to the abolition of slavery. It was his resolute Christian faith that prompted him to become interested in social reform, including the improvement of factory conditions in Britain. He firmly believed that the revitalisation of the Church and individual Christian observance would lead to a harmonious model society.
In every city, town and village in the UK, we see the positive impact and vital contributions that Christianity, Christians and churches make to our society, as, indeed, other faiths do too. My hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes mentioned the importance of Christian schools and faith schools; just before coming to the Chamber, I was with one of the schools in my constituency, All Saints Catholic College in north Kensington, which I am delighted to say is an outstanding school. There is no question but that Christian schools play an important role.
Churches are often centres of community support and provide a range of services, including after-school care, youth clubs, financial advice and addiction support, to name but a few. They often provide a safety net for those in need, running, for example, homeless shelters, food banks and warm hubs. As the Minister for homelessness, I want to put on the record my personal thanks for everything that churches do in support of the homeless. We recently distributed a £10 million night shelter transformation fund, with a specific focus on voluntary and faith groups.
The hon. Member for Luton North asked what the Government are doing to support charities. I am delighted that the Budget included £100 million specifically to support charities, and homeless and domestic abuse charities will be beneficiaries of that. We are conscious that there are inflationary pressures in the economy and that charities need more support, so I was delighted that the Chancellor made £100 million available. That comes on top of the huge amount of support that the Government have given to those facing cost of living pressures, with £37 billion in the last Budget and a further £26 billion in the autumn statement. We are, in effect, paying half of everyone’s energy bills at the moment; the average household is receiving £1,500 in support for its energy bills.
The pastoral impact of the Church extends further into our society with the provision of chaplaincy across the public sector, including in prisons, hospitals and the armed forces. The Government recognise and support the importance of faith. My colleague Baroness Scott, the Minister for faith, continues to champion the brilliant work of our faith communities up and down the country. She regularly meets leaders from across faith groups in our country.
We were the first Government to commission a wide-ranging review of how the Government engage with faith. As Members may be aware, the independent faith engagement adviser, Colin Bloom, will soon publish his review. He will make recommendations to the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities about how the Government can celebrate the contribution of faith groups and their positive role in society, while also tackling harmful practices. There was an unprecedented number of responses—21,000—to the review’s public call for evidence. That demonstrates the high level of interest in religion and faith across our society. We will carefully consider Colin Bloom’s recommendations when the report is published.
Sarah Owen
I am grateful for the Minister’s considered response. Will she answer my question about returning overseas aid spending to 0.7%?
Felicity Buchan
That falls outside my remit—it is a Foreign Office matter—but I will certainly pass on the hon. Lady’s question.
I would like to express my gratitude to the Christian Church for everything it has done for the people of this country. The Government’s support for the Christian Church reflects the importance of religion in the UK. Religion plays a significant role in the lives of many people, and the Government are committed to ensuring that it can continue to play a positive role in society. By working together, we can achieve even more to help our faith communities.
Before I conclude, let me take this opportunity to reiterate the important message that the Government are fully behind the work of our faith communities. Easter is the very foundation of the Christian faith. For Christians worldwide, the importance of Easter is in praising and acknowledging Jesus Christ’s resurrection and what that means to them. Easter is a time when we can all learn from Christians coming together, and a time we can all share with loved ones in unison.
I wish my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley and everyone else who has taken part in this timely debate a very happy Easter.
Nick Fletcher
I thank all Members for attending today. I am very pleased to see so many people here on the Thursday before recess. I particularly thank the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda), who named all the Christian charities that are helping in his constituency, and my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), both for her continued support and for sharing her story of faith.
The fantastic Christians in Parliament all-party parliamentary group is one of the most active APPGs in this place, and I thank it for all its work. I have Bible study on a Wednesday morning and everyone is welcome—please do contact me. It is so wonderful to be part of that group. When I first came here as a Member of Parliament, I knew literally nobody, and the APPG helped me through that period. It was a fantastic group to get to know.
I thank the Minister for her response to the debate. I know that she will report back to the Government on how important this subject is and how well attended the debate was. She will obviously make sure that Christians are thought of when anything happens in Government; it is really important that we think of people of faith. I also thank the Backbench Business Committee for letting me have this debate, which is really appreciated, and I thank you, Mr Mundell, for chairing it.
Easter is, more than anything else, a time to reflect. The main point of Easter is that Christ died for our sins and he forgave us. That is something we should all remember, and we should follow Christ’s lead on that. No matter how we have been wronged, and no matter how far in the past—whether we were wronged centuries ago, weeks ago or today, or whether we will be wronged in the future—the message of Christ’s story, more than anything else, is forgiveness. I understand how difficult it is to forgive, but if we can all learn to forgive each other, we will have a wonderful future. Happy Easter, everybody.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered Christianity in society.
Easter Adjournment
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Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
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Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered matters to be raised before the forthcoming adjournment.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I place on the record my thanks to Madam Deputy Speaker for allowing flexibility this afternoon, enabling us literally to move from one debate to another, rather than this second debate starting strictly at 3 pm, as would normally be the case. That flexibility allows Members to contribute and indeed allows us to have a full and proper debate.
The only shame, of course, is that the Government have chosen to put on a debate in the main Chamber today on a very important topic—the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement—rather than allowing us to debate these matters there. Nevertheless, we have been elevated to this Chamber as a result, and I am glad to see many Members here to contribute to the debate.
At this time of year, we of course remember the late Sir David Amess, who would give a valedictory performance in these debates. I am afraid that I will not attempt to cover the number of subjects that he normally covered—
Bob Blackman
The hon. Member may regret saying that by the time I sit down. [Laughter.] However, I will seek to raise a number of topics.
Let me kick off with the excellent performance of Harrow Council. In less than a year, it has managed to balance the budget overall, saving itself from bankruptcy, and ensuring that there is transparency in putting residents first in the delivery of services.
Over the Easter holiday, more than 1,000 free places will be available for children and young people aged five to 16 at the various different local clubs and activities for the school holidays. That will entertain children over the holidays, help them make new friends, allow parents to work, and help with childcare costs. Each space will include a free, nutritious meal per day. More than 20 organisations in my borough have received funding to deliver the activities, which include sports, arts and crafts, skills workshops, cooking clubs, theatre and other trips, and much more. There is also much-needed provision for those with special educational needs.
As the weather improves and spring is upon us, Harrow Council is embarking on the reworking of 37 tennis courts in 13 parks in the borough, bringing them up to a high standard. Thanks go to the Lawn Tennis Association for funding that, because at the moment 11 are literally unusable. Encouraging people to play safely outside and to play more sport has to be good news as we enter the summer months and as we look forward the Wimbledon championships.
On a less happy note, antisocial behaviour has clearly grown in recent years across the country, including in my borough, although I welcome the Government’s strategic plan on combating antisocial behaviour, which was announced this week. At the moment, 11% of my casework is on antisocial behaviour, and it is the second most recorded crime in Harrow—second only to vehicle crime. This year, 5,550 incidents have been reported to Harrow Council and the police.
I welcome Harrow’s positive measure of consulting on a public spaces protection order aimed at tackling antisocial behaviour. The order would result in fines of £100 for anyone caught urinating, defecating or spitting anywhere in the borough. The council is also considering imposing restrictions on bird feeding and requiring dogs to be on leads in parks. The consultation runs for eight weeks until 15 May and seeks the views of Harrow residents and businesses.
The council aims to crack down further on antisocial behaviour, such as fly-tipping, which is endemic in Harrow and I am sure in many other places; street drinking; and uncontrolled dogs. The order would allow immediate enforcement action to be taken, including against those who drive over and damage footpaths, making them unsafe for walkers, and those who fail to pick up dog mess after dogs have been around.
Of course, we are in the run-up to the expansion of the ultra low emission zone. Unfortunately, we have not had a proper response from the Mayor’s office to the 41 constituents who wrote with detailed questions and concerns about the ULEZ. All those were sent to the Mayor’s office some months ago but, instead of a personalised response answering each constituent’s concerns, in a Kafkaesque move, we received a generic send-to-all copy-and-paste, and now we are simply being ignored when we send chasers.
I am pleased to have launched a ULEZ poll and petition. In just three weeks, we have had more than 250 responses. Surprise, surprise: 96% do not support the ULEZ expansion, with only 10 people—none of them with a car—saying that they do support it. More than 260 people have now signed the petition calling on the Mayor to reverse the ULEZ expansion to Harrow. Despite that, cameras are going up across the borough, to the obvious dissatisfaction of residents.
To good news once again, Mr Mundell: Home Office responses to casework are improving. The list of Home Office cases with which my office is dealing is down from more than 180 to 26. We are still struggling with some long-standing cases, which are more complicated—the oldest started on 23 July 2021—and urgent and last-minute cases, one of which was referred to in the main Chamber this morning, on matters such as urgent visas, funerals and fast-track services that are not being dealt with in the time promised.
As the protests in Iran rage on, I visited the Iranian Ashraf 3 refugee camp last month to meet Maryam Rajavi. It was deeply overwhelming to visit the museum that details the torture and deaths of as many as 120,000 MEK—Mojahedin-e-Khalq—supporters over the years of struggle for a democratic Iran. In 2015, Iran launched a 40-rocket attack against Ashraf 2, the camp’s previous home, sited in Iraq, leaving 24 dead and forcing the other refugees to move to Albania. Albania does not always get good press in this place, but let us thank the Albanian Government for allowing Ashraf 3 to be set up and enabling those refugees to settle.
I unreservedly condemn the Government of Iran’s actions in suppressing the protests in their country, and I deplore the violent behaviour of the Iranian police. I continue to be deeply concerned by reports of threats made to organisations in the UK that support the rights of protesters in Iran. I will continue to urge the Government to include the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the list of proscribed terrorist organisations and to work with our international counterparts to ensure that further sanctions are placed on Iran without delay.
The recent attack on the Indian high commission was more than just a hullabaloo. The hooliganism of some Khalistani demonstrators outside the Indian high commission is a disgrace to this country. This is the sixth time in as many years that it has been attacked in a similar way. Security guards were injured, windows were smashed, an attempt was made to remove the tricolour, and further damage was caused. I drew attention to that at business questions last week. I was very careful about my words—I said that these were Khalistani militants—but sadly the people who put subtitles on social media decided to substitute “Sikh” for “Khalistani”. I made it very clear that the vast majority of Sikhs in this country are law-abiding citizens who behave properly and appropriately. Indeed, this country owes a big debt to the Sikh community for coming to our aid during the great war and the second world war.
The fact is that these militants operate across Canada, the United States and Australia at the same time. We are harbouring a number of organisations that are proscribed by India—our friend. They are terrorists, and they should be proscribed and prevented from taking further action. I commend the bravery of the officials at the high commission, who, rather than protect themselves during the attack, simply replaced the flag with an even bigger version, demonstrating that they would not be cowed by the demonstration.
Last week, I welcomed a group of Romanian MPs and ambassadors to Parliament for a series of meetings on Romania. They also participated in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office conference to strengthen our bilateral relations. In Harrow East alone, we have 11,000 Romanians, who contribute positively to society and our economy. One thing that shocked me was the lack of a Romanian GCSE in this country, despite the fact that there are about 350,000 Romanian young people living here. There is already a Polish GCSE, so why are we discriminating against our Romanian friends? I have raised this matter already with the Education Secretary. I trust that her Department and the Government will continue to look at the opportunity.
I am pleased that my private Member’s Bill—the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill—has gone through the Commons and will enter the other place on 21 April. I have been consulting local authorities, providers and stakeholders in the sector regularly to continue resolving any concerns or questions they have. I hope my Bill will fly through the other place. Lord Best is piloting it, as he did for my previous private Member’s Bill. It is crucial that rogue landlords are regulated to protect vulnerable tenants from exploitation. I recently learned of two tragic homicides as a result of irresponsible and negligent landlords. That highlights how important the Bill is to the supported housing sphere.
I have been lucky to visit India on several occasions recently, and I am pleased to have met a wide range of people: Government officials, ambassadors, businessmen and women, and the general public. It is clear that both countries are extremely supportive of the potential for the India-UK free trade deal. We are now on the eighth round of talks on the deal. Although we were promised it would be signed by Diwali last year, let us hope it will come into operation by Diwali this year. I chair the all- party parliamentary group for India (Trade and Investment). We plan a delegation in the very near future, and I am sure that parliamentarians will continue to strengthen and champion relations between the countries.
Chris Stephens
I thank the hon. Member for giving way and for taking my earlier intervention in good humour. Talking about India and trade, would he also be interested in the newly formed all-party parliamentary group for kabaddi? The British Kabaddi League has now been set up, and my constituent Prem Singh is very active in it and is liaising in India to promote the sport of kabaddi both here in the UK and in India.
Bob Blackman
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I noticed the setting up of that all-party parliamentary group, and I confess that I was ignorant of the sport. I will certainly look at and consider participating in it.
Let me also mention smoking, which remains the biggest cause of cancer and avoidable death, with 78,000 people dying as a result each year. Reducing the number of smokers will benefit the NHS, the individuals’ health and the health of those around them considerably. This is a cause I am very passionate about, because both my late parents died as a result of smoking-related cancer. For me, this is deeply personal, and I will continue to champion the cause.
Indeed, I proposed a ten-minute rule Bill that would mean, were it to be passed by this place, that any retailer looking to sell tobacco goods would have to hold a licence, as is currently the case with alcohol. That would mean that, to ensure that their licences are not revoked, vendors would have to be aware of the importance of proof of age when selling products. Further, I hope it would eradicate the sale of fake or copy tobacco goods, which are often cheaper and remain untested and very harmful materials. As we approach a year since the eye-opening Khan review, I hope that the Minister will consider the proposals and publish the Government’s long-awaited tobacco review plan imminently. I utter a “gardyloo”—we are growing impatient for that tobacco control plan to be implemented.
Finally, I wish everyone who is celebrating a very happy and healthy Eid and Easter, because we are of course not only celebrating the festival of Ramadan but breaking for Easter. We also have the festival of Passover, which Jews will be celebrating, and today is Rama Navami—a tongue-twister if ever there were one—when Hindus celebrate, once again, the triumph of good over evil. I trust that everyone will be able to relax and enjoy some time with family, friends and loved ones over this period, as well as of course to campaign in the local elections. Most importantly, I hope that hon. Members can take time for reflection, whichever religion they follow, so that they come back refreshed and in a better mood.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
Thank you, Mr Blackman, and thank you for referencing Sir David Amess, who was indeed a stalwart of these debates. I am sure that he would have given you a “highly commended” for your efforts to follow in his footsteps.
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for ensuring that this important opportunity to raise issues is taking place in this Chamber today. I have two particularly very personal issues, and then a couple of others that affect a wider group of constituents. I would ordinarily have liked to raise them in an individual Adjournment debate, which is another reason why I am grateful to raise these important matters.
[Martin Vickers in the Chair]
The first is a very tragic case, and the wider issue is about how schools support pupils with medical conditions. The issue arises because my constituent Lorna Williams lost her nine-year-old son, Rasharn, who died at a school in my constituency in October 2014. Rasharn had a heart condition that the school knew about, but when he fell ill after dancing at the school disco, an ambulance was not called immediately, and he died later that evening in hospital. I pay huge credit to Lorna and her family. Despite suffering the most unimaginable loss, Lorna still wants to campaign to ensure that no other mother goes through what she has had to live through. She has had to go through the many inquiries and processes that surround a death of this nature, and in the middle of it was her lovely little boy Rasharn. While those inquiries progress, it feels like a long time before any answers come. In many cases, there are more questions than answers, as was indeed the case for Rasharn.
Lessons need to be learned from Rasharn’s death, and we need the Government, schools and education authorities to take them on board. The first lesson is the importance of clear and accurate record keeping in respect of medical conditions, so that everybody in a school—the teachers, the support staff; indeed, where appropriate, other pupils—understand the actions that need to be taken in different circumstances for different children, so that all staff are aware of that information. They cannot all be aware in the moment, so there need to be proper records; that way, staff can access the records on an individual child at the moment a crisis strikes.
It seems there is not always clear guidance to schools on how individual healthcare plans should be formatted so that it is easy to find the right information at the right moment. Lorna remembers sometimes coming back from hospital appointments with updates on Rasharn’s condition and never being quite sure if it was going to be filed in the right place or that it would be passed on to the special educational needs teacher or the classroom teacher. Parents of all children, but especially those with special health problems, need to have the confidence that the school will handle that information consistently and properly.
Looking to see if any statutory guidance could be provided, we had a meeting that was very productive, on the face of it, with the then schools Minister, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), and officials in January 2022. We were grateful for that meeting, which was still online because of lockdown restrictions. When we discussed this idea, the Minister and officials were receptive to it, but we have had little follow-up since. Of course, there have been rather a lot of Ministers since then, which has not helped the situation. One reason I want to raise this issue today is that we cannot forget this matter. Obviously, it matters to Lorna Williams, although for her it is too late, but it also matters for the children following.
First, what we would like to see—what Lorna, particularly, would like to see—is clarity on what information schools hold and, as I have said, ensure that it is very accessible. We are also considering whether it is possible to have wristbands or some other clear identifier—where a parent and child agree it, of course, as there are privacy issues; not every child or parent might want that. Where that is accepted by the parent and child, such a measure would allow the school to see, if a child falls over in the playground or has an incident, instantly whether there is a particular need to action a very quick process to call an ambulance, if appropriate, or the relevant authorities.
Nothing can bring Rasharn back, but what Lorna Williams needs is a clear hearing from Government. I ask this for her today. We have had that first conversation, but I look to the Minister today to raise this with the Department for Education to see what we can do. We are not after masses of extra bureaucracy for schools, because we know that would be counterproductive; however, we need to see what can be done better and done more consistently so that other children and parents do not go through this situation.
I have a second issue to raise, Mr Vickers—it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, too. I have seen off one Chairman already. This issue, again, is a personal matter for a constituent of mine who worked in the Secret Intelligence Service—the SIS—from 1975 until 1984 with a record of high performance and positive feedback from his superiors. He has since seen his own personnel records, and I have seen notes from those records. In 1984, he was offered a fantastic opportunity to serve at a station abroad. While discussing that opportunity with his personnel officer, my constituent disclosed that he was gay. Very shortly afterwards, his employment was terminated, and it was expressly explained that his sexual orientation was the reason for his dismissal. That dismissal, as we all now know, was an injustice, but it was within the rules of the SIS at the time.
I have seen correspondence between my constituent and various officials, and I have also raised this through the system. I think there is genuine embarrassment now about the calumny that was visited upon my constituent and others. To be sacked from one’s job simply because of one’s sexual orientation is unacceptable.
There have been a number of consequences for my constituent. He had what looked like a potentially glittering career, because he was a very good civil servant and was very good at his job. That ended, so he has not had the opportunity to progress in something that he absolutely loved doing. Crucially, he has also been denied the right to continue to build up his pension.
As recently as 2019, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service apologised for the historical treatment of LGBT+ people in the secret services. He has said clearly—I hope we all agree with this—that the security bar on LGBT staff until 1991 had been “wrong, unjust and discriminatory”. An independent review is currently under way to examine the effects that the pre-2000 ban on homosexuality in the UK armed forces has had on LGBTQ+ veterans, so there is precedent for looking at what the impact has been on people who, through no fault of their own, were sacked or had to hide their sexuality and be something that they were not at work.
The Government have accepted that the historical policy of banning homosexuality in the armed forces and the secret services was wrong, but they are not reviewing the situation in the secret services, so I believe that the review on the armed forces should be widened to include civil servants who have been affected by the Government’s treatment of LGBTQ+ staff in the past, such as my constituent. If that is not possible because it has gone too far down the line—although there are so many similarities that it would make sense logically and financially, and for expediency, to include such people in the same review—I would call for a similar independent review on the non-military civil servants affected in this way. I imagine that it is a relatively small number. It has been difficult to get information on this issue, because a lot of people would not have declared their sexuality in the first place. They may not even have joined the service in the first place. This issue matters massively, but I do not believe that a large number of civil servants will have lost their pension rights as a result.
The Government need to right this wrong by addressing the issue across the board. Tackling it on a piecemeal basis will be a lengthy process for the Government and those involved, and unjust for those who have missed out, and we need a standard approach and recognition across Government that the calumny of the past is righted. I hope that the Minister can secure me a meeting with the relevant Minister to see whether we can make progress. I could forgo the meeting if the Government write back and say they will agree to address the issue, but I might accept a meeting in the interim.
My next issue causes misery for many of my constituents: delays to lift repairs. I sense recognition from around the Chamber. There are often issues with obtaining key electrical parts for lifts, because they are in short supply and difficult to obtain, and there are problems with the supply chain. But having looked into this because I was so concerned—whichever landlord I am dealing with, there are problems with lifts—I have discovered a bigger issue. I should just highlight the impact on people. I have a constituent who lives on the seventh floor of a tower block. One day, he went out to visit a friend when one lift was out of operation. When he came back three hours later, the second lift was out of operation. He had to walk up seven flights of stairs with his oxygen, so this issue is having an absolutely huge impact on people’s lives. If a lift is not working and someone lives high up, they are effectively trapped in their home and cannot go out.
I have raised this problem with a number of landlords, and I have picked up that four main lift providers dominate the lift market in the UK: Otis, Schindler, KONE and ThyssenKrupp, also known as TK Elevator. The lift providers want the landlords and developers who buy the lifts to take out maintenance contracts with them, which sounds a bit like a cartel. Independent contractors, who may be more on the spot in Hackney, Harrow, Newport, Reading or Congleton, have issues accessing technical information to maintain the provider’s lifts, and the providers often say that they will nullify the insurance policy on a lift if any other contractor gets stuck in and tries to resolve the problem.
Instead of the closed protocol system, I would like to see an open protocol system that offers customers, landlords and developers a greater deal of flexibility, as they could choose from a variety of suppliers. They could also choose from a range of engineers. Virtually any trained engineer can do these repairs, which will ensure that they choose whoever offers the most value for money or expertise. Crucially, it would open up the market. The Government would want to see that to ensure we can create jobs in this area.
The closed protocol that the four main providers insist on is much more insular. Customers can only install components from the same company that provided the overall system due to compatibility issues. That can often be very expensive for the customer as there is a lack of market competition to help drive down costs. It needs to be resolved. I was surprised when I started looking into it; I thought it was going to be about other issues. There was another issue about the availability of semiconductors. However, the main issue is that we should ensure more competition in the market, and that there is not this closed approach. That would make a difference.
Finally, I turn to an issue that I raise, sadly, very often at such debates and in the House: housing in my constituency. I have more private renters than homeowners, and around 50% of residents in my constituency are social housing tenants. There is talk about the renters reform Bill coming through. In that Bill, I want to see greater rights for tenants. We are hearing some good noises from the Government, but then we keep hearing some backtracking here and there. Maybe the Minister can even give us some answers today, as we keep being told that legislation is imminent. We need to see longer-term tenancies—homes that people can raise their families in. They should not be worrying every year that the rent will go up so much it will become unaffordable for them to stay there, or that they will be evicted.
We need certainty over rent levels. I favour a rent escalator model. Just as we know that social housing rent will go up by the consumer prices index or the retail price index plus 1%, we could at least have a similar model for private rented housing, which would give certainty to both sides of the equation. We also see some properties in very poor repair. According to work done by the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office, 13% of private rented properties nationally in England are posing an actual risk. There is a quality issue. In fact, there is just a crisis in the private rented market generally.
Overall, we need a much bigger housebuilding programme and more social housing. We need social housing in Hackney in particular because private rents are so high that they are unaffordable. If someone gets a job they suddenly cannot afford the rent, and the cap on housing benefit means that they cannot pay rent on any family-sized home within my constituency.
The number of households in temporary accommodation in Hackney is over 3,100. Over half of those are sadly housed outside the borough due to a lack of supply. I am not talking about a lack of supply of housing overall; that is just a lack of supply of temporary housing, often including hostel spaces. That equates to 3,528 children in temporary accommodation—enough to fill eight primary schools and equivalent to 1% of Hackney’s total population.
The number of households seeking support for homelessness has risen by 44% from 2017 to the end of the last financial year. Hackney Council anticipates that the number of approaches will continue to increase at around 8% a year. That is unsustainable. We need to see properly affordable housing. With a decent home over their head, someone can get a job. They can study. Their mental health improves. It is the key to solving many of society’s crises. It is the key to families establishing themselves and being able to live their lives as they choose. It gives them freedom and independence.
I want to touch on rent figures in Hackney. The average two-bed rent for a private sector property is around £2,000 a month, but there are currently fewer private rented properties available due to many issues, which I will not go into today. I will touch on overcrowding in a moment, but the average waiting time for council and housing association housing for homeless households is three years for a one-bedroom property, 12 years for a two-bedroom property, nine years for a three-bedroom property, 13 for a four-bedroom property and a notional 39 years for a five-bedroom property. That is notional because by the time a person gets to 39 years, those are nonsense figures.
It is unbelievable that people have got no hope. I have visited families week in, week out on doorsteps, meeting people where they live. I recently met a woman who was living high up in a block with four little girls in two bedrooms, one living area and a tiny kitchen. One child slept with the parents and the three other girls shared bunk beds in one room. Similarly, I have seen adult children in that situation, where three adult children are sharing a room and the parents live in the living room. We have many households where one family live in the living room and another in the bedroom, and we have families staying with someone from their church because that is the only place they can get accommodation. Even if they had recourse to public funds, which can be an issue for some people, that is not the barrier; the barrier is the lack of quality, affordable social housing.
I give credit to the Mayor of Hackney, Phil Glanville, for his work in trying to resolve this issue. He is planning to build 1,000 council homes, with 350 near the De Beauvoir estate that are part way through the process. That is great, but it is a drop in the ocean. Because of a lack of Government funding for social housing, one has to be built for sale to provide one for social rent.
We talk about affordability. There are about five or six categories of affordable housing, but let me be clear what I mean by affordable: it needs to be affordable for someone on a reasonable wage to pay. We have people who are working and who can barely afford to pay their council rent, let alone ever being able to afford to rent privately. This gives them no choice and locks them in overcrowded conditions. It is bad for their mental health, it can impact on their ability to work and it has a huge impact on their children. Children grow up in such situations until they are in their 20s, and then they cannot move anywhere—imagine growing up like that.
This is the crisis of a generation. This is the Government that delivered home ownership to the masses through right to buy, which I will not go into today. The Government have totally failed on housing provision for people, whether they are private renters, those who rent socially or many others who are locked out of the home ownership market. On every level, the Government have not acted. I hope the Minister can give us some hope from the legislation that is coming through, as well as some insight into the discussions between the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and the Treasury over his ambition, as we have read, to provide more social housing and the Treasury’s ambition to trim his spending. It would be helpful to have some sense from the Government as to the direction of travel. It is little comfort for my constituents who are trapped in housing, but we need to ensure the next generation get the homes they deserve.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I would like to speak to just one concern today, and that will probably come as a great relief to the Minister. I want to speak at some length, and I am delighted to have the opportunity to do so. It relates to my role as the Prime Minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief—a role I hugely enjoy and count as a great privilege, having the potential to make a real difference to some of the most oppressed and vulnerable people on earth.
My mandate from the Prime Minister refers to three strands of work, and I want to raise my concern regarding progress on one of them, which is my duty to support the implementation of the Truro review. The review was initiated in 2019 by my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) when he was Foreign Secretary to improve support within the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for persecuted Christians and, by extension, all who are persecuted across the world, of whatever faith or belief.
I will touch on the other two strands of my role. They are to work on
“how the UK government can protect and promote this fundamental freedom internationally”
and to work with the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, as I do. This growing alliance of countries is appointing ambassadors or envoys like myself—I am working on hopefully being promoted to ambassador, but for the moment I am content to be an envoy. There are 42 countries that have committed to promoting and protecting this freedom around the world, championing its good use and calling out its abuses. Both the number of countries and the substance of our work is growing. It is my privilege to have been elected chair in 2022 and re-elected for 2023.
On another occasion, I would like to talk much more about our work, but I will briefly touch on it before I move on to my main concern about progress on the Truro review. The FORB special envoy team is myself, the Prime Minister’s deputy special envoy, David Burrowes —the only deputy special envoy there is—my parliamentary aide Chloe Black and my private secretary from the FCDO, Sue Breeze. We work together, and I commend the tremendous dedication of my colleagues in the special envoy team to this work. I am greatly encouraged by the progress we have made over the last two-plus years, since my appointment and that of David Burrowes, to ensure that the UK continues to be seen as a leader across the world in addressing freedom of religion or belief. As a special envoy team, we are working with others across civil society—non-governmental organisations, academics and my counterpart envoys and ambassadors from the alliance countries—because we all recognise that nothing is achieved alone in this challenging sphere.
We have developed a number of areas of action since the London ministerial conference last July. Time sadly precludes my going into the detail of those areas of action, but I will list them. We are developing education materials on FORB for the very youngest children. That is being piloted in four schools in this country, including one in my constituency.
We are inspiring the next generation of FORB ambassadors by planning for a global virtual conference this autumn, which will involve 1,000 young people joining virtually from around the world—including those in countries such as Myanmar and Pakistan, where they are experiencing real-life persecution—who will be able to share their experiences with other young people. Hopefully, we will galvanise young people from around the world to speak out, particularly using the social media tools they have so effectively used in challenging issues regarding climate change.
We are championing individual prisoners of conscience, such as young Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, who is 19 and in Nigeria. He is actually a little older than 19 now, but at 19 he was arrested on a charge of blasphemy, because one of his friends shared some music he had written. He was taken to court without any legal representation and he has been sentenced to death by hanging. We are supporting his appeal to the Supreme Court. We are building an international network of FORB roundtables, including a particularly strong one in central and eastern Europe around the countries where Putin is attacking Ukraine. Those countries that suffered under communism and know what it is not to have freedom of religion or belief are very exercised about this issue right now.
We are networking human rights defenders, engaging the media on FORB, working with lawyers on legislative reform and protecting religious and cultural heritage. I have recently written to every one of our UK diplomatic posts across the world, and I am greatly encouraged by the responses I have had to date showing that they are increasingly aware of the importance of freedom of religion or belief in their missions.
All of that is good news, but I will return to the main purpose of my speech. My concern is that while so much progress is being made internationally, and with the UK playing a leading role, the same sadly cannot be said for progress on implementing the Truro review in the FCDO. Indeed, work on the Truro review, which is a manifesto commitment, appears to be stalling.
Five written parliamentary questions were recently raised by one of our senior parliamentary colleagues, my right hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice). Those questions specifically requested progress on recommendations 4, 5, 6, 12 and 17 in the Truro review. Disappointingly, all five questions received the same answer—a generic reply that did not address the specific questions or recommendations raised at all. I know that concerns about the need for further progress on Truro are shared by other parliamentary colleagues and by the Bishop of Truro himself, who remains actively and admirably engaged on this issue—in fact, he has just returned from several days in Greece, where he has been speaking about the issue.
One year ago, an independent assessment was undertaken of progress on the Truro review. It was a three-year assessment, required by the Truro review under recommendation 22, to measure progress. It was conducted by three world-renowned FORB experts, including the then UN special rapporteur on FORB and the current UN special rapporteur on FORB—one cannot get much more expert than that. Their detailed expert assessment clearly indicated that there was, and is, still much to do to implement Truro and honour our manifesto commitment.
That detailed assessment contained many constructive suggestions for progress and best practice. When it was published, I pressed for those to be acted on, particularly the experts’ recommendation for a comprehensive operational action plan on FORB in the FCDO—that is not the same thing as a FORB strategy. I pressed for the need for better co-ordinated work on the part of those in the FCDO working on FORB; for greater engagement at a more senior level in the FCDO; and for the implementation of appropriate working groups, including jointly with other Government Departments where FORB matters.
The then Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), in a written ministerial statement published at the time of the ministerial conference on FORB in July 2022, accepted the expert assessment and its conclusions in full, stating:
“We welcome and accept this expert review on progress and in line with the findings, accept their assessment for the need to continue to work to promote and strengthen Freedom of Religion or Belief as a fundamental human right for all…we will continue to ensure that the changes we have made are embedded and to look for opportunities to make FoRB central to the FCDO’s wider human rights work.”
At the time of the very successful FORB ministerial conference in July 2022, to which 88 countries sent official delegates, expectations were raised internationally and domestically about the UK championing FORB and fully implementing the Truro review. In September 2022, I raised a question in the House about progress on Truro and the adoption of the experts’ recommendations in their three-year assessment. My hope was to politely nudge people about the fact that the work needed to continue and, indeed, to be more focused. I again raised my concerns more explicitly and in more detail in a debate in this room in November when I said, among other points:
“The Truro review is a manifesto commitment and there are still outstanding elements to be fulfilled. I hope that the Minister will concur with me—indeed, it is in accordance with the Prime Minister’s determination to address outstanding manifesto commitments—that work on the Truro review should be completed. It is about promoting not just freedom of religion for Christians, but freedom of religion or belief for all.”
I went on to say that it was “well over six months” since that expert assessment was completed,
“and action on the comprehensive operational action plan needs to be taken forward. A lack of joined-up working within the FCDO on FORB means that resources are not being used as efficiently as they could be, and that needs to change.”—[Official Report, 17 November 2022; Vol. 722, c. 369WH.]
I most recently raised a question on Truro’s progress earlier this month. Sadly, none of my interventions to date appear to have initiated an appropriate degree of action, hence my need to be more forthright today. To quote one my colleagues:
“We cannot simply shuffle Truro off half-done.”
The Truro review was considered a landmark document when it was published in 2019, and it made an international impact. I know from my travels in my role across many countries that it continues to be hugely respected. At the same time, many across the world are watching to see how it is implemented. We must continue to work on it. If we do not, we will not only be perceived by others to be going backwards in an area on which we have led internationally to date, but we will actually slip backwards. There are best practice suggestions in Truro to ensure we keep our feet to the fire; it is an ongoing piece of work.
It was, as Ministers know, a great disappointment to me that freedom of religion or belief was omitted from the recent integrated review refresh. Yes, I understand that that document was meant to be an evolution from the 2021 integrated review and that Ministers did not want to make it too long, but it is actually only half the length of the 2021 document and, however we nuance it, the omission of FORB has sent out a signal. Renewed energy in the implementation of Truro would help to address that.
I have one specific suggestion to make to Ministers for immediate action, please. This relates to recommendation 6 of the Truro review, which recommended that the role of special envoy on FORB be established permanently. The expert assessment of that in the review three years later noted that
“‘no substantial action has been taken, to date’ with respect to delivering this”.
If we are to ensure that the role I hold is not at the discretion of an individual Prime Minister—although it has been my great privilege to serve under three Prime Ministers—but is embedded in statute and continues under successive Governments, a short Bill is required in this Parliament. That would send out a clear public statement internationally about our continuing commitment to FORB and, indeed, to the implementation of the Truro review. Will Ministers work with me to ensure that? I am optimistic about such a Bill being passed, and hopefully with the support of all parties, given the substantial cross-party support in this House for freedom of religion or belief—something that I now know is unique across the world and that we should rightly be proud of.
In addition to work on recommendation 6, there is much outstanding work on the other Truro recommendations. I hope that Ministers will similarly support me to ensure that that happens. I should mention that in expressing these concerns about the implementation of Truro, I am not in any way disparaging Ministers’ commitment to FORB. I know that every Prime Minister under whom I have served in this role, every Foreign Secretary and all other FCDO Ministers are absolutely committed not only to the UK’s wider FORB work, but to the Truro review in particular. That includes Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, the Minister with responsibility for human rights, whom I work alongside and who is personally seized of the importance of this issue. I look forward to continuing to work with them and to ensuring that our manifesto commitment, which states that we
“will seek to protect those persecuted for their faith and implement the Truro Review recommendations”,
is honoured and fulfilled in full.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. May I start by commending the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for her work in championing the rights of people who face persecution—both Christians and others around the world—and by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), who is campaigning on a number of important fronts? Not only do I wholeheartedly support that, but many of my own residents face the same enormous difficulties with the high cost of housing in London and the south-east, and people face enormous overcrowding in Reading town centre.
I want to take this opportunity to champion a very important local campaign in Reading and Berkshire. I have been pursuing this for some time and have had enormous support from the right hon. Member for Reading West (Sir Alok Sharma), Reading Borough Council and many local groups in our community. It is the campaign to save Reading gaol and to turn the famous Victorian gaol into an arts and heritage hub, so that we may celebrate the heritage of Oscar Wilde and the other important national and local heritage that is part of the gaol and the surrounding site, for the good of the community, to celebrate diversity and to support the LGBT community and the arts across Berkshire and the wider UK.
I want to update the House briefly on where I am with the campaign, but also to point out some of its important features and urge the Government to support the local bid for an arts-based solution for the building—it is currently mothballed—rather than the commercial redevelopment favoured by the Ministry of Justice, which would like the Victorian building to be turned into a hotel or possibly into luxury flats. As anybody who has been through our area recently will have seen if they travelled on the train, or as colleagues from Wales who travel on the motorway may have seen, Berkshire is dominated by a large amount of urban development. Many flats are being built, but we do not have a major hub for our wonderful arts community to perform in and put on stage productions. We have some centres, but they are dispersed around the town and the area. Similarly sized cities and towns in the south-east of England, such as Brighton, Oxford and Southampton, have large arts organisations based in purpose-built theatres, and much bigger centres than the ones we have in Reading, although we are the second largest urban area in the south-east of England after the Greater Brighton area.
I turn to the history of this important site. Reading gaol was the county jail for Berkshire. It was built on the site of Reading abbey, a major medieval building that was one of the largest abbeys in England in medieval times. It was founded by King Henry I and was a centre of pilgrimage throughout the middle ages. Indeed, Henry I is believed to be buried there. Rather like Leicester, Worcester and a number of other medieval towns and cities—I am sure this applies to Scotland and Wales too—we have a monarch buried in our town centre.
The gaol was designed by the architect who designed Pentonville and St Pancras station. It is a masterpiece of Victorian gothic architecture. Anyone who walks past it or goes in will see scenes that remind them of “Porridge”, if, like me, they are a fan of it—younger Members may have dabbled in UK Gold and seen it fleetingly. Reading gaol has all the echoes of a Victorian building; people can walk through it and feel that presence. It is rather grim in some ways, but it is historic and very important.
The gaol was opened briefly in 2014, and was used for art installations. An amazing arts organisation called Artangel used each individual cell to house installation art. It also put on performances in the prison chapel, and it had a number of other activities. It was incredibly powerful. I walked along one of the metal landings, which are reminiscent of “Porridge”, behind a very famous BBC arts presenter—I will not name him—and it was quite wonderful to hear what he said. As I said, we suffer from a lack of institutions to support our amazing local art scheme. He was on his phone to his friends back in London, and he said something along the lines of, “I’m in Reading, in the gaol, and it’s actually really rather interesting.”
Like many towns and cities around the country, we suffer from a lack of support from the national arts establishment. It would be wonderful to see that sort of provision permanently in our town. It could be a venue for local young people, community groups and charities. We have had a lot of interest from the local LGBT community, which wants to use part of the building as a hub for its activities, and other historical and community groups would like to take part in the same way.
The tragedy is that although Reading Borough Council has put in a bid for the wonderful building—we have also had an offer of help from Banksy, who put a mural on the wall of the gaol about 18 months ago, to enormous excitement, and there is the possibility of other support from philanthropists—unfortunately we do not have the go-ahead from the MOJ to start negotiating. It is instead working with a preferred bidder, which is sadly a commercial developer. The site has had a history of somewhat disappointing commercial bids constructed around the idea of gutting the old building or changing it dramatically, so we would sadly lose the history.
At the moment, people can walk into Oscar Wilde’s cell and spend a moment there thinking about how he was treated, and about his amazing writing and his ability to turn what happened to him into incredibly powerful prose and poetry. If the gaol were changed dramatically, we would sadly lose that. That would be an utter tragedy not only for Reading but for people from across the world, who visit his house in Dublin and the cemetery in which he is buried in Paris. Sadly, a great piece of artistic heritage would be lost, and that would be a shame. It would be deeply disappointing for us and the country as a whole. I urge the MOJ to have another look and to reconsider how it manages procurement.
We have had a number of meetings, most recently towards the end of last week when the deputy leader of Reading Borough Council talked to the MOJ about this important issue, but it is still refusing to budge. We would like the MOJ to think about it deeply. We understand that under the Government procurement rules, a Department has to receive best value for selling off buildings and land. However, is it not possible to think about the wider context? We are not expecting any special favours; the MOJ just needs to look at it in the round and to see the possibility for this amazing building. We are hopeful that we will be able to offer a suitable sum to pay for the level of capital receipt needed for the site.
I urge the MOJ to think again and to work with Reading Borough Council, me, the right hon. Member for Reading West, and local arts and community groups to redevelop this wonderful site. The MOJ has spent a long time thinking about it, and the building was mothballed back in 2013, so in many ways it is high time for another look—indeed, it is somewhat overdue. In a meeting with the MOJ, the right hon. Member for Reading West made the point that if we consider the upkeep of the gaol during that time, a lot of money has sadly been lost to the public purse, because of how the MOJ mothballed it and has not been willing to engage in a more thoughtful discussion about its reuse.
As I am sure the Minister is only too aware, it is also Government policy to reuse historical buildings, and in a creative way. Other Departments, such as the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, are fully behind such an approach to heritage buildings, so I hope that, given the wider thrust of Government policy, it will be more than possible for the MOJ to look at this and to reconsider how the project is being discussed.
I will briefly mention one or two other community issues; they are also on heritage, given that I already spoke about social work in our community in the previous debate. I want to point out the potential as community buildings of some other, currently derelict sites in the Reading area, Cemetery Arch in particular. It is an amazing early Victorian building in the eastern part of our town that has the scope to be redeveloped and turned into something for the whole community. Proposals are being looked at the moment, and I thank residents and others who completed my survey.
We also have the exciting opportunity of the former BBC listening post. The hon. Member for Congleton might well be familiar with its work, because she is so abreast of foreign policy. Caversham Park was the site of BBC Monitoring. News of many recent historical events that happened in remote parts of the world was first broken from there, including—I know she is interested in Iranian society and history—the Islamic revolution in 1979. The very first reports of it were translated by Persian-speaking staff at the BBC.
The Caversham Park site has been empty for some time. Similar to the gaol, there is enormous potential for it to be redeveloped. Thankfully, there is a very sympathetic developer, Beechcroft Developments, which wants to use the old building as a piece of sheltered accommodation, together with flats for people who can look after themselves and are somewhat older. I support its efforts and those of Reading council to preserve the building, reuse it and turn it into something useful, with community access to the amazing parkland near the site.
My final local example on a similar theme is in Woodley, the other town in my constituency. Woodley was famous as the airfield where Douglas Bader was injured before world war two. It also featured in the war as an important site for manufacturing aircraft and for training of personnel. There is some scope for reusing some of the airfield buildings on the site and I thank the local volunteers taking part in that project.
I have talked a lot about local history in our area. To sum up, I point out the importance of community. I have been talking about one aspect of that. We are all are discussing different aspects of our local communities and the importance of them in our lives and our work. I thank you, Mr Vickers, for the opportunity to speak today. I could talk about many other things in my community, but I am sure other Members would prefer that I did not. This has been a wonderful opportunity to talk about one aspect of life in Reading and Woodley, and I thank others for their contributions, which have been many and varied. I look forward to enjoying a happy Easter, and I wish a very happy Easter to all Members present.
Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
I have learned since coming into Parliament that there are many pleasant surprises in this place—indeed, your becoming the Chair during this debate, Mr Vickers, is one—and it is another pleasant surprise to see the Deputy Chief Whip, the Treasurer of His Majesty’s Household, my right hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), here in Westminster Hall to respond to us. I am much more accustomed to seeing him sitting next to me as we fight for the A5 to be improved between Tamworth and Hinckley, in my patch.
Today, I will talk about my surprise at the constant phone calls I have received about the use of TikTok. There is no more timely or pleasant a surprise than to have at least an hour in which to talk about the ins and outs of TikTok. I come at the subject as someone without any technical expertise in digital programming, but with a curiosity and an appetite to keep up with the times and to try to hold on to my youth by picking up these tools. When Facebook first came out in the UK, I was on it, starting in 2004. I try to use these kinds of tools to find out a little bit more about them, which I find interesting.
With so much going on with TikTok, the likes of social media and, of course, artificial intelligence, we as a society are left in a very interesting place as to how we should deal with these things. I am privileged enough to be able to ask questions of the people who matter and to try to come up with some ideas about how we can deal with such issues. Over the next hour—well, probably the next five minutes—I will talk a little bit about my background, including how I became interested in this area, what I see at the moment and the way I see things going in the future.
I came into this area through my work on body image. Many Members will know that I campaign about social media and the warped sense that we create around the body, particularly body proportions—simply, scaling up biceps, slimming down waists, making breasts larger—in our pursuit of what we as a society deem beautiful. This also has an impact on mental health. More recently, my work has led me to consider the use of steroids. We know that there are between 500,000 and 1 million people in the UK using steroids, mainly to try to fit an aspiration of what they want to look like. Such issues lead to huge problems societally, from people simply feeling bullied or not good enough, which leads to anxiety, depression and—in the worst cases—to suicide, eating disorders, and heart attacks and strokes if they are addicted to steroids.
Social media has a lot to answer for. I knew nothing about TikTok when I came into Parliament. I did not meet TikTok representatives until, after I had met Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, they offered to meet me during the pandemic. I thought that I needed to know a little bit more about what TikTok was, because, like many people, I assumed that it was just people—particularly young women—dancing and talking. How wrong could I have been?
TikTok is an incredible community, because it is so varied and diverse. It is no wonder that at least 16 million people in the UK use it and that it is still growing very fast. The reason for that is the ability to seek knowledge and to learn very, very quickly on such a user-friendly platform. It is engaging, exciting and really easy to use. That is where I saw an opportunity, from my side, to try to explain the role of Parliament. What do we do on a daily basis? How is legislation introduced? Why do we only shake each other’s hand once? Why do we turn round in Prayers? What even are Prayers? How do we form an opinion? What does a Committee look like? How does a piece of legislation go through? What does a parliamentary private secretary do? I have shared videos on all those subjects. There is even the question of how we decide where we sit, when we sit and what that looks like. There is a huge amount of public fascination out there with how we deal with and what we do in our niche, which is politics.
To give Members an idea of how powerful TikTok is, a simple video about how people sit in Parliament and where the Speaker is was seen by 750,000 people. However, it goes even further than that. During the tributes to the Queen, I was the 274th speaker out of the 283 speakers on the day, sitting there for 10 hours, explaining that and reading a poem that had gone viral on social media. My video about all that has been seen by 1.9 million people. That is the power of this app.
TikTok is so user-friendly is because it is easy to interact, to duet or to stitch—that is, people can made videos straight away with someone else when they are both looking at TikTok. That is the beauty of it, but, of course, that in itself is part of the problem.
Where does that leave us now? In the last few weeks, I have seen a lot of concern and caution, and hype and hysteria. That came out particularly in the congressional hearing in America. I have not watched all four or five hours of the CEO taking questions, but having spent three years on a Select Committee, I have some understanding of how those questions are formulated, the briefings and what people are trying to elicit. What struck me was that lack of understanding from some on the panel and the lack of clarity from the tech companies that were answering the questions.
What do I mean by that? For hon. Members who have never used these apps, some of the questions might seem quite silly, but they have a serious undertone. It is important to ask how the apps connect to the wi-fi, but a child would know that apps need to connect to the wi-fi. The question underneath that needs to be: once it is connected to the wi-fi, what else can it connect to?
One of the questioners asked about following pupils and using facial recognition. The CEO is completely right to say that they need that to map pupils to know where the sunglasses go. Anyone who has played with the app, particularly the “bold glamour” filter, which has gone viral, will know that it is incredibly powerful in changing one’s shape and the way one looks in a very subtle way. Naturally, the technology needs to be able to pick up those facial points to be able to do that, so the CEO was correct to say that the app follows the user’s face. The question is, what happens with that data? When is it being done, and when else is the company using it? Those questions were not answered in that hearing. In my private meetings, I cannot get answers to those kinds of questions. There lies the concern. This is not just aimed at TikTok; it relates to Instagram and Snapchat—all the platforms have a similar problem. When we flick on and load up an app, it asks for permission to use the microphone or camera, and we have to do that to interact with the app, but to what end, how far and what does that mean? That is the crux.
I will bypass the issue of where the data goes and TikTok being owned by ByteDance—frankly, even as a politician, I do not know whether the Chinese Communist party has access to that data. After listening to the hearing, I am not sure that anyone else is quite sure either. Those are some of the obscurities in the debate. We need to think much more about what we need to know, what can be done with this technology and, more importantly, what is being done with it. The realms of possibility and probability are very different.
That comes down to managing risk. The public and, indeed, politicians have a particularly poor grasp of the difference between absolute and relative risk. As a GP, I spent a lot of my time dealing with this issue. If I told someone that the risk of taking the contraceptive pill had gone up twofold, they would panic, but if I told them that it had gone up from one in 20,000 to two in 20,000, that is not as scary. We need to know the absolute and relative risks of using this data, and for whom.
It is right for the Government to ban an app on Government devices if the risk is high, given the fact that the Prime Minister is probably a high-value target, but does that apply to a teenager who is watching educational videos? We simply do not know, and that is the problem for someone sitting in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and trying to find the answers to such questions. By shining a light on this issue and having this debate, I hope that we can get some transparency on what is going on with our data, what it looks like and what the capabilities are.
That leads me on to where we should be going in the future. We are at the forefront of the AI technology revolution. In this debate at Christmas, I delivered the first speech written by OpenAI with ChatGPT. We are already on the fourth iteration of ChatGPT. For hon. Members who do not know what that means, it is quite literally able to design an app by looking at something written on a napkin. It will deliver speeches. It will write copy. Many MPs may well be using it to answer hundreds of items of correspondence and give their opinions, because it can source data from across the internet, condense it all and use it in a practicable way. It is fundamentally changing the way in which we as society use this data.
Some Members may have seen that Elon Musk has put out a letter saying that we should pause AI development for six months because of the dangers of AI. Now, I think that is probably an exaggeration, but he makes a point for this House to consider: we need to think very hard and very quickly about how we can ensure that AI development is done safely, but in a way that does not stifle innovation and investment or stop the UK being one of the world leaders in this field.
I am pleased to see the Government bringing forward Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill and their AI White Paper. Fundamentally, underneath this whole issue are two parts: data and algorithms. The sheer scale of the data we can draw on means that inherent biases are built in and no one can give an answer as to why an algorithm has made its decision. With some probability, they will be able to say it is likely to have made a decision, but if it is scouring the entirety of the Department for Work and Pensions’ records across the Department’s existence to decide the right amount of support someone should receive without rigorous human oversight, we are going to be in real trouble. Imagine that happening with passport applications or applications to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and even into the financial world and back into social media.
This is all happening at pace right in front of our eyes. We, as the public and as legislators, need to better understand what data we have, who it is about and who it is for, why we are using it and how long we are going to allow people to do that. While that will start to help with transparency, for the algorithms themselves we need much more accountability regarding who uses them and how they are used. When I put this to the likes of TikTok, Facebook or anyone else in the click-based economy, I am simply told, “It’s commercially sensitive,” or, “We have a team. It’s very complicated and difficult over here.” That simply is not good enough, because either maliciously or by accident people are being sent huge amounts of content and we rely more and more on algorithms.
To my mind, as a simple person who has stepped into this with no expertise but with the privilege of having the opportunity to ask questions to those who lead and think in this field, there is space for a regulator of algorithms to link the issue to data—not in every single Department or looking into every single niche, but to try to bring this all together. There is a danger that if we outsource this issue to the finance world, or have specific ones for social media or health, they may diverge. We need the specialisms in how this works, but we also need to work in a similar fashion to the way the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency dealt with the vaccines: we must regulate as we move forward at the pace of industry. If we can do that now that we have the Brexit benefits of being free to set our own regulation, we have a real opportunity to set the course for the rest of the world on this area.
To come full circle, I will follow the Government guidance and keep using TikTok. We must think very carefully about how we should secure and use our data, but, of course, as that advice changes as we learn more, we should all take that on board. We should all think very carefully about what we are doing and make those changes accordingly.
Martin Vickers (in the Chair)
I now call the SNP spokesperson, Chris Stephens.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Vickers. I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, as there will be a number of topics where that will be relevant.
First of all, I thank the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for opening the debate and doing his best impersonation of Sir David Amess, who was a great man. He was always one of the highlights of these Adjournment debates, as he often managed to go through 47 issues in his allotted time, which meant 47 press releases during the recess in the Southend newspapers. I even found myself in those newspapers through one of my exchanges with Sir David, which is probably one of the pinnacles of my parliamentary career so far.
I thank everyone else who has contributed. A couple of issues have leapt out for me. The hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) reminds us that there are still injustices that affect the LGBTQ community, and I thank her for raising those issues. The hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) continues to raise issues of persecution and religion. I really enjoyed the excellent speech from the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) on the history of Oscar Wilde in gaol and all of that.
The hon. Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans) talked about body image. I regularly attend secondary school citizenship events, where school pupils present issues of concern to elected Members, and body image comes up on every single occasion. There is always a group of young girls who have an art project and want something to be done about issues to do with body image. It is very encouraging that young women are doing that.
The thread running through many of our debates over the last few weeks is that, frankly, the cost of living crisis is still biting. It is still affecting far too many in society, and the economy is struggling. The Resolution Foundation recently published a report that shows that after 15 years of stagnation and austerity, workers are £11,000 a year worse off than in our European neighbours. That is a staggering statistic—one that all of us should contemplate in our recess. I should say at this moment to those watching that it is a recess, not a holiday; there is a big difference between the two. Ipsos MORI polling of 6,000 adults suggested that two thirds think the UK economy is going to get worse in the year ahead; it also found that one in four are struggling on their current income, and nearly half are worried about their financial situation.
I have always believed that, as an elected representative, I have a duty and a responsibility to try to tackle some of these issues. That is why I work with Feeding Britain and Good Food Scotland. We have now opened three larders, and will be opening a mobile larder, in Glasgow South West: we have one in the Linthouse area, one in the Cardonald area, and we have the Threehills larder, which in June will become Scotland’s first community supermarket. This work is about giving people the opportunity to buy food at cost and helping them to make their money stretch a bit more, as well as providing wraparound services, so that people can get help on related issues. For example, there are staggering statistics that show that many of our constituents across these islands are not claiming pension credit. We all have a responsibility to deal with these issues. I encourage the Government to keep pushing and to make sure that those who are entitled to support get it.
I am glad that the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch, is listening to me, as this also leads me on to some of the other issues and hobby horses that I have been raising for a long time. Universal credit deductions are a nonsense. There is this nonsensical position where people are either told they have to wait five weeks for their first universal credit payment or they can get a loan after two weeks. It is a loan; Government Ministers keep telling me it is an advance, but when someone is given money and they are expected to pay it back, that meets the dictionary definition of a loan.
How we got into this situation, where far too many people who are struggling are paying back through deductions over a long period, really needs to be addressed. I encourage them to go through the report of the Work and Pensions Committee, which recommended that the starter payment should be paid within two weeks. I would be very interested—I anticipate an intervention from the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, for example—to know the costs of the whole administrative exercise of the deductions system.
Dame Meg Hillier
The hon. Gentleman prompts me to raise a concern. What he highlights is something that we often raise on the Committee. There can be a Whitehall decision on what a policy looks like, but once it hits real people’s lives, the picture can be very different. He and I would probably agree that we need to see much more understanding of real people’s lives when policy is being made. Whitehall can seem very distant from our constituencies, and this is a case in point.
Chris Stephens
I thank the hon. Lady for her kind words. It is the duty of every parliamentarian to speak truth to power and to highlight real-life experiences, because that is the only way we can make policy better.
That brings me to the issue of sanctions on those who are going through the social security system. We have seen a huge increase in the number of sanctions. How do we know that? We know from parliamentary questions that I tabled in November 2022, which gave statistics that showed that sanctions were ramping up incredibly.
Dame Meg Hillier
The hon. Member raises a very important issue. The Public Accounts Committee has looked at sanctions, which do not do what Government Ministers often think they do. They are actually ineffective. There are other ways to encourage people into work, but sanctions are a blunt instrument that does not work.
Chris Stephens
I agree, and I think the Government should look at providing incentives rather than having a blunt instrument approach of harming people with sanctions.
It will not surprise those of us on the Opposition Benches that when I recently tabled a parliamentary question to get an update on the figure for sanctions, to see whether the numbers had increased again since November, I received a response that many Opposition Members will be familiar with. The Government said that they were no longer going to provide the figures, because to publish them would be at disproportionate cost—yes, our old friend “disproportionate cost”. That tells me that there is a huge increase in sanctions, so much so that they can only be published at disproportionate cost. What an absolute, complete and utter nonsense and outrage. I anticipate another intervention from the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee.
Dame Meg Hillier
I point the hon. Gentleman to the National Audit Office, which has access to a lot of data that often the Government do not necessarily wish to put in the public domain. It has complete access rights. I am shocked that the Government will not release information on sanctions. It is actually a vital piece of management information that we should have.
Chris Stephens
Absolutely, and I hope that the Government will reconsider.
There is one last issue that I want to raise, because I am conscious of the time. As chair of the PCS Parliamentary Group, I hope that the Government will start to negotiate with their own workers and their own workers’ trade unions, particularly the PCS. The Government are alienating their own workforce. The same workers who were applauded as heroes during the pandemic now find themselves with an employer that is seeming to dig its heels in during the worst cost of living crisis in recent memory.
In the coming weeks, there is going to be strike action at the Passport Office, the Animal and Plant Health Agency, Ofgem, the British Museum, the British Library and the Government Digital Service, and further UK-wide action will take place at the end of April. I hope Ministers see that it is not a sustainable position when so many workers feel they have been so mistreated over pay, pensions and other issues that many—indeed, 130,000 civil servants—are having to take industrial action. I hope that the Government will put real and new money on the table to resolve those issues.
As the hon. Member for Harrow East reminded us, it is not just Easter coming up; other celebrations of other religions are going on, such as Passover and Eid. I hope that all hon. Members from across the House have a good recess and do the great work that we all try to do for our constituents.
Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for leading today’s debate. As always, we have discussed a great range of issues. It has been a really interesting debate, and I am certainly learning a lot. It is good to see the pre-recess Adjournment debate on tour here in Westminster Hall, although I hope that we get back into the main Chamber in the future.
I will start with a short apology to the pupils at Caldicot School. I was originally due to be with them this afternoon for their Easter musical “Back to the ’80s”, which was the decade in which I misspent my youth. I am sorry to miss it, and I send my good luck to them. To follow on that theme, I know that the Conservative party is often keen to turn the clock back to the 1980s, but I am proud to represent a party that looks to the future under the leadership of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer). Whether it be making our streets safer, kickstarting a green industrial strategy with support for things such as steel, which is important in my constituency, or breaking down the barriers to opportunity at every stage and working for sustained growth in the G7, we have a confident vision for the modernisation of our economy and our public services to prepare Britain for the years ahead.
Speaking of looking ahead, I know many of us will be looking ahead to Easter, as will the congregations of the churches and chapels in my constituency of Newport East, who will be gathering to celebrate the most important time of the Christian calendar. I put on record my thanks to the Christian congregations across my constituency for all they do. In doing so, I praise the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for all her work as the special envoy for freedom of religion or belief. In her contribution to the previous debate this afternoon, she raised some important cases. It was fascinating and valuable to hear about her work, and I hope that the Minister takes up the points raised in the Truro review.
Last weekend, I hosted a surgery at St Julian’s Methodist Church. It is one of several churches running warm hubs in my constituency, offering people the chance to stay warm. These kinds of initiatives run by volunteers typify the way our churches continue to offer people help and hope. They offer a helping hand during worrying times in a cost of living crisis, as the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) said. We have a host of initiatives across our communities, with campaigns on behalf of vulnerable and persecuted people across the world, including the many persecuted Christians in Africa and Asia who will be unable to worship in freedom this Easter.
I will highlight one project before referring to other hon. Members’ speeches. The Sanctuary Project is based at Bethel Community Church in the constituency of my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones). She is not present today, but had she been she probably would have spoken in the previous debate. Sanctuary is another example of that kind of community work. Run by the brilliant Mark Seymour and Sarah Croft, it offers practical support, advocacy and friendships to refugees and asylum seekers in Newport. With the team last week, I met one of the Afghan interpreters who has settled in Newport—we have had a community for quite a while now. The interpreter outlined to me just how many brave interpreters who worked with the Ministry of Defence and have been accepted under the Afghan relocations and assistance policy are still waiting in UK-sourced accommodation in Pakistan, all these months on. They are awaiting entry clearance visas, which can be issued by only the Home Office. With no income or right to work in Pakistan, some are resorting to the treacherous small boats journeys that we have talked so much about to claim asylum in the UK, in the hope of having a quicker journey. The same is true of some former Afghan military personnel who were trained by and worked with the UK forces. It is in the UK’s moral and security interests to address this dire situation 18 months on.
Volunteers at the Sanctuary Project are dismayed by the Illegal Migration Bill. I also had lots of letters about it this week from year 5 pupils at Lliswerry Primary School in Newport, who are fundraising for the Sanctuary Project. It was disappointing that the Government voted down the amendments to the Bill this week, including the amendments on improving support for victims of modern slavery, removing the Home Secretary’s power to detain and remove unaccompanied children, and the creation of a new national crime agency unit to crack down on the smuggler gangs. I hope that the Government will think again in the Bill’s remaining stages.
The hon. Member for Harrow East mentioned response times. The end of term presents an opportunity for the Government to reflect on their responsiveness to communication from hon. Members—whether that be in the form of oral or written questions, or correspondence to Ministers in the hotlines that we and our staff use. I have raised the issue of responsiveness in previous Adjournment debates as shadow Deputy Leader. There has been some improvement in some Departments. Notably, the Department for Health and Social Care picked up in 2022 after a pretty dismal record in 2021.
However, we know that others are still lagging behind or not disclosing up-to-date information on how quickly they respond to inquiries and questions from MPs. The Home Office is one prominent example, but there are so many Departments, including the DWP, the MOJ and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, that say they are committed to increasing response times—even that they are undertaking regular training with the parliamentary capability team—but will not provide up-to-date information on responsiveness to us. We are a few months too late for new year’s resolutions, but a commitment to greater Government transparency going forward would be most welcome.
The hon. Member for Glasgow South West mentioned that away from the workings of Westminster, as I am sure we will all be aware, people up and down the country are still experiencing a very real cost of living crisis. He was quite right to quote and highlight the figure from the Resolution Foundation that people are £11,000 worse off since 2010.
It is always difficult to pull together the full range of contributions, but I will say to the hon. Member for Harrow East—as mentioned earlier by the hon. Member for Glasgow South West—that he did indeed live up to the record of the late, great and wonderful Sir David Amess in this debate. He talked about the excellent facilities in Harrow and antisocial behaviour. That allows me the opportunity to say that building up really good neighbourhood policing teams, which is a Labour promise in the next general election, is very important. My force has been cut by 40% since 2010, and Operation Uplift is possibly just bringing us up to where we were when we were cut. It is really important that we do that. The hon. Member for Harrow East also represents a diverse community, and it is always interesting to hear about a range of issues, not least the suggestion of a GCSE in Romanian.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) spoke about the tragic case of Rasharn, sending love to his family, and about the need to learn lessons in record keeping. I really hope that that particular issue for Rasharn’s mother is taken up by the Minister in his closing remarks, as well as the awful case of historical discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. That is completely unacceptable. My hon. Friend has done a good service to her constituents in raising that today, as well as the issue of housing.
That issue was also mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda), who gave a really compelling case for an arts-based solution for using Reading jail. It is an excellent idea, and I wish him well with that campaign. It reflects the importance of preserving the significance of our historic buildings; for instance, in Newport we have the Westgate Hotel, the home of the 1839 Chartist uprising, where our Chartists fought for democracy. I think we all share that view about saving those really important buildings.
I have been to the drop-ins of the hon. Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans) on body image. I am most grateful to him for the work he does, not least as the parent of two teenage children who use social media. He does a great service there, and he made some really important comments about TikTok. There are questions with that going forwards, which I am sure will be heard. His was indeed the first AI speech, but it was quite amusing watching my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan); he had done precisely the same thing, but the hon. Member for Bosworth got there first.
Finally, I wish everyone across the House and all staff on the Estate a very happy Easter. I know it is a special time for many other traditions, too. I met recently with the Kurdish-Turkish community in Newport and celebrated Newroz at the weekend. The Muslim community is currently observing Ramadan, and I am going to various iftars next week, and the Jewish community will soon be marking Passover. I hope that wherever we are and however we are commemorating the days and weeks ahead, we all have a restful but constructive working recess, and I will see everyone in April.
Martin Vickers (in the Chair)
Before I call the Minister, I ask him to allow Mr Blackman a minute at the end to wind up.
The Treasurer of His Majesty's Household (Mr Marcus Jones)
Thank you for your guidance, Mr Vickers; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on the excellent speech with which he opened the debate. It was absolutely in the spirit of the late, great Sir David Amess; I think he would have thought that you did him proud. My hon. Friend did say that he would not have as many subjects as Sir David, but I think that is possibly not the case, if I may mention that. I will endeavour to answer as many of his points as possible, and those made by other Members, in the time that I have available.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East mentioned Harrow Council. It is excellent to hear about the great job that it is doing on the activities and support for children across the holidays and on the upgrading of tennis courts and other sports facilities. We all know that Conservative councils deliver better value services and cost the council tax payer an average £80 less, so I hope that in this year’s local elections the Conservatives will be supported on the basis of quality services, lower council tax and the value for money that they provide.
Antisocial behaviour is a scourge on communities across the country. I am glad to hear about the public space protection orders in Harrow. That fits very well with the Government’s work on antisocial behaviour, which includes increasing the penalties for fly-tipping and the ban on laughing gas. Not only do many people suffer the effects of canisters being strewn across playgrounds, pavements and roadsides, but laughing gas is an extremely dangerous thing to use.
My hon. Friend also mentioned ULEZ, which is hurting his most disadvantaged constituents and many others across London. The Mayor of London does not seem to be listening to residents, and it is pretty scandalous given the 9.5% increase in the precept that he has put forward this year. I heard what my hon. Friend said about the Home Office as well. It is good to hear about the improvement in casework—long may that continue. I have found that that seems to be the case as well. He also mentioned the Romanian diaspora.
Dame Meg Hillier
The Minister raises the issue of Home Office responses. Many of us deal with the Home Office—I am one of the top six customers on behalf of my constituents. One reason why there has been a degree of improvement is that our constituents get the opportunity to meet caseworkers one to one, face to face. Although that is a welcome temporary stopgap, it is not a sustainable way for the Government to operate, so does the Minister acknowledge that there still needs to be a lot of work done to improve the process? I have constituents who have been waiting years for responses.
Mr Marcus Jones
There is always work that needs to be done, and a significant amount of investment is going into that.
To go back to the Romanian diaspora in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East, he spends a massive amount of time supporting various diasporas in his constituency, and I know that they are very grateful for that. I am sure he will continue to press the case of the Romanian GCSE.
In terms of private Members’ Bills, my hon. Friend will recall the success that we had with the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. I took that through for the Government and was proud to do so in support of my hon. Friend’s private Member’s Bill. It has made a big difference to people that face homelessness and the risk of homelessness. I understand what he says about rogue landlords, and I hope that his private Member’s Bill will fly through the House of Lords.
He mentioned the Indian trade deal—I think talks are continuing on that. It will massively boost trade between our countries. He also mentioned smoking prevalence and what we can do to reduce that, but it is at a record low of 13%. I have never even tried a cigarette or any form of smoking, but I acknowledge the damage that it can do. We have the independent Khan review of 2022 and Ministers are in the process of considering a response to that.
I was very sorry to hear about the tragic and sad death of Rasharn Williams in the constituency of the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier). My condolences certainly go to Lorna Williams and her family and friends, and the friends of Rasharn. It seems like a terrible situation and extremely tragic. There are procedures in place for schools to support pupils with medical conditions. The statutory guidance is clear that governing bodies should ensure that written records are kept of all medicines administered to children, and that the school’s policy sets out procedures to be followed when it is notified that a pupil has a medical condition and that it covers the role in individual healthcare plans. I certainly hear what the hon. Lady says and will make sure that her comments are fed back to the Leader of the House of Commons, so that they can be followed up on. Hopefully another meeting can be arranged with the Schools Minister. That would be important and worthwhile.
The hon. Lady mentioned a constituent who has been severely disadvantaged because of his inability to serve in the diplomatic service because of the completely misguided perception that LGBT people were more susceptible to blackmail and would therefore pose a security risk. That is an awful case, and I commend her for taking it up. In terms of what can be done now, there are a number of issues that would go across a lot of Departments. I will therefore try to find out who the best person would be to engage on that issue and will ask the relevant Minister to meet the hon. Lady to discuss this important case—a sign of previous times rather than times today, thankfully.
On lifts, the hon. Lady mentioned an awful example. Providers of lifts should provide better support to their customers. As a Conservative, I think the more choice we have in being able to procure such items and the more resilience there is, the better. I am sure the Minister responsible for that area will consider her comments.
On the renters’ reform Bill, as the hon. Lady knows that will come forward in due course. While there are real challenges with housing, 632,600 affordable homes have been built since 2010 and the Government have a £11.5 billion fund for an affordable homes programme.
My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) is a passionate advocate for freedom of religion and religious rights. She is a passionate envoy for the Prime Minister. She mentioned that she wants to become an ambassador. For me to confirm that position today would be slightly above my pay grade, so I will not do that at this point, but I commend her and her team, particularly our friend David Burrowes, who was a valued Member of this place just a few years ago. It was good to hear about the education element of the work she does in galvanising young people to speak out about religious persecution. It was sad to hear the case about the young man who was sentenced after he sang a song and put it on social media. Clearly, the Foreign Office takes up such cases on a regular basis, but it would be interesting to speak further with my hon. Friend on that case, perhaps after the debate.
In terms of the implementation of the Bishop of Truro’s review, I hear what my hon. Friend said, and the passion with which she said it, in particular when it came to recommendation 6. I will speak to the Leader of the House and ask that a follow-up meeting is arranged for my hon. Friend so that she can take up those concerns with the Minister responsible.
What the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) said about the project in his constituency, which he and my right hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Sir Alok Sharma) are trying to get up and running, sounded like an interesting prospect. I am someone who wants to protect heritage and bring heritage buildings back into use. I could not quite picture what the hon. Member was describing until he mentioned “Porridge”, which was one of the best comedy series, probably ever. That gave me a picture in my mind of the type of building we are talking about. It was great to hear his passion and to hear about the link to Oscar Wilde, who served his sentence there.
As I understand it, at the time Oscar Wilde was sentenced, the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name” was quoted. That is clearly something that we would not recognise today. It therefore sounds fitting—if I can put it that way—that the suggested project is one for community, arts and the LGBT+ community. Clearly there is a decision to be made by the MOJ, and I am not in a position to give a view on that. I will ask the Leader of the House to ask the MOJ Minister responsible to get back to the hon. Member for Reading East and my right hon. Friend the Member for Reading West.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans) made a fleeting reference to our local campaign about the A5—I will not mention that again today. He mentioned a lot about TikTok and other social media sites and made some really serious points about body image and the challenges around that. The work that he is doing on that front is well recognised in this place. He also made good points about how those companies use the information that they glean when someone signs up or uses such apps. There are lots of unanswered questions, which is why the Government have decided not to allow the use of TikTok on Government mobile devices. That is the right thing to do until those questions are answered. My hon. Friend also mentioned AI; the Government White paper sets out clearly the work the Government are doing to ensure that people are protected, while trying to bring forward a technology that could make a massively positive difference to our economy.
Very quickly, in the time I have left I will touch on the fact that the cost of living was mentioned by the hon. Members for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) and for Newport East (Jessica Morden). We are providing £94 billion to support the cost of living. We are raising the state pension by a record level in cash terms. It is the 13th year that fuel duty has been frozen; we have actually cut fuel duty by 5p this year, saving people £200. The Government are doing everything they can, but the best thing we can do is bring inflation down. [Interruption.] The Chair is asking me to finish, so on that basis I wish everybody a happy Easter and I wish well all the other religions that are taking part in religious ceremonies in April.
Bob Blackman
Thank you, Mr Vickers, for your chairmanship of this debate; no doubt you would have liked to have participated in it. I thank everyone who has contributed; it demonstrates the value of these debates, which allow Members to raise a whole range of subjects within the timeframe. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests. On many of the issues that I mentioned, I am the chair of their respective all-party parliamentary groups. I wish everyone a very happy and relaxing time away from this place; I hope everyone comes back refreshed, whatever their faith.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered matters to be raised before the forthcoming adjournment.
Written Statements
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Correspondence from MPs and Peers: 2022 Data
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Jeremy Quin)
I am today publishing reports on the performance of Departments and agencies based on substantive replies to correspondence received from Members of Parliament and peers in 2022. While individual Departments and agencies are accountable for their own performance, the Cabinet Office is publishing this data to improve transparency and highlight where the Government have handled correspondence effectively.
The footnotes to the table provide general background information on how the figures have been compiled or how they have been affected by departmental restructuring.
The Government attach great importance to the effective and timely handling of correspondence, and recognise that the right of parliamentarians to take up issues with those in Government underlines our accountability as Ministers.
A copy of these reports will be deposited in the Libraries of both Houses in Parliament.
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Use of Non-corporate Communication Channels: Guidance
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Secretary of State (Oliver Dowden)
The Government are today publishing new guidance on the use of non-corporate communication channels for Government business. This supersedes the 2013 guidance to departments on the use of private email.
The new guidance is aimed at ensuring that the Government can use non-corporate communication channels when appropriate while considering the record-keeping, transparency, security and data protection implications. It takes account of the Information Commissioner’s report (“Behind the screens - maintaining government transparency and data security in the age of messaging apps”).
I have requested that a copy of using non-corporate communication channels (e.g. WhatsApp, private email, SMS) for Government business be deposited in the Libraries of the Houses of Parliament. The guidance will be published on gov.uk.
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Nuclear Test Medal Eligibility Criteria
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Minister for Veterans’ Affairs (Johnny Mercer)
Alongside my right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary, I am pleased to provide details on the eligibility criteria for the commemorative Nuclear Test Medal to the House today. This follows the announcement by the Prime Minister on 21 November 2022 regarding the introduction of the medal.
This important step moves us closer to recognising the work of those civilians and veterans who played a critical role in establishing the UK’s nuclear deterrent and contributing to our enduring international security.
The medal will be awarded to eligible UK service and civilian personnel, and individuals from Commonwealth nations, who served at the locations where the UK atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted, including the preparatory and clear-up phases, between 1952 and 1967 inclusive. The qualifying period for the medal is defined as “service of any length”.
The full eligibility criteria will be published today on gov.uk together with information on how veterans, civilians and their next of kin can apply.
With regard to the design of the medal, the Royal Mint Advisory Committee has commissioned designs and will present its recommendations in April 2023. Following approval of the design by His Majesty The King, we expect the first medals to be available for award by late summer 2023. Priority will be given to those veterans and civilians applying for their own medal.
I have requested that a copy of the eligibility criteria for the medal be deposited in the Libraries of both Houses of Parliament.
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Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (James Cartlidge)
My noble friend the Treasury Lords Minister, Baroness Penn, has today made the following written ministerial statement.
In January, Treasury Ministers commissioned an internal review to assess how legal fees licence applications are considered. Following this review, I am updating the House on its findings.
Since the unlawful invasion of Ukraine, we have taken decisive action to sanction Vladimir Putin and those who support his regime. With partners, we have implemented the strongest set of economic sanctions ever imposed on a major economy. We have designated over 1300 individuals and over 140 entities including over 130 oligarchs with global assets worth over £145 billion.
The sanctions regime is governed by the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 which was considered by Parliament between October 2017 and May 2018. It gained Royal Assent on 23 May 2018. The Act empowers HM Treasury to issue licences which permit activities otherwise prohibited by sanctions, including for payment of legal fees. In the case of legal fees, the law requires that the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation’s decision-making must carefully balance between the right to legal representation—which is a fundamental one—with wider issues, including the aim and purpose of the sanctions. While some legal claims may be unfounded, it is for the courts to decide whether their claims should be permitted to succeed—not the Government. The review confirmed this position.
The Government are clear, however, that our courts and legal system must not be used by those seeking to silence investigations in the public interest. We are committed therefore to bringing forward legislation to tackling strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs). This will include a statutory definition of SLAPPs, an early dismissal process, and costs protection for SLAPPs cases. The Government have committed to primary legislation to make these reforms a reality as soon as parliamentary time allows. These changes will help to uphold our fundamental liberties of free speech and a free press, end the abuse of our courts, and defend those who bravely speak out in the public interest.
As a result of the review the Government are committed to further targeted changes to the process for issuing legal fees licences that safeguard the sanctions regime against the risk of manipulation and ensure that Ministers are accountable for OFSI decision-making.
Our approach to date reflects the fact that the right to legal representation is a fundamental one and it is therefore important that designated persons are still able to access legal representation. However, in this context, it is the Government’s view that in most cases, the use of frozen funds for payment of legal professional fees for defamation cases is not an appropriate use of funds, and in many cases will be against the public interest. While still reviewing each individual application on a case-by-case basis (for both appropriateness and compliance with the right to a fair hearing), OFSI will, in future, take a presumption that legal fees relating to defamation and similar cases will be rejected. The Russian and Belarussian legal services general licence will also be amended so that it no longer authorises legal fees for defamation and similar cases. Any person or entity that acts without a specific licence where the activity is not covered by the general licence, will be in breach of financial sanctions and liable for a monetary penalty or, if egregious enough, criminal prosecution.
To strengthen the decision-making framework for specific licence applications in these and other cases, the Government have further updated the delegation framework under which decisions are taken by OFSI rather than Ministers. This framework will support and reinforce scrutiny of licensing decisions by making clear when it is appropriate for Ministers to take these decisions personally, or where officials can take these decisions. A copy of the updated delegation framework will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
The UK remains committed to stopping Putin’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions have been, and continue to be, a critical tool to holding those who support Putin’s regime to account. We have taken decisive action to freeze the assets on 23 major Russian banks holding over £960 billion, and with partners immobilised over 60% of Russia’s foreign reserves. The changes I have announced today to the decisions the Government take to sanctions and licences, support our efforts to oppose this barbaric war.
[HCWS700]
Oil and Gas Decommissioning Relief Deeds
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (James Cartlidge)
The Government’s fiscal approach for oil and gas aims to balance encouraging investment with ensuring a fair return for the nation in exchange for the use of its resources. Following the introduction of the energy (oil and gas) profits levy in May last year, the UK currently has a headline tax rate of 75% on profits from oil and gas production, one of the highest tax rates for oil and gas across comparable countries around the world.
At Budget 2013, the Government announced they would begin signing decommissioning relief deeds. These deeds represented a new contractual approach to provide oil and gas companies with certainty on the level of tax relief they will receive on future decommissioning costs.
Since October 2013, the Government have entered into 105 decommissioning relief deeds. Offshore Energies UK estimates that these deeds have so far unlocked approximately £10 billion of capital, which can now be invested elsewhere.
The Government committed to report to Parliament annually on progress with the decommissioning relief deeds. The report for financial year 2021-22 is provided below.
Number of decommissioning relief agreements entered into: the Government entered into three decommissioning relief agreements in 2021-22.
Total number of decommissioning relief agreements in force at the end of that year: 101 decommissioning relief agreements were in force at the end of the year.
Number of payments made under any decommissioning relief agreements during that year, and the amount of each payment: two payments were made under a decommissioning relief agreement in 2021-22, for £46.6 million in total. These were made in relation to the provision recognised by HM Treasury in 2015, as a result of a company defaulting on its decommissioning obligations.
Total number of payments that have been made under any decommissioning relief agreements as at the end of that year, and the total amount of those payments: 10 payments have been made under any decommissioning relief agreement as at the end of the 2022-22 financial year, totalling £244.3 million.
Estimate of the maximum amount liable to be paid under any decommissioning relief agreements: the Government have not made any changes to the tax regime that would generate a liability to be paid under any decommissioning relief agreements. HM Treasury’s 2022-23 accounts will recognise a provision currently estimated to be £102.1 million in respect of decommissioning expenditure incurred as a result of a company defaulting on their decommissioning obligations1. The majority of this is expected to be realised over the next two years.
1 This figure takes into account payments made subsequent to the financial year covered by this written ministerial statement and may be updated to reflect newer information.
[HCWS699]
Public Service Pensions: Superannuation Contributions Discount Rate
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (John Glen)
SCAPE—superannuation contributions adjusted for past experience—is the process for setting employer contribution rates at valuations of unfunded public service pension schemes. As part of the SCAPE process, the SCAPE discount rate is used alongside many other factors such as earnings changes, changes to life expectancy and demographic assumptions to determine the appropriate employer contribution rate. Valuations as at 31 March 2020 are currently under way and will result in new employer contribution rates which will be implemented from April 2024.
The current methodology for setting the discount rate, based on the OBR’s forecast of long-term GDP growth, was adopted in 2011. At the time, the Government expressed an intention to review the discount rate methodology every 10 years. A 2021 consultation met this intention and sought views on the most appropriate methodology for setting the SCAPE discount rate.
The Government have today published their response to the June 2021 consultation on the methodology used to set the SCAPE discount rate and have concluded that the existing methodology best meets the balance of the Government’s objectives for the SCAPE discount rate, and therefore do not intend to modify the methodology.1
The SCAPE discount rate to be used as part of the ongoing 2020 valuations will therefore be based on the expected long-term GDP growth figures, published by the OBR in July 2022. Based on these figures, the new SCAPE discount rate is CPI+1.7% p.a.
The Government are aware that the updated SCAPE discount rate will generally lead to higher employer contribution rates for most unfunded public service pension schemes resulting from the 2020 valuations. In recognition of the cost pressure that an increase to the employer contribution rate would bring to existing departmental budgets, the Government have committed to providing funding for increases in employer contribution rates resulting from the 2020 valuations as a consequence of changes to the SCAPE discount rate; this commitment is for employers whose employment costs are centrally funded through departmental expenditure. These funds will be used to pay for employer contributions and therefore will contribute to meeting the costs of public service pensions provision which means this will be cost neutral for the Exchequer.
1 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/public-service-pensions-consultation-on-the-discount-rate-methodology.
[HCWS697]
Scottish Government and Welsh Government Funding
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (John Glen)
In addition to changes in funding at supplementary estimates 2022-23, and in line with the statement of funding policy, the Welsh Government are switching £65.000 million from resource DEL to capital DEL (general). £ million Scottish Government Welsh Government Resource DEL excluding depreciation1 36,009.512 15,576.221 Capital DEL (general) 6,063.628 2,694.523 Capital DEL (financial transactions) 348.742 194.714 Total DEL 42,421.882 18,465.457 1Due to the scale of tax devolution in Scotland, Scottish Government DEL funding is shown excluding tax and welfare block grant adjustments. Welsh Government DEL funding is shown including tax block grant adjustments.
The Scottish Government have also been provided with an additional £16.300 million resource DEL in relation to the implementation of international financial reporting standard 16 (IFRS16).
Revised 2022-23 funding is as follows:
[HCWS694]
Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education: De-designation as Designated Quality Body
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education (Robert Halfon)
Today, I am announcing the de-designation of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) as designated quality body (DQB) for higher education in England under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (HERA).
Assessing quality and standards is an integral part of considering applications to join the Office for Students (OFS) register, which enables providers to access student finance, sponsor visas for international students, and to become eligible to be granted degree-awarding powers among other benefits.
HERA makes provision for a body to be designated to carry out assessment functions under the Act. The DQB assesses quality and standards in relation to relevant conditions for providers registered or registering with the OFS. It also provides advice to the OFS regarding quality and standards in connection with the grant, variation and revocation of providers’ degree awarding powers.
QAA has been designated since April 2018. On 20 July 2022, QAA announced that it would no longer consent to be the DQB after the current DQB year ends on 31 March 2023. The OFS supports QAA’s request for its designation to be removed given that it has significant concerns about QAA’s performance, which it has set out in its triennial report on the DQB’s performance.
The Secretary of State is required to consult before removing the designation, even where the DQB has asked to be de-designated. Accordingly, my Department consulted from 8 February to 3 March 2023. The Government response to this consultation will be published today. An overall majority of responses—31 of 47—disagreed with de-designation. I have considered these responses carefully and appreciate that a number of higher education providers would prefer QAA to remain as DQB. However, QAA has made it clear that it would no longer be content to be the DQB. I also note that the majority of responses from representative bodies on behalf of their members agreed with de-designation, including Universities UK which represents 140 providers.
Having considered the responses to the consultation, and QAA’s decision to step down from the DQB role, I have concluded that QAA should be de-designated as DQB. I will therefore publish a notice to remove the designation with effect from 1 April 2023.
Where no body is designated to perform the assessment functions, the functions revert to the OFS. The OFS has confirmed that, from 1 April 2023, it will undertake all quality and standards assessment activity on an interim basis pending further consideration of future arrangements. The DFE, OFS and HE stakeholders will work closely to consider options for long-term arrangements for the assessment of quality and standards.
I will deposit a copy of the Government response to this consultation in the Libraries of both Houses.
[HCWS695]
Powering Up Britain
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero (Graham Stuart)
Cheap, abundant and reliable energy is a foundation stone of a thriving economy. We rely on it to power our homes, our infrastructure, and industry. Affordable and plentiful energy makes businesses more competitive, generating growth, jobs and prosperity. It keeps the cost of living down, and will help bring down inflation.
A global pandemic, Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine, and Britain’s continued reliance on imported oil and gas have pushed up energy prices to unprecedented levels over the past year. The Government have stepped in to pay half of the typical household’s bills over winter and around half of wholesale energy costs for some businesses. This was the right thing to do, but this approach is not sustainable.
The creation of a new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in February was a clear statement of intent by this Prime Minister and this Government. Energy security and net zero are two sides of the same coin. Cheaper, cleaner, domestic sources of energy can break our link with reliance on imported fossil fuels, meet our long term energy needs, bring our bills down and keep them down.
We are in a strong position to drive the energy transition. We have seen huge investment in our renewables sector since 2010. We currently have the world’s largest operational offshore wind farm project, Hornsea 2, and the second, third and fourth largest operational offshore wind farm projects in the world. We have delivered the second highest amount of recorded low-carbon investment cumulatively across Europe over the last 5 years and estimate that since 2010, the UK has seen £198 billion of investment into low-carbon energy, through a mixture of Government funding, private investment and levies on consumer bills. Now is the time to go further.
“Powering Up Britain” announces the Government plans to diversify, decarbonise and domesticate energy production. The plans launched today will set out a blueprint for the future of energy in this country—boosting the UK’s energy security and energy independence—and help to achieve wholesale UK electricity prices that rank amongst the cheapest in Europe by 2035. It will underpin the UK’s clean energy transition, create new jobs and investment, protect consumers and businesses from volatile international energy markets, and drive us towards net zero by 2050. To meet this ambition, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero will deliver:
Energy security: setting the UK on a path to greater energy independence.
Consumer security: bringing bills down, and keeping them affordable, and making wholesale electricity prices among the cheapest in Europe.
Climate security: supporting industry to move away from expensive and dirty fossil fuels.
Economic security: playing our part in reducing inflation and boosting growth, delivering high skilled jobs for the future.
Our plan contains significant new policy and Government investment across different sectors of the economy, including:
Delivering Great British Nuclear (GBN): We are matching the global competition and scaling-up our nuclear programme by having launched GBN, responsible for driving delivery of new nuclear projects, backed with the funding it needs. The organisation will be initially led by an interim chair and CEO and will be based in or around the Greater Manchester area. This body will support our ambition to ramp up nuclear capacity in the UK to up to 24GW by 2050. The first priority of GBN is to launch a competitive process to select the best small modular reactor technologies. This will commence in April with market engagement as the first phase. The second phase—the down-selection process—will be launched in the summer, with an ambition to assess and decide on the leading technologies by autumn. The Government are committed to a programme of new nuclear projects beyond Sizewell C, giving industry and investors the confidence they need to deliver projects at speed.
Making a world-leading commitment to Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage: We are announcing the eight projects to progress to negotiations to form the first two CCUS clusters, in Wales, the North West and the East Coast of England, and that we will launch a process to enable expansion of those Track-1 clusters later this year. We are also launching the process for confirming the next clusters for deployment in Track-2. Our initial view is that Acorn and Viking are the leading contenders for Track-2 transport and storage systems.
Delivering a Hydrogen economy: Our 2030 hydrogen production ambition could generate enough clean electricity to power all of London for a year. We are announcing a suite of developments that get that ambition under way: confirming the first winning projects from the £240 million net zero hydrogen fund, naming the two CCUS-enabled hydrogen projects moving forward on the Track-1 clusters, publishing a shortlist of 20 projects we intend to enter due diligence with for the first electrolytic hydrogen allocation round (HAR1); and announcing our intention to open two further hydrogen funding rounds in 2023.
Accelerating deployment of renewables: Our goal is to develop up to 50GW of offshore wind by 2030 and to quintuple our solar power by 2035. We are opening the latest allocation round of the UK’s world leading contracts for difference (CfD) scheme to incentivise investment in renewable energy. UK levy funded support for renewable power since 2010 has totalled around £80 billion. The UK is a world leader in offshore wind and floating turbines represent the next frontier. We are launching £160 million of funding for pilots of the floating offshore wind manufacturing investment scheme to build UK port infrastructure to further reduce the cost of offshore wind.
Reducing household bills by increasing energy efficiency: We are confirming plans for our new energy company obligation scheme the Great British insulation scheme, extending help to a wider group of households. This will mean that around 300,000 of the country’s least energy efficient homes could save £300 to £400 each year as part of a £1 billion energy efficiency programme by March 2026. This will form part of our work to meet our 15% demand reduction target by 2030 which will not only help lower bills, but also support our net zero objectives.
Reducing our reliance on fossil fuels to heat our buildings: The Government has an ambition to phase out all new and replacement natural gas boilers by 2035 at the latest. People's homes will increasingly be heated by British electricity, not imported gas. The heat pump investment accelerator will mean heat pumps are manufactured in the UK at a scale never seen before. We want to make it as cheap to buy and run a heat pump as a gas boiler by extending the boiler upgrade scheme by three years.
Decarbonising transport: We are signalling our long-term plans for decarbonising road and air travel, continuing to provide strong market signals and incentives to drive supply chain development. We are publishing a final consultation on the zero emission vehicle mandate: requiring that from 2024 an increasing percentage of manufacturers’ new car and van sales are zero emission. We are announcing more than £350 million investment in electric vehicle charging infrastructure. We are also consulting on a long-term trajectory for sustainable aviation fuel uptake in the UK through a mandate to be introduced from 2025.
Speeding up planning and networks: We will be publishing a revised set of energy national policy statements for consultation, covering overarching energy, renewables, electricity networks, gas generation, and pipelines. On 23 February 2023 the Government published our nationally significant infrastructure project action plan, which sets out how the Government will reform the consenting process to ensure the planning system can deliver for the future, to meet the demands of a greater number and complexity of cases and deliver against Government ambitions. The Electricity Networks Commissioner, Nick Winser, has been tasked to advise Government on what more can be done to accelerate grid delivery, and will present recommendations to Ministers in June. We will respond with an action plan this year.
Mobilising private investment: Our updated 2023 green finance strategy will strengthen the UK’s position at the forefront of the growing global green finance market while supporting the investment needed to meet our targets. This includes maximising the impact of the UK’s public financing institutions, for example through the UK Infrastructure Bank with its £22 billion of financial capital. It also sets out our pathway for the UK to become the world’s first net zero aligned financial centre, equipping the market with the information and tools necessary to meet this goal.
Supporting industry through the transition: The Government are exploring a package of potential carbon leakage measures to mitigate this risk at all stages of the UK’s net zero transition. Doing so will give industry confidence to invest in the UK in the knowledge their decarbonisation efforts will not be undermined. We are also announcing a new phase of the industrial energy transformation fund to support the development and deployment of technologies that enable businesses with high energy use transition.
Building on our COP26 Presidency: The UK will continue to lead internationally, building on our COP26 presidency. Two of the documents we are publishing today—the 2030 strategic framework for international climate and nature action and the HMG international climate finance strategy—show what this leadership will look like in practice. We are delivering on our commitments—including our £11.6 billion contribution from 2021-22 to 2025-26 to the $100 billion per year global climate finance goal for developing countries. Our international work delivers on the UK’s domestic agenda—improving energy security by accelerating the energy transition, bringing down costs of new technologies for our own net zero plans, and opening up huge economic opportunities for trade and investment.
Detail of these announcements is included across a suite of publications, notably:
Powering Up Britain—The Energy Security Plan: which sets out the steps the Government are taking to achieve our vision to power the UK through affordable, home-grown, clean energy.
Powering Up Britain—The Net Zero Growth Plan: which builds upon the plan laid out in the net zero strategy, strengthening delivery by focusing on the action we can take to ensure the UK remains a leader in the net zero transition, and meets our carbon budgets. We are also responding to the independent review of net zero, led by my right hon. Friend Chris Skidmore, and partly or fully acting on 23 of his 25 recommendations for 2025, demonstrating that the Government are committed to delivering our decarbonisation targets in a pro-growth way.
The importance of this Department is clear. The aims of this Department are clear. We will deliver for amongst the cheapest wholesale electricity prices in Europe, powered primarily by renewables, domestically sourced, ensuring the security of our energy supply. We will maintain our position as a global leader on the net zero transition, ensuring we bring the world with us to meet this global challenge. Making Britain an energy secure, net zero nation, is one of the greatest opportunities of our time. This Department, and the plans we have outlined today, lay the roadmap to get us there.
I will place copies of “Powering Up Britain—The Energy Security Plan”, “Powering Up Britain—the Net Zero Growth Plan”, the 2023 green finance strategy, 2030 strategic framework and international climate finance strategy in the Libraries of both Houses.
I will continue to update Parliament on progress towards these aims.
Full list of publications
Powering Up Britain–The Energy Security Plan.
Powering Up Britain–The Net Zero Growth Plan.
NZGP annex–Technical Annex.
NZGP annex–Carbon Budget Delivery Plan.
NZGP annex–Government response to the CCC Progress Report.
NZGP annex–Government response to Net Zero Review.
2030 Green Finance Strategy.
2030 Strategic Framework for International Climate and Nature Action.
UK International Climate Finance Strategy.
Consultation on addressing carbon leakage risk to support decarbonisation.
Net Zero Research & Innovation Delivery Plan.
National Policy Statement.
Floating Offshore Wind Manufacturing Investment Scheme announcement.
Launch of floating offshore wind manufacturing investment scheme.
Consultation on the Clean Heat Market Mechanism.
Heat Pump Investment Accelerator Competition.
Launch of the draft scheme guidance and expressions of interest in the competition.
Patrick Vallance’s Pro Innovation Regulation of Technologies Review: Green Industries report and HMG response.
Government Response on Secure, Smart Energy Systems.
Strategy and Policy Statement for Energy.
Consultation on the draft SPS.
Power Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) Government response to consultation on the power BECCS business model Cluster Sequencing Process Phase-2: Track-1 Project Negotiation List.
Cluster sequencing for Carbon Capture Usage and Storage (CCUS): Track-2 guidance.
Notice on gov.uk announcing the shortlist for the first electrolytic hydrogen allocation round (HAR1).
Notice on gov.uk announcing the Net Zero Hydrogen Fund (NZHF) strands 1&2 competition winners.
Consultation on Community Benefits for Electricity Transmission Network Infrastructure.
[HCWS690]
FCDO Programme Allocations
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Mr Andrew Mitchell)
The FCDO annual report and accounts 2021 to 2022 explained that the department’s official development assistance (ODA) spending plans needed to be revisited to ensure all ODA-eligible spending was managed within 0.5% of gross national income (GNI). This was in the context of the significant and unexpected costs incurred to support the people of Ukraine and Afghanistan escape oppression and conflict and find refuge in the UK, and others seeking asylum. The Government provided additional resources of £1 billion in 2022-23 and £1.5 billion in 2023-24 to help meet these unanticipated costs, and we remain committed to returning ODA spending to 0.7% of GNI when the fiscal situation allows, in line with the approach confirmed by MPs in July 2021 which provides a clear measure assessed against independent forecasts. FCDO 22-23 ODA Allocation Multilateral organisations £3,311m Bilateral programmes £2,511m FCDO operating costs £606m Financial transactions £411m Arm’s length bodies, scholarships and international subscriptions £367m Research and development £300m Vaccines £66m Total FCDO ODA 22-23 £7,572m Bilateral ODA 22-23 Allocations DG Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean Africa (East and Central) £418.4m Africa (West and Southern) £344.6m Latin America, Caribbean and Small Island Developing States £35.2m North Africa £2.9m DG Humanitarian and Development Development and Parliament £16.3m Education, Gender and Equality £93.2m Global Health and COVID-19 £58.4m Humanitarian and Migration £55.3m International Finance £130.1m Office for Conflict Stabilisation and Mediation £18.3m DG Economics, Science & Technology Economic Security £5.4m Economics and Evaluation £0.8m Research and Evidence £15.8m Technology and Analysis £3.2m DG Europe Europe Group £6.8m DG Geopolitics & Security Open Societies and Human Rights £57.9m DG Indo-Pacific British Investment Partnerships £53.3m Indian Ocean £105.3m Southeast Asia and Pacific £77.7m DG Americas, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Middle East & Overseas Territories Energy, Climate and Environment £154.2m Overseas Territories £80.6m Afghanistan and Pakistan £304.4m Middle East £247.0m DG Defence & Intelligence Eastern Europe and Central Asia £226.1m FCDO 23-24 ODA Allocations Multilateral organisations £3,974m Bilateral programmes £2,191m FCDO operating costs £691m Financial transactions £554m Arm’s length bodies, scholarships and international subscriptions £385m Research and development £300m Total FCDO ODA 23-24 £8,095m Bilateral ODA 23-24 Allocations DG Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean Africa (East and Central) £389.8m Africa (West and Southern) £256.1m Latin America, Caribbean and Small Island Developing States £25.8m North Africa £2.2m DG Humanitarian and Development Development & Parliament £9.6m Education, Gender and Equality £79.9m Global Health and Covid-19 £41.8m Humanitarian and Migration £43.7m International Finance £130.9m Office for Conflict Stabilisation and Mediation £13.3m DG Economics, Science & Technology Economic Security £2.6m Economics and Evaluation £0.8m Research and Evidence £6.8m Technology and Analysis £3.9m DG Europe Europe Group £5.9m DG Geopolitics and Security Open Societies and Human Rights £64.2m DG Indio-Pacific British Investment Partnerships £108.9m Indian Ocean £105.4m Southeast Asia and Pacific £56.5m DG Americas, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Middle East & Overseas Territories Energy, Climate and Environment £155.8m Overseas Territories £85.7m Afghanistan and Pakistan £141.9m Middle East £229.6m DG Defence & Intelligence Eastern Europe and Central Asia £230.0m
I would now like to update the House on our spending in 2022-23 and plans for 2023-24 allocations. The tables below set out the top-level allocations for those years. These numbers are indicative and subject to revision. In deciding these allocations, we have applied the principles described in the Foreign Secretary’s 22 November 2022 statement, “Official Development Assistance”. These are: to focus spend on the international development strategy priorities; to meet our financial commitments to multilateral partners; and to empower FCDO officials to decide how to adjust bilateral programmes in line with our approach to prioritisation.
The Government remain committed to delivering the priorities set out in the international development strategy, and the strategy’s spending targets where funding allows. UK development spending has funded work to build the sustainable foundations for prosperity and security around the world. Achievements include supporting women and girls’ education and rights, as set out in the new international women and girls strategy, supporting jobs and infrastructure through British investment partnerships, and the launch of new just energy transition partnerships. Our development spending has also provided life-saving food, water, healthcare and sanitation around the world, as well as a rapid package of support for both Turkey and Syria in response to the devastating earthquake.
In 2024-25 we plan to spend £1 billion on urgent humanitarian needs and expect to mobilise up to £8 billion of UK-backed financing a year under British investment partnerships by 2025. We remain committed to the cross-Government international climate finance target of spending at least £11.6bn by 2026. We continue to work towards the IDS target on restoring funding for vital work on women and girls, and the new target set out in the international climate finance 2023 to 2030 for at least 80% of the FCDO’s bilateral aid programmes to have a focus on gender equality by 2030.
I want to acknowledge to the House that the revisions to FCDO’s ODA budget in 2022-23 and 2023-24 have necessitated difficult choices as our spending plans have changed. Throughout the revision process we have worked closely with our partners to understand the best way to allocate our revised budgets to deliver the most positive development outcomes possible for those who need our help. I am confident that our allocations will achieve this aim.
The integrated review 2023 reaffirms our commitment to the IDS and sets out our ambition to reinvigorate our global leadership on international development, by stepping up our contribution to the UN sustainable development goals, delivering our patient approach and strengthening how development is delivered across Government. The ODA Board, which I jointly chair with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, will more effectively scrutinise ODA spending, ensuring it delivers for UK objectives overseas and represents good value for money.
The FCDO annual report and accounts 2022 to 2023, due to be published later this year, will include full breakdowns of the 2023-24 allocations, including by country. The UK’s statistics on international development will be published next week and will give a provisional overview of all UK ODA spend in 2022.
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NHS England: Revised Financial Directions
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Minister for Health and Secondary Care (Will Quince)
My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State, Lord Markham, has made the following written statement:
I am revising the 2022-23 variation to the financial directions to NHS England made on 30 June 2022 and setting the 2023-24 financial directions to NHS England. The amendment to the total revenue resource use limit for 2022-23 has been agreed with NHS England as required under section 223D(4) of the National Health Service Act 2006.
The directions include a number of transfers of funding between NHS England and DHSC that are in addition to the headline spending review/autumn statement settlement for the NHS. For example, funding is being transferred for the voluntary scheme for branded medicines pricing and access (VPAS), the covid-19 vaccination programme, as well as to fulfil manifesto commitments on primary care, car parking and nursing recruitment.
Furthermore, the directions also reflect the organisational changes which have occurred over the last year. The 2022-23 revised directions have now incorporated NHS Digital’s revenue and capital budgets into NHS England’s budget. Moreover, the 2023-24 opening directions will incorporate the full-year budgets of NHS Improvement, NHS Digital and Health Education England’s budgets. This is because those organisations have been (or in the case of Health Education England, will be from 1 April) formally brought together with NHS England into a single legal organisation.
They will be published on gov.uk. The existing NHS mandate remains unchanged by these publications.
[HCWS706]
Approach to Managing Covid-19
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maria Caulfield)
On 21 February 2022, the Government published, “Covid-19 Response: Living with Covid-19” which set out the plan for living with covid-19. This response has enabled the country to manage covid-19 like other respiratory illnesses, largely due to the continued effectiveness of vaccines and improved treatments. Our approach to managing covid-19 from April 2023 continues this important work.
The overwhelming majority of people in the UK now have some protection against covid-19 through vaccination and/or previous infection, but the virus will continue to evolve and variants which are immune-evading may still occur. The Government will therefore maintain a range of capabilities to protect those at higher risk of severe illness. It will also retain proportionate situational awareness through surveillance, and maintain proportionate critical resilience for the future, for example a holding of lateral flow tests, should a dangerous new wave or variant emerge.
Proportionate scale back of testing
Appropriate levels of testing will remain to support diagnosis for clinical care and treatment and to protect very high-risk individuals and settings. Lateral flow device (LFD) testing continues to be effective in detecting positive results, including of new variants, providing better value for money than polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing at this stage of the pandemic as well as rapid results. LFDs will be used except where there is a specific clinical or epidemiological need to use a PCR test.
From April 2023 the Government will continue to fund and provide diagnostic PCR testing as part of the standard clinical management of individuals requiring covid-19 treatment (similar to other respiratory viruses) and LFD testing in the following situations:
Adult social care settings and hospices: symptomatic testing of care home residents to support access to therapeutics and for specific clinical need, symptomatic testing for staff working in hospices (which care for individuals unlikely to respond to vaccination), and outbreak testing for care homes and similar settings.
NHS settings: symptomatic testing for staff on wards caring for patients at the highest risk from covid-19 (who are least likely to mount an immune response to vaccination due to their current condition or treatment), symptomatic testing of some patients in hospital where needed to inform decisions such as ward transfers, outbreak testing and testing of all patients on discharge not care settings as appropriate.
People who are eligible for covid-19 treatments in the community: to enable access to antiviral treatments.
Individuals who live in high-risk closed settings: highly targeted outbreak testing and testing to support clinical care in settings such as prisons (and other places of detention), and homelessness, domestic abuse refuge and asylum seeker accommodation.
In line with this stage of the pandemic, routine asymptomatic and symptomatic staff testing in all settings will end. Individuals will follow the standard guidance for the population based on illness severity and symptoms. The guidance is available here:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/people-with-symptoms-of-a-respiratory-infection-including-covid-19
Surveillance
The Government will maintain essential covid-19 surveillance activities in the community, primary and secondary care, and in high-risk settings, which will enable the evaluation of the effectiveness of vaccination against a range of clinical outcomes, to inform vaccine deployment, and appropriate disease management. This will be underpinned by the continuation of genomic sequencing to detect and assess severity and vaccine effectiveness against new variants in surveillance studies and where PCR testing has been performed in secondary care on a proportionate basis.
Contingency
The Government will retain proportionate capability for testing use in the event of a covid-19 wave or variant that results in a significant increase in pressure on the NHS. Laboratory infrastructure and a stock of LFDs will be maintained to provide resilience to respond, allowing for a period of additional testing for individuals at higher risk of severe respiratory illness across the NHS and the care sector. A more comprehensive response can be scaled up, should this be needed.
Guidance
Guidance published on 1 April 2022 for individuals in the community with symptoms of covid-19 or respiratory illness continues to set out the actions we can all take to help reduce the risk of catching covid-19 and passing it on to others.
Guidance on covid-19 specific testing regimes for the NHS, adult social care and other high-risk settings will be updated to reflect the latest advice from public health experts. This guidance will be published for settings to implement from 1 April 2023.
Vaccines
The covid-19 vaccination programme continues to reduce severe disease across the population, while helping to protect the NHS. Covid-19 vaccines remain available to eligible groups, and the Government will continue to consider the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) on future vaccine selection and booster programmes for those at greatest risk.
Devolved Governments
UKHSA is committed to work with devolved Governments to take forward the testing programme in each nation from April 2023. While UKHSA will procure and distribute tests on behalf of devolved Governments, it will continue to be up to each nation to decide their own testing policy.
Conclusion
The Government will continue to work together with our partners to keep all these measures under review.
[HCWS702]
Maternity Investigation: Programme Transition
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maria Caulfield)
This statement updates Members on the transition of the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch’s (HSIB’s) maternity investigation programmes.
On 26 January 2022, Official Report, 25WS, by way of a written ministerial statement, the Department of Health and Social Care announced that a separate Special Health Authority would be established to continue the independent maternity investigation programme, which is currently overseen by the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch.
The Department is committed to ensuring the continuation of independent, standardised maternity investigations that provide learning to the system and contribute to the Government’s ambition to halve the 2010 rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths and brain injuries in babies occurring during or soon after birth by 2025.
Following careful consideration, the Department has determined that the most appropriate and streamlined mechanism for delivering the valued and independent maternity investigations is for the function to be hosted within the Care Quality Commission. The purposes of the maternity investigation programme remain as set out last January: to provide independent, standardised and family-focused investigations of maternity cases for families: to provide learning to the health system via reports at local, regional and national level; analyse data to identify key trends and provide system wide learning; be a system expert in standards for maternity investigations; and collaborate with system partners to escalate safety concerns.
We will now work with the CQC and the HSIB to complete the transition of the maternity investigation programme to the CQC by October 2023.
As announced in the written ministerial statement of 9 February 2023, Official Report, 40WS, the establishment of the new HSSIB will take place in October 2023, to enable all the necessary work to be completed to ensure a smooth transition of these investigation programmes.
[HCWS698]
East Midlands Freeport
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Dehenna Davison)
Today I have the pleasure of announcing that east midlands freeport has received final Government approval, in a huge boost for the midlands. This is another significant milestone for the freeports programme and demonstrates the speed in which these areas, and the programme, are moving to deliver the freeport benefits. This gives a clear signal: the Government are backing these areas to grow and thrive.
Freeports play a major role in this Government’s economic strategy by mobilising investment through a combination of tax reliefs on new economic activity, a special streamlined customs procedure, an ambitious programme of public investment, and wide-ranging support from the UK Government to help businesses trade. These measures will drive growth, create jobs and, in turn, bring opportunities and prosperity to the communities that surround them: a real example of levelling up in action.
East midlands freeport will now receive up to £25 million in seed funding, and potentially hundreds of millions in locally retained business rates to upgrade local infrastructure and stimulate regeneration. This is alongside generous tax reliefs and a simplified customs procedure, all backed by a package of trade and innovation support for businesses located there.
Armed with these tools, east midlands freeport will drive investments in and around the East Midlands airport and Gateway industrial cluster in north-west Leicestershire, the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station site in Rushcliffe, Nottinghamshire and the East Midlands Intermodal Park in south Derbyshire. This will bring jobs, in sectors such as advanced manufacturing, automotive and space, to local communities.
And this is only the beginning. Across Government, we are working closely with the English freeports to support them to achieve their objectives and deliver transformational benefits for their local areas.
We also recently announced two new freeports in Wales as well as two green freeports in Scotland. Discussions continue with our stakeholders in Northern Ireland about how we can extend the benefits associated with the freeport programme there.
This is an incredibly exciting time for UK freeports and the wider levelling up agenda as we start to see local areas bring their plans to life with big private investments, upgrades to local infrastructure, and bold regeneration initiatives in those areas that need a boost, creating real impacts for local people.
[HCWS691]
Intergovernmental Relations Annual Transparency Report 2022
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Felicity Buchan)
Today, the UK Government published the second annual report of our engagement with the devolved Administrations on gov.uk. This report has been laid as a Command Paper in both Houses.
The annual report follows on from each of the quarterly reports published on gov.uk throughout 2022. The report shows that the UK Government and the devolved Administrations share the same challenges and are working towards the same goals for the future. It gives an insight into the extensive engagement between the UK Government, Scottish Government, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Executive between 1 January to 31 December 2022. During this reporting period the Administrations worked together on a number of areas, not least in organising the commemoration of the sad passing of Her Majesty the Queen, the domestic response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including the Homes for Ukraine resettlement scheme, and the work to tackle the impacts of the global inflation crisis. The report demonstrates how our collective strength enables us to face and tackle big changes and challenges.
The report is part of the Government’s ongoing commitment to transparency of intergovernmental relations to Parliament and the public. The Government will continue with publications to demonstrate transparency in intergovernmental relations.
[HCWS704]
Machinery of Government
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak)
I am making this statement to bring to the House’s attention the following machinery of government changes.
The Government Debt Management Function will move from the Cabinet Office to HM Treasury, to sit alongside the centre for the Government Finance Function. This will improve the management of debt owed to the Government and provide strong expertise and leadership for the public servants in its profession.
Ministerial responsibility for the Fraud Act 2006 will move from the Ministry of Justice to the Home Office. This will enable a single Department to hold responsibility for policy and legislation relating to fraud against individuals and businesses, enabling the Home Office to best tackle fraud and reduce inefficiencies. The Home Office will continue to liaise with the Public Sector Fraud Authority, which sits across the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury, in relation to tackling public sector fraud.
Both machinery of government changes will take effect immediately.
[HCWS692]
Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism: Intelligence and Security Committee Response
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak)
On 13 July 2022, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament published their report entitled “Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism” (ERWT).
The threat from ERWT is an important issue for the Government and we are grateful to the Committee for devoting time and attention to this subject. Today, the Government are publishing their response to the report.
Copies of the Government response have been laid before both Houses.
[HCWS696]
Grand Committee
Supported Housing
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the case for providing more supported housing, given its impact on homelessness prevention, health and well-being.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)
My Lords, I have no interests to declare as I recently stepped down as chair of the National Housing Federation. In that role, I was fortunate to visit a large number of supported housing providers and was incredibly impressed by their work. The tragedy is that there is not enough of it. When I think of what can be achieved for those who benefit from supported housing and the savings to the public purse, it is heartbreaking that we do not do more.
A definition might be helpful. Supported housing is accommodation provided alongside support and supervision to help people live as independently as possible in the community. It might be a shared house for people with learning disabilities, a hostel for people who have experienced homelessness or specialist housing for people transitioning out of psychiatric care. Housing associations are the main providers, with more than 400,000 of these homes.
I feel so passionate about this because I have seen that good-quality, suitable supported housing can have significant positive—indeed, life-changing—outcomes for the people it supports. Research has shown that it also plays a key role in relieving pressures on the NHS and social care, criminal justice and housing systems, saving the public purse around £940 per resident per year. I will say a bit more about this, look at some of the challenges facing this service and highlight some potential solutions that I hope the Minister can respond to.
Earlier this month, research was published by Imogen Blood & Associates in partnership with the Centre for Housing Policy at the University of York. It was commissioned by the National Housing Federation and a number of housing associations to understand better the ways in which supported housing supports and interacts with the NHS, social care, the justice system and other public services and its impact on homelessness, health and well-being. Significantly, the research found that good-quality supported housing is shown to aid its residents in building healthy relationships, higher esteem and independence and in developing a greater sense of agency over their lives. It shines a light on how supported housing relieves pressures on the social care, health, criminal justice and housing sectors, ultimately lessening demands on the public purse.
The complexity of need of those living in supported housing is striking. It offers a more person-centred package that can offer greater safety or security than mainstream housing, because multiple needs can most effectively be met as part of a combined housing and support package. The report’s survey of service users found clear evidence to back up this approach; 84% of respondents who had at least five identified needs had made some progress during their stay in supported housing.
The impact of supported housing on homelessness prevention cannot be overlooked. Short-term and transitional supported housing plays a key role in reducing and preventing high-risk forms of homelessness. In 2019-20, housing associations housed more than 57,000 former homeless households, nearly 35,000 of which had been found to be statutorily homeless. Of course, as people benefit, they can move on to independent tenancies, but often that is not possible and they have to stay longer than necessary because there is no affordable and suitable housing. In her response, I hope the Minister will say something about this wider problem facing the country.
The research is also clear that supported housing makes a substantial contribution in helping residents to access primary care and specialist treatment and diagnosis from partner services to maintain their health and well-being. One in four residents across all types of schemes has a physical or sensory disability or a limiting long-term health condition. Effective partnership working with the NHS and social services is therefore critical. Supported housing enables hard-to-reach individuals to access timely preventive healthcare, reducing avoidable emergencies and admissions.
This point was amply demonstrated by the Adult Social Care Committee in its recent report on the state of the adult social care system in England. It called for
“a fundamental rethinking of how we understand, approach and design social care”,
including
“the solutions offered by accessible and inclusive housing”.
I am a member of the committee, so excellently chaired by my noble friend Lady Andrews. Our report sets out what we think needs to change to make this possible—
“to enable every citizen to live a ‘gloriously ordinary life’, regardless of their age or disability.”
Indeed, it is being debated today in the Chamber as we speak. I hope we will have the Government’s response soon.
It will be obvious by now that there are challenges. Despite its significant benefits to the NHS, social care, criminal justice, and housing systems, supported housing is hindered by a lack of government investment and focus. Supported housing in the social rented sector operates on very tight margins and inflationary pressures are pushing up the cost of all aspects of managing schemes.
One of the biggest challenges facing supported housing has been the reduction in funding over time. This is amplified by cuts right across the public sector, especially for local authorities. Inevitably, rationing has followed, with social care resources concentrated on the highest-need individuals. A procurement-driven, contractual relationship between local authorities and the supported housing sector has led to a lack of long-term security for providers. In the absence of a national strategy and a secure funding stream, a shift towards localism has led to a fragmented approach. As local authority spending on housing-related support has reduced over the past decade, there has been an increase in non-commissioned provision. Profit-seeking landlords have been able to exploit this part of the market by providing dangerously inadequate housing and support services for vulnerable people.
The noble Lord, Lord Best, who I am delighted has chosen to speak in this debate, will bring forward the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill for its Second Reading after the Easter Recess. I strongly support this legislation’s intention to drive rogue landlords out of the supported housing market. However, alongside improved regulation must also come greater security of funding for good providers so that rogue operators cannot exploit this unmet housing need.
I will conclude by touching on some of the potential solutions to the challenges facing supported housing. In their 2021 White Paper, People at the Heart of Care, the Government made a welcome commitment to make
“every decision about care a decision about housing.”
To turn this commitment into a reality, supported housing must play a critical and enhanced role. First, this could be achieved through substantial investment in social housing to improve the short-term supported housing sector’s ability to move people into suitable independent tenancies. I would be grateful if the Minister could set out what the Government are doing to deliver this much-needed social housing.
The Government could also ring-fence the long-term revenue funding for housing-related support to ensure that spending matches, at the very least, the £1.6 billion per year allocated in 2010. Revenue funding for support would help local authorities to commission more effective and better-quality supported housing, as rogue landlords are driven out of this market. What assessment has the Minister made of current levels of revenue funding for support and its impact on supported housing providers?
Gathering better data about the profile and needs of people living in support housing would allow providers, local authorities and central government to deliver better policy solutions for vulnerable and marginalised groups. Does the Minister agree that there is a clear need to improve data and information about the supported housing sector?
Finally, the Government could secure a quick win by allocating the £300 million committed in the Department of Health and Social Care’s strategic housing fund, so that supported housing can continue to support the NHS and social care services. Can the Minister tell us if, and when, this will be done?
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Baroness for initiating this debate, which complements the one taking place in the Chamber. We are also grateful to her for raising the concerns of many housing associations and their clients, who come under the broad umbrella of “supported housing”. Many of these groups are vulnerable: they are rough sleepers, refugees, young offenders and those recovering from alcohol and drug issues.
I remember going to visit, nearly 50 years ago, the first women’s refuge in Chiswick, run by the formidable Erin Pizzey. I listened to the problems that confronted her: it was not just that the local residents were not entirely happy about the refuge but that Hounslow council was trying to close the operation. Principally, she had to juggle a range of revenue streams simply to keep the show on the road.
Since then, we have had a whole variety of funding regimes. In the consultative Funding Supported Housing policy statement, the funding regimes were summed up with some beautiful Civil Service-speak:
“Funding for supported housing is complex and comes from a variety of sources, with ‘housing’ costs and ‘support’ costs being met separately.”
I pause there because none of the institutions from which some of the residents have come—young offender institutions, prison or NHS in-patient support for drug addiction—has to grapple with separate funding regimes. Indeed, those running them would be horrified if they had to do what the voluntary sector has to do and run the organisation using a whole range of streams.
In my view, the most successful regime was the supporting people regime, introduced in 2003, with £1.8 billion ring-fenced for local authorities to support people who wanted to live independently. Since then, we have progressively moved away from that regime. In 2009, the ring-fence was removed, despite warnings from the Select Committee down the other end that this would expose “electorally unpopular” groups. Once the ring-fence was removed, the institutions and support organisations had to compete with more electorally popular bids for local authority funds.
We have now arrived at the position that the noble Baroness explained, where exempt housing benefit meets the management costs of these projectsand the top-up for the extra support comes from the local authorities. Both those legs are subject to criticism. As the noble Baroness explained, the top-up has been progressively squeezed, with the pressure on local authorities leaving no support for the one-to-one help that is often needed for these clients and with the exempt housing benefit being exploited, as was explained. The noble Lord, Lord Best, may talk a little more about the less scrupulous providers, who come to the local authority armed with lawyers to argue their case. If care is provided in some of those institutions, it comes out of the universal credit of the person claiming, not out of the other resources.
The basic question for the Minister is: is she satisfied with the current regime and how it is working? If not, is she prepared to look at options for reform? There is some concern, which we heard, that where we are at the moment is not the optimum way of running supported housing.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for initiating this debate and I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. I declare a strong interest in the debate as the sponsor in the Lords of the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill, the Private Member’s Bill from Bob Blackman MP, which has cleared its House of Commons stages and comes to your Lordships’ House with the backing of government next month.
The supported housing story is one of two halves: first, the story of supported housing brilliantly provided for very vulnerable and homeless people by highly effective and sensitive teams from housing associations and charities; and, secondly, the story of the ghastly, so-called “supported” housing, exploited by some unscrupulous private operators. These two extremes require contrasting responses: first, a significant boost to the wonderful work being done by some exemplary non-profit and charitable bodies; and, secondly, some fierce regulation, diligently enforced, to rid the country of appalling private providers abusing the system to make substantial, undeserved profits at the expense of both the taxpayer and people in desperate need of somewhere to live.
The National Housing Federation and the reputable providers have given strong support for weeding out the private operators who have discovered a loophole enabling rents to be paid by housing benefit, often for overcrowded and substandard properties, without regard to the local housing allowance ceilings, by claiming untruthfully to supply proper care and support. One MP in the debate on Bob Blackman’s Bill suggested that returns on this investment are more profitable than dealing drugs. Mostly the activity is not commissioned by the local authority, but councils have been forced to make use of these lettings by a shortage of genuine supported housing. It is clear that a robust regulatory regime is overdue and the forthcoming Bill is intended to put this right.
Nevertheless, I see the danger that much-needed regulatory measures, if handled without sufficient care, could make life more difficult for commendable providers. This comes at a time when we need the proper provision of supported housing to be boosted following loss of funding from the old supporting people grants, to which the noble Lord, Lord Young, referred, and while the freeze on local housing allowances means that the option of normal private renting is increasingly unattainable. The worst possible outcome from new regulation would be to deter action by the bona fide organisations by adding excess cost or bureaucracy. Already there are anxieties that this vital sector has been diminished by cost pressures over recent years and its insecure and inadequate funding means that any deterrent to continuing to provide good supported housing could be disastrous. We absolutely must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
The forthcoming Bill does not rigidly prescribe the new regulatory system but rather enables this to emerge from consultation with an expert new advisory panel. I hope that this approach will ensure that a licensing regime emerges with national standards that can end the abuses while enabling growth in this Cinderella sector to produce more of the superb supported housing projects that are clearly so badly needed.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for securing this debate and bringing to the Committee’s attention the excellent report by Imogen Blood and the University of York for the National Housing Federation.
I would like to use this opportunity to highlight in particular the work of one organisation in Leicester, with which I have had the privilege of working. I will highlight some of the points made in the aforementioned report and also in Homeful, a report by Professor Jo Richardson of De Montfort University in Leicester.
For several years, One Roof Leicester operated a night shelter, providing emergency accommodation for those who would otherwise be sleeping rough. Indeed, it was credited as running the first interfaith night shelter in the UK; for three months, it rotated between multiple places of worship. It then began to offer supported housing for people experiencing homelessness, and the outcomes have been so positive that it has now moved over fully to that model.
As the Housing First approach suggests, once people have a safe and secure place to call home, they are in a much better position to engage with support services. But to also help residents navigate the complexity of the various different agencies and services that they might need, each One Roof Leicester resident has a key worker who helps them access benefits, housing, employment or training, and health services. Residents are also supported by local volunteers, who offer befriending and practical help. This means that residents feel they have a community where they belong, as a well as a physical home.
All of this makes it possible for residents to get back on their feet and live independently. Between 2020 and 2022, 32 of One Roof’s residents successfully moved into their own accommodation, and 100% of them have been able to maintain their tenancy. Those numbers would be higher if it were not for the shortage of social housing, as the National Housing Federation report highlights. Years-long waits for council-owned properties and the impossibly high cost of privately rented accommodation mean that residents stay with One Roof longer than they need. That, in turn, means that people whose lives could be changed by that one-to-one support have been turned away. Just last Monday, three people looking for a space with One Roof were turned away; it is clear that the need is great.
We are doing what we can in my diocese. I have the honour of chairing the city’s homelessness charter, which brings together agencies, charities and businesses with an interest in ending homelessness so that they can work together more effectively. A couple of our churches in Leicester are also making plans to build or convert accommodation for people who would otherwise be homeless. But there are limits to what the charity, voluntary and faith sector can do without government support.
The Government are in a position to increase the social housing stock with capital investment and by ensuring that new developments dedicate at least 10% of the stock to affordable housing. By creating a ready supply of housing for people to move into from supported accommodation, that sector can achieve transformational outcomes for more and more people. The Government can also make joined-up working par for the course at local level through strategic use of their funding. The disadvantages and challenges that our most vulnerable citizens face rarely sit neatly within disciplinary silos, so it is vital that housing, justice, health and social care work together effectively, ideally following a Housing First approach.
It is fiscally sensible to invest more into social housing and supported accommodation. The Everybody In campaign of 2020 showed the strides that we can take against homelessness when there is the will and resource. Knowing that we can do better for our most vulnerable citizens, it is morally imperative that we do so.
Earl Effingham (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for proposing this debate. I am sure that everyone in this Room would agree that we should do everything in our power to ensure that people living in this country have a roof over their heads as a bare minimum.
The Government are trying to put an end to rough sleeping by the end of this Parliament, and this is a goal we should all be aiming for. One of the key ways we can achieve this goal is with supported housing, which provides crucial help to some of the most vulnerable people in our country. It can have an enormous positive impact on an individual’s quality of life, from their physical and mental health to the way they interact with everyone they encounter on a daily basis. We could actually say that good-quality and suitable supported housing saves lives. If individuals are able to access this, it protects them from rough sleeping and keeps them off the streets. This reduces their chances of ending up in hospital, undertaking criminal activity or using social services, which in turn helps to reduce the pressure on that type of support for others who are also in need.
Achieving such a system which works has multiple positive knock-on effects. Research shows that, every year, around 50,000 people are moved on to live independently from transitional supported housing. Around half of those people will have had a previous history of homelessness. We owe it to them to give them another chance of independence and a helping hand.
Supported housing provides the kinds of additional services that people in need acutely require. It can act as a one-stop shop to greatly help individuals move onwards and upwards with their lives. It links them up with their local GP. It helps them attend health appointments more consistently. It helps them engage professional help, whether for mental or physical conditions, and it helps them apply for benefits. In short, it gives them the kind of support that they desperately need to get their lives back on track and the kind of support they may never have previously experienced due to their circumstances.
Aside from the basic premise of an individual’s right to have a roof over their head, supported housing creates an environment where people can experience joy and fulfilment. How many of us take pleasure in preparing a meal for family and friends, enjoyed around a table where conversation flows and relationships blossom? That is exactly the kind of caring environment people experiencing homelessness should benefit from, and it is one that supported housing can provide.
Once the essentials have been covered, supported housing can help with what for many is the ultimate goal: help with job applications, which will enable them to stand on their own two feet, feel a sense of achievement and be able to live in their own accommodation one day and enjoy a happy and fulfilling life.
The community benefits speak for themselves, but from a financial perspective it also makes sense because of the additional cost it takes away from the state through reduced pressure on services. As we currently experience the cost of living crisis, supported housing plays an even more important role than before in helping people who are struggling and in need of assistance.
If the Government can commit to providing adequate funding for the sector, this will maintain the current level of support and will allow the development of new schemes which are needed to meet growing demand. I hope that, together, we can work to ensure that this hugely important area receives the focus and attention it deserves.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Earl and I thank my noble friend for her leadership in this debate.
Homelessness is not just about people sleeping rough on the streets. The lack of affordable, quality homes means that families and individuals endure poor-quality, privately managed, often cramped and unsanitary accommodation. For people with physical disabilities, there is often dangerously inadequate and unfit housing which is not sufficiently monitored, causing untold strain on their mental health and physical well-being.
I speak from two perspectives. The first is experience of leadership in a local authority and managing a housing association which provides an excellent quality of accommodation. The other is recently supporting a vulnerable adult on a journey through the maze of supported living.
If the system works well and a person is discharged into good-quality provision, it can be transformative, as noble Lords with far more expertise than I have said, with life-changing outcomes, an impact on individuals’ health and well-being and a reconnection to social interaction in the community—even a transition to independence.
While those are ideals, it is not the experience of many whom I have come across during the past 18 months, whether the supported accommodation is run by an independent residential care home or by a private landlord contracted to a local authority with a portfolio of housing that is often poorly, and sometimes wholly dangerously, adapted and managed. Frankly, I do not know how such accommodation has passed the inspection standards to meet the statutory duty of care.
Many individuals are stuck with desperate needs, with local health and social services simply overwhelmed because of a lack of funding, social workers, occupational therapists and other professionals, without whom many remain unnecessarily in extremely costly residential care homes. For example, lack of co-ordination between services in Medway meant that an individual who had recently had an amputation, and following positive rehabilitation in London, was placed back in Medway in costly yet wholly unfit accommodation where he was not able to properly access the toilet or shower facilities for three months, scraping his hands every time he tried to access his bedroom when leaving his kitchen or toilet.
This young man experienced 17 falls in three months trying to access the toilet over a very unsatisfactory ramp and without the promised level of local authority support, which the local authority was supposed to be paying for. As a result, he ended up in hospital for a further six months. Harrowingly, he then went back to a residential home for another very expensive batch of rehabilitation. It is a vicious circle: a process in which an individual in desperate need is not able to effect or influence change.
Due to a reduction in funding packages for supported housing, many residents are transitioning directly from a residential home or hospital into somewhere not fit for human habitation, let alone for people with complex physical needs, where local authorities are constrained with funds and have to work within the boundaries of the housing benefit cap.
I ask the Minister what consideration has been given to people accessing the good-quality homes that are often lying empty in an area when the same authorities are forced to pay thousands to residential homes and charlatan landlords who profit from their misery. It is not compassion we should talk about today but statutory duty of care and the obligatory standards we would set for ourselves.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
My Lords, I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak in this debate, introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe. Her excellent opening speech, as well as the short but on-the-button contributions from other noble Lords, have really laid bare the fact that this is indeed a very complex, multifaceted area, and we have a long way to go.
I hope the Committee will forgive me if I spend my four minutes taking a slightly different angle. My very first experience of supported housing came when I was standing for election for the first time back in the early 1990s. Some noble Lords will remember that this was the era that saw the start of care in the community.
A housing association had bought a pair of semis in my road and was turning them into supported housing for adults with learning difficulties. I was shocked and disappointed to find that some of my neighbours had decided “We don’t want that sort of people here”. They were banging on my door telling me that if I wanted their vote, I had to get it stopped. There were very nasty public meetings. The council stood its ground and granted the planning permission, and I lost the election.
However, I learned a very valuable lesson. People in my parents’ generation had been used to “that sort of people” being locked up in Victorian gothic institutions and they had massively entrenched views about the worth of such citizens and where they should live.
I am pleased to say that the residents moved in and one of the first things they did was to invite the neighbours to a barbecue. A good time was had by all and it was the start of a positive relationship with the home.
Would it not be good if I could say that that attitude has long gone? But it has not. Throughout my 16 years as mayor, some of the most acrimonious meetings were about the following: a drug rehabilitation clinic, a homeless shelter, accommodation for ex-prisoners and a women’s refuge. Yes, decent, civilised and, one might say, respectable middle-class people were screeching, shouting, swearing and baying for blood like film extras in a medieval hanging scene. Each meeting is etched in my memory.
I am left wondering whether this is at the heart of why vulnerable people across a wide spectrum of needs are very much the forgotten of the housing world. Think Grenfell Tower—they certainly felt forgotten; not seen and not heard.
It is clear from numerous reports and research that things are far from well in this part of the housing world, as articulated by noble Lords. There are many questions, but the one that struck me forcibly in those early days was: why should every local authority not have to provide for these vulnerable groups? Clearly, some opt out and find different ways to do so, particularly in two-tier areas where the upper tier has the duty to advise, support and provide the strategy, but the district council is not always obligated to work with this and provide accommodation in their local plan, so—guess what—some do not provide it. Guess why. It is because the attitude of, “We don’t want those sorts of people in our area” is still alive and well, often disguised as, “There’s no need for this here. We don’t have those sorts of problems”.
Is this why unscrupulous people feel that they can exploit and abuse such people? Who is checking up on them? Who gives a damn? The accounts given to the DLUHC committee last year made for difficult reading but did not surprise me. If some of our residents are regarded by some as the flotsam and jetsam of society, does that not make it easier to ignore them, at best, and, at worst, to assault and rob them? I hope the Minister will be able to tell us that quick wins will be had, loopholes will be changed and plans for long-term change are, at least, on the table. Finally, I am sure that she has got the message about the need for social housing. I apologise for going over time.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Warwick of Undercliffe for securing this important debate, and all noble Lords who have participated. I also thank the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the National Housing Federation and Shelter for their exceptionally helpful briefings, and, of course, our brilliant Library, which, as ever, has provided us with a comprehensive, relevant and balanced briefing.
Many of us in local government care passionately about supported housing and genuinely understand the importance of having safe, secure and stable accommodation accompanied by support tailored to individual needs. However, we often feel that we have been trying to deliver this for years with both hands tied behind our backs. We make the case over and again that, for vulnerable groups such as older people, those with learning or physical disabilities, families at risk—including the homeless—those who have been in the criminal justice system, people with complex needs that may include drug or alcohol dependency, those with poor mental health and those fleeing domestic abuse, a safe, secure and affordable home is the starting point for supporting their other needs.
We should also take note of the overwhelming evidence that providing these groups quickly with the housing and other support they need has the potential to save the public purse billions, as it prevents more expensive interventions having to be used, as comprehensively outlined by my noble friend Lady Warwick, the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, and other noble Lords.
It is fair to say that there are some fantastic examples of just what can be achieved all over the country, and it is to the enormous credit of local government that it has delivered some of these innovations in spite of the truly unprecedented cuts in local government funding and unfunded inflation experienced in recent years. The problem now is that we see a patchwork approach to this instead of what we want to see, which is excellence delivered everywhere.
I will give a couple of examples from Stevenage, which I know best, but there are great examples all over the country, including the one that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester kindly outlined about One Roof Leicester. We are developing new residential accommodation for older people, based on their ambitions and aspirations articulated during our consultation process. Sheltered housing will be located alongside extra care facilities so that people do not lose their community connections, neighbours, shops, faith groups and so on when they need more support. There will be on-site provision of health, podiatry, chiropody, hairdressing and so on—all available for them.
Our “No More” service started as a support project to help those with complex needs sustain tenancies, providing one-to-one support from a caseworker. Following the pandemic, it extended to incorporate a new range of housing under our housing first project. Using a combination of modern-method-of-construction buildings, new builds and regenerated homes, we are making sure that people have a roof over their heads and are supported by a package we have negotiated with the adult care team at the county council.
Lastly, for domestic abuse victims, we have our safe space accommodation. The noble Lord, Lord Young, clearly articulated the need for this, and kindly referred to the supporting people funding programme, which provides fully equipped homes for abuse victims and their families which have everything they need, even if they flee with nothing but the clothes they stand up in. They receive support from our team and initially occupy under licence but, in some cases, we are able to convert to a permanent tenancy if that proves in the interest of the victim.
However, there remain structural, financial and, occasionally, legal challenges to making the best provision for those who need supported housing. With support provision being under the remit of adult care and the NHS, as well as voluntary and community sector providers, and housing sitting with the district council, this becomes very complicated in two-tier areas and, I suspect, not much less complicated in areas with unitary government. The National Housing Federation reports that nine out of 10 supported housing residents have complex needs and at least one health condition or disability; half of them have more than one of these conditions.
Financing is always a challenge. With housing authorities still facing considerable difficulties, with receipts taken from right to buy by government and rent levels capped, it takes herculean efforts to fund the innovation we need to see in supported housing. Does the Minister have any idea what further steps the Government can take for financial incentives to deliver supported housing?
We had a useful, thoughtful and helpful debate in Committee of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill about what the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, described as a challenging planning environment. In response to a question in your Lordships’ Chamber this morning, the Minister indicated that she would be open to amendments to LURB to encourage supported housing provision. We would be interested whether she has any further thoughts on that this afternoon.
I will conclude—I could go on about this all day but will try not to. We know that there is an unmet need for supported housing, alongside all the other community aspects that can improve physical health and well-being. Sadly, the important role of all of these in public mental health is under great pressure following years of austerity cuts, as outlined by many noble Lords. We believe that this is short-sighted and only puts far more cost pressure on acute services. Let us pick up the innovation already under way in local government so that everyone who needs it has the supported housing provision best suited to their needs, leading to, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester mentioned, the transformational outcomes that we all want to see.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)
My Lords, I am very conscious that I do not have an awful lot of time. I will get through as much as I can and, if I do not answer everything, I will write to noble Lords.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for securing in such a timely manner this important debate on supported housing and its impact on homelessness prevention, health and well-being. I also thank all noble Lords for their considered and insightful contributions. I have a personal interest in this sector. My daughter, Sarah, who has been physically handicapped from birth, has just moved into wonderful supported housing in Winchester. It has transformed her life. She thought that she could not continue to be independent, but she is and has that support. However, noble Lords are absolutely right that funding for supported housing is more difficult and can be more expensive for people. We must consider this; as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, said, there are good facilities but there are also some bad ones.
The reach of supported housing is wide, providing vital support for many people to live independently. These include older people, people experiencing homelessness, people with disabilities and those with mental ill health. There are many good providers, but there are others that we need to deal with.
The Government see supported housing as key to the delivery of successful outcomes in areas of utmost importance, including rough sleeping, domestic abuse, and adult social care, as we have heard. Not least through the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill, the Government are committed to ensuring that there is supported housing for those people not just in numbers but of good quality into the future. We are hearing horror stories about what is happening in the sector.
I am grateful to the National Housing Federation for commissioning its important research on the impact of supported housing on homelessness prevention, health and well-being. Its key findings include the finding that, were it not for supported housing, there would be an increase in homelessness and more need for in-patient care and prison places. The research also highlights the importance of pathways from supported housing, as we heard, and the difficulties that may be experienced by some people when moving on—there was a lot of talk about moving on, which is an important issue.
As I said, the Government are very aware of having enough accommodation for people, not only supported housing but accommodation afterwards. That is why two things are happening: there is £11.5 billion in the affordable homes programme, which includes a necessity for local authorities to look at housing for older, disabled and vulnerable people in their areas. Our planning rules, which will be strengthened through the LUR Bill, mean that, in councils’ local plans, they must consider the needs of these people, which is perhaps an important change in attitude.
Socially rented homes often serve the needs of the most vulnerable in society, and, as I said, the Government recognised this in the levelling-up White Paper. We want people who need help to live independently to be able to access supported housing, but, where possible, they should also be able to move forward with their lives and into general housing in a timely way.
There is evidence that the demand for supported housing is growing, particularly among certain cohorts. Research by the London School of Economics in 2017 projected that, by 2030, the amount of supported housing needed in England for older people and people with learning disabilities would increase by 35% and 55%, respectively—that is a big increase. However, national data is outdated and needs to be improved, which is why the department has commissioned research to provide an up-to-date estimate of the size, cost and demand of the supported housing sector. The findings are expected to be published at the end of this year, and they will be important in further policy development in this sector.
In the longer term, and subject to Royal Assent, strategic planning and licensing measures in the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill—which the noble Lord, Lord Best, will ably lead through the House—will enable further opportunities for data collection to support national and local decision-making on supported housing. Taken together, these steps will build a better national picture of the need for, and supply of, supported housing into the future, as I said.
The Government encourage new supply of supported housing through capital subsidy—I mentioned the £11.5 billion affordable homes programme—alongside the Department of Health and Social Care investment in supported housing through the care and support specialised housing fund. But, as noble Lords said, we know that supported housing is more than the bricks and mortar of a building; it is about the critical support services that come along with the home, to enable people to live independently.
Funding for housing-related local support services is through the wider local government settlement. This will perhaps be difficult for anyone in local government to take into account, because they are under so many pressures, but local government got £59.7 billion in England this year, and much of that was for use in adult social care.
But the integrated care systems coming together in areas are also key to this, because that is where we can look at the joined-up health and care services—the council working with the health community—to see where we can keep independence. I have to say that it is also probably where we can look to save money locally, or at least get more service than is currently there, by keeping people independent in really good accommodation, such as supported housing. So that is an opportunity to have those conversations locally in integrated care partnerships.
Supported housing is, and will continue to be, an integral part of achieving the Government’s manifesto commitment to end rough sleeping by the end of this Parliament. However, as I have said, we do not care just about the amount but about the quality. That is why the Government are backing the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Best. We look forward to its Second Reading on 21 April. The Government will support it wholeheartedly.
I just make it clear to the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, that care homes are separately regulated under the CQC. They are not supported housing, but some forms of housing with care—such as extra care or supported living—are. It is quite a complex issue and it is important that we understand that. That is why the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Best, is so important: it covers the regulatory bit of the supported housing that the CQC provides at the moment in care homes.
The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, talked about poor housing that is not fit for purpose. Again, I ask that we make time for the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Best, because that is an important part of taking that forward.
We have talked about moving-on accommodation; I think that I have covered everything that noble Lords have asked, but I will go through Hansard. We recognise the benefits of supported housing and what it can deliver for not only residents but wider society. The Government are committed to ensuring that supported housing is available and provides good-quality support—quality is important—and accommodation for all those in our communities who need it.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
Before the noble Baroness sits down, may I raise a point about the funding that has gone to upper-tier authorities in two-tier areas for adult social care? There is no requirement for those authorities to passport any of that to the housing authority, which is a really big issue. We can deliver what we can with the funding that we have in district authorities, but there is no requirement on those other authorities to pass that funding on. That is something that the Government may want to think about.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I take that into account; I will look at it and come back to the noble Baroness.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
Also just before the noble Baroness sits down, as a former social worker, I understand the differences very well. The point that I was trying to make—perhaps in a rush—is that there is a transition from residential healthcare via social services. Local authorities have some responsibility for ensuring that people are placed properly.
Performing Arts
Baroness Featherstone
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to support the performing arts sectors throughout England.
Baroness Featherstone (LD)
My Lords, I am certain that the Minister and Secretary of State are both fully aware that cultural recovery post Covid in the regions of England is well behind London. In this debate, I am expecting the Minister to list the things that the Government are doing in terms of the performing arts, such as tax reliefs, the culture recovery fund and culture places—they are indeed needed and most welcome. He may point to pots of money available for projects such as town funds, levelling-up funds and so on. However, as Eliza Easton of PEC and Nesta asked:
“How can levelling up funding (which requires competitive bids) make up for the huge decline in the day-in-day-out revenue funding which used to come through local authorities?”
Moreover, the funding pots that are available just do not touch the sides of the massive cuts to local government funding of 30%. Local authorities are, or were, the biggest funders of cultural activity across the whole of England, and they have been comprehensively kneecapped. They fulfil the most obvious of place-based actors, as they are in every place.
In its recent report, Cornerstones of Culture, the Local Government Association makes it clear that there is a vital need for a sustainable, multi-year funding settlement to enable local authorities to support the arts. The report reveals a £2.4 billion funding gap. It rightly argues that greater collaborative work between councils and cultural partners, combined with place-based funding from the Government, is crucial for sustaining the ecology of art and culture in the UK, and that a shift towards place-led approaches that enable a greater diversity of communities, cultural providers and practitioners to shape local decision-making is vital.
Absolutely nothing that the Government are doing slows or reverses the decline in teachers of dance, drama and music, or in teaching hours or position in the curriculum—nor does it solve the apprenticeship levy or the much-needed support for work-based training for young people and for people already in the industry and freelancers. It does not deal with the potential decimation of music hubs—out to consultation—nor is there support for our small music venues, which are closing down at the rate of one a week. That is where real people meet locally for real music. It is where Ed Sheeran and Adele started—it is where local talent begins. I understand that Minister Lopez is to meet the music industry about support for small venues, so let us hope that it is not just a meeting but a catalyst to actual support. Some government pressure would not go amiss on the industry itself to step up.
Mid-scale touring is also under pressure and threat. What are the Government doing about support for it? The whole touring ecosystem has been shaken. Yes, tax credits will help a bit, but they will not help most of the mid-scale touring. Then there is the scarlet pimpernel of promises—the eternally missing manifesto pledge of a £90 million arts premium, which is nowhere to be seen. We were told that it was to fund enriching activities for all pupils. Rishi Sunak, now Prime Minister, promised £25,000 on average for each secondary school to invest in arts activities in his March 2020 Budget. Then teachers were told that the funding would arrive in September 2021. When it did not, the Schools Minister said that the arts premium was subject to that year’s spending review. But—guess what?— when the spending review arrived, Rishi Sunak made no mention of the arts premium.
The performing arts are vital for all sorts of reasons, not just economically but in terms of well-being and community; they help with depression and anxiety and building bridges between cultures and worldviews. In other words, they are a vital part of the existence of a civilised society, which no one should be denied. Ministers can regularly be heard to chant that very same mantra, paying verbal homage but without willing the means and the action to achieve the ends.
We need a new deal to ensure the maintenance of performing arts in England, one that will ensure that we re-establish higher numbers of students taking and learning performing arts subjects across the country. At the heart of this diminution of the performing arts—I am sure the Minister will correct me on this—seems to be a systemic reductionist approach by the Government by deed and by word. We see it in the choice of EBacc subjects, the slashing of 50% of funding for university arts courses and the reduction in the number of our brilliant teachers of drama, dance and music, together with, as I mentioned before, a reduction in teaching hours of those subjects and their position in the curriculum. It is exacerbated by perpetual derogatory references to those vital subjects, describing dance and other creative subjects as “low value”, “non-priority”, “dead-end” and so on.
The government message that only a knowledge-based curriculum is valid has resulted in 66% of educators reporting a decline in the uptake of, for example, dance qualifications for students aged 14 and over. Music, dance, performing arts, art and design, as well as media studies, have seen their subsidy fall from £243 per full-time student per year in 2020-21 to £121.50 —more than halved. Drama teacher numbers have fallen by 20% and drama hours taught by 15%. There are 9% fewer music teachers, and one in seven music teachers have left the profession.
This Government’s school reforms have caused pupils to move away from subjects such as dance, music and art. We need both STEAM and STEM. I ask the Minister where it is that everyone, no matter what their background, can be enthused, imbued, uplifted, find talents, and enjoy and expand their horizons culturally? It is school. If it is not school, it will be who your parents are, what your parents earn and where your parents live—and that is not very levelling up, is it?
When it comes to apprenticeships—such a great way to bring young people into the working world of performing arts—the apprenticeship levy is not fit for purpose. Under the current system, firms have to set aside 0.5% of their payroll for apprenticeships. However, many employers say that they are unable to use the funds, which are taken by the Treasury if not used within two years, because the condition imposed is that businesses are not allowed to fund any courses that are shorter than one year in duration. This means that they are often unable to use the funds because many performing arts opportunities are of less than one year; they are much shorter. It is not fit for purpose, so please just change it.
Then there are the music hubs, where the proposition that they should be reduced from 116 to 43 is out to consultation until tomorrow. How can the Government go on about levelling up when these sorts of retractions are proposed? Chris Walters, the MU national organiser for education, has said, quite rightly, that
“the Government’s rationale for wanting fewer hubs has never been clear, and its updated rationale remains a list of untested assertions”
and that if the reduction goes ahead, it is
“likely to cause a great deal of disruption with no guarantee that children will receive better music education”.
All in all, it is quite a bleak picture for the performing arts across England.
I understand that there is to be a new cultural education plan, chaired by the superb noble Baroness, Lady Bull, but can the Minister confirm whether that review will enable actual curriculum changes? Will it outsource the cultural curriculum away from the school estate and timetable? I am really concerned about that, because if it is so, it will be a nail in the coffin of every child being able to take part in dance, drama and music—literally, a death knell.
There is also to be a music education plan in 2024—I wait more in hope than expectation—and, of course, the all-important creative industries sector vision. Given that the new Secretary of State highlighted the creative industries as a
“key growth sector for the UK economy”—
I could not agree more—at the opening of Creative UK’s Creative Coalition Festival this year, expectation is running high.
I have had very little time to present the case for so many parts of our performing arts under threat—I did not have time to touch opera and many others. It was literally a gallop through, when each deserves its own debate. I look forward to the Government’s response and hope that all the issues that I have raised will be fully addressed.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate and thank the noble Baroness for securing it.
As noble Lords will be well aware, last year music, performance and the visual arts contributed an estimated £11.5 billion to the UK economy and, importantly, provided priceless joy and entertainment to millions across England.
No doubt a lot of focus in the debate will be about funding but before I turn to that I too want to talk briefly about the immensely positive impact performing arts have on the well-being of those of us who are lucky enough to experience them. I put myself in that category: there is no feeling or adrenaline rush quite like the one you get at the end of a great concert or show. Personally, I particularly enjoy musical theatre and never tire of Les Mis—but I will not admit on the record how many times I have seen it.
Having said that, we know that too many people in communities across the country do not get the opportunity to go to the theatre or to hear live music and be inspired, entertained and challenged by that experience. So it is important that there is a sustained focus in government to support, encourage and expand access to the performing arts and creative sector more broadly; otherwise, the critical support provided to the performing arts through the culture recovery fund during the pandemic will have been in vain. That saw more than £1 billion given to over 5,000 cultural organisations across England. For many, that support during Covid was crucial to their survival.
In north-west Norfolk, Westacre Theatre received £158,000, which it described as a lifeline that enabled it to
“survive turbulent times and carve a sustainable and exciting future”.
Based in a small village, the theatre provides a year-round programme of in-house productions, visiting companies, concerts, cinema screenings, and so much more. It runs youth workshops, providing opportunities in rural Norfolk for young people who might otherwise not get them to act on stage in a theatre and experience the thrill of live performance.
It is to be welcomed that support for the performing arts has continued post the pandemic. In this month’s Budget, for instance, the Chancellor extended the higher rate of theatre and orchestra tax relief.
Obviously, Arts Council England plays a central role in supporting arts and culture in this country but, as we heard from the noble Baroness, it is just one piece of the funding jigsaw. Through a variety of initiatives and funding streams, not least in relation to the levelling-up agenda, the Government should be, and are, supporting the performing arts to extend access and opportunity for people to both enjoy and take part in them to all regions in England.
One such example can be seen in King’s Lynn, which successfully secured £25 million from the Government’s towns fund. Some £8 million of that funding has been allocated to refurbish St George’s Guildhall—something that had not been done for years and for which the local community had been campaigning for a long time—and develop a new creative hub. As noble Lords may know, the Guildhall is Britain’s oldest continuously working theatre, and one in which Shakespeare is believed to have performed.
The project aims to build on this important cultural heritage and develop an arts and culture centre, with the Guildhall at its centre, in the very heart of the town. Importantly, it will increase participation for young people through its educational programmes. I welcome such developments as, for me, extending the educational, economic and social benefits that come from culture is, and should be, a core part of the levelling-up agenda.
I would be grateful if my noble friend could set out what further plans the Government have to extend opportunities to young people, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, to get more involved in the performing arts.
Of course, it is not just taxpayer funding that supports the performing arts. Private sector investment and involvement are crucial if we are to continue to see the sector thrive. A great example of what can be achieved with local determination is Festival Too. In 1985 a group of businesspeople got together to put on a free music event to complement the established King’s Lynn Festival. The budget that year was £5,000. This year the budget will be £140,000, with the money for the event raised from local sponsorship, fundraising events, and bucket collections during the event. It is held over three weekends, is entirely free, features well-known and local music acts, and attracts around 60,000 people. It is a fantastic local initiative and, having been last year, I can thoroughly recommend it to all noble Lords.
Another oft-cited example of how government has successfully leveraged private investment into the arts is the tax incentives that have helped our film and television industry to become world leading. Shepperton Studios is currently on course to complete an expansion project that will see it become the second-largest studio complex in the world by the end of this year, with long-term leases signed with Netflix and Prime Video. In February, Buckinghamshire Council approved plans for a 1.4 million square foot expansion at Pinewood, which will deliver 21 new purpose-built sound stages, a backlot filming space and a training hub, creating more than 8,000 new jobs, importantly, and injecting £640 million into the economy. Having been fortunate enough to see first-hand the sets for “No Time to Die” on a visit there, I know how huge the existing site already is and what a vote of confidence such an expansion is for the UK’s film industry, with all the benefits for the wider creative and performing arts sector that will flow from it.
Although I am perhaps more positive than the noble Baroness and believe that there is a bright future ahead, there can be no room for complacency; I completely accept that the performing arts and broader creative sector continue to face an array of challenges. Can my noble friend give us any update on the progress and likely publication date of the creative industries sector vision, which I know is keenly awaited?
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, on the helpfully wide view of her opening speech. I am grateful for briefings from the Independent Society of Musicians, Equity, UK Music and the Music Venue Trust. There are so many concerns now facing the performing arts—indeed, all the arts—that it is difficult to know where to start. Therefore, with six minutes, we will be necessarily selective.
Only four weeks ago, the three BBC English orchestras and the BBC Singers were unthreatened, highly regarded public assets—we should emphasise the word “public”, because if the BBC Singers are saved, and that is still an “if”, but end up being supported by private money, they will not be the same much-loved people’s choir that they have been for almost 100 years. That is a step backwards, not forwards. The huge outcry against the BBC’s decision has taken some by surprise; not just the classical music world has protested but, tellingly, much of the rest of the arts sector, which understands that an attack on classical music is an attack on all the arts because of the ecology that exists within them. It is the same principle that, if we diminish the arts in London, we diminish the whole country. That is why, in levelling up, robbing Peter to pay Paul is no solution.
We are getting mixed signals from the BBC over how significant budgetary constraints have been in this decision-making. However, the Independent Society of Musicians points out that the £1.5 million cost of the BBC Singers is a mere 0.04% of its broadcasting expenditure. Although the BBC’s finances are undoubtedly being squeezed by central government, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that there is an ideological component to these decisions—or a serious mistake has been made. The cuts are unnecessary and need to be reversed. The performing arts are a huge part of the significance of the BBC and are massively important for the country. As regards expenditure, the BBC needs to understand better where its real priorities lie. It says that it wants to concentrate on music education, but what is the point of that if there are no jobs to go to?
As has been pointed out, music hubs are being cut from more than 150 to about 40 and will cover a wider geographical area. Music should be brought properly back into schools and, ideally, every student would have the same opportunities. That means removing the EBacc and Progress 8, which have been largely responsible for the 40% fall in GCSE arts subjects between 2010 and 2022, with a 40% fall in A-level music entries over the same period. Numbers of hours taught for arts subjects, numbers of specialised teachers and teacher recruitment have all seen significant reductions, to the point that some secondary schools now have no music teachers at all, while the subject is replaced by an EBacc one.
Moreover, if the performing arts are not to be the preserve of the rich, significantly more money must be spent on these subjects in state primary and secondary schools. That should include free instrumental tuition across the whole of the UK. The shortage of workers with technical and behind-the-scenes skills in theatre is not just about the better-paid film industry poaching them; it is also about drama in all its aspects not being understood within schools as an exciting and viable career path. The current accountability measures have a lot to answer for.
In terms of touring, I ask the Government to continue to make representations to the US Government with a view to scrapping the planned 250% increase in the filing fees for certain US visas, which would be prohibitive for emerging artists and orchestras. Following Brexit, this would be a double whammy for many new artists—particularly when you consider that they need to accrue the points that European tours enable in order to tour the US. A survey by the #LetTheMusicMove campaign found that 70% of artists and managers said that they would not be able to tour the US with these changes.
Very little has happened to better enable music touring in Europe. The major problems around visas, work permits, carnets, CITES and merchandise remain. The Government could do much more both domestically and in talks with Europe, including negotiating a visa waiver agreement. Indeed, in evidence to the European Affairs Committee on October 11 last year, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, said:
“I do not see why we could not agree a narrow visa waiver arrangement covering defined categories such as musicians and actors … If the relationship warms up … these things are possible.”
Now that the Windsor Framework has passed through Parliament, there is no excuse not to do so.
Finally, I mention the importance of grass-roots music venues, which the noble Baroness has referred to, and the disturbing statistic that one music venue closes every week. High energy bills have hit all the arts, but smaller local live music venues are hugely important for the pipeline of talent. The Music Venue Trust recommends that tickets sold for the larger stadiums should contain a contribution to the grass-roots circuit in the same way that Premier League football supports the smaller clubs. It also asks for such venues to be included within the energy bills discount scheme and that VAT be removed from cultural ticketing, which would make a huge difference to this sector and be of considerable help to emerging artists. The arts sector has been grateful for the extension of tax relief to theatres, galleries and orchestras, but it would be more helpful still if the music element of the orchestra relief was widened to include other music artists.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, for securing this debate and share the concerns of many other noble Lords about the challenges facing BBC musicians and the need to support small venues and touring programmes. The case has been made eloquently.
I am also grateful for the Library briefing, but I note that it begins—as has already been quoted—
“In 2022 music, performance and visual arts contributed an estimated £11.5bn to the UK economy.”
Have we really reached the point where we primarily describe the arts by the financial contribution that they make? Can we not imagine a world where the House of Lords Library produces briefings which say that, in the past year, 39,000 people had their minds opened and changed because of the plays they saw at the National Theatre; scores of people entered into the grim reality of migrants because they went to something at the National Theatre and then came back and signed up to some campaigning organisation to support them; and 40,000 people felt that they touched eternity in that breathtaking silence at the end of the Rachmaninoff “Vespers”? Can we not somehow talk about enriching the human soul? That is surely what it is about. We cannot and must not measure the performing arts primarily in financial terms but in the way that they expand our imaginations, unlock our sympathies and confront us with alternative realities that take us out of our comfort zones and demand that we engage with them.
In the few moments that I have to speak, I want to focus on one specific section of the performing arts: church music. The world has never considered the UK to be an especially musical nation—others can sometimes be rather rude about us. Yet, when you look back over the past 150 years, you can see that many of our greatest composers—Gurney, Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Howells, Walton, Parry, Stanford, Tavener, Rutter and so on—started out singing in church choirs. Most of them did not come from privileged backgrounds. Often their fathers were church organists and their earliest compositions were hymns and anthems. Without church music, most of them would never have become composers. That tradition continues today among popular contemporary musicians, such as Ed Sheeran, Annie Lennox and Chris Martin of Coldplay—he was a chorister in the Exeter Cathedral Choir.
Take our Anglican cathedrals, which currently employ over 100 professional musicians and are involved with 4,000 choristers. Catholic cathedrals, other large churches and some Oxbridge colleges also employ more than 100 professional musicians. The National Schools Singing Programme, run by the Roman Catholic Church, has already expanded into 27 of the 32 Catholic dioceses, reaching more than 17,000 children in 175 schools. The Royal School of Church Music engages huge numbers of people through the “Voice for Life” scheme, designed to help people discover what their voice can do. The RSCM medal scheme takes choristers step by step through the various singing exams. A new initiative, Hymnpact, is a scheme designed to connect churches and schools, which is being piloted in my own diocese.
The St Albans Cathedral chorister outreach programme was developed in partnership with the Hertfordshire Music Service. Funded by Sing Up, the national singing programme, it was designed to encourage church choristers to work with primary school-aged children to enjoy singing. It has so far worked with more than 80 primary schools in west Hertfordshire, involving more than 6,000 children. The results have been so impressive that my own cathedral, in partnership with the Hertfordshire Music Service, continues to fund it even though the funding stream has officially ended. It has now been running for over 15 years. Two or three primary schools join the project every term for 10 weeks of singing teaching in schools, with up to about 90 children, followed by a concert in the cathedral to sing with the choristers at the end of the project.
None of this is funded by the state. In some limited cases, it has been helped with some seed-corn funding to get it going. It is absolutely right that in this debate there will be calls for proper long-term funding for professional musicians, actors and dancers. I support that. We need a long-term settlement which will enable this vital area not just to survive but to flourish and grow in our nation. However, at the same time, I ask the Minister: will he and his colleagues take a fresh look at the whole breadth of the creative and performing arts? There are many areas where, with some modest but consistent grants, we can see quite extraordinary results in our performing arts, such as what is happening through grass-roots singing in our churches and schools right across this land.
Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)
My Lords, I cannot demur from anything I have heard thus far. I thank the noble Baroness for instigating this debate. I declare my interests as a composer, a broadcaster and—the right reverend Prelate will be pleased to hear—an ex-chorister at Westminster Cathedral.
Drawing on my broadcasting experience, at least 50% of the people who come through my door, as it were, to be interviewed were turned on to music by an inspired teacher at school. A lot of young people go on to be choral scholars, for example, or to play in pop groups, which brings in incredible revenue.
When we have mentioned our concerns about the lack of music in schools, the Minister has always in the past quite rightly talked about the hubs. I accept that they have done a great job but, if they are going to be cut, our concerns will increase still further. Musicians at the moment are beginning to feel as though they are at the wrong end of a coconut shy: so many things have hit us. I understand that, in order to level up, as the noble Baroness and I would like, it is terribly important that we take the arts to underprovided areas. People will have to suffer; there will have to be cuts. It is true with the BBC as well, but the problem is that the arts are somehow always the first port of call for people wanting to make cuts.
With great respect to the right reverend Prelate, I will say one thing about money. It is important that we get into context that we are not asking for charity. Of that £11.5 billion that has been mentioned often, the Government’s stake, as an investment, was 4%—my very kind accountant worked this out for me this morning—and, even with the National Lottery money, it becomes 6%. So investment in the arts is very profitable for this country, which is why I worry about the future of music, if young people will not be there to people our choirs and orchestras and to become teachers.
The noble Baroness mentioned an important point: in schools, you now tend to get peripatetic teaching for an instrument, or music classes, if you are well off. If you are not, you will probably not get anything. I subscribe to various charities, such as the London Music Fund and Future Talent—I have even provided instruments—and one realises what a difference it makes. I remember going into Wormwood Scrubs prison and places like that, as a member of the Koestler Trust—I mentioned this in my maiden speech in 2013. I managed to get a guitar for a prisoner, who wrote to me afterwards and said, “You’ve no idea how this transformed my life. To be honest, if I’d had this means of expression when I was 19, I don’t think I would now be serving life for murder”. I realise that that is a rather dramatic point, but it is important if you broaden it, because there is a social dividend. It is not just about money, as the right reverend Prelate mentioned, although obviously that is important; it is about having a more cohesive society. The arts bring us together and make us listen to each other. If we are singing in a choir or playing an instrument, we have to listen, which is one of the first ways of getting young people to behave well and understand the nature of listening and giving.
I will say a little about why we are all so worried about certain groups such as the BBC Singers and the ENO—Sir James MacMillan has written about this. Nowadays, we do not think that the visual arts—Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, for example—are terribly difficult to process; we all love them. Millions of people go to Tate Modern. New music is more difficult: as it moved away from tonality—although it has moved back in many ways—a lot of people felt totally out of touch, which is why you need expert groups such as the BBC Singers, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta and the Britten Sinfonia, because they are the adventurers that are pushing the way forward.
I will make two points, which are more about asking the Minister to pass this on to his colleagues. First, in order to take the arts wider, somewhere like Reading Gaol is a wonderful example of a place that could be used as an arts centre. People have marched locally. This was Oscar Wilde’s great triumph in adversity, which he overcame by writing the wonderful “Ballad of Reading Gaol”. The area around there cannot be developed, for lots of architectural reasons. So that is a question for the Ministry of Justice.
Secondly, cabotage means that, if people have the visas, which are beginning to come through, they can arrive at a third location and have no instruments to play. I wrote to the office of the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, about this and I was promised a written reply that I have not received yet. If the Minister could chase that up, I would be very grateful.
Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)
My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend for this important debate.
We applaud the concept of levelling up but the delivery is most important—I think this is what the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, was saying—and an essential part of that is the performing arts sector. The year 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of local authority spending on the arts. I echo my noble friend’s big ask: how can levelling-up funding make up for the decline in the revenue which used to come through local authorities—which understand the needs and asks of their local communities?
I am a trustee of the Lowry in Salford, a prime example of the important contribution local culture can make to levelling up. Not so long ago, the Salford Quays were derelict, disused docks; now they are a thriving, creative hub. What was behind this regeneration? It was an artist, who inspired a gallery and a performing arts centre within a great building, with a mission to involve, include and inspire the local community—since the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, likes musical theatre, I ask her to come to the Lowry. Most importantly, there was a city council which had the foresight and the commitment to achieve this, its vision. What a result. I argue that without the Lowry there would have been no move to Salford by the BBC, no expansion into Salford by ITV, and no MediaCity. The local mayor and local council continue to be intrinsically and intimately involved. So will the Government take note of the excellent LGA report Cornerstones of Culture, already mentioned, which recommends a return to local decision-making when shaping cultural provision?
As my noble friend Lady Featherstone, the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, engagement with the arts starts at school. But STEM, not STEAM, has been the Conservative mantra, totally ignoring the fact that there should not be a choice between arts and science—they are symbiotic. The Government say that arts subjects are not “strategic priorities”, the same Government whose industrial strategy prizes the creative industries—of which the performing arts are integral—as a priority sector. Yet they persist with the STEM-obsessed EBacc. As Grayson Perry correctly predicted some years ago:
“If arts subjects aren’t included in the Ebacc, schools won’t stop doing them overnight. But there will be a corrosive process, they will be gradually eroded … By default, resources won’t go into them”.
That is what is happening.
There is another problem: the very different approach to cultural education in the state and private sector; the private sector recognises the benefits and offers art courses in abundance. The noble Baroness, Lady Evans, touched on the inevitable consequence: research by the Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre has found that people from more privileged backgrounds are twice as likely to be employed in the cultural sector, which means less diversity in every sense. The UK’s creative workforce does not adequately reflect the diversity of the UK population.
I join my noble friend Lady Featherstone in welcoming the appointment of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, as chair of a new cultural education plan, and I hope that when she and her team deliver a solution to righting these wrongs—which I am sure they will—the Government will listen. I join others in asking the Minister when the Government will finally make good on his party’s manifesto pledge of the arts premium. Here I say to the right reverend Prelate that if we do not make the point that the arts bring money in, the Treasury does not listen. I also ask the Minister, to echo the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, again, when the creative industries sector vision—another Scarlet Pimpernel, to steal my noble friend’s analogy—will see light of day? It was first announced in February 2022 to be published that summer, but that is quite a long time ago.
As mentioned by my noble friend Lady Featherstone, there is a threat to touring. The ability to tour is essential to the performing arts, both economically but also in building careers and expanding audiences. We face a particularly serious problem in Europe due to Brexit—again, mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley—with cost issues and complicated paperwork over visas, carnets and cabotage. Since reopening agreements with the EU appears no longer to be out of bounds, does the Minister agree that it is time to negotiate a cultural touring agreement with the EU, and that this is urgent? Then there is the loss of Creative Europe funding, and support via the EU structural funds. The UK shared prosperity fund has been set up to cover that gap. Can the Minister update us on what proportion of successful bids and local investment plans will help our cultural organisations?
Finally, the Prime Minister, when Chancellor, said:
“For any country, there are probably a few things that you are world-class at … For us, in the UK, the creative industries, arts, culture is something we are genuinely world-class at”.
This may not remain the case unless the problems mentioned today are addressed, and swiftly.
Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter. She always puts her finger on the point and makes it well. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, on her robust and trenchant opening speech, because she has opened up a debate that we will need to continue having extensively.
This week, Paul O’Grady died, and there have been lots of tributes to him—I pay my personal tribute. He was a performing artist, who excited people about the world of art and culture in a different way that many of us found very enjoyable. I particularly liked the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Evans. I have now found something that she has in common with my wife: a love of a good musical—I was struggling before, I must confess.
It has not been long since our last debate on the arts, but plenty has happened in the intervening weeks. English National Opera has been given a one-year funding reprieve, and we expect news of a longer-term package shortly. A survey of the ENO Chorus by Equity, however, suggests that an overwhelming majority of performers would leave should the organisation be relocated out of London, as most have children in schools in or near the capital and spouses whose jobs are London-based. It is a serious problem for the ENO, and I hope that there is a solution to some of those issues. Perhaps the Minister can shed some light on it.
We have also had the BBC’s announcement of plans to wind down BBC Singers, prompting a significant public backlash and a U-turn. Wigmore Hall has announced its latest schedule, including a trio of “low stimulus” classical concerts to ensure neurodivergent audiences can access live music. However, another downside is that the closure of the Oldham Coliseum has been confirmed.
There have been missed opportunities too. The Chancellor’s Budget extended existing tax reliefs for theatres, orchestras, museums and galleries for a further two years—a move which of course we welcome—but there was nothing for grass-roots venues. I recently asked Ministers why they did not give some form of tax relief and got a very interesting reply from the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, who told me:
“A tax relief for grassroots music venues is not currently under consideration.”
In a reply given to me the same day, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, said that that the Government were
“committed to supporting our grassroots music venues, which are the backbone of our world-leading music sector”.
Those two comments and observations do not seem altogether to be in the same place.
Many venues are reporting gradual improvements in visitor numbers, which is important, but many are still unable to operate at capacity, either because some people remain reluctant to attend live performances following the pandemic or because the cost of living crisis means that they simply cannot afford to spend that part of their income. At the same time, many venues are facing high energy and other costs, exacerbating issues around attendance figures. Can the Minister outline what work the department does with cultural organisations and venues to keep track of ticket prices and sales and trends in audience numbers and behaviour? How are the datasets used to assist with policy-making? Is that something that his department gives fair consideration to?
One area where more discussion and support may be needed is live music. We have heard today about problems with visas, cabotage and so on for those wishing to travel abroad, and we know that the number of music venues is beginning to shrink—the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, referred to that: one venue a week. That is a serious issue. I know that in my own city a number of venues have disappeared.
We are lucky in the UK to have a vibrant music scene and to export artists’ work across the globe, but while venues such as the Manchester Arena have a full programme and strong ticket sales, smaller venues are not necessarily doing so well. We have seen an explosion in the number of new large music venues in recent years, which is a good thing, with a number planned for London and several other major UK cities, but many are asking what those venues are doing to ensure that they have new headlining acts—ideally, acts from a diverse range of backgrounds, rather than those who start their career on an elevated platform—in the coming years and decades. If we do not do more to stimulate smaller venues, the acts that develop and improve the quality of their performance in them, becoming niche and then broader-based and mainstream, we will not have performers in the bigger venues in years to come.
Whether it is theatre, dance or music, we need to ensure that there are opportunities for people to get involved, be spotted and work their way up. Some of that work is down to production companies, but a lot of it is down to education. I was delighted that education was brought to the fore of the debate today. I do not know about others, but when I was at school, my interest in the arts was greatly enhanced when, aged 15, I saw Judi Dench perform at the Aldwych Theatre. It was part of my curriculum.
To conclude, we want to see the performing arts continue to flourish. This requires a long-term, strategic approach. The noble Baroness, Lady Evans, put her finger on it: we need to see the Government’s plan. I hope that the Minister can help us with that today so that we can begin to see the development of meaningful help for grass-roots organisations and venues.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for securing the debate today and to all noble Lords who have spoken for their thoughtful contributions.
The past two or three years have been a turbulent time for the performing arts. I was appointed Arts Minister, the first time round, towards the tail end of the pandemic, as we were starting to emerge from those very difficult months. It has been a privilege to see the resilient and adaptive way in which the sector has responded, welcoming people back across its thresholds, and I have been very proud of the part the Government have played in supporting these sectors that are incredibly important to not just our economy but our lives.
The Government’s commitment to the performing arts is demonstrated to the tune of billions of pounds through the range of support that we have made available over the past three years; the £1.5 billion culture recovery fund and the recent tax reliefs in the Budget, which have been mentioned, being key elements of it. I am also delighted that the Arts Council’s next national portfolio investment programme, which kicks in next week at the start of the new tax year, will see a record number of arts organisations—almost 1,000—receive funding from the taxpayer.
This programme will invest over £400 million a year over the next three years in creative and cultural organisations right across England and will see more organisations funded in more parts of the country than ever before. It is a larger funding pot, and annual funding for organisations in parts of the country which have previously been neglected will increase substantially. We will see a particularly increased investment in 78 places—areas designated as Levelling Up for Culture Places—which were previously overlooked for arts funding, which will collectively get £43.5 million each year. That is an important thing and I look forward to seeing the arts transforming the lives of people and communities across England in the coming years, particularly in those areas which are benefiting anew.
As a number of noble Lords mentioned, at the Budget earlier this month the Chancellor extended the higher rates of theatre tax relief, orchestra tax relief and museums and galleries exhibition tax relief. These higher rates were brought in to help those vital sectors bounce back from the pandemic, but we know that the tail effects of the pandemic still endure and that there are new challenges, not least the rising cost of energy, so extending them for a further two years will help offset those ongoing economic pressures and boost investment in our cultural sectors. I am sure I am not the only person on the Association of British Orchestras’ email list. It sent its spring update this morning. I think it is worth quoting what it says:
“The higher rate of relief will help unlock new growth, protect and generate employment in the sector, increase access to culture and opportunity across the country and boost music export potential”.
I completely agree.
The changes the Chancellor made at the Budget are estimated to be worth £350 million over five years—a strong sign of the Government’s faith in and support for our cultural sector. In addition to that support, last week we announced that more than 70 cultural projects across the country will receive a share of £60 million of taxpayer subsidy through the Government’s cultural investment fund. That funding will help to level up access to arts and culture for everyone, no matter where they live. It will support organisations to upgrade venues and incorporate new technology so that they can best serve their local community and the wider country. It will help museums, cultural venues and public libraries to carry out essential maintenance, improve access and drive economic growth.
I was pleased to visit King’s Lynn with my noble friend Lady Evans and her husband to see one of the recipients of a previous round of funding: True’s Yard Fisherfolk Museum, which has strong links to her successor as Leader of your Lordships’ House. Successful recipients in the latest round include Basildon Borough Council, which is receiving £4.5 million to turn empty properties in the town centre into a creative hub, aiming to support over 200 start-ups over the next 25 years in the film, TV, gaming and animation sectors. Colchester Library is receiving more than £300,000 to transform part of the library into an interactive learning and play space for children and families. There are examples right across the country: Cannon Hall in Barnsley; the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent; Sunderland Museum; Morecambe Winter Gardens; and the Guildhall building in Walsall, to name just a few.
Noble Lords are right to stress the importance of venues big and small. I am glad that the Music Venue Trust’s work has been mentioned. The noble Baroness is right that my honourable friend Julia Lopez is meeting that organisation very soon. I attended the briefing that it held in Parliament—or rather above the Red Lion pub—in the autumn, to hear about its proposals to give local communities a share in the venues that are so important. I certainly agree with what the noble Baroness and it said about the importance of those venues to emerging artists as well as to communities and the people who go to enjoy them.
I also agree with what the right reverend Prelate said about the importance of church music. Last week I was celebrating with friends at St Bartholomew the Great, which celebrated its 900th anniversary last Saturday, along with a beautiful new composition by John Rutter. If the right reverend Prelate has not heard it, he can listen to it on “Sunday Worship” on the BBC Sounds app, along with some wise words from his right reverend friend the Bishop of London.
My noble friend Lady Evans is right to point to some of the other funds, such as the towns fund—which the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, was kind enough to mention too. The Government’s flagship £4.8 billion levelling up fund is also supporting access to culture and the performing arts across the UK. The second round of the fund, announced in January, made 31 awards to projects with culture and heritage at their heart, totalling £546 million. Thanks to that, dancers, bands, classically trained orchestras and many more will be able to perform in state-of-the-art spaces across the country, such as the currently empty Assembly Rooms in Derby, which are becoming a working theatre; the new theatres in Colne town centre; and the much-loved Hexagon theatre in Reading, which has received £19.1 million for its rejuvenation.
I will certainly take the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about Reading Gaol to colleagues at the Ministry of Justice. I was aware of the project and agree with what he said about both the culturally important history of that institution and its potential. As requested, I will chase up a response to his letter from my noble friend Lord Ahmad.
I want to touch on what the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and others said about the BBC orchestras and singers. Noble Lords will understand that I must stress that the BBC is operationally and editorially independent, so it is for it to devise its strategy and to take decisions on this matter. However, I recognise what they and many people around the country have said about the importance of the BBC orchestras and the BBC Singers to so many listeners, viewers, performers and communities across the country. I welcome the BBC’s announcement that it will undertake further work to decide on the future for the BBC Singers, and to do so in discussion with the Musicians’ Union. I also welcome the update that it is engaging with the Musicians’ Union and other BBC unions about its proposals regarding the English orchestras.
The BBC is, of course, required to deliver its remit as set out in the royal charter and agreement, which includes the BBC’s mission to serve all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output. It should prioritise using the £3.8 billion that it gets from licence fee income as necessary to deliver that remit.
The noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, rightly took the opportunity to raise international touring. It is only hours since we voted on the Windsor Framework, but he is right to point to that landscape. As he knows, the Government are committed to supporting our creative sector to adapt to the new circumstances. He knows that the vast majority of member states offer visa and work permit-free routes for musicians and creative performers, and we encourage member states to align their requirements more closely with the UK’s own generous rules—but those discussions continue.
On the United States of America, Julia Lopez met representatives of the American Embassy here in London on 16 March to raise that issue, and we continue to engage with them on that. We know how important it is to the UK music industry and its concerns.
In my closing moments I will address skills and education, which featured heavily in noble Lords’ speeches. My noble friend Lady Evans and others asked about the creative industry sector vision, which is due to be published in the coming weeks and will set out how to remove barriers to growth and address skills gaps and shortages—one of the shared priorities for the Government and the sector over the next decade. A key part of that work is ensuring that young people, no matter where they are and no matter what their background, have opportunities for high-quality cultural education, which is why we are working with the Department for Education on the cultural education plan, chaired by the excellent noble Baroness, Lady Bull. We will make an announcement shortly on the other members of the panel and the terms of reference. However, we are looking at education in the round—not just in schools and colleges but the work that cultural professionals can do to make sure that we give people across the country, whatever their background, the opportunities to share in the best practice that we see. More details will follow shortly.
I also point to the next phase of the discover creative careers programme, which we launched in February, targeting schools in 77 areas across England to engage and inspire children and young people to pursue a creative career. As the noble Baroness mentioned apprenticeships, we point to the work that we are doing in partnership with the Arts Council and Greater Manchester Chambers of Commerce to co-fund a flexi-job apprenticeship scheme across the north of England, focused on the business administration and creative skills needed for the sector, which will create 50 new apprenticeships in the first year, and the new Power Up Agency, which is being launched in three pilot areas across the north-east, north-west and Yorkshire to secure placements with employers.
On music hubs, the DfE has published a rationale for its proposal to move to fewer hubs covering wider areas, which aligns with the approach taken by similar initiatives and infrastructure, such as teaching school hubs, multi-academy trusts, local enterprise partnerships, Sport England’s active partnerships and more. Both the Arts Council and the DfE are inviting feedback on their proposals and inviting people to look at what is proposed for their local area and how that will best serve children and young people. The survey is open until five o’clock tomorrow, so I strongly encourage people to make their views known about it. I certainly make my views known about a desire to meet our manifesto commitment on the arts premium as soon as possible. Of course, the effects of the pandemic and the need for schools to help children catch up on missed teaching time are noted.
Briefly on data, the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, is right. One happy effect of the pandemic is that organisations have been communicating more with their loyal audiences. They capture data, because places that were ticketless have for a period asked people to book in, and they know more about their audience. They are sharing it with each other and talking to the Arts Council. I certainly have very interesting conversations with them about the additional insights that it is giving them into audiences as they return.
With grateful thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, I may have to consult her speech and see which other areas I will need to follow up on afterwards.
Transport: Investment Plans
(1 year, 8 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Berkeley
To ask His Majesty’s Government how bus and rail passengers will benefit from the investment plans for the transport network announced on 9 March.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity to talk about this subject today. I promise that I shall say something different in the next debate, which has been fixed for the first day when we come back after the holiday. It is a mistake—I do not know whose mistake it is—but I shall make sure I do not repeat myself, and I am sure the Minister will not either.
I was persuaded to put down this subject for debate because of the launch by the Secretary of State on 9 March of a big investment plan in
“transformational transport schemes over the next 2 financial years across the country”.
I thought that was rather good, but when I looked into it, I had the feeling that there is lots of talk and lots of big figures—which we hear not just in transport but from many other people—but I want to question whether those schemes actually happen on the ground, where people want them to happen.
On the £40 billion over two years, it was confirmed in a Written Answer I received, HL6611, that it was the same budget over two years, and that included an extra £200 million for potholes—I am sure that is welcome. As for the rest of it, is the transformation growth or a cut? On the railways, the Midland main line electrification to Sheffield has been cancelled or postponed. For major roads, the statement says that they have cut £8 billion. We can have opinions on all this, but is it “transformational”? I am told that active travel has been cut by £3 billion, and lots of bypasses are referred to in the press release as being cut.
On buses, which are really important and on which I want to concentrate to a large extent today, the Confederation of Passenger Transport says that grants will now be 20% lower in real terms than they were 10 years ago. It may be that HS2 is mopping up all the budget, but leaving that aside, do all these cuts deliver for the customers?
I want to explore what the customers want, who they are and how they will benefit—this is transport customers all the way through. People need to travel—short, medium and long distances, and several times a day sometimes—to school, college, work or shopping, and sometimes once a year for a holiday. They also need to travel for important things such as doctors and hospitals, to visit friends or for caring et cetera. They are very similar to the needs that the NHS provides for. Many of those transport journeys are pretty essential.
We can walk, cycle or use scooters—I will leave that aside—but public transport is what everybody else will use for distances greater than the smallest ones if they do not own a car or cannot afford to run it. It needs to be safe, affordable and reliable.
It is always my impression when travelling around Europe that the charges and reliability of public transport are very much better than in this country. Some of it is very cheap. It seems to be the best way of getting around safely—and towards net-zero carbon—but we do not seem to care so much about those with no access to a car.
I welcome the Government’s new bus plan, as far as it goes, but to some extent it is another short-term fix. It does not enable people to plan where they might go to school, shop, work or live, and it does not cover all of England. When people want to use buses, they need certainty. The Transport Committee report published this morning commented of the bus service improvement plans:
“Local areas were asked to be ambitious, but the Department has not matched this level of ambition in the funding it has made available, pitting local areas against each other for a share of an inadequate pot.”
It also says that half the country has missed out. I hope that is not the case; perhaps the Minister has an answer to that.
One really bad example of the failure of buses is the community transport Dial-a-Lift funding in Northern Ireland. I know that the Minister is not responsible for transport there, but she could advise her colleague who is. They have cut the funding for Dial-a-Lift completely from the end of April and all the staff have probably been given the sack. This is because of the trouble with the Windsor Framework; I will not go into that, as we heard plenty about it yesterday, but it is a serious problem.
I will give an example. A young single mother in south-east Fermanagh has a 52-mile journey to hospital with her acutely ill six year-old son. She has no money or car; there is no public transport and the taxi service is a £60 to £65 fare. What happens to the child if she does not get there? A female wheelchair user had the same problem; a return fare in a taxi would cost £100. Previously, community transport provided all this. I have a bit of experience of this in Cornwall. The community transport people are really good; they are an essential part of the lives of people who do not have a car and cannot afford one. They reminded me that the Northern Ireland scheme was set up 25 years ago, which is a significant date in the Northern Ireland calendar. I hope the Minister can follow that up with her colleague and make sure that it does not happen here.
Our real challenge is in spending money on the railways, which I will not say much about. The National Audit Office has suggested that there needs to be a reset button on Euston; I suggest it should be a “Delete” button and send everyone to Old Oak Common, which everyone knows is a much better place. The key for railways is that there needs to be a much greater improvement in the services that people want to use every day to get to work, school, shopping or whatever. I have always had an ambition that this country would have a network of local services in the Midlands and the north as good as what we have in the south-east of England. But we do not have that yet, or any budget for it. It is very sad that HS2 seems to be swallowing all the money.
In conclusion, we need a long-term bus strategy. Who will provide it? That will depend on the next election. The Labour Party has produced some really excellent ideas about who should own it. The key is that it should be reliable, affordable and properly funded, delivered locally but with one consistent policy, and not dependent on how well the local authority has submitted its application—they are strapped for cash and time. It needs to provide a service for those who need it and do not have a car or do not want to use one—it is good for the environment, anyway. We need a long-term plan for the railways in the Midlands and the north, as many of us have said for a very long time.
I wonder whether some of the problem with transport is that politicians—we are all politicians—whether local or national, need to understand the needs of their electorate for local, cost-effective public transport and to put their regular daily journeys into a better state, rather than going once a week or once a month to places such as London.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for securing this debate. It is a vital area for us. Those of us who live in the south-east of England are aware of the huge strains that are being put on ordinary people’s lives day by day, and on our businesses, through the problems with our transport system, not least with public transport.
I am also aware that this matter touches so many other areas of concern at the moment, such as our desire to work for a net-zero carbon future and the question of how we can get people off the roads as much as possible and on to good, fast, efficient public transport. I am aware that this means having a long-term policy on active transport; we need to work out how to get a sea change in what we expect and what we can offer. I was therefore pleased to hear the announcement by His Majesty’s Government of the provision of additional funding for transport in the recently published Statement. However, as has already been pointed out, it raises an awful lot of questions, not just about what was in it but what was not in it.
I declare my interest as president of the Rural Coalition. I want to focus my comments mainly on the rural dimension of public transport policy. Nearly 10 million of this country’s 67 million people live in rural areas—one in six of us. Sadly, there was little in the Government’s announcement to bring cheer to rural inhabitants. I and others who care about rurality and the long-term sustainability of the countryside entirely accept that we cannot expect anything like the levels of public transport and roads that our urban colleagues take for granted.
However, it is deeply disappointing that the recent Statement made no specific mention of buses and bus routes, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, pointed out. In my diocese of St Albans—which is, compared with many shire counties, not that rural; by and large, we have large villages and are pretty much a commuter county—buses provide a vital lifeline to rural communities, especially for those on low incomes, pensioners and those with disabilities who cannot drive themselves or afford disabled-friendly vehicles. Therefore, such people are almost entirely reliant on rural bus routes to carry out their daily activities. According to Age UK, one in three older households in rural areas have no access to a vehicle, leaving them entirely reliant on bus routes or expensive taxis—if they can get a taxi. We moan in our urban areas that it is sometimes difficult to get a taxi; it is much worse in rural areas where, sometimes, there simply is no taxi available.
These bus routes continue to be relied on by our rural communities, with statistics showing that over a quarter of bus passenger journeys in England outside London are made in rural areas. It is therefore very concerning to see the steady reduction in rural bus services. Since 2017, there has been a 56.5% reduction in bus mileage in Hertfordshire, and many of our “lifeline” routes such as the 84 service between Potters Bar and New Barnet have been phased out and only partially replaced.
Funding for rural transport has long been an issue. Most rural bus routes are not commercially viable if it is simply left to the market. They tend to be used by fewer people and to involve much longer journeys. They are not sustainable without local government support. Further, as noted by the Government’s Statement, the pandemic has, certainly in the short and medium term, reduced the number of passengers hugely. The problem with cutting bus services is that the chance of rebuilding them as we try to emerge into whatever new society we are to have will be difficult; it is more or less being forced on people.
I am grateful that His Majesty’s Government have been funding the £2 cap on bus fares in England; I note that this was extended for a further three months recently, and for that we are grateful. However, as transport economists have been quick to point out, if and when the subsidies come to an end or are removed, it is likely that hundreds of rural bus services will be cut.
One of the major concerns for rural areas is the Government’s Bus Back Better strategy, which requires that local authorities develop a local bus service improvement plan and apply for funding. Of the 79 local authorities that submitted those improvement plans in 2021-22, only 31 are set to receive central government funding to deliver their plans. The Campaign for Better Transport has highlighted that this strategy leaves out rural authorities, which have often much smaller transport teams and advisers and simply lack the resources and expertise to successfully apply for and win government funding. That is an extraordinary irony, whereby the communities most in need of government support do not have the capacity or the skills to apply for it, with some notable exceptions.
Good public transport networks are vital to all communities. As we are trying to work out a long-term strategy for sustainable rural communities, we need those networks to allow people to connect to their workplaces, families, local shops, doctors’ surgeries and so on. A report by KPMG estimated that for every £1 invested into local communities for bus networks, you could expect to see an economic return of £4.48. Therefore, I conclude by asking the Minister: what steps will His Majesty’s Government take to ensure that rural authorities are not left out of the local bus improvement plan funding in future?
Baroness Randerson (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for again giving us the opportunity to debate important transport issues, and I am grateful for the topic today. By virtue of the Statement of 9 March being a Written Statement, it was slipped out in a way that suggested that it was not an important one, but of course it was.
HS2, which is Britain’s big on-again, off-again project of the 21st century, is once more in serious doubt as a proper project. The delays hollow it out. It seems that it will be truncated at both ends. Let us start with Euston. Will the Minister clarify exactly what the plans are here? There was discussion that suggested that there would be long delays to the completion of Euston. There was a suggestion that it might terminate at Old Oak Common, which was probably not a bad idea to begin with but, since Euston is now a building site, it is really beyond the point where it is sensible to think that it is not going to be the terminus. But having cast doubt on whether HS2 would eventually go to Euston, the Prime Minister earlier this week suggested that it would. But the latest evidence, as the NAO points out, is that it will not be ready until 2041, or even 2043. That is a long time to live in a building site.
The NAO also points out that costs have ballooned, and refers to £1.5 billion spent on land purchases and preparation work—but £100 million was written off because the original Euston designs were scrapped. The NAO is scathing about the dither and delay that has led to a doubling of costs. We would welcome clarification.
There is also the fact that it is clear now that HS2 is unlikely to go beyond Birmingham, which basically turns Birmingham into a part of the commuter belt for London—hardly the economic reset for the north of England that was intended. With the state of rail services in the north of England currently beyond dire, it is unacceptable that there is no hope in sight of a decent long-distance railway service—which, as we all need to emphasise, would in turn take pressure off existing lines and enable them to work more effectively.
Of course, there is also the Department for Transport document that is doing the rounds which makes it clear that the delays to HS2 as a whole will increase costs and cause job losses. It also casts doubt on whether HS2 will even call at Stafford, Macclesfield and Stoke. The Government have now had time to reflect on that document, on which they refused to comment because it was leaked—but no one suggested that it was a forgery. It is damaging investor confidence, so I invite the Minister to clarify the Government’s intentions, for the economic good of the north of England.
Another issue that I have raised before in this respect is the Barnett consequential for HS2 funding. Scotland and Northern Ireland were awarded Barnett consequential money but not Wales, the reason apparently being that Wales was going to benefit because HS2 was going to Crewe and would improve services in north Wales. But HS2 is not going to Crewe—or it is unlikely to go there while we are still active politicians. Therefore, it is really time to look at this again in all fairness. Even if the Government will not give Barnett consequential money to the Welsh Government, they need to invest a very large amount of money in Welsh infrastructure directly. We are talking about £5 billion-plus that Wales is missing out on.
The vast majority of passengers travel by bus, which was not mentioned on 9 March. Noble Lords who have spoken so far have made some excellent points. Bus passenger numbers outside London have been in freefall for many years, with a 15% reduction between 2009 and 2019 in the number of bus routes—and that was intensified in the pandemic. The market has failed; there is little competition for new routes and fares have increased beyond inflation. Buses are so important because they are relied on by the poorer, the younger, the older, the disabled, and by women rather than men. They unlock education for young people and jobs for the unemployed. In other words, they are fundamental to levelling up—as well, of course, to decarbonisation and improved air quality.
Bus Back Better is a good strategy but, unfortunately, there is no strategic funding to go with it. I add to the points made already about the importance of a review of the way in which bus funding is allocated. These separate pots of money, subject to the bidding process, are chaotic and are no way of improving bus services. They discourage bids from those local authorities where bus services are already skeletal or non-existent. There needs to be a much more comprehensive approach and support for those areas that are no longer in a position to improve bus services because they do not have any.
The Department for Transport does not have a good record of picking winners. Bus operators have no certainty for the future, and neither do local authorities. This morning, during Oral Questions, the Minister accepted that the June cut-off date for current funding was a problem. This needs to be addressed, and very soon. I am sure that the Minister will point to lower passenger numbers, but we have to accept that we have gone beyond being able to point to Covid as the ongoing cause of this problem. There is lots of evidence that passengers have not returned because of reduced services and poor reliability. A more strategic approach is needed in order to overcome that.
Before I finish, I do not know if the Minister will have had time to look at the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s 35th report but, as a member of that committee, I would like her to take note of its recommendation that the Government need to look beyond a review of concessionary bus fares and beyond Covid at other aspects of why people are not using the buses.
I again thank the noble Lord for doing something that we all should have done, which is to put a focus on the importance of passengers. We talk too often in this House about the infrastructure, without emphasising passengers at the heart.
Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)
My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Berkeley for securing this debate. Bus networks across England are fundamentally broken, and railway operators are breaking records for delays and cancellations. The Statement on 9 March does not solve this. In fact, there was no mention of buses at all. The bus network is used by twice as many people as use trains, yet a lack of reliability across England is holding back the economy and causing misery for millions.
I therefore begin by asking the Minister: does she agree that this is a result of Britain being the only country in the developed world where private bus operators set routes and fares with no say from the public? Fares have consistently risen twice as fast as wages since this Government came to power. While we can all recognise the value of the £2 bus fare cap in England, its time-limited nature, and the fact that many providers have chosen not to take part in the scheme, means that it falls far short of expectations.
Only a new system that gives local communities a say over routes and fares can make the network fit for the future. Mayors across England have been using their devolved powers and funding to bring down the cost of living and put more money in people’s pockets. With greater authority, they could achieve so much more. Will the Minister therefore bring forward new legislation to devolve further powers across England, put the public back in control of the public transport they depend on and end the ideological ban on municipal bus companies?
I was chairman of London Buses for two years, during which time I came to realise what buses mean. More than any other form of transport, they are engines of social change. They carry the old, the young, the poor and the weak. We should be debating not profit but the value they bring to communities, in particular their weakest parts.
On the future of the railways, the Government have again rewarded failure by handing Avanti West Coast an extension. It is the worst-performing operator on the rail network, but its problems are not isolated—TransPennine Express has caused misery across the rail network, with dozens of cancellations every day. After more than a decade of this Government, railways in the north and the Midlands are broken.
Despite fares rising, performance remains unacceptable and promised investment is not being delivered. The scaling back of Northern Powerhouse Rail, coupled with the scrapping of the eastern leg of HS2, is a betrayal of the promise made to the north. This scheme alone could have sparked a rail revolution and created tens of thousands of jobs. Given that the Government based their decision not to go ahead with Northern Powerhouse Rail on seat capacity and time savings, will they now commission that independent assessment so that the north can finally get the rail network it deserves?
Among the minor updates and tinkering in last month’s Statement, the most significant announcement was the confirmation that HS2 is delayed and set to cost the taxpayer even more. This latest announcement appears to confirm that HS2 trains will stop at Old Oak Common for up to 10 years. Is the Minister aware that the Government’s own review and assessment found that this would evaporate time savings, detonate the business case, overwhelm the Elizabeth Line and cost £30 billion in growth?
The railway has now been in chaos, to a greater or lesser extent, for at least a decade. We need to grip its challenges. The Government have a plan with Great British Railways. It seems to me that it is the only plan in town, so why cannot we get ahead with it, to a position where we can hold a single body to account for the railways and their improvement?
A £1 billion cut to the active travel budget was confirmed as part of the announcement, as well as the mothballing of major roadbuilding schemes. What assessment have the Government made of the impact of this on rail and buses? Does the Minister expect that it will increase demand?
The piecemeal announcements on 9 March fall far short of people’s ambition for buses and rail. We need the Government to put passengers back at the heart of our railways and bus networks and build the infrastructure fit for the century ahead, unlocking jobs and growth. I hope the Minister will reflect on the comments made during this debate and that the Government will reassess their investment plans.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed. As ever, I will reflect carefully on those contributions. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for once again giving noble Lords the opportunity to discuss buses. It is a subject close to my heart, and I think we all agree that we want the same thing; we are dealing with how, on the pitch that we are on, we can achieve the sorts of services that we would like to see.
Let me start by commenting on the announcement on 9 March. Essentially, the £40 billion set out in that Statement was the capital investment for transport over the next two financial years. Sometimes it is easy in transport because the figures get very big very quickly, but it is a significant amount of money that we are going to invest in our transport systems—that is across all modes—and it does not include the further funding that is committed for revenue support in terms of the services as well.
I shall try to focus my reflections today on rail, both high-speed and traditional, and local transport. I accept that there were some comments on active travel and roads, the responses to which I may put in a letter after the debate—certainly, the figure given for the reduction in active travel funding I just do not recognise.
When we restated the amount of funding that will be forthcoming in the next two financial years, we did so in the face of two quite significant challenges. The first is the overall decline in the number of passengers on the railways and on buses, as well as a change in the nature of travel, because fewer people are going to work —indeed, we have seen a welcome rise in the amount of leisure travel taking place. The second is financial. There has been significant inflation within the construction sector. That is not a homogeneous situation; some things are inflating at a higher rate than others, and it is time to reflect on the impact of that inflation and to consider how we can de-risk the investments that we want to make.
The Transport Secretary’s statement set out which sections of HS2 the Government are prioritising to deliver as planned and which sections need to be rephased to take into account that inflationary pressure on the cost base. Cost estimates for each phase of the programme will be published. His announcement clearly requires officials to work through the consequences with HS2 and the supply chain to firm up the information that we have.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The six-monthly updates will continue to be laid before Parliament as they have been previously. We will of course endeavour to put in every single update as much information as we have at that time. We will not have all the information immediately, because various things will be worked through at a different time.
We confirmed that the first stage of HS2 will be delivered as planned between Old Oak Common and Birmingham Curzon Street by 2033. Sometimes, I am mildly disappointed by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, making comments such as “serious doubt about the project” and “unlikely to go beyond Birmingham”. I am not sure where such observations have come from, because we have been quite clear in our plans.
On the rail system more generally, as the Secretary of State said during his Bradshaw address,
“operating the railways is currently financially unsustainable and it isn’t fair to continue asking taxpayers to foot the bill”.
We have to be very careful about the costs, thinking particularly about the depressed revenue that we are seeing at the moment.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
Can I invite the Minister to look carefully at the National Audit Office report?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I will of course look very carefully at the National Audit Office report. I do not know that it is saying that it believes that the line is unlikely to go beyond Birmingham; again, I would not know where its evidence would come from for a statement such as that.
We have an opportunity to improve the rail and local transport networks and to adapt to the needs of passengers today. There is a rare chance of some sort of redesign so that the system is fit for the future, because, as I said at the outset, I think all noble Lords want the same thing.
I will now turn to comments about HS2. The Transport Secretary has been very clear that Old Oak Common will act as a temporary London terminus while Euston is completed, but I do not think that any noble Lord should be under the impression that this will somehow be substandard. It will be probably the best-connected and largest new railway station ever built in the UK; it will have 14 platforms—six high speed and eight conventional—and it will be a transport superhub, providing connections to Heathrow via the Elizabeth line and, of course, high-speed rail services through to various parts of the country.
It was already planned that Euston would open later than Old Oak Common. However, we have decided not to proceed to full construction of Euston station in the next two years, which is the period that the Statement looked at, due to affordability and profiling issues. There is an opportunity to look again at the Euston station design to ensure that it is affordable and delivers for both the local community and passengers.
Following this debate, I will set out in a letter as much as I can about the phasing for the different elements of High Speed 2, including going to Crewe and beyond. It is important to put that on record.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her offer to write a letter. Will she also comment on the lack of a firm design for not the station itself but the approaches to Euston? My information is that there is no option that is actually safe to build, and that is quite critical.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I will certainly include that in the letter. I do not have anything with me today.
I turn now to buses, which, as many noble Lords have pointed out, are the absolute backbone of our public transport system. The national bus strategy, which we published back in March 2021, is a long-term strategy. It is important to understand the role of the BSIPs—bus service improvement plans. We asked all local transport authorities to prepare one, which they did, and we used them to look at how to prioritise funding. To a certain extent, there was no bidding process: we did not ask for bids but to review all the bus service improvement plans.
Noble Lords may ask themselves, “Where did these bus service improvement plans come from? Who inputted into them?” We were clear in the national bus strategy that they must have the input of local people; there had to be a passenger board, or whatever they wanted to call it. Listening to the input of local people and businesses allows the bus service improvement plan to have local accountability. I have heard two different things today: that we need to give more powers to local authorities but also that national government should take control of the bus network, as some noble Lords have suggested. Local accountability is really important.
Funding is absolutely key. The Government are spending an additional £3 billion. This is the largest investment in buses in a generation, and it is on top of funding that still goes out to local transport authorities or bus operators to support fares, such as the bus service operating grant of £250 million a year, and the concessions payment of about £1 billion a year. Local transport authorities also get funding in the block grant for tendered services. Unfortunately, some local authorities, particularly rural ones, decide not to use that money on tendered services. That is a disappointment, and local people should be holding those councils to account for those things.
Therefore, with the bus service improvement plans and subsequently the enhanced partnerships, which are a partnership between the transport authority and the bus operator taking into account what has been said by the passengers, that is how bus networks are planned locally. So it is not quite right to say that it is left to the market, because local transport authorities have quite a significant amount of leverage over the bus operators in agreeing what the enhanced partnerships should say, and 75% of enhanced partnerships have now been “made”—that is, they are in existence. Of course, if the enhanced partnership is not working or it is not what the local authority wants to do, it is at liberty to start franchising, and we know that places such as Greater Manchester have already done that. So there are many ways in which local transport authorities can exert power over the bus network to provide what their local people want.
I accept, as I did earlier today in the Oral Question, that the funding is short term at the moment, until 30 June, and that there is an enormous amount of analysis to be done: the impact of the £2 bus fare cap will be important—but also some of the BSIP funding, the revenue side of it in particular, is being used to support fares in places such as Manchester, Liverpool, West Yorkshire and Lancashire, so that will be important. The capital spending from BSIP will take slightly longer to come in, because that is all about bus priority, bus lanes and all those sorts of things, so we need to give that a little more time. However, the market is still in transition, so we are analysing where we are and looking at what any long-term future support might look like.
I know that the right reverend Prelate is a great champion of rural areas, and he was concerned that rural authorities would not have the resources to be able to do the BSIPs that we ask them to do. In fact, we gave them the money to provide the resources for that. We gave them £23 million to work up their BSIPs and enhanced partnerships and, subsequently, we gave all the local authorities that were not successful in getting funding—about half of them—£11 million to make sure that they could roll out the bus service improvement plans that they had. There are many things that they could do to improve services which do not necessarily require funding.
The right reverend Prelate will have heard me speak before about demand-responsive transport in rural areas—the bus fare cap is very good for rural areas, particularly on longer routes—and the BSOG really supports fares in rural areas as well. In addition, community transport is important in rural areas, which is also taken into account in any BSIP.
I am very conscious that I have 45 seconds in which to do rail. I recognise the expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, in this area and his great interest in rail, and from a DfT perspective we recognise that performance needs to improve across the system. We have had numerous conversations about Avanti and TPE, and we know the impact of removal of rest-day working there. However, at the heart of it are the passengers, and GBR, the transition team for Great British Railways, is looking at that 30-year vision for our railways. We continue to invest billions of pounds in our railways for the sorts of local railways that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, wants to see. Now we have to look through the RNEP, make the correct decisions based on current passenger numbers, which again are not the same all over the country—some areas are seeing higher passenger return then others. Therefore the RNEP is being reviewed by Ministers at the moment and that will be published; the investment will continue, and that is part of the £40 million.
I note that I have gone over my 12 minutes. I know that there are many things that I have not been able to cover but I will certainly write a letter. Once again, I am always grateful to talk about railways and local transport—both subjects that are very close to my heart.
Prison Officers: Retirement
(1 year, 8 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Earl Attlee
To ask His Majesty’s Government what are their reasons for setting a retirement age of 68 for newly recruited prison officers; and what assessment they have made of whether that retirement age is appropriate and in the public interest.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, after a debate about prison overcrowding initiated by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, in September 2017, I decided to take a very close interest in the UK’s prison system, because it is quite clear that there is a lot of room for improvement. One of my first actions was to read the 1991 report of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, about the riots at Strangeways prison and elsewhere. No one who has read that report could fail to be struck by the risks that prison officers manage on a day-to-day basis and the extraordinary physical and moral courage exhibited by prison officers during those riots. It is clear to me that a 68 year-old prison officer is far too old to deal with physical challenges of this nature, no matter how good their jailcraft is.
In February 2020, I produced a paper that proposed drastic reform in respect of prolific minor offenders. I ran it as an amendment in your Lordships’ House, and it was well received. However, during my researches, as your Lordships would expect, I detected a number of other problems, such as the “potting” of prison officers by prisoners, which is just one example of why prison officers are special and need to be treated differently. Another problem that came up was Friday release, which is where large numbers of prisoners tend to be released on a Friday, when other agencies are not in a good position to help a newly released prisoner, and when those prisoners are at their most vulnerable. Along with my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, I ran suitable amendments, and I am pleased to say that the Government are supporting a Private Member’s Bill that will address this problem. So we do have good news from time to time, and I am grateful to Ministers.
During my researches into our prison system, my admiration and respect for prison officers went only one way: upwards. We charge them with looking after often the most objectionable members of society that we can possibly find. The source of the current problem—although not the cause—is that, in his 2011 review of public sector pensions, the noble Lord, Lord Hutton of Furness, left prison officers off a list of “uniformed services” that he proposed to protect from the state pension age rise to 68, insisting that, for the Armed Forces, police and firefighters,
“where pension age has historically been lower to reflect the unique nature of their work a pension age of 60 is appropriate”.
I understand that a retirement age of 65 has already been conceded in negotiations, although I think that is already too old for practical reasons. I do not believe that a retirement age of 68 for a prison officer is appropriate or in the public interest. I am honoured to debate this Question with my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy, and I look forward to his answers and having many more debates with him about the prison system.
In my time, I have served for over 40 years in the reserves, I have undertaken international aid operations in the Balkans and Rwanda, and I have undertaken military operations in the Balkans and the Middle East. But I am now 66 and, although my brain seems to work reasonably well, my body cannot do what it used to be able to, even five years ago. It would be absolutely out of the question for me to perform the duties of a prison officer. Can any noble Lord honestly picture me attempting to exercise control and restraint of an 18 year-old prisoner? If I cannot do it, even with my background, why should I expect prison officers to do it when they are even older than I am? That is why it is morally wrong to have a retirement age of 68 for our prison officers.
When the noble and learned Lord, Lord Stewart of Dirleton, answered my Oral Question on this matter last June, he claimed that prison officers worked in a controlled environment compared with firefighters and police officers. Anyone who thinks that prisons are a controlled environment should go away and read the Woolf report. During my investigations in the Prison Service, I quickly lost count of how often the alarms went off and all available prison officers had to pitch in to control an incident. Most prisons and custodial institutions are inherently violent places, but the skill, courage and fortitude of the prison officers are what limit the frequency and severity of incidents.
The other argument that I expect my noble and learned friend the Minister will advance is that prison officers do not make anything like the pension contributions that police officers and firefighters do. That is true, of course, but the reason is that the low pay of a prison officer makes such contributions unaffordable. I understand that the POA would be quite happy to make greater contributions, but only if the pay was increased. Prison officers are prohibited from taking any form of industrial action. That being the case, Ministers need to be very careful to ensure that they are not abusing this restriction and underpaying and underrewarding prison officers—and I think that they are underpaid. There is very good evidence: the retention rate of newly recruited prison officers. Unfortunately, the retention statistics are terrible. There will be a variety of reasons for this, but mostly it will be the terms and conditions of service.
The pension age of 68 sends a signal that the Government, Ministers and, indeed, the public simply do not care about prison officers. If that is the message we are sending, why are we surprised that junior prison officers walk away and take a much easier job—say, in a warehouse? The Prison Service desperately needs experienced prison officers, but Ministers are failing to retain them. Rather, resources are being wasted on training newly recruited prison officers, who quickly leave, while the Treasury quietly calculates the notional savings from full pensions not being paid out—but those savings will of course not arise for decades.
There is another fatal flaw in treating prison officers as mainstream civil servants. Understandably, prison officers have to undergo regular fitness tests. There are two issues with this. The first is that the process results in early retirement for some very experienced prison officers whose jailcraft is so refined that they hardly ever need to resort to control and restraint—an own goal if ever there was one. The second is that it makes it very hard to stay working as a prison officer until 68. In fact, it is almost unachievable. For instance, last year I was very ill and, if I was a prison officer, I would have had to retire. In any case, I would almost certainly fail any reasonable agility test because my joints are giving up due to a misspent youth. However, if I was an ordinary civil servant, and with the nature of my illness, I could have continued working to 68 with only a few minor adjustments. It is much easier for a mainstream civil servant than a prison officer to achieve the retirement age of 68, and that cannot be right. I have heard that Ministers are, in correspondence, comparing prison officers with ratings on Royal Fleet Auxiliaries. I will have to follow that up with my Defence hat on, because 68 is far too old for that role as well.
I have realistic expectations about what the response from my noble and learned friend the Minister will be this afternoon. It would be good if Ministers could go away and privately have a hard think about whether the current policy makes sense. I do not believe that it is morally right, and nor do I think it is correct in practical terms.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, I do not have extensive experience of the prison estate, so I do not come here with that hat on, but I do have a background in the trade union movement stretching back to when I was 16 years old, and I was for some years the trade union envoy for David Cameron when he was Prime Minister. Our aim at that time was not to convert the trade union movement, because its leaders are not going to suddenly say, “I’d like to support the Conservative Party”. Our job—or my job—was to make clear to them that something like one-third to 40% of serving and active trade unionists voted for the Conservative Party, and that we were not their enemy but wanted a constructive relationship with them. That is what motivates me to be here today.
The current Prime Minister has made it very clear to me—most recently, last Monday night—that he wishes to have a good relationship with the trade union movement. Obviously, we cannot give it everything it wants any more than we can give anyone else everything they want, but we can have a good and civilised relationship with it. As such, I am sure the Minister and many other people would agree that having a pension age of 68 is rather high. Indeed, I see from today’s papers and releases that Mel Stride, the Pensions Minister, is looking again at whether and when we should move to the age of 68. I think that is a jolly good idea.
My noble friend Lord Attlee has made reference to the pension contributions and pay, and he is absolutely right. I served for many years as a trustee, and indeed as a chair, of pension funds. A rate of contribution of 5.4% is, frankly, laughable. In the pension funds that I ran, we were looking at 12%, 13% or 14%. That is not far out of line with the police at 12% and the fire brigade at 14%. However, to achieve those contribution rates, you must have the salary to back it up. Those contribution rates cannot be paid from the current salaries, and the whole system really needs a good look at.
As I often do when I come to debates like this, I looked up on Wikipedia the Minister’s background and saw that he began his career in the Monckton Chambers. Walter Monckton was widely regarded in the TUC as probably the best Minister of Labour since the war. He was the Conservative Minister of Labour from 1951 to 1955, and his approach was based on industrial peace, talking to the unions and trying to reach a common accord within the resources of the state and the demands of the union. So, the Minister comes—as we would say in my horse racing part of the world—from a pretty good stable. I hope that some of the atmosphere of the Monckton Chambers is still within him these many years after.
I realise that a Minister can ask only for a certain amount, and a Minister in the Lords is doubly constrained, to an extent, so I have a very simple but, I believe, acceptable request. Will the Minister ask his responsible ministerial colleague to initiate informal talks with the POA to ascertain whether there is enough common ground to resume official discussions on just the retirement age in the rejected Liz Truss package of December 2016?
I am told that, of the three elements in that package, the retirement age was rather dominated by the pay increase issue. If we could manage to sort that out and set it aside, there may be some room for moving forward. To quote one of my early heroes, Harold Wilson, I am sure that “talks about talks” could be quite useful in this regard. I hope that the Minister, given the new atmosphere that is coming from No. 10 and our desire to have a good relationship with the trade union movement, will find himself able to agree to my modest request.
Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)
My Lords, I strongly support the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, in his suggestion that there should be fresh talks about this issue. That is a sensible suggestion and I hope the Minister will take it up.
My father was a policeman. He retired in his mid-50s with the rank of chief superintendent, after 30 years’ service, on full pension. He told me that throughout his police career he had drawn his baton only once: in 1933, when called upon to charge a crowd of miners on strike at Bersham Colliery, near Wrexham. The only person hurt was a reporter from the Wrexham Leader, who had foolishly stuck his head over the hedge to see what was going on and was clacked, as we say, as the PCs passed. Apropos of nothing, the pit was later the film set for “The Corn is Green”, starring Katharine Hepburn in 1979.
I mention this because in the prison inspectorate’s May 2022 report on Berwyn Prison, only two or three miles away from Bersham, it is recorded in paragraph 3.20 that
“During the previous 12 months, batons had been drawn seven times”
to control prisoners, that an
“incapacitant spray … had been drawn and used once”,
and that this was an improvement on the position in 2019, when batons had been drawn 26 times.
I have referred to Berwyn Prison on a number of occasions in this House because it is close to my home. Opened in 2017, it remains the largest prison in the UK, and is the second largest in Europe, with a capacity of over 2,000 places—although I have to say that it has always been underoccupied and understaffed. It suffers from a drug problem, to the despair of the Crown Court judges in north Wales.
Last May’s report says that, at the prison,
“The rate of violence was falling, although it remained comparatively high when set against comparator prisons.”
It continues:
“Among the key challenges facing the prison was the need to recruit and retain staff … There was some evidence … that staffing pressures were undermining local morale, but crucially, the shortage was impacting the quality of staff-prisoner relationships and the pace of regime recovery.”
There was some improvement on figures dating from 2019, which I have previously referred to in the House. At that time, 90% of the staff were less than two years in post. In this report, it is noted that there was
“a severe shortage of band 3 officers, probation and health care staff”,
which
“affected the delivery of some services.”
I have discussed this situation with a very experienced prison officer from Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight. He told me that a lack of experienced prison officers at Berwyn prison was to be expected. He told me, “We watch each other’s backs as prison officers, and you will not get experienced officers into a prison staffed by rookies.”
There you have the background to this debate. Violence, or the threat of violence, is always there, yet the Ministry of Justice requires a prison officer to serve into his late 60s in a job which is probably beyond his physical capabilities. Of course, if he fails his annual physical test, the prison officer is allowed to retire but does not get his full pension. That saves the MoJ money—the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, has already covered that point—but it leads to poor recruitment and retention. It is said that the pool of labour to man Berwyn prison in north Wales has been exhausted, and the Prison Service has to look elsewhere, outside of Wales. I should include women, since there have been 18 instances of improper sexual conduct between female staff and prisoners, some of which have attracted heavy prison sentences on the women.
The Ministry of Justice refuses to equate prison officers with policemen or firefighters. It says that officers in those uniformed services make a higher contribution to pensions—again, the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, has referred to this; it is 15% as opposed to 5%—but of course they are paid significantly more than prison officers. I am sure that prison officers would welcome the same pay and conditions for the risks to personal safety which they constantly run. They are in the same position as police officers and are not allowed to withdraw their labour. Consequently, their bargaining position is open to exploitation by the Lord Chancellor, and that is what has happened.
Why was the Ministry of Justice the first to accept cuts to its funding and why does it remain incapable of persuading the Treasury to fund services for which it is responsible? As I recall, it was a grand gesture by the noble Lord, Lord Clarke, who wanted to be the first in Cameron’s Government to clutch austerity to his bosom. The consequence is that we have a justice system which is starved of funds, collapsing courts and barristers on strike. The backlog of cases is a disgrace which denies victims justice. On the other side of the coin are its responsibilities. The Prison Service is failing in safety, in combatting drugs and, most importantly, in providing adequate rehabilitation, all through the lack of trained and competent staff. It is easy for Dominic Raab to say that he will not address the question of the pension age when prison officers cannot strike. His legacy, I am afraid, will be failure.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My Lords, I open by agreeing with the three previous speakers. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, closed by asking for a “hard think” about this situation. The noble Lord, Lord Balfe, asked for informal talks to start with the POA, and that request was supported by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas.
I thank the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for securing this debate. He has shown dogged determination to secure justice and dignity for prison officers. I know that the POA union is extremely grateful for everything he does in this place for its members, who, let us face it, have one of the toughest and most dangerous jobs that we ask public servants to do.
We have heard some of the statistics, but I shall go over them again. Violence in prisons, especially against people working in them, has increased in recent years. The latest ONS safety in custody statistics, published January, show that there were 20,872 assault incidents in the 12 months to September 2022, up 11% from the 12 months to September 2021. In the most recent quarter, assaults were up 5% to 5,590 incidents.
It was recently reported that civil servants at the probation service’s HQ are being redeployed to work in prisons because of the staffing crisis there. An HMPPS spokesman said:
“We are temporarily moving around 90 qualified staff from desk-based roles to help frontline colleagues in prisons and probation.”
My first question for the Minister is: what action will the Government be taking immediately to address insufficient staffing in our prisons?
As the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, said in introducing this debate, newly recruited prison officers cannot draw their full occupational pension until they are getting on for 68 years old, depending on their date of birth. As he said, the POA has argued that this increased pension age is one reason why many younger officers are leaving the occupation. In recent evidence to the House of Commons Justice Committee, Mark Fairhurst, the national chair of the Prison Officers’ Association, said:
“If I join now as an 18-year-old recruit, I have to work for 50 years on the frontline before I can access my full pension, because our retirement time is now 68; it is related to the state pension. We must be the only uniformed frontline service in the entire country that expects staff to work in what I class as the most volatile, hostile workplace environment … That is not practical, and it puts off a lot of people.”
As we heard from the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, a 2011 report by the noble Lord, Lord Hutton of Furness, proposed that some uniformed services—namely the police, firefighters and the Armed Forces—should be exempt from the rise in the retirement age to 68. The decision excluded prison officers from the uniformed services that were spared the retirement age rise. This omission has never been explained or justified; it is a cause of anger and resentment among prison officers. This omission was then enshrined in law with the Public Service Pensions Act 2013 despite its apparent conflict with the Prison Act 1952, which grants prison officers
“all the powers, authority, protection and privileges”
of the police.
In 2016, as part of a prospective deal negotiated by the then Secretary of State for Justice, Liz Truss, the retirement age for prison officers would have been reduced by up to three years from 68 to 65. This was voted on by the POA’s members but was rejected by 65% of those polled. Since then—this is another point made by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee; in fact, by all the speakers in this debate—Conservative Ministers have argued that any lowering of the pension age for prison officers would
“mean that their pension contributions would have to increase.”
Of course, prison officers would be quite happy to make a greater contribution if their salaries were comparable to those of the other uniformed services.
Another point, which has not been made, is that reports by the Prison Service Pay Review Body have continued to raise the pension age as a concern, arguing that it is
“far too old to cope with the physical and mental demands of being an operational frontline Prison Officer.”
I quote again the POA’s national chair, Mark Fairhurst, who told the Justice Committee this last month:
“Lord Hutton neglected to include us as a frontline uniformed service. He classed us as civil servants who are deskbound. We are not. We are unique. We face violence every single shift. The police do not. They might go through the entire week dealing with pleasant people, and of a weekend they have to deal with a bit of violence when the pubs spill out. We deal with violent people every single shift, and we are expected to do that in our late 60s.”
In concluding, my question for the Minister is this: do the Government recognise that it is more difficult for men and women in their late 60s to control and restrain people who may be only a third of their age? Can the Minister show any evidence that prison officers at this age are able to do this work?
I think all noble Lords have asked for talks to be reopened. This is a difficult issue; it will not go away, and I will listen to the Minister’s answer with interest.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Bellamy) (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for tabling this Question and all noble Lords who have spoken this afternoon. I will try to explain the Government’s position but, before I do so, it is right for me to highlight and pay tribute to the vital role that prison officers play in keeping the public safe and rehabilitating offenders. Prison officers and probation staff are vital key workers; many go above and beyond the call of duty to keep safe the public, their colleagues and those committed to their care. One is hugely impressed by the commitment of prison staff, who work in the most challenging of circumstances.
I will first make a clarification regarding a phrase used in the Question and at times this afternoon: the “retirement age” of 68. This is the age at which the state pension is fully payable, so we are not talking about a retirement age; we are talking about the age at which a full pension is payable. Nothing prevents anyone retiring before 68; many in the prison service retire before that age and very often return part-time or do other jobs. We are talking about the state pension age and the fact that, in line with the rest of the Civil Service, prison officers at the moment qualify for the full pension at that age.
I should say to noble Lords, although I am not fully apprised of the details, that I think there is a Statement today about the fact that the Government are considering the point at which to introduce the age of 68. There is talk of deferring the introduction until after the next general election in 2026, having regard to changes in life expectancy following the pandemic and other factors. However, this afternoon, let us continue with the hypothesis that we are talking about a difference between the state pension age which applies to all prison officers and the whole of the Civil Service, as compared to the lower pension age that applies to police officers and firefighters. I think I can leave out of account the armed services because we are probably in general agreement that that is a different case, for fairly obvious reasons.
It is also worth recording that, as I understand it, as of today, about half the prison service in bands three to five, who joined before 1 April 2015, are on legacy pension arrangements of one kind or another. In those cases, their retirement age may well be 60 or 65, depending on the legacy arrangement in question. It is perfectly correct that the full pension age refers to recruits joining after 1 April 2015, and it is likely to be between 65 and 68, depending on the precise date of birth of the individual in question. As noble Lords have observed, that results from the reforms proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Hutton, in the Hutton report in 2011, subsequently enacted in the Public Service Pensions Act 2013.
The answer to the first part of the Question as tabled is that 68 is the full pension age because this is the age which applies to the Civil Service generally, which comprises hundreds of thousands of people, and reflects the recommendations of the noble Lord, Lord Hutton. It is quite true that his recommendation 14 proposed an exception for the uniformed services, but he defined uniformed services as the Armed Forces, police and firefighters. He suggested in those cases that the normal pension age should be 60, which was in fact an increase from 55. But he did not, as has been pointed out, include prison officers.
In effect, the thrust of this Question is whether prison officers’ retirement age should be reduced from that which applies across the public sector now to that of police and firefighters. For various reasons, the Government’s position is that such a reduction is not appropriate in the present circumstances—or, to put it another way, the Government are not yet persuaded that such a reduction is appropriate. I deliberately put it in that slightly softer way because I entirely accept the comments that have been made that the Government would wish to have a constructive relationship with the trade unions and, particularly, with the Prison Service. I will come back to the questions that have been asked in that regard.
The short answer to the Question that has been posed is that despite the very persuasive points that have been made by noble Lords today, the Government do not currently consider that the job of a prison officer, very demanding though it is, is sufficiently comparable with that of a firefighter or a policeman to justify a downward reduction in the qualifying age for full pension.
Firefighters have exceptional fitness requirements much more stringent than those for prison officers. They do life-threatening work. Similarly, the work of police officers, generally speaking, involves a higher degree of risk of fatality or serious injury. Since the noble Lord, Lord Hutton, did not include prison officers, it would not, in the Government’s view, be appropriate to reopen that issue.
Certain general points arise in this respect. The first is that in most western societies such as this one, the general trend is to raise the pension age. We know that that is happening as a result of longer life expectancy, ageing populations and falling birth rates. Looking at it for a moment in a global view, any responsible Government concerned with controlling public expenditure in the future would have to think very hard before reversing the trend—actually lowering a pension age. We have seen the opposite problem in France, where they are trying to raise a pension age. Fortunately, we have not had the same problem in this country. But, in current circumstances, to reduce the pension age would be going against the grain of wider economic trends and demands. That is a first point.
A second point, if I may make it—and I would be interested to know whether noble Lords agree—is that we are, as a society, moving away from the idea of a job for life, or that you start a career and continue in that career, like the distinguished examples given by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, of his father and by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, from his long career in the trade union movement: starting at 16 and remaining typically in that same occupation for many years. These days, people move around a great deal. The expectation that today someone of 18 would think of remaining with the Prison Service until he is 68 would be open to question, frankly, because modern youth, certainly the ones that one knows of anecdotally in one’s immediate circle, do not really think in those terms.
So the Government are cautious about acting on the basis that someone at the age of 20, deciding whether to join the Prison Service, is at all focused on whether their full pension would be payable in 2071, 2068 or 2063. In the Government’s view, that is not the kind of thing that affects recruitment or retention. So that is a further general point in relation to the impact—which is probably contestable—that this pension age has on the decision of a recruit to either join, or stay in, the Prison Service. These are rather detached points, and the cause and effect that has been raised is not entirely persuasive in the Government’s view, to put it as softly as that.
Thirdly, the issue of the contributions was raised. Under the standard Civil Service pension scheme, the employee rate is about 4.6%, and there is an employer contribution of 27%, which is pretty generous, compared to police and firefighter schemes, where the rate is between 12% and 14%. It is possibly the case that there is link between pay and pensions, and one has to look at them as package, as it were. In 2017, and on an earlier occasion in 2013, the Government considered, and negotiated with the prison officers, a package that would have involved a lower pension age but also had various points about pay and conditions. The POA voted on the package, and it was rejected.
So it is not as if the Government have not done anything in this respect; they have addressed questions of pay and pensions. The 2017 negotiations—they might be the Liz Truss negotiations to which the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, referred—did not reach agreement. The Government would say that that was not for lack of trying on the Government’s part, because a package was sufficiently agreed by the parties to be put to a ballot, but the ballot did not work. My noble friend Lord Attlee said that a retirement age of 65 had been “conceded” in the negotiations but, if I am correct, that would have been in the context of the wider package. I do not think that anything, as such, has been conceded separately as an appropriate retiring age for prison officers.
I will pick up the remaining points. I entirely accept my noble friend Lord Balfe’s suggestion that the Government desire a constructive relationship with the Prison Service. I am not in a position to commit the Prisons Minister to discuss this with the Prison Officers’ Association as a separate point, but the Minister is in constant touch with it, and I am sure that this, among other issues, will come up.
On this particular issue, there is a slight complication at the moment as a result of the McCloud judgment, which has thrown in some doubt the 2015 pension reforms as regards the younger members of the various pension schemes. There is a question about whether there is an age discrimination issue in those reforms. That is currently under consideration by the Cabinet Office, and, as I understand it, a remedy will be duly developed across the Civil Service to deal with that judgment. That may change the landscape a bit, but I think a detailed discussion of pensions should probably take place when that remedy is clear—or is announced or agreed, whatever the situation is—and would probably need to take place in relation to discussions about pay as well.
In relation to pay, the Minister for Prisons, my colleague Minister Hinds, has only today been giving evidence to the Prison Service Pay Review Body. Prison officers received a pay award last year, which has been welcomed. There are some signs of improved recruitment and retention. We have an extra 4,000 officers compared with 2017. Retention is still an issue in some prisons, but not in all prisons; some parts of the country have no trouble at all in recruiting and retaining prison officers. In general, the retention rate on average—I mean the rate of those not retained—is around 15% annually. Across both the public and private sectors, the national average is about 14% and in the Civil Service it is about 12.5%, so it is not completely out of line. But that is an average, and there is not a problem everywhere; it is only a problem in some cases. There are very focused efforts on trying to improve that situation, but the Government are not persuaded that there is a real link between the ultimate pension age at which the full pension is payable and the problems of retention and staffing in prisons. I think that they are due primarily to other factors and not the pension issue, although I accept that the pension issue has some symbolic value.
However, this is a difficult issue, and the Government would not wish to indicate that the position is for ever closed. It depends on what the remedy is that comes out of McCloud and further discussions. I would not presume for a moment to be able to replicate or follow the magnificent example of Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who was mentioned earlier as a very fine Minister of Labour in the 1950s Conservative Government, but I hope that we find a way to move forward constructively with all parties on this question.
House of Lords
Housebuilding
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they remain committed to building 300,000 houses a year.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)
Yes, the Government are committed to continuing to work towards our ambitious target of 300,000 homes a year, as set out in the 2019 Conservative manifesto. Annual housing supply is up 10% compared to the previous year, with over 232,000 houses built and delivered in 2021-22. This is the highest yearly rate for the last 30 years.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
I am grateful to my noble friend, who is dealing heroically with housing and the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, which after eight sittings still has as many groups ahead of it as at the first. Does she understand the concern that the concession made over Christmas to head off a rebellion in another place has made it even more difficult to hit the 300,000 target? Does she understand that many of us want to give the other place an opportunity to think again by amending the Bill, and so help the Government to hit their target?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The Government are committed to building more houses of the right type in the right places, but we know at the moment that there are economic challenges faced by the sector. We need to work as closely as we are, and more closely—and with Homes England—to better understand those challenges and to provide support. We have already consulted on changes to the planning policy that will support how we plan to deliver these houses in our communities, and we will respond to that consultation in due course. I assure my noble friend that we remain committed to a plan-led system, and national planning policy that expects local authorities through their plans to make sufficient provision for housing and identify the sites to deliver these much-needed homes to meet local needs.
The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, is participating remotely.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab) [V]
My Lords, if, prior to planning approval, land for both high-density public and private housing development was acquired at agricultural acreage prices, as has happened in parts of Europe, and then allocated for both social rental and restricted leasehold sale to housing associations and housing trust development programmes, would that not be a huge incentive for construction levels not seen since the 1970s, as against today’s numbers, where scarcity is driving up prices and denying millions a home?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The noble Lord brings up a very interesting idea. We are looking at different ways of land use in the levelling-up Bill, and I am sure that there will be more discussions on those sorts of issues.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, will my noble friend bear in mind the immortal words of William Morris, that a thing of use should also be a thing of beauty? Can we have some attention paid, far more than in the past, on the quality of housing, and make sure that it can easily be equipped to deal with climate change?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My noble friend is absolutely right and if he has the time over the Recess to read the levelling-up Bill, he will see that the Government have plans and are committed to building better houses with better design, and building more energy-efficient housing as well.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)
My Lords, changes to the planning system, to which the Minister referred, pose a risk to the supply of new housing. In a recent public letter to the Secretary of State, 19 leading organisations from across the housing sector expressed serious concerns about the impact of proposals, particularly for the new infrastructure levy and its impact on the supply of housing, particularly social and affordable housing. What steps are the Government taking to respond to these widespread concerns and protect affordable housing delivery?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
We do not agree. We absolutely want to protect the amount of affordable housing and particularly the social housing part of that affordable housing. We believe the Bill will help us to do that. We will continue with it and continue to deliver much-needed housing in that sector.
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My Lords, it is the turn of the Cross Benches.
Lord Best (CB)
Does the Minister agree that, of the 300,000 target, 10% or 30,000 homes ought to be for older people’s housing—retirement housing—because this gives us terrific gains in terms of health and care facilities? It also means two for one because, for every one of those homes, another is released by an older person moving on. Can we in the levelling-up Bill therefore insist on local authorities including provision for older people—retirement housing—in their local plans?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The Bill makes it clear that local authorities, in their local plan, have to include housing for older people and for disabled people and other vulnerable groups. The Government want to deliver the best possible outcomes for these groups by helping them to live independently in safe, appropriate and good-quality housing for as long as they can possibly stay in it. The £11.5 billion affordable homes programme includes the delivery of new supported housing for older, disabled and vulnerable people, and our planning rules already mean that councils must consider them in their plans.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
Targets do not get homes built. People do, people with a wide range of skills. Given that every single report, from Kate Barker in 2004 to the recent BEIS figures, have warned us of a severe skills shortage in the construction industry, what are the Government’s plans to reverse this decline? Do the Government see SME builders as part of the solution, as they appear to have been phased out of significant housebuilding altogether over the past decade?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
We are collaborating across government to ensure that we are supporting the sector. The Department for Education is improving training routes into construction and creating opportunities for workers to retrain by working with employers to make apprenticeships available and more flexible and to promote T-levels. The Government are increasing funding for apprenticeships across all sectors, including construction, to £2.7 billion in 2024-25. We are continuing to fund more apprenticeships in non-levy-funded employers, which are often SMEs, and the Government will continue to meet 95% of the apprenticeship training cost for those companies.
Lord Haselhurst (Con)
Can my noble friend estimate the significance of a recent report that the Nationwide Building Society has been directly involved in the construction of 239 properties on wasteland? This would suggest that there are other ways that we can make sure that the Government’s target figure can be met.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My noble friend is absolutely right. We need to look at all types of construction ideas and use whatever financial incentives we can to ensure that we are building the houses that we know we need.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, having somewhere safe, stable and secure to live is essential for good mental and physical health. For too many people, housing insecurity and poor mental health reinforce one another. Will the Minister commit to ensure that all new housing developments include within their plans a priority to promote good mental health and well-being for the population?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I thank the noble Baroness for that question. This is something that should be brought up in the LURB as we discuss it further. She is absolutely right. We need more good-quality housing in the United Kingdom because we know that if somebody is in a good-quality, safe home their mental health and physical health are better.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest. I was grateful to the Minister for mentioning energy efficiency in one of her earlier answers. In the light of the CCC’s report about adaptation and the Government’s proposals today on energy security, will she look at my Amendment 486 to the LURB? The Government might save themselves some time by adopting it in relation to solar panels on new housing.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I am sure we will discuss the noble Baroness’s Amendment 486 in the LURB when we get to it.
Arrivals Duty Free at UK Airports
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Lord Goddard of Stockport
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the (1) jobs created, (2) revenue generated, and (3) tax receipts generated, by the introduction of arrivals duty free at UK airports.
The Parliamentary Secretary, HM Treasury (Baroness Penn) (Con)
Duty free on arrival would place additional pressure on the public finances, to which excise duty makes a significant contribution. Any loss in tax revenue would have to be balanced by a reduction in public spending, increased borrowing or increased taxation elsewhere. Although there are no plans to introduce such a scheme, the Government keep all taxes under review.
Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)
I thank the Minister for that Answer. Is she aware that arrival duty-free stores have had considerable success in Norway and Switzerland, where they provide additional commercial revenue streams for the airport to supply growth, and that passenger spending would increase by 30% if they were brought in in this country? Will the Minister ask the Treasury to commit to discuss arrival duty free with airports and ports and explore the wide-ranging economic benefits for the UK through consultation?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, we welcome engagement on this issue, and we have heard the case put forward for duty free on arrival. As I have noted, the Government believe it would place additional pressure on public finances. One challenge is that any potential uplift in spending potentially displaces spending with other domestic duty-paid retailers and therefore could compete against them. The Government would also need to be confident there was adequate infrastructure and resourcing to combat fraud and ensure compliance. We have no plans to consult on duty free on arrival, but we keep all taxes under review and we consider all available evidence as part of the tax-making policy process.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I am delighted that the Government are not looking at this but, if they were to do so, would they look at the alcohol harm that could be caused by the increase of cheap alcohol?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, public health considerations are a consideration in the decision-making process. I am sure the noble Baroness will welcome both the changes that we have made to the system for alcohol duty, relating it to strength, and the decision in the Budget around uprating.
Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)
My Lords, Brexit has presented the travel industry with a wealth of opportunities, and the clear advantages of permitting duty-free purchase on arrival into UK airports would provide us with a level playing field along with our global competitors in this area. Will the Minister urge the Secretary of State and the Chancellor to reverse the current situation, which is damaging our tourist sector and our world-class retail sector?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I have set out the position on duty free on arrival, but of course my noble friend is right that, following our exit from the EU, we have been able to introduce changes. One of those changes has been outbound duty-free sales of alcohol and tobacco for passengers travelling to the EU from Great Britain, including by rail and on board cruise ships. That is a new opportunity for retailers to offer that service.
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I think what the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, said was very sensible and I hope there will be a proper review of this matter. As the noble Baroness is the Minister who has been responding to me on my duty-free Question, could she now please give us a plain and simple answer for why, if Northern Ireland is still part of the EU, duty free cannot be got from Northern Ireland to Great Britain? More importantly, if you can get duty free from anywhere in Great Britain to the rest of the EU, why can we not get it from Belfast?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, Northern Ireland enjoys frictionless trade with both the rest of the UK and the EU, and the Government are committed to ensuring that that remains the case. Introducing duty-free shopping for goods moving between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK or the EU would undermine that commitment.
Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)
My Lords, it may well be that the introduction of duty free has been one of the fantastic benefits of Brexit, but it seems odd that the Government have taken the opportunity of Brexit to get rid of tax-free shopping. That means that wealthy tourists who used to come here and shop now go to France, Germany, Spain and Italy. It hits our regional airports and our small manufacturers. The change has been opposed even by the Scottish National Party, which must be a clue that the Government have got this catastrophically wrong. Will the Minister keep this policy under review and eventually change her mind?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My noble friend is a persistent campaigner on this issue. He is right that, in leaving the EU, we were not able to maintain the previous policy of offering tax-free shopping to non-EU citizens only; it would have to be extended to all visitors, which would come with a significant cost. However, I reassure my noble friend that we keep all taxes under review, and we welcome representations to help to inform future decisions on tax policy.
Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)
My Lords, the Government were slow to back the tourism sector during the coronavirus pandemic, U-turning on a special deal for airports and airlines and missing the opportunity to tie support to green initiatives. Their flip-flopping on the issue of tax-free shopping for international visitors and slowness on the issue of arrivals duty free have led many in the sector to question whether the Treasury truly understands the challenges that the industry faces. What plans, if any, do the Government have to bring forward a cross-departmental strategy for boosting British tourism?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I reassure the noble Lord that the Government fully understand the contribution that tourism makes to our economy. To pick up his point about the Covid pandemic, through the pandemic the UK Government provided over £37 billion to support the tourism, leisure and hospitality sector in the form of grants, loans and tax breaks. Since then, the Government have contributed to various successful campaigns to stimulate recovery, including the £10 million National Lottery Days Out scheme and efforts by VisitBritain to deliver its international marketing campaign.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, following the question from the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, who mentioned the Scottish National Party, is the Minister aware that in Scotland we have had a Minister for Tourism—which includes what we are talking about in this Question today—since 1999, but the current Government of Scotland have made no such appointment? Instead, they have appointed a Minister for Independence, when the Prime Minister has rightly ruled out a referendum. As a Treasury Minister, will she get her officials to look into this unauthorised expenditure by the Scottish Government?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I will say that it shows that the Scottish Government’s priorities lie in the wrong place, instead of seeking to address the priorities of the people of Scotland, whether it is tourism or improving their health and education systems. I think the people of Scotland would welcome a greater focus on those issues and less of a focus on something on which we recently had a referendum that settled the issue.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
My Lords, further to the answer that my noble friend has given, surely this is a question of the propriety of the use of public funds. The Scottish Government are involved in spending public money on a matter for which they have no rights. If these people were in local government, they would be being surcharged.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I will repeat what I said to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, that this absolutely demonstrates that the priorities of the Scottish Government lie in the wrong place and are not aligned with the people in Scotland.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
My Lords, returning to the abolition in 2020-21 of the right to reclaim VAT on purchases made in high-street shops, I think the Minister said that nowadays that would cost a considerable amount. But the tourism and retail industries contest that claim. It is two years since that decision was made. Surely the Treasury has up-to-date details.
Baroness Penn (Con)
The noble Baroness is right that there are direct costs of offering any scheme through VAT being refunded but there may be indirect benefits in terms of stimulating tourism and other spending. The Treasury seeks to take both those issues into account when looking at these issues. When the decision was taken to withdraw VAT-free shopping for visitors, the Treasury also held a round table with the industry to hear those views. As I said to my noble friend Lord Vaizey, we continue to welcome representations to help to inform future decisions.
Bus Services
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Taylor of Stevenage
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of trends in the provision of bus services in England since 2019.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, Covid-19 resulted in significant reductions to passenger numbers and bus service levels. To mitigate that, the Government have provided over £2 billion in emergency and recovery funding to keep vital bus services running. On 9 February we announced a further extension of that support until 30 June. As a result, bus service provision in England outside London remained at over 85% of pre-Covid levels in 2021-22.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, last week two separate zero-emission buses projects, in Milton Keynes and Stevenage, collapsed when the private sector partner, Arriva, pulled out, saying it was because passenger numbers had not recovered after the pandemic. What specific assessment have the Government done of the reasons for the 18% drop in passenger numbers since the pandemic? What more can be done to encourage the private sector to participate in these zero-emission pilots?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My Lords, it is very disappointing that Arriva decided it was no longer willing to take part in those projects. Other bus operators are taking part in projects elsewhere in the country, and indeed Arriva itself is still participating in other separate zero-emission buses projects. Essentially, we very much hope that it will come back to the table once, and if, passenger numbers increase.
The reduction in passenger numbers is related to changes to concessionary travel and to people going to work and working from home. We believe that we have stabilised at this point, and now we look forward to bussing back better.
Lord McLoughlin (Con)
My Lords, I draw your Lordships’ attention to my registered interest as chairman of Transport for the North. May I ask my noble friend to give some long-term assurance on the amount of support we are giving to bus companies? What has been done has been very welcome, but there is uncertainty about what will happen after 30 June, and buses are needed as a reliable form of public transport for our country.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I absolutely accept what my noble friend is saying. From the Government’s perspective, we have had to see what happens to patronage and where service levels have ended up, given the current levels of support. We are also looking at the impact of the £2 bus fare cap. All these things are going into our analysis of what we may be able to do to support the bus sector after 30 June.
Lord Watts (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that what is called for is regulation, and that if we reintroduce it right across the board and give those powers back to local authorities, they will be far more efficient in their use of bus resources?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I keep hearing this from the Labour Party, and I am not entirely sure which regulations and powers Labour is proposing to give back to local transport authorities. As the noble Lord well knows, at the moment, local transport authorities are required to produce an enhanced partnership, which is between them and the bus operators. If they do not want to do that, they can take all the powers they want and franchise the whole system.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, will my noble friend be issuing guidance to plumbers and electricians on how to carry their tools and equipment on a bus, especially in outer London, since the Mayor of London appears determined to deprive them of their vans?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
Questions is fun today, isn’t it? The Government will not be issuing guidance to plumbers and electricians, on the basis that they probably know how to carry their tools. We are looking with great interest at the Mayor of London’s proposed extension of ULEZ. I would also point out that he announced—yesterday, I think—something called the Superloop for outer London, which sounded very new. However, I checked and in my area that includes the existing X26, so the Superloop involves quite a substantial amount of rebranding, as often happens with the Mayor of London.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
Does the Minister accept that there is an urgent need for reform of bus service funding and an end to this hand-to-mouth approach caused by the short timescales for Department for Transport decision-making? Does she also accept that any new funding mechanism should be based not on competitive bids but on greater devolution and less interference from the Department for Transport?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I believe I have already addressed the point about the short-term nature of the funding. I agree it is not ideal; however, it has been necessary as the whole system has transitioned. I reassure the noble Baroness that we will also be looking at BSOG reform this year. To remind noble Lords, this is a very important amount of money: some £250 million goes into the sector, which keeps bus fares low, but we have to make sure that it also supports net zero. There are all sorts of different things we can do with bus funding. In 2021-22, 57% of all income for the bus sector came from central and local government.
The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, is participating remotely.
Lord Shinkwin (Con) [V]
My Lords, many people rely on buses to get to work, especially in cities, including, of course, disabled people. Given the urgent need to close the disability employment gap, which continues to be at a high of around 30%, what assessment have the Government made of the impact on disabled people’s ability to get to work in light of the trends in the provision of bus services?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
As we set out in our long-term national bus strategy, ensuring the safe and comfortable movement of all people on buses, including those with accessibility issues, is an absolute priority. I will take back to the department my noble friend’s specific question about disabled people. In a similar vein, it is also worth mentioning some further good news: the accessibility information regulations should be laid today, which, I am sure, many noble Lords will welcome.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I wonder if the Minister would be kind enough to go back to the department for me and then drop me a line on the appalling treatment of the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority in respect of central government funding. It is a mystery to all of us how the Government can talk about better buses when buses are actually disappearing.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
We asked all local transport authorities to prepare bus service improvement plans; some were better than others, and the best ones were given funding. Regarding the ones that were not so good, we supported the local transport authorities by providing them with revenue support so they could upskill their staff and improve their BSIPs for the future. I believe that is what happened in South Yorkshire, and I very much hope it has been able to use the money we gave it successfully.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend will be aware of the importance to rural bus services of concessionary bus fares. What will the future of these fares be after June?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
We are not planning any changes to the levels of concessionary bus fares, but we are looking closely at the implementation of the concessionary fares scheme. Over the course of 2023 we will look closely at the reimbursement guidance and the calculator to make sure that bus operators are getting the correct amount of money for the people they carry.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, the statutory concessionary bus fare scheme provides free travel for pensioners and disabled people from 9.30 am to 11 pm Monday to Friday, and at any time on weekends and public holidays. Given the change in use patterns, that people needing to get to medical appointments often have to travel before 9.30 am, and that many older people—including someone I was talking to in Liverpool at the weekend—are providing childcare that enables other members of their family to work, should that statutory concession not operate 24 hours a day on weekdays as well?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My Lords, we have looked at the concessionary scheme and we have no plans to change it at this time. However, I remind the noble Baroness that the £2 fare cap is currently in place, and that will benefit those who are not able to use the scheme early in the morning.
Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
My Lords, my understanding is that when a bus is cancelled at very short notice, often because of congestion, that data is not filtering through in real time to Google Maps or any of the national APIs. This makes it very difficult for people to plan their journeys and has an impact on economic productivity. Will the Minister look into this and see what can be done to put it right?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I will happily take that back to the department. The Government set up the bus open data service a few years ago now, and for the first time we were able to consolidate all the information from the bus operators and make great strides towards providing the real-time information that passengers need. But I will certainly take that point back to the department to make sure we are considering it.
Ukraine: Depleted Uranium
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Lord Balfe
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the consequences of their decision to supply Ukraine with shells capped with depleted uranium, given the potential health impact of spent munitions.
Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a serving Army reservist. Given the lack of tangible evidence to the contrary, we do not recognise the presupposed potential risk to health or the environment. The UK notes that environmental and long-term health effects of the use of depleted uranium munitions have been thoroughly investigated by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, the International Atomic Energy Agency, NATO, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Commission and others, none of which has documented long-term environmental or health effects.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, for those of us who are students of history, the present times seem very much like 1913. Every few weeks, there is a ratcheting up of confrontation and no one has any apparent desire to end this and seek peace. There are health hazards involved and the UN has looked at them. Is the Minister morally happy that we are now supplying depleted uranium shells to Ukraine? When will we begin a serious search for peace?
Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, I can say, hand on heart, that I am morally very comfortable that we are providing these armour-piercing rounds to Ukrainian forces so that they can push back Putin’s illegal invasion.
The Lord Bishop of Derby
Does the Minister agree that, whatever legitimate concerns people may have about the health and environmental impact of uranium-depleted shells, which I personally share, President Putin’s claim that he is looking to store tactical nuclear missiles in Belarus because the West is collectively beginning to use weapons with a nuclear component is utterly bogus, given that British forces have been using these armour-piercing shells legally for several decades, in accordance with Article 36 of the 1977 protocol additional to the Geneva conventions?
Lord Harlech (Con)
I completely agree with the right reverend Prelate.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
Will the Minister go back and talk to his colleagues about the great care that needs to be taken in answering questions on issues of this sort from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and from the Ministry of Defence?
Lord Harlech (Con)
I thank the noble Lord for his comments and I shall definitely do so.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
The Minister mentioned the United Nations but did not take account of its report, which says that the use of this ammunition is likely to cause chemical toxicity, which can result in skin irritation and kidney failure. Is he aware of that report? The other point is this: have we not handed Mr Putin an ill-founded but successful propaganda opportunity to claim falsely that the allies are seeking to introduce a nuclear element to the conflict? Who authorised the use, and indeed the supply, of this ammunition? Who took account of the possible public responses which people such as Mr Putin might take advantage of?
Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, I reiterate that multiple scientific bodies, including the UN, have studied this at length and concluded that there are no, or minimal, risks of long-term health effects from exposure to DU. On the point about Putin’s posturing, he is simply trying to deter our support for the forces of Ukraine. It is fundamental that we supply Ukrainian forces with these rounds, due to their armour-piercing capabilities, so that those forces can engage Russian adversaries from further distances.
Lord Singh of Wimbledon (CB)
My Lords, I have read reports that depleted uranium shells cause birth defects in infants. That very thought, or even the uncertainty, is such that it will lower the moral standing of both the UK and Ukraine to use them. As has been said, it gives a very effective weapon to Vladimir Putin to escalate conflict. Surely that is not desired.
Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, on escalation, it needs to be reiterated that Putin signalled his intention to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus as early as June 2022. He has been playing this game for a long time and is simply trying to capitalise on the supply of these munitions to our Ukrainian allies.
Lord Bellingham (Con)
My Lords, the Minister mentioned a number of organisations that have concluded that these weapons were safe, but is he aware that the Royal Society carried out a report and concluded that any impact on personal health and the environment is, in its words, “very low”? Does he also agree that it is incredibly hypocritical of the Kremlin to criticise this supply of weapons when it has been using depleted uranium shells from the start of the war?
Lord Harlech (Con)
My noble friend raises several excellent points, all of which I agree with.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
Let me say to the Minister, because it is important to continually restate our unity of purpose in this Chamber, that His Majesty’s Opposition fully support the provision of depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine by the Government. The crucial point is to say to President Putin: you will not get a propaganda coup from this. The important point, which I reiterate, is that despite the word “uranium” these are conventional weapons used in many conflicts. Is the task for us all not to prevent a cynical use of western fears by Putin to justify placing tactical nuclear warheads in Belarus?
Lord Harlech (Con)
I personally thank the noble Lord opposite for the support from His Majesty’s loyal Opposition, and the whole House, in our continued resolute support for Ukraine. He is absolutely correct that this is nothing but Putin’s brinkmanship. Putin could end this war tomorrow by cease-firing and withdrawing his troops from Ukraine immediately.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
My Lords, is it not important that we keep a sense of proportion here? People in Ukraine are being blown to smithereens by Putin’s missiles. There may be arguments about the health effects of these weapons but those are as nothing compared to what is happening to the Ukrainians. That is why it is so important that we continue to support them in every way we can to defeat this tyrant and his dreadful behaviour.
Lord Harlech (Con)
I thank my noble friend for that support. He is entirely right that the major threat to life and the environment, and to the way of life of the people of Ukraine, is coming from the shelling and merciless bombardment from Russia’s forces. That must end immediately.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, the positioning of Russian short and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Belarus offers Russia no advantage whatever, beyond what it already achieves from its current basing arrangements. What it does is to demonstrate, since it is contrary to the Belarusian constitution, that under its present leadership that country has become a wholly Russian-subsidised and Russian-dominated puppet state, completely contrary to the wishes of a great many of its people. In all of this, will the UK Government undertake to do all that they can to support the Belarusian people in their resistance to their oppressive regime?
Lord Harlech (Con)
The noble and gallant Lord makes a very important point. We condemn the Lukashenko Government’s provision of support to Putin’s unprovoked and illegal war in Ukraine. We are very concerned about the recent passage of constitutional amendments in Belarus which enable it to renounce its nuclear-free status, and its recent decision to host Russian nuclear weapons on its territory.
Lord Swire (Con)
When Putin is eventually dragged in front of the ICC, can we also add to the charge sheet the illegal munitions that he used against the people of Syria?
Lord Harlech (Con)
My noble friend is absolutely right and that should definitely be considered.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, we should be very grateful for the intervention from the Front Bench opposite. I strongly reinforce what my noble friend Lord Forsyth said about losing all sense of proportion. This is a widely used uranium-depleted metal and very little to do with nuclear power. The absurd proposition seems to be that being killed by one of these shells might cause skin irritation, whereas if you are killed by a shell without it you would just be dead. Can we please keep a sense of proportion in this Chamber about these matters, because at the moment we seem to be losing that?
Lord Harlech (Con)
My noble friend is absolutely correct. I reiterate that DU armour-piercing rounds are effective. They are legal and fully compliant with the law of armed conflict, while extensive research and tests have shown them to be safe to those operating these munitions.
Building (Public Bodies and Higher-Risk Building Work) (England) Regulations 2023
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Scott of Bybrook
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 28 February be approved. Considered in Grand Committee on 28 March
Social Care
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Andrews
That this House takes note of the future of adult social care given (1) the recent reports from the House of Lords Adult Social Care Committee (HL Paper 99) and the Archbishops’ Commission on Reimagining Care, (2) the Care Quality Commission s local authority assessment duties which commence from 1 April, and (3) His Majesty’s Government’s stated intention to publish a social care plan in Spring 2023.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, I am extremely grateful for this opportunity to introduce a debate which has a particular resonance in this House and a real urgency. I am very pleased that so many Members of the House have been able to take part today, particularly members of the Adult Social Care Committee. I am delighted to share the debate with the Church, alongside the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. We are considering two reports, in respect of which Church and state are joined in values and prescriptions. We are also anticipating some of the changes coming down the track. I regret that we do not have the national care plan today, as we had hoped, but we can anticipate the CQC changes. There is a lot to discuss, and the debate will go far wider than the two reports before us.
We have not yet had a reply to our Select Committee report, A “Gloriously Ordinary Life”, which was published last December, but I hope the Minister will be able to say something about the national care plan, not least when it will be published and when we can debate it. Perhaps he could answer one or two of the outstanding questions, such as: will the £500 million workforce funding plan be halved?
I said that this debate has a particular resonance in this House, and there can be very few noble Lords who have not had the experience of caring for someone close to them. It is estimated that one in two of us is likely to become an unpaid carer by the time we reach 50. For some people, it is a lifetime’s commitment; for others, it is an overnight change in circumstances that leaves them with a future which is darker and very different. Overall, at any one time about 10 million adults of all ages come into contact with adult social care. When it matters so much to so many people, we are bound to ask why, as a whole, it has been out of sight and off the public radar for so long. Perhaps a better question is: why do we not care more about it—sufficient to make it the social and political priority it needs to be? What do we need to change in order to care more, and to plan and provide more effectively for a fairer and more robust service? Why is it not a national imperative? The answers to these questions are rooted partly in human frailty and partly in the history of the NHS and the time in which it was born: a time when women did not work and people did not live as long.
What is significant about the two reports is not that they reach similar conclusions, but that they are rooted in similar values which start from the assumption that adult social care has so far been denied the opportunity to be what it could and should be: a service that enables people to live a gloriously ordinary life which is fruitful, active and valuable. The support provided is not transactional or contractual; it is based on a generous and mutually supportive set of relationships which reflect what, at best, being cared for and caring mean. The Archbishops’ Commission’s report, Care and Support Reimagined, describes it as a fulfilled life based on love, mutuality and interdependence, embedded in the concept of a national care covenant.
Today’s realities are very different. Many of those who need care or support in order to care, particularly as unpaid carers, battle their way through a barrage of services, systems, agencies, tests and charging regimes that seem designed to deter demand until needs become extreme. The daily realities are set out in our report in the words of those who live that reality. We were extremely privileged to hear so many witnesses share their experiences and their lives with us—people who have lost jobs, homes and health in the process of caring. That co-production helped our report to reach a wider audience, and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude, as we do our superb committee staff—Megan Jones, Daphné Le Prince-Ringuet, Alasdair Love and Abdullah Ahmad—our wonderful special advisers, Jon Glasby and Anna Severin, herself an expert by experience, and every member of the committee who gave so much time and insight and shared their own experiences. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Laming, could not be in his place today. He kicked this off through the Liaison Committee and helped us settle on a topic in a very well-worked field which has not had the attention it deserves—the plight of the unpaid carer.
Caring goes on day and night, without public acclaim, in private, behind closed doors, and with pitiful reward. Indeed, unpaid carers were described by no less than Jeremy Hunt, when chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, as the least visible aspect of a service which, overall, suffers from “entrenched” invisibility. Understanding what that means for adult social was a task we undertook, and trying to work out how to dismantle it consumed much of our inquiry, because invisibility takes many forms and has many impacts. Adult social care may be a nationally funded service, but it is locally delivered. It does not have a coherent national profile; it is fragmented across 18,000 organisations. While care homes are, tragically, more in the national spotlight because of Covid, the rest of the service is below the radar until you need it—when you cannot find it. At its most graphic, although it is the same size as the health service and of equal importance to the well-being of the nation, its budget is a fraction of the NHS’s: £17 billion compared with £153 billion. As we know—this statistic is all too familiar—a third of local government funding has been lost in the past decade. Compared with the NHS, adult social care is not the national treasure it should be.
This is not a remote failure. At the start of 2022, 2.6 million over 60s were living with some form of unmet need, such as the basics of washing and eating, and 2.2 million hours of care had been lost in the first three months of that year. Half a million people are now waiting for assessment. Care support, as it was described to us, even when it comes with the best of intentions and people, can still make people feel very grudging and guilty rather than supported.
The relative invisibility of the service is compounded by a lack of information. We were astonished by what we did not know. The number of unpaid carers is estimated at between 4.2 million and 6.5 million, but there may be many more who are not registered because of the problem of identification. We know that they save the country £132 billion a year, but less well known is that they receive the lowest of all benefits—£2 an hour, or £69.70 a week. To get that, you have to work for more than 35 hours a week and fulfil a means test. It is no wonder they are worried sick about heating and food bills, and that they do not manage to stay in work—and when they do, the support they get is significantly less than that offered by other countries. Put together with a paid workforce which is not valued for its exceptional skills and which works for less than the minimum wage, it is hardly surprising that they are driven out of a job they love or that it is so hard to find a personal assistant these days.
The reports provide all the evidence any Government would need as to why this is urgent, and they set out a plan for change. Both say unconditionally that there must be a radical shift in perception and investment in all parts of the service, so that adult social care can become the transformational life-enhancing service it could have been designed to be. We heard someone say to us informally, “The NHS saved my life. Adult social care has helped me to live it.” That was a graphic description.
The greatest failure has been the failure to plan strategically for an ageing society. The result is that we see longer life as something to be borne, a burden, a nuisance—and that cannot now just be fixed. That needs to be seen together with the repeated failures to cap residential care; to implement the Care Act 2014; to integrate social care into the health service, until recently; to prepare a realistic adult workforce plan based on skills, a full pay review, and a resilient service that people feel proud to be part of; and to challenge the false economy of underinvestment in adult social care year on year, at a time when the impact on the health service alone is immeasurably worse.
Add to that the failure to honour the promises that have actually been made to unpaid carers: better leave, a better carer’s allowance, better respite. It is a catalogue of disappointment. There has been so much analysis and diagnosis, so much hand-wringing over failure and so little meaningful change.
But the future is catching up with us: we will have a population of about 2 million in 10 years’ time who will be ageing without care, with no family to look after them. Where are the plans for these people to get the support they need? At the same time, if we are smart, we have new technologies and new devices that can help reduce risk and plan for where the skill gaps are. I think of the wonderful Tribe Project we came across, which does outstanding work but which ought to be all across the country. We saw so much good practice in local authorities as different as Wigan and Somerset, and an appetite for innovation and for engagement with the community. There are tremendously creative ideas at local level, all waiting to be galvanised and shared.
The most challenging question of all is what needs to change before we care more sufficiently to make adult social care a national imperative. Four things are necessary: to raise adult social care’s voice, visibility and agency; to revisit and build on what already could work better; to build capacity through workforce skills and strategic investment; and to change the way we view it—as a unique social good in itself, not simply part of propping up the NHS.
First, and simply, adult social care has to have a louder, more coherent and challenging voice, so that it can be more powerfully championed inside and outside government. It has been too easy to get away with simply patching up adult social care in an emergency and parking the workforce strategy. It has not had the power to fight for priority, which is extraordinary when we think of the power it has to change lives, for better or worse.
We recommend what looks like an easy reach, but which could make a huge difference: a commissioner for care and support to lead that fight, to raise that voice, to hold Ministers’ feet to the fire, to do some shaming if necessary, but also to celebrate and mobilise the best. That champion will be a champion for unpaid carers as well, to make sure the Government cannot get away with any more delay and procrastination there.
Reducing invisibility means knowing more: to do better, we have to fill those information gaps. We have to have a national plan for data on adult social care, so that we actually know who is caring when and where; so we know where the gaps are, where the resources can be deployed best, and what we need to invest in most effectively. That could also be helped by creating an R&D network akin to that in the NHS, so that we could trap ideas, innovation and good practice. If we have increased visibility, we can have more and better opportunities to design more flexible services—more “choice and control”, as is described, whether through better access to better packages that work more effectively, more personal assistants with less bureaucracy, direct payments that actually get to where they are needed, or giving respect to enable unpaid carers to give their own expertise more effectively, as full partners in providing care.
I have been banging on about housing in this House for well over a decade. We need accessible and adapted housing, so that we do not have thousands of people stuck in hospitals. They should be able to go to a safe home and be looked after safely, not just at times when care is needed, but urgently, as a matter of sensible planning for an ageing society. The social care White Paper recognises the role of housing, so I very much hope we will see some funding come forward to actually meet that desire.
So much of what is in these reports is not new; so much was set out in the Care Act 2014—principles, processes, project design. It is tragic that it has been on the statute book but not implemented by local authorities, which have not been able to put the training plans in place; they have not been funded to do so. That leads to the inescapable reality that adult social care needs a national investment strategy.
Compared with the costs of failure and delay, adult social care is not expensive. Again, when the Chancellor was chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee in 2017 he called for an annual increase of £7 billion between 2021 and 2023—this at a time when energy companies are scooping up hundreds of billions. This is the same Chancellor, though, who did not put any additional money for adult social care in the Budget. I ask the Minister what he thought of that.
In conclusion, so much of this is not about money at all; it is about moving away from the culture and perception of a service where the dominant language is not that of celebration but of “burden”, of “dependence”, of “failure” and of “crisis”, towards one which values and empowers the people it serves and those who do the caring, paid and unpaid. Among the assumptions which must change are the long-held assumptions that disabled adults and older people are not capable of living a life that is as rich and fulfilling as everyone else’s; that social care work is unskilled work; and that families will always be there to care.
Let me put it another way and quote Social Care Future:
“We all want to live in a place we call home, with the people and things we love, in communities where we look out for one another, doing what matters to us.”
It seems to be the most modest of ambitions—so many of the things that are asked for are so modest—but one that is well within reach if we choose to do it. The greatest risk, as our report says, is not to change, and the hardest question is, if not now, when? We have waited long enough to make adult social care a national treasure as well as a national imperative. I really hope the Minister agrees with me this afternoon. I beg to move.
Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Con)
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and to have a chance to thank her for her outstanding chairmanship of the committee. I also thank our superb professional team.
Our report’s introduction describes adult social care as
“largely out of sight and off the public agenda until we need it.”
That is in strong contrast to the NHS, despite there having been, in the last 25 years, no fewer than eight Green Papers, four White Papers, three cross-parliamentary committees and two full government inquiries. We should ask ourselves why it is that a sector so vital to one in five of our population at any one time, to the overall health of the nation and to the functioning of the NHS has been so overstudied and, as we found, so underresolved over such a long period.
It is mostly, I suggest, because it has “just grown”, and is now highly and almost unmanageably complex. I give just three examples. The first is funding. Public spending on adult social care, which is around £22 billion, is a mix of central government grant and council tax. Some £11 billion comes from private expenditure. At least £132 billion is contributed by an army of unpaid carers, often family. Actual funding arrangements vary, from self-funding care home residents, through a mix of local authority or NHS top-ups, to the fully publicly funded.
The second example is commissioning. Commissioning responsibility is split, in England, between 152 local authorities and the NHS.
The third example is provision, which is equally complicated, with 95% of residential and nursing beds being in the independent sector. Agencies provide some home care, and, in all, 18,000 organisations run around 34,000 establishments. National accountability and responsibility are, of course, divided between the levelling-up department, the NHS and the Treasury.
The effect of all this on those needing social care, almost always urgently, is that they face a lack of comprehensible information even to get into the system. They then find, all too frequently, a shortage of provision, delays, confusion and unclear accountability. Our report contains wonderful examples of good practice and ingenious solutions to these problems, but also graphic evidence from people struggling to cope at the same time with grievous personal or family situations via a massively complicated system. Their courage, and that of those caring for them, is immense.
The effect on the NHS of neglecting social care must also be tackled. We all know the NHS is experiencing unprecedented problems, some resulting from the pandemic, of growing demand and staffing and funding difficulties. How acceptable is it that every single day 10% of hospital beds are occupied by patients who do not need them but cannot be discharged because social care is not available, and that preventative social care is not available to avert many hospital admissions in the first place? The NHS has got to be fixed, but it cannot be fixed without first fixing social care.
The Government know this, and, to their credit, they do have solutions, not least from reports that they themselves have commissioned, such as the Dilnot report of 2011; from legislation they have passed, such as the 2014 Care Act; and White Papers they have published, such as People at the Heart of Care in 2021. For the one in five of us, and for the health of the nation, it is now time to see some implementation.
Baroness Barker (LD)
My Lords, I have had the privilege of being a member of the Adult Social Care Committee, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and I am now a member of the Select Committee on the Integration of Primary and Community Care, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, so I have come to think of the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, as my partner in crime on both of those, as we question a series of professionals coming in to try to tell us just how bad the situation is currently.
We are having this discussion in the run-up to a general election, nearly a decade on from the passing of the Care Act and more than two decades on from the royal commission on the future of long-term care, and I suspect we are no nearer a resolution now than we were then. But I think it is important, as we are in the run-up to a general election, to make a few recommendations to all those people in political parties who are drawing up their manifestos.
The first is that there needs to be an update of the Dilnot commission proposals. We need a realistic assessment of the needs of older people and adults with disabilities for long-term care and the extent to which that can be funded by individuals’ capital assets. A crucial element of that assessment has to be the availability and cost of trained skilled staff, because that is a huge issue in the sector. For the first time, a further element needs to be the number of people ageing without children—that is a phrase which covers a number of different circumstances. We have now got to the point where Secretaries of State for Health admit openly that we have a health and social care system predicated on the fact that the majority of care, and management of care, will be done by families. There are at least 1 million people who do not have children, and it is children we are talking about. We do not even record the number of men who do not have children; we do not have that basic data, and yet we are expecting them to manage care. Unless and until we do that, there will be a profound effect on those people when they come to moments of crisis, such as hospital discharge. We need the Government to start to really look at this issue.
The second recommendation is that we need, as a matter of urgency, the development of legislation, policy and protocols that governing the use of, and access to, data of health and social care users. Currently, we have a system in which the sharing of information just between the departments of an acute hospital is utterly random, and between the different parts of the health and social care system, between acute and community health, and social care and local authorities, is non-existent. We talk about care pathways, but they are rapidly becoming a fictional idea. I defy anybody—a professional, a user or a carer—to know what a care pathway is and how to get from one place to another. Unless and until we sort this, we will have an ineffective, expensive mess: duplication of services on the one hand and lack of access to basic services on the other.
My third point is that, as regulators of health and social care—particularly the CQC as it goes into the new single assessment framework—look at these new integrated care systems, they need to specify who is responsible not just for a single episode of care but for care pathways. We have not begun to see that yet, and it is fundamental to our ability to build a system which works in the long term.
I suspect, in the run-up to the election, there will be calls from some people to say that we ought to take care away from local authorities; that for the sake of efficiency, we either put everything under the NHS, or outsource much more to the voluntary sector, charities and faith groups because they will make better use of limited resources. I would caution against that. Local authorities have a public equality duty and access to population data, and to data about individuals within their areas. I think it is crucial that we stick with them.
Finally, as president of the National Association of Care Catering, I want to make a plug for meals on wheels: old-fashioned, much denigrated, but an absolute lifeline to people. I had the privilege of being an undercover meals-on-wheels volunteer a couple of years ago—I said I was a trainee; I do not think most of them would have given me the job. The immense value of low-tech services to older people cannot be overestimated. We really should make sure that those services which give great value are maintained for older people.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for securing this important debate, for her Select Committee’s outstanding report on adult social care and for including the recent report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Reimagining Care in the debate title. I am also very grateful to my noble friend the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle, who co-chaired the commission. He will be addressing some of its specific recommendations later. I would like to speak about the motivation for its commissioning by the most reverend Prelate the Archbishop of York and myself.
First, in common with those of almost every political, religious or social belief, we think the current care system is broken. It cannot be tweaked; it needs reimagining. We have had the same reason for the Church reports on housing and, I regret to say, the same indifference to them from the Government, despite the enthusiasm of the industry in both cases.
Secondly, each of the reports we commissioned is based in Christian values which have guided this country at its best for centuries but overlap almost exactly with those of other faith groups and those of humanists. We were discussing this, over an Iftar meal on Monday evening, with Muslim leaders from across the country. Anything like housing, care, households, families, ethnicity or race has to have a value base which is realistic, mitigates possible harms and exalts the value of human dignity. The values must also maintain a healthy realism on the tendency of individuals and institutions, including government and the Church, to look for short-term fixes in their own interests, not long-term solutions for the common good. The list of reports and White Papers, so eloquently put by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, which really should have ended with “and a partridge in a pear tree”, illustrates this point finely.
Thirdly, each report makes demands of government but also of every other aspect of society. In terms of care, it may be companies and businesses, charities, families and households, and we always point to the needs for the Church of England to improve and up its game. Every part of society is needed to be involved in care.
This commission was started in April 2021 and produced its final report in January of this year. We need an understanding that care and support is not an end in itself but the means by which every person can begin to fulfil their potential as a human being as it varies through life. The commission’s central recommendation is for the development of a national care covenant. This would clarify the mutual responsibilities of us all—individuals, families and communities, alongside local and national government—in relation to care and support.
Funding matters. If it is our starting point, we will fail. Once we know what kind of care system we are aiming for, we can begin to see how it could progressively be paid for. Much as I admire His Majesty’s Treasury, if we start with it, we will be pragmatic but are unlikely to be imaginative.
The revolutionary value that should be at the heart of our social care system is interdependence. In the report, it replaces the myth of autonomy for each person. No one is autonomous; we all rely on others at every point of life and death. We must recognise that reality, with its beauty and dignity. Interdependence builds community; autonomy creates atomisation. Atomisation is painfully described in a book with that name as the title in the English translation but which in French is called Les Particules Élémentaires, by Michel Houellebecq. Autonomy takes us to Huxley’s Brave New World; interdependence overcomes differentials of class and power and offers the prospect of robust compassion. Autonomy ends up with dependence on the state, because we all need support. It is a myth, and the truth is found in the prayerbook phrase
“whose service is perfect freedom”.
Interdependence takes us away from a narrow argument about who should provide care and instead says that responsibility lies with all of us to different degrees: with families and communities; with government, with regard to funding and implementation; and with NGOs, the voluntary sector and community actors such as churches, with regard to participation.
So I ask the Government and the Minister: will they begin, as we move forward, to reimagine the care system and to look at setting out clearly through a national care covenant the mutual responsibilities we all have?
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)
My Lords, I, too, start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for securing this debate today, for her very sensitive chairing of the Adult Social Care Committee, on which I was privileged to serve, and for her tireless commitment to improving the landscape of care, which is a real conundrum of our time. We must “reimagine” it, as the most reverend Primate urges, and, while many have claimed that they will fix it, it remains unfixed.
No one chooses to be cared for, or to become an unpaid carer. If the noble Lord, Lord Laming, was here, he would tell us that either could happen to any one of us at any time. But, as our report points out, both are invisible. This invisibility leads to confusion around what social care is and who delivers it. While the NHS is there “from cradle to grave”, individuals who do not currently need care cannot imagine they ever will and therefore fail to plan for such a time.
I draw your Lordships’ attention to my interests as laid out in the register, in particular my work as chief executive of Cerebral Palsy Scotland and also with people with neurological conditions. My lived experience says that we must not view social care through the prism of the NHS. Many of the people I work with are neither ill nor old; they just need help to be able to live what our committee’s report called
“a gloriously ordinary life”.
I know people who choose to study with the Open University and miss out on all those extracurricular experiences that I am sure many of us look back on with fond nostalgia, because they cannot be confident that they will be properly supported to get around campus and get to lectures like their contemporaries. I know parents who have to give up their own professional lives when their adult child leaves formal education because the system assumes that they will; and I know people who remain living with elderly parents because there is no suitable accommodation for people under the age of 65. Our committee heard from many witnesses who were not ill or old but could not get the right support. Worse than that, they were worried that, if they contacted their local authority for a review, the support they did have would be reduced.
For many of working age, what they want and need are good PAs, personal assistants. These are professional enablers who help you do what you want, whether it is getting to work, feeding you, taking you to the pub or, in a case highlighted to us during the course of our inquiry, enabling someone to pay their respects to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at the gates of Balmoral—something that could never be assessed as an outcome by a local authority care package.
Yet there are not enough PAs. You are really stuck if your PA is ill or does not turn up, and the challenges of becoming an employer and dealing with recruitment, PAYE and pensions too often just puts people off. We heard evidence in our committee from Enable Scotland, a charity which works with local authorities across Scotland delivering their PA model of care, where the charity deals with all of those employer issues and provides a personalised service to people who want it. I encourage the Minister to look at this model.
For too many, as we have heard, contact with social care services is forged in crisis and fraught with difficulty. The providers of last resort are family and friends, who are thrust into roles they neither sought nor are supported to fulfil as unpaid carers. I believe the Minister himself has been a carer and appreciates the challenges. He has called unpaid carers
“the backbone of the system”—[Official Report, 20/2/23; col. 1434.],
but I am afraid that, despite warm words, unpaid carers continue to be taken for granted.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, pointed out, carer’s allowance is the least generous benefit and considerably less than the minimum wage. There is little respite, little support and severe financial implications, but too many families feel they have no other options.
If we do nothing else in the Government’s forthcoming social care plan and future work, I urge the Minister to improve identification of unpaid carers, including children who care. Self-identification is not working and neither are the formal systems set out in the Care Act. There are still so many gaps. We heard about the No Wrong Door initiative successfully employed in Liverpool. How can the Minister ensure initiatives such as this are more widely adopted?
As others, particularly my noble friend Lady Shepherd, have said, over the years, Ministers have been given a veritable shopping list of solutions. I hope these two reports and our debate today can add to the impetus the Minister needs within government, because the last thing people who rely on care want is yet another plan that fails to be backed up with action.
Lord Bradley (Lab)
My Lords, as another member of the Adult Social Care Committee and declaring my interests in the register, I am pleased to make a short contribution to this very important debate. I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Andrews on securing this debate and, more importantly, I praise her knowledgeable and passionate chairing of the committee and her opening speech today, which I fully endorse.
The evidence we received throughout our inquiry was for recognition and support for social care in general and unpaid carers in particular, as a largely hidden workforce. The evidence was compelling, inspiring but also at times harrowing, and I praise all the contributors. As the committee stated at the beginning of our report:
“Creating a sustainable social care system in which people, their families and friends can thrive is a national imperative”.
A sustainable adult social care service must be seen as
“an indispensable partner to the health service”
and clearly and genuinely integrated with it. Surely no one can disagree with that. As we further noted, the new integrated care boards and systems must be at the forefront of realising this ambition.
As we have heard, to achieve it, investment and resources must be forthcoming. Again, the committee made clear that the Government must increase the financial settlement for adult social care over three years and then commit to sustaining realistic, long-term and protected funding for the sector to enable the robust planning of services. So it was clearly disappointing that there was no mention of sustained funding in the Budget, or any recognition of the need to reform the social care funding system based on the laudable principles established by the Dilnot inquiry.
Linked to this funding settlement is, as we have heard, access to the key benefit for carers—carer’s allowance. It is the lowest benefit rate of its kind—I do not apologise for repeating that—and it is not reflective of the extraordinary value of unpaid carers, as we have already heard today. Some of the most shocking evidence we heard from unpaid carers was about families’ lives being suddenly and unexpectedly overturned by some catastrophic event, perhaps a critical or terminal illness or a life-changing accident, with their immediate income and long-term financial planning in absolute turmoil.
So access to carer’s allowance must immediately be made easier by lowering the threshold of carers’ hours and ensuring that the earnings limit is uprated in line with the national living wage and in law. Further, the DWP should fundamentally review the carer’s allowance and report back to Parliament within one year to give some hope of financial support for this army of unpaid carers—I would be very grateful for the Government’s views on that today.
Touching very briefly on workforce, we wait expectantly for the Government’s social care plan and the workforce proposals within it. The current situation of low pay, limited career opportunity and thousands of vacancies in the sector is an utter disgrace. The committee’s recommendation that the Government must produce, with people who work in and draw on adult social care, a comprehensive, long-term, national workforce and skills plan, is an absolute priority.
Finally, it is essential that a laser focus is maintained on adult social care, and particularly on the incredible work and dedication of unpaid carers. To this end, the committee strongly believes in the establishment in the next 12 months of a commissioner for care and support to act as a champion for older adults, disabled people and unpaid carers. Critical early priorities for such a commissioner would be to include oversight of a government-commissioned, independent public review of the Care Act 2014, working with local authorities to ensure that the Act is fully implemented, and also to set up, as we have heard, the identification of the millions of invisible unpaid carers, perhaps through NHS patient records—with their permission—to ensure a mechanism to provide carers with information, self-care and digital resources to support them. They deserve nothing less.
Baroness Campbell of Surbiton (CB) [V]
My Lords, I declare an interest as the recipient of a personal health and social care budget. It was a great pleasure to serve on the Adult Social Care Committee last year, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, on her very skilful chairing, which ensured that the voices of all those involved in social care were heard and listened to.
One of our significant recommendations is that the Government work with local authorities, the voluntary sector and social care providers to embed the principles of co-production. That will give staff the necessary skills and the balance of power to the individual receiving care.
Co-production bloomed with the passing of the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act 1996, which was initiated by the noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich, in his 1993 Private Member’s Bill. I remember watching the late Baroness Masham of Ilton championing the legislation with skill and wisdom; I think I can speak on behalf of all of us when I say that we miss her fierce presence today and I pay tribute to her inspirational legacy.
The Act enabled disabled adults to purchase social care tailored to our individual needs, giving us choice and control; it is what enables me to be a Member of your Lordships’ House today. Under the Act, disabled people established local centres for independent living and worked with their LAs to educate and support other disabled people in employing personal assistants to meet their needs using the co-production model. Regretfully, the committee heard evidence that this essential support has eroded with a lack of investment. Older, disempowering models of social care provision such as institutional care and threadbare support at home are now commonplace—we need to get back to co-production.
Our report proposes specific funding to ensure that local authorities commission peer-led, independent organisations to promote innovation and capacity building. Information, advice, advocacy and peer support are key; local authorities already have duties under the Care Act 2014 to provide information and advice. Part of the funding identified in the current White Paper should also be allocated to making direct payments and personal assistance a realistic option.
This is an urgent problem. In a survey of 1,000 people by the LGA last year, 77% found it more difficult to recruit a PA—that has been my own experience. Not enough is known about the role of PAs. One witness told us that if it were recognised as a valuable and skilled role, “many will intuitively see that as a vocation—as a career”. Raising its profile would attract more people to the profession. The report recommends that a government-led workforce revaluate the pay and working conditions of PAs, and appropriate training.
To conclude, our committee endorsed Social Care Future’s simple challenge for social care: to make possible the ambition of people who “want to live in the place we call home, with the people and things we love, in communities where we look out for one another, doing what matters to us”. Indeed, our report is titled A Gloriously Ordinary Life—that was how one witness described their aspiration. The Government have the power to ensure that this is not a pipe-dream.
Lord Polak (Con)
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. I learned so much from her. It was also an honour to have served on the Adult Social Care Committee under the expert chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and I also pay tribute to the excellent support staff that we had. When I joined the committee, I thought it would be an important learning experience in an area that I was not particularly familiar with. However, as we met and listened to witnesses, it became apparent that this was not an academic exercise but, sadly, a practical guide for me and my family, as it is in one way or another for every family in the country.
I will concentrate on just one area of the report, on page 45 with the heading “Navigating the social care system: a constant fight”. Paragraph 147 states:
“Whether it is trying to get support for themselves or for the person they provide care for, unpaid carers often find that they are left to their own devices when it comes to navigating the adult social care system”.
As stated in our report, witnesses found it difficult to organise formal support for the person they care for.
Because of the difficulty of accessing care and support, social workers and local authorities are seen as gatekeepers, and there is little trust in the system’s ability or willingness to provide help. How sad, as my noble friend Lady Fraser said, that some unpaid carers told us that they live in fear of assessments which they see as a process designed to minimise their needs so as to deny them support.
I totally understand. My mother is suffering from brain cancer and has 24/7 care at home in Liverpool. We have experienced, and are experiencing, both some of the best and the worst that the system has to offer. On the positive side, the care and attention of the Marie Curie Hospice in Woolton, Liverpool, led by the deeply sensitive and professional palliative care doctor Dr Mark Mills and his team, has been exemplary. While mum is at home, the staff at the hospice have been an enormous comfort and help, not just to my mum but to my sister and brother too.
On the other hand, the experience we have had with the local authority assessors has been woeful. On 9 February, my mother was assessed by a nurse via Zoom. The nurse was in Kent and my mother was over 200 miles away, unable to communicate, in her bed in Liverpool. The assessment was to decide what the immediate next step for her care plan should be. The report, compiled by a nurse who has never met my mother, was then to be sent to an unknown panel of people who also have never met her to decide the best course of treatment and care. This absurd assessment was executed over a three-hour Zoom call seven weeks ago, and as I stand here today, we have heard nothing. The system is sadly broken. As we speak, we should consider that people up and down the country are battling to understand an incomprehensible system at the same time as trying to care for their loved ones as best they can.
During the committee’s deliberations, we understood that we were not going to be able to change a system that desperately needs an overhaul, but we were attempting to move the dial a little to bring some clarity to people doing their utmost to care. Our committee has made 36 recommendations, and that only scratches the surface. Each one is important. My own experiences have made me think more carefully, for example, about the point forcefully and powerfully made by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, about people without children ageing. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, I urge my noble friend the Minister to look carefully at recommendation 9, where we ask the Government to establish a commissioner for care to bring about a more accessible adult social care system. I concur with the suggested actions on page 45 of the Archbishops’ report that assessment and budget planning should be simple and consistent, and that care planning services should be focused on what matters to people.
I appeal across this House to all parties and to none to help that commissioner to take the politics out of care. We must come together to find and implement an urgent solution so that people up and down the country can fulfil with dignity what the late Lord Sacks wrote in his book Celebrating Life—that the supreme act of caring is to make a difference to someone else’s life. In his book the Dignity of Difference, he said, “To care is to look into the face of the other and see their uniqueness, their vulnerability and their pain”.
Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate today, and I congratulate my noble friend Lady Andrews. I have lost count of the number of debates on social care in which I have participated in my 25 years in your Lordships’ House, and it has often been a rather depressing experience. I would often have to cajole, persuade or even beg people to take part. I took to calling the few stalwarts who could always be relied upon to speak—the “usual suspects”. We were a small but devoted band. For me, the best thing about today’s debate is the number of your Lordships speaking and the attention that is being drawn to social care, at last. To be able to call my noble friend Lady Andrews and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury “usual suspects” is a measure of the progress being made. Their influential reports mark, in my view, a step change in views about social care, which for so long has been the poor relation or the Cinderella vis-à-vis the NHS.
That is not to say that the social care scene is any better than the dire situation to which I have drawn attention over the years. On the contrary, it is worse, as the statistics and examples cited in the debate today illustrate. There is not enough money, not enough integration, too many broken promises, and too many vulnerable people and their families neglected. I, like others, had hoped that we would have the long-promised plan from the Government today, but in its absence we must once again rely on promises and assurances that the Government hear our pleas and will answer our questions.
Your Lordships will understand that, for me, the most important recommendations in both the reports we are discussing today were about unpaid carers. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Polak, for sharing his moving personal experience on the issue of being an unpaid carer. Our social care system relies heavily on the care and support from these carers. In fact, they outnumber the paid health and care workforce by at least two to one. Many live in poverty or on its margins, often building up poverty for the future because of a lack of access to pensions and paid employment. Their health suffers physically and mentally, as we have heard.
The House of Lords report makes a series of sensible and modest recommendations, recognising that carers have to deal with a baffling range of organisations and agencies, which is stressful and time-consuming. For example, the report recommends that carers should be properly identified and have mechanisms for getting information. It states that carer’s allowance is inadequate and should be reviewed—hurrah—and recognises how important respite care breaks are and that there should be ring-fenced funding to provide them.
The recommendations from the Archbishops’ Commission are summed up as a new deal for carers which ensures that they have the practical, financial and emotional support to be able to provide care, maintain a loving relationship and live a full life themselves. These are modest enough demands which surely every carer deserves so that they have opportunities for a rest, better advice, better financial support, and coproduction so that they are involved in planning. None of these recommendations is rocket science, and neither are any of them unreasonable. They are simply actions and commitments which would help unpaid carers do what they want to do, willingly and with love: provide care for their loved ones, as well as caring for themselves.
It is a great disappointment that the Minister is unable to respond to all these recommendations today in the absence of the Government’s plan. I acknowledge that their White Paper, People at the Heart of Care, published in 2021, set out a 10-year vision for adult social care in which unpaid carers were recognised as equal partners in care. I cannot fault the Minister for the words he has shared many times in your Lordships’ House when acknowledging the vital role played by carers. I was delighted by the support his noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, gave to the Private Member’s Bill that would give carers access to unpaid leave, which we hope will receive Royal Assent very soon. However, carers are at breaking point. I ask the Minister to assure the House today that he knows that more funding and better integration is vital for their support. Warm words are not enough.
Beyond carers, can the Minister assure the House that when we finally see this long- awaited plan, it will have some vision in the spirit of that 10-year plan, and that it will make some attempt to address the causes of the difficulties in health and social care and not leave the Government open to charges of yet another sticking-plaster solution? Health inequalities must be addressed. They are the result of poverty and inadequate services, which are in turn the result of many years of spending cuts. The most efficient way to ensure our health and social care services are not overwhelmed is to make sure that people do not need them. If we could rebalance the agenda towards the prevention of ill health, that is the sort of vision and focus that could give some hope for the future of social care and reassure the carers who are its main providers.
Baroness Jolly (LD)
My Lords, I considered myself fortunate to sit on the Select Committee, most able chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and joined by experts and enthusiasts for the subject, along with brilliant witnesses. A few years ago, I would have had to declare my interest as the chair of a national charity providing services across England for adults with a learning disability. That is where my heart is. I echo the question posed by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, to the Minister about the national care plan.
Everyone has a right to the best life possible, and that includes people with learning disabilities, but they face obstacles that are hard to imagine. Their challenges can be complex and certainly lifelong. Even so, with the right care, support and encouragement, everyone with a learning disability can find more enjoyment, comfort and satisfaction in their lives. We saw evidence of this on our several visits. I also met pensioner children: children of our age being cared for by their parents. I met 70 year-olds being cared for by 90 year-olds. They would have had it no other way. I just cannot imagine that.
The Care Act 2014 changed the way that adults in England who require care due to old age, illness or disability receive their support. It replaced most existing legislation on this issue. The Guardian called it
“the most significant change in social care law for 60 years.”
I remind noble Lords that it received its Second Reading in the House of Lords when Jeremy Hunt was Secretary of State. Its authors were Health Ministers Paul Burstow MP and Norman Lamb MP. At its heart was the well-being principle, which established local authorities’ responsibility to safeguard and further the well-being of those under their jurisdiction. It introduced new ways of supporting adult social care. A set of national minimum eligibility criteria was introduced to ensure that people across the country received the same care for the same needs. It rather begs the question of whether local authorities and the CQC ensure that these criteria are being delivered now. That would make a good Oral Question to the Minister; I have put a marker down.
The Care Act 2014 is governed by six principles to safeguard vulnerable adults from harm: empowerment, protection, prevention, proportionality, partnership and accountability. They are as important now as they were nearly 10 years ago, and they are all to be found in the Select Committee’s report, A “Gloriously Ordinary Life”.
Looking back, why did we need the Care Act 2014? Previously, there were lots of different laws on care and support in England, and it was difficult to know what support and care one could get. The Act brought them all together under one new law and determined what type of care people should get. The Act also gives guidance and information for authorities on how to use its provisions appropriately. It gives clear and simple rules and advice on care and support for adults. The Act helps to improve people’s independence and well-being. It aims to protect vulnerable adults from any kind of mistreatment, giving people who need support more control over what happens. Consequently, it has improved their quality of life by keeping them safe and protected.
My noble friend Lady Barker brought up the issue of costs. Alongside that Act was a discussion about paying for care, influenced by Andrew Dilnot, now warden of Nuffield College, who was also a witness to our committee. Back then, he was chairman of the UK Statistics Authority and of the Commission on Funding of Care and Support, which reported in 2011.
The six principles I mentioned that govern the Care Act 2014 to safeguard adults were first introduced by the Department of Health in 2011, and they are embedded in the Act to apply to all health and care settings. It is the law that sets out how adult social care in England should be provided. It requires local authorities to make sure that people who live in their areas receive services that prevent their care needs becoming more serious or delay the impact of their needs.
Disabled adults and older people, as well as unpaid carers, frequently pointed to the vision described by Social Care Future. With the right care, support and encouragement, I believe that everyone with a learning disability can find more enjoyment, comfort and satisfaction in their lives—their glorious lives, as the title to the report realised.
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Andrews for initiating this debate, and congratulate her on the Select Committee report. It has been said before, but the report follows other distinguished predecessors. When preparing for this debate, I pulled out my well-thumbed copy of the Dilnot report and the Economic Affairs Committee’s report—otherwise known as “Lord Forsyth’s report”—together with speeches made by my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley. Here we are again: the needs are more desperate and the achievements are less. Some 58,000 fewer older people now receive long-term care, compared with 2015-16. There will be no major development until after the general election, as the introduction of a cap on lifetime care costs and changes to the means test have now been postponed until October 2025. As has been said, these changes were contained in the Care Act 2014, yet we know that 10 years will have gone by before we even start to build a system.
Those providers in the social care industry—if they are caring and conscientious—are seeing diminishing profits and worse deficits. More than half of providers had to turn down admissions and 20% of them have closed services. Those that are less caring and conscientious are making good money out of human misery. Local government funding is half of what it was 10 years ago. What help will the Government give to providers in their remaining two years? In particular, will they continue the enhanced support for energy costs at least to assist providers to stay in business?
With no long-term policy changes in prospect, we have to turn to the short-term mitigations, with the top priority being staffing. Can the Minister tell the House whether it is correct that the Government’s promise in the social care White Paper to dedicate £500 million for
“investment in knowledge, skills, health and wellbeing and recruitment policies”
has been cut by 50%? The executive chair of the National Care Association, Nadra Ahmed, representing the independent carers, believes that the report of these cuts is correct. Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, commenting on the rumour of cuts, said that
“it will set back social care for many years to come.”
The number of vacancies in the care sector is 165,000. The number of additional social care workers required is estimated to be 480,00 by 2035. Skills for Care has predicted that the UK will lose 430,000 carers in the next 10 years if those aged 55 and over take retirement. Hft and Care England published the 2022 Sector Pulse Check report, which covers, among other things, how the care sector is mitigating staff shortages. The “refer a friend” scheme, international recruitment and increasing use of agency staff each contains its own problems.
“Refer a friend”—a scheme where existing members of staff refer friends or relatives in exchange for financial reward—was the most popular method of recruitment, selected by 24% of respondents. In my view, this method contains real risks that suitability and skills will take second place to the loyalties of relationships. We have seen the consequences of this in various cover-ups of mistreatment of the most vulnerable. I have been a fellow of the CIPD for more than 20 years. Unless the right checks and balances are in place, the “refer a friend” scheme could be seen as a sub-optimal recruitment method.
The second method is international recruitment, used by 15% of respondents. In February 2022, the Government expanded the shortage occupation list; that was welcome but the primary barrier here is pay. The minimum wage that the Government have set for care workers employed from overseas is £10.10 per hour, which causes a disparity in pay between overseas workers and the existing workforce. Obtaining a certificate of sponsorship is bureaucratic and time-consuming, often taking up to 12 weeks. Visa applications are also an issue, with costly legal services beyond the reach of smaller providers. Even the agencies that provide these staff can no longer guarantee to provide workers, which has broader implications for the NHS. Many NHS nurses are doing extra shifts in adult social care rather than working overtime in the NHS. The report concludes that
“failure to manage this market will see nurses leave both the NHS and adult social care and become agency nurses at a few, select high-paying agencies.”
In conclusion, if you are in need of social care and money is not a worry, you can probably still receive a good experience. If you are poor, growing old will be the biggest challenge in your life at a time when you are least able to cope.
The Lord Bishop of Carlisle
My Lords, I have had the great privilege of sitting on both the Adult Social Care Committee and the Archbishops’ Commission on Reimagining Care. I also pay tribute to the outstanding work of their respective chairs, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and Dr Anna Dixon.
When the two reports were published, it came as no great surprise that there were huge areas of overlap. In fact, a careful analysis has revealed at least 17 different points of congruence, ranging from providing everyone with the opportunity to lead a full life, through to appointing a commissioner for care and support and properly implementing the Care Act 2014—all of which have already been mentioned.
As we have heard, the role of unpaid carers, including children, was highlighted in particular by both reports. Because that became such a central feature of the Select Committee’s investigation and report, it is being fully addressed by many noble Lords speaking in this important debate. Rather than repeating their valuable contributions, I, like the noble Lord, Lord Polak, and the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, want to focus on another area of concern raised by both reports, namely the current difficulty experienced by those who try to navigate the statutory care and support system. Phrases such as a “baffling range of organisations” and a “fog of confusion” abound. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, whose long-term contribution to this debate we so value, dealing with the complex and circular bureaucracy is time-consuming and frustrating.
As we heard from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, the commission’s central recommendation is the development of a national care covenant. This covenant would emerge from a major programme of public engagement with cross-party support and significant co-production, as with the NHS constitution. It would reflect four main themes. The first is the empowering of communities, which have a vital role to play in all this, not only in addressing practical needs but in combating loneliness and social isolation and fostering physical and mental well-being. Both the committee and the commission witnessed many good examples of that happening in practice, but we all know that supportive and inclusive communities do not just happen by accident; they need investment and nurturing. They also need local authorities to work in partnership with them, to provide a network of community-based support for everyone.
The second theme is a new deal for carers that includes recognition of their value. We applaud that recognition in the White Paper, People at the Heart of Care. As we have heard, as well as respite and, where necessary, financial support for unpaid carers, care for carers is essential to the future of social care.
The third theme is a universal entitlement to care and support, including the pooling of risk, to ensure that everyone is able to lead what the committee calls a “gloriously ordinary” life.
The fourth theme is the acceptance of our mutual responsibility as citizens. A covenant of this kind would make it abundantly clear that social care is not just the state’s responsibility. As citizens, our rights come with corresponding responsibilities; the principle of interdependence, mentioned by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, emphasises the simple fact that, in this arena, all of us have a vital part to play.
The commission began its report with a call to rethink attitudes and values, several of which have already been mentioned. It concluded that, ultimately, the whole care system needs to redesigned rather than merely adjusted. However, a national care covenant that would rebalance roles and responsibilities was its key proposal. I very much hope that His Majesty’s Government might consider this alongside their other plans for implementing the recommendations in People at the Heart of Care, which we all look forward to seeing in the very near future.
Lord Lipsey (Lab)
My Lords, social care is the Passchendaele of the welfare state. It is now 25 years since I sat on the royal commission on this subject. Since then, there has been a veritable snowstorm of excellent reports—including the two in front of us today—with, often, government promises and, sometimes, government policy statements. However, all have melted the moment they touched the ground.
I cannot hope to cover the whole subject in the time available to me so I will concentrate on one issue that is very close to my heart. After that royal commission, my noble friend Lord Boateng called me into his office; he was in charge of funding long-term care. He asked me a very good question: “If you had a bit of money to spend in the social care field, where would you spend it?” I replied, unhesitatingly, “On increasing the pay of social care workers.” Then, I said by £1 an hour; now, it would be more like £2. It is a scandal what goes on now for both the workers involved and the people for whom they care.
In January this year, Skills for Care reported that 10.9% of posts—around 170,000 of them—were vacant, meaning people will not be properly cared for. According to the latest figures, a care worker in the independent sector earns £9.66 an hour; in local authorities, it is £11.03. Care workers’ pay has dropped behind that in other sectors. In 2012-13, retail assistants earned 16p an hour less than care workers; today, they get 21p an hour more. One care manager is quoted by the Commons Health and Social Care Committee as saying:
“I dread hearing Aldi opening up nearby, as I know I will lose staff.”
Being a social care worker does not just involve hard skills, though there are those. It also involves soft skills in getting on with people. Do we really want those soft skills transferred to behind cashier points in supermarkets?
There are also problems of low promotion. People love the job but cannot see the way forward. There is also the problem of local authority finance. Councils are trying to push care home fees down. Homes make it work because they charge the councils the marginal cost of putting up with someone and get the rest of the money back off the private payers. The Government said that they would tackle this. Can the Minister kindly tell us where they have got to? I would be most grateful.
This problem is going to get worse and worse, for the simple reason of demographics—an increasing elderly population with increasing care needs. The overall population in England grew by 7% in the 10 years between 2011 and 2021. The number of people aged 85 or over rose by 16%, so nearly three times as fast. Many of those people will need care. By 2038, 57% more adults in the population will be 65 or over, compared with today. How are we going to care for them?
I make this final point. There is a crude choice in social care. You can spend the money that you have available on helping people to pay their care home fees, which helps the top half of the population, or you can spend it on providing better care. The Government plan to prioritise a cap. Fortunately, the proposal for that has now been ditched, or postponed indefinitely. However, they should have prioritised the first, with better care for all, starting with better care for those who give their lives to these difficult but rewarding tasks.
Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Andrews and her committee, and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, on two excellent reports, and address my contribution to the urgent recommendation for a proper social care workforce strategy.
I declare an interest. When I was general secretary of the TUC, we sought and secured core participant status in the Covid public inquiry. We worked closely with Covid bereaved families’ campaigns throughout. I believe that the evidence is there that many Covid deaths in care homes and among front-line workers—disproportionately among black and ethnic-minority workers—were entirely preventable. From the start, the Cinderella status of the social care service was symbolised by that failure to provide staff with proper PPE. The absence of proper sick pay also put staff and service users at terrible risk. Statutory sick pay is still far too low, at just £99 a week, and 2 million people in this country do not earn enough to qualify at all. No worker should be forced to choose between going into work and risking spreading a virus, or staying home but being unable to feed their family.
Many hoped that the pandemic would spark a sea-change in our social care service, and that severe cuts to local authority budgets, inflicted over many years, would be restored, but today the service is still subsidised by the love, the labour and the low pay of unpaid carers and the social care workforce, predominantly women. In my experience, staff care deeply for those whom they care for, and find their work profoundly satisfying. While progression routes are poor and training needs to be improved, be in no doubt that this is skilled work. However, that vocation is being exploited. Nearly a quarter of the workforce are on zero-hour contracts. Most care workers earn barely above the national minimum wage, which is currently £9.50 and due to rise to just £10.42 in April.
The Government rebranded the national minimum wage, calling it a living wage, but the real living wage, calculated according to how much it costs to lead a basic decent life, is much higher: £11.95 in London and £10.90 in the rest of the UK. The Resolution Foundation, along with many others, has argued that the bottom rate of pay for care workers needs to be significantly higher even than that, just to tackle the crisis in recruitment, retention and turnover. Service users, their families, and decent employers, know that even with the potential of new technologies, the heart of the service is human. How we treat and reward care workers reflects how much we, as a society, value those who receive care. No doubt the Government will ask how we pay for it. Part of the answer must be a fairer taxation system. It cannot be right that a care worker pays a bigger share of her income in tax than the private equity chief who buys up care homes, saddles them with debt, and then sells them on for profit.
I am proud that as part of its New Deal for Working People, Labour is committed to a policy of sectoral fair pay agreements, just as the New Zealand Government have introduced, and as is common across Europe. It is only right that first in the queue for a UK fair pay agreement should be social care workers. I hope that we can build a broad consensus for this approach, bringing Governments, employers and unions together to lift the status of social care as well as the pay, conditions and morale of staff. Investing in our social care service would relieve pressure on the NHS and, I hope, act as a catalyst for creating the decent and properly staffed and funded service that those in need of care deserve, and that care workers themselves have well and truly earned.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, that social care jobs—indeed, all jobs—should pay a real living wage. It should be a foundation of our social contract. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and her committee, for this report, which shows great compassion and sense, as does the report from the Archbishops’ Commission on Reimagining Care. We can hope only that the Government will follow their lead. There is little that I could disagree with in the intentions of either report, but as Greens we always aim to go further, so I particularly acknowledge the interrelationship of other policy natures and the nature of our society, rather than looking at social care as a stand-alone unit or looking simply to join it up with healthcare. This is really systems thinking.
First, I give a personal reflection. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, referred to the 1 million people who do not have children. This is personal to me, since I am one of the 18% of women of my age, and most ages now since those born in the 1950s, who do not have children. I have no brothers and sisters—no living relatives at all. That reflects the position of increasing numbers of our society, something that we are entirely unready for. Civil society is generating solutions. I note particularly the Older Women’s Co-Housing project in north London.
The Government do not need to direct these, but they must do far more to enable them to happen, for we have now a society that does not care for the vulnerable. Any of us could be left in that situation, at any time. That is why Green Party policy is free social care to all who need it. Provision of free social care must be central to any green new deal. When you hear that phrase, you might think of hard hats and solar panels, but you should equally think of a person caring for someone and meeting their needs—someone holding another’s hand when they need it.
That would be central to what the most reverend Primate referred to as a fulfilled life, which we should be offering everyone. Care must be provided, as the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, said, in a way that is “not transactional, not contractual”. That is our vision, and why the Green Party says that the profit motive has no place in any form of care provision—health or social. The terrible state of our care system owes a great deal to privatisation, which has taken public and individuals’ money and often put it into the hands of hedge funds and other tax-dodgers, while exploiting our workers and providing terrible care.
A study this week from the Guardian showed that the five largest private care chains are taking £150 million a year in taxpayers’ money for places in elderly care homes rated as “inadequate” or “requiring improvement”, including some classed as “not safe”. The leading earner from public funds is HC-One, a chain of 285 care homes majority-owned by a US private equity company. It was paid £50 million, the Guardian calculated, by town halls in 2022 for homes in the two lowest CQC categories.
Many noble Lords have referred to unpaid carers. Another Green promise is a universal basic income—a foundational, secure payment to every member of our society. If they chose to be a carer, we would top that up. This is a system in which everyone would have the security to care without fear of poverty. That truly is system change.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, alluded to, we are that point in the electoral cycle where parties are drawing up their manifestos. I am not expecting other parties to adopt wholesale the Green vision—although I would be happy if they did—but I will offer a couple of smaller-scale policies that I would be very happy if any party wanted to steal.
First, I was speaking earlier today about the concessionary bus travel scheme. How about we extend free public transport to family carers? That would be a modest acknowledgement of the contribution they make to our society. Secondly, young carers are far too often ignored. They often start at a terribly young age, with huge responsibilities. The pupil premium should be applied to them to help their schools support them. Thirdly, on housing, we were talking this week in the levelling-up Bill about the need for vastly better housing, both newbuild and refit, and every new home should be built to lifetime homes design standards. That would mean that people could stay longer in their own homes.
I have a final thought on technology. There is no doubt that it can help a lot, particularly in medical care, by providing security and reassurance and notification of when help is need. But please, let us not assume that a robot, no matter how snazzy, can actually provide human care—the comfort of a human touch, the thoughtful listening to a cry of pain. If noble Lords are tempted by the technological care vision, I point them to the Isaac Asimov novel The Naked Sun. There is a great deal of robot “care” in that, and I promise you it is a dystopia.
Lord Prentis of Leeds (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest: I was the general secretary of Unison, the public service union, which represents over half a million health and social care workers—members who worked throughout the pandemic.
As we have heard today, despite all the inquiries, reports and initiatives, no matter what the Government may say, social care has not been fixed—far from it. As we have also heard today, it is quite simply broken. This has been said not just in this Chamber. The King’s Fund states that there is no credible programme to address the issues and that the workforce is in crisis. The social care ombudsman highlights an underresourced system, unable to consistently meet the needs of those whom it is designed to serve. The Care Quality Commission, the independent regulator, despite its own workforce challenges, states that the workforce crisis in adult social care needs to be addressed urgently.
I do not detract from the issues involved in kinship care and unpaid care, which have to be addressed as a matter of urgency, but there is also consensus across social care that nothing can be achieved in the sector until the workforce crisis is addressed. A third of staff leave every year. There are over 165,000 vacancies—more than in the NHS. Vacancy rates are at over 10% and are growing by the day. Many staff are on zero-hours contracts and many have no sick pay arrangements. Many people who work in domiciliary care are not even paid travelling time between visits to people in their care, meaning that they earn less than the minimum wage. There is alarming exploitation of migrant workers, with repayment clauses tying them to their jobs and employers. This is done throughout social care.
A small number of councils do show the way, agreeing ethical care charters with their providers and unions that cover training, pay rates and standards of care. A small number are sharing best practice. But these councils are few and far between. In too many areas, career development and progression are simply non-existent. The pay differential between a new starter and an experienced, long-serving member of staff in social care has been squeezed down to a measly 7p an hour. This feeds the increasingly high turnover rate of staff and reinforces the image of care work as a low-skilled, unregulated profession.
Astonishingly, despite the massive problems, the social care sector has no workforce plan and the Government lack ambition to deal with the crisis in care. What is needed more than anything is a Government committed to a national care service. Call it what you want, but we are crying out for a national care service, with a Government who recognise the beneficial impact that social care could have on the economy. It would boost the independence of those who receive care and allow more women who deliver the bulk of unpaid care to play a larger and more active role in our economy.
We need to raise the status of the care sector in our society, with a new deal for care workers, making social care an attractive sector to work in. Caring for the future is an integral part of any industrial society moving forward, and something that is long overdue. We need a Government who will ensure that no private equity firm is able to profit from running care homes where they are failing residents and underpaying staff. We need a Government who care for carers; a new Government who will boost the status of social care, making it the profession it really should be—one that people want to work in. We need a new Government who will change the perception of social care from being merely a drain on resources and make it a crucial component of the drive to boost economic growth. That is where the future of social care should lie. It is a massive challenge to all of us, but one that we have a duty to tackle together.
Lord Turnberg (Lab)
My Lords, I also thank my noble friend Lady Andrews for introducing this debate in such an inspiring way. I was not a member of her committee and nor was I, for obvious reasons and much to my regret, a member of the Archbishops’ Commission, but I can hardly express ignorance of the reports or of the many reports that have come out before this, so I am fairly well informed.
We have become so used to debating a situation that has been a disgrace for so long that it has become a sort of constant background noise that we have managed to ignore. For example, we are all fully aware that, for many years, large numbers of patients have been stuck in acute hospital beds quite unnecessarily, when they would be much better cared for in the community, but they cannot be moved, sometimes for weeks, because there is no one out there to look after them. Nowadays, it is almost as difficult to get out of hospital as it is to get in. If that phrase sounds familiar, it is because I have used it many times before in the more than 20 years that I have been in this House. I may be a bit of a bore on the subject, but I will emphasise a few more obvious facts.
As others have mentioned, the number of patients who need care in the community is rising as the population ages, yet the number of staff available to support them is going down. No one seems surprised by that anymore. In my few remarks, I will concentrate on the workers on whom this whole shaky system is dependent; it is they with whom the buck stops.
The care workers’ lot is not a happy one. Recruitment is difficult and retention is worse. The turnover rate of care home staff is 35%; that is a third of staff leaving every year. I have heard various figures, such as 105,000 adult care worker vacancies advertised every day and 15,000 fewer filled posts last year than eight years earlier. As we have heard, pay is a significant factor in this poor recruitment and retention. An average of £9.60 an hour means many can earn more in jobs at Tesco or Amazon, and about a third of them are on zero-hours contracts, as we have heard.
But it is not just about pay. We must pay them at a rate commensurate with their responsibilities, but it is about much more than that. These workers are at the bottom of the feeding chain: they are underappreciated, underrated and underrespected. We know that nurses and doctors are widely respected in the community, but not care workers. There are no media articles extolling their virtues and no TV programmes or films with them as heroes. They are the neglected end of the health and social care system. “Entrenched invisibility” was the phrase I heard today, yet we absolutely depend on them. So many of the problems in the NHS—bed blockages, ambulance queues, long waits in A&E and departments on trolleys waiting for beds—are due directly to the paucity of care in the community. So it is here, with the care workers, that we should begin.
As we have heard today, we must give them the recognition and respect that they deserve, by not simply giving them a salary that recognises their important roles but much more than that. We must offer them a training programme that is both mandatory and nationally recognised. We must then give them a professional qualification and a place on a national register. Only in this way will they hold their heads up as qualified professionals, along with the prospect of career progression within care work or even on to a nursing career as, for example, nursing auxiliaries. Will the Minister please ensure that something along those lines is included in the long-awaited social care plan?
I know that this is not a novel set of proposals. I recently took a rather unrewarding look back at some of the speeches I have given on this topic in the Lords over the very many years that I have been here. I am more than used to not being listened to—how could I not be, having been married for more than 50 years? On this occasion, at least, I hope the Minister will give me a little more encouragement.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)
My Lords—follow that. As the excellent reports we are debating today make clear, we are failing those in our society most in need of our care. As we have heard powerfully in today’s debate, the social care sector is in crisis due to chronic underfunding and the repeated deferral of hard decisions. Fundamentally as a society, we are sending the message that we do not truly value caring and caregivers.
The care that people, both older people and those of working age, need to have a good quality of life is often either unaffordable or unavailable. People who could be supported to stay in their own homes are being moved into residential care and people who are medically ready to leave hospital are unable to, because the care they need in the community is just not there. This has knock-on effects throughout the NHS. We know from the CQC’s latest State of Care report that the health and care system is gridlocked and is unable to operate effectively or, in some cases, at all—as we heard so poignantly from the noble Lord, Lord Polak.
As we have also heard, demand for care is rising as people live longer and often with more complex needs. As my noble friend Lady Barker explained, we now have a growing number of people without children of their own. Recent analysis from the King’s Fund showed that overall requests for social care have hit an all-time high.
At the same time, as we have heard, the workforce is in near meltdown. I want to explain why I use that term. We know that there are severe staff shortages and problems both in retention and in recruitment, which mean that current needs are not being met. Without major change, things are going to get worse as demand grows. As we have heard, according to the King’s Fund, the current social care staff vacancy rate is the highest since records began: 165,000 unfilled posts is a huge number.
Looking ahead, Care England estimates that the number of adult social care jobs will need to increase by 27%, to around 2.3 million, by 2035. In reality, we are looking at the prospect of further workforce reductions over the next 10 years as the current care workforce, more than a quarter of whom are over 55, retire and are not replaced. Poor pay and conditions are key drivers affecting recruitment. One in three care workers is paid the minimum wage, or less as their travelling time between clients typically goes unremunerated. At the same time, other sectors are offering far higher rates for, frankly, less demanding work.
It is a scandal that the social care workforce is among the lowest paid in our economy and zero-hours contracts are prevalent. The Health Foundation has found that staff experience much higher levels of poverty and deprivation than other UK workers and health workers. For many in the sector, career progression is simply non-existent. Given all this, it is not a surprise that the workforce is in near meltdown.
The impact of these workforce shortages on both patients and the wider NHS is devastating. First, increasing numbers of people, especially the elderly, have unmet care needs. Due to a shortage of care workers, 170,000 hours a week of home care could not be delivered during the first three months of 2022. That is seven times more than spring 2021.
Secondly, there is a backlog in initial assessments and long waiting times for many people to have their needs assessed. Shockingly, people are dying while waiting for care. Age UK found that some 37,000 people died in 2020-21 without receiving the care that they were waiting for. According to the CQC’s recent State of Care report, only two in five patients are able to leave hospital without delay when ready for discharge.
Many of these problems, which so many noble Lords have talked about, are rooted in funding, which has been inadequate for many years. According to the Health Foundation,
“When the pandemic hit … government spending per person on social care was lower in real terms than in 2009/10”.
This is compounded by how social care funding is often piecemeal, with crisis cash in winter making planning harder. This is exacerbated by the fact that the actual costs of providing care, either in the home or in running a care home—wages, Covid expenses and the increased costs of food and heating—are rising, but many local authorities are rationing social care to those in greatest need due to inadequate funding from government. This point was underlined last year by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. At an individual level, a failure to introduce a cap on lifetime care costs means that one in seven people over 65 faces catastrophic costs of more than £100,000.
Like other noble Lords, I was particularly alarmed to read recent press reports suggesting that the Government are poised to cut £250 million from investment in the social care workforce in England. I join the noble Baronesses, Lady Andrews and Lady Donaghy, in asking the Minister, when responding, categorially to either confirm or deny that this is the plan.
Of course, all of this results in an overreliance on informal unpaid carers, as demonstrated vividly in the recent report of the Select Committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews. According to Carers UK, in England the number of unpaid carers outnumbered the paid health and care workforce by at least two to one. Many other speakers have pointed this out passionately in our debate today. Millions of unpaid carers are having to bear the negative effects of social care workforce shortages and a lack of funding for social care. This leaves far too many of them with very little support, often feeling isolated and undervalued in the face of the relentless demands of caregiving.
Too many unpaid caregivers face financial hardships themselves, as they receive little financial support. Many find it hard to juggle staying in paid employment with caring. That is why I was so pleased to support the Private Member’s Bill put through the Commons by my honourable friend Wendy Chamberlain MP; it had its Second Reading here recently. It creates a new entitlement for employees to take up to a week of unpaid leave a year in order to provide or arrange for care. Yes, it is a very small step forward in improving employment rights for unpaid carers, but it is important none the less.
The most depressing thing in today’s debate has been the litany of broken promises of reform over the past decade. We had Dilnot, endlessly postponed; and White and Green Papers that never materialised. As my noble friend Lady Jolly reminded us, the Care Act 2014 was a seminal piece of legislation, but key provisions in it have been indefinitely postponed. The Government’s “Build Back Better” plan for health and social care, published in 2021, led to the passing of a law to collect a health and social care levy, but this was then reversed and the charging reforms outlined were subsequently delayed—again.
Despite all this doom and gloom, I want to end with some solutions to add to the others that have been put forward. There are five things on my immediate wish list which I am very much hoping to see in the long-awaited government social care implementation plan.
First, we need to invest in the workforce, pay wages people can live on and offer career progression by professionalising the care sector. That is why I am so pleased that Liberal Democrats are calling for a legal obligation to provide a carer’s minimum wage, to be set at a rate of £2 an hour above the national minimum wage. This much-needed boost is long overdue, and I know others have referred to it.
Secondly, the Government need properly to fund local authorities so they can continue to provide the social care services they are legally required to, and ensure that care homes are paid a realistic rate rather than relying on excessive cross-subsidisation by self-funders.
Thirdly, we desperately need to integrate services, so that there is a joined-up preventive approach which reduces the risk of reaching crisis point and needing care home placement or hospital admission. I hope the development of 42 integrated care systems can help bring this about, but concerns remain that social care sector providers struggle to get their voices heard within these systems.
Fourthly, we must provide more support for informal carers and introduce a statutory guarantee of regular respite breaks for unpaid carers.
Finally, as others have said—including, very powerfully, the noble Lord, Lord Bradley—the carer’s allowance must be reformed so that it no longer discourages carers from remaining in paid work. The carer’s allowance is the lowest benefit of its kind and does not reflect the contribution of unpaid carers; it must be increased.
I therefore ask the Minister: what assurance can he give me that the vital issues that I and others have underlined will indeed be addressed in the Government’s plan?
Baroness Wheeler (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for securing this important debate and for her excellent introduction, and I sincerely endorse noble Lords’ praise for her expert chairing of the Select Committee. She was just the right person to lead this authoritative cross-party group, whose spotlight on adult social care could not be timelier as we are now in sight—we hope—of the Government’s long-promised follow-up White Paper. It is a moment that many of us cannot quite believe in, having waited so long for something to come out of the oven-ready, back-pocket social care plan promises made since this Government took office. We have had a decade of social care reform failure and have become used to hearing that world-leading proposals are on the way, only for them to be delayed, substantially changed and delayed again.
We were led to believe that the White Paper would be the national plan we have been promised, and that we would have it as the backdrop for today. Now we understand it will be published in the recess, that it is a two-year update rather than a plan, and that next week we may have the promised workforce plan—or a bit of it—and a key policy document on primary care. Like other noble Lords, I hope the Minister will be able to enlighten us on what is happening. Can he explain why all this has to be in recess, rather than when Parliament is sitting? We are still awaiting the Government’s response to the Select Committee report. Can he say when that will be published, so that, post-recess, we can have an urgent and full debate on the report as well as the White Paper?
When we get the White Paper and any workforce proposals, we will examine them in detail to judge whether they are anywhere near being the comprehensive national plan for social care we have been led to expect, with the milestones for reform the Minister has promised, including on workforce, data and technology. The first White Paper was strong on vision—on what social care could look like—but only partial in terms of the issues it addressed and the mostly short-term sticking plaster funding it came up with. It was also decidedly lacking on how today’s and tomorrow’s demands for social care could be met, addressed and funded, or how it fitted in with the then proposed cap on care costs, or the fair costs of care proposals.
The urgent need for a comprehensive national plan is where the Lords Select Committee report comes in. It is a giant piece of work that leads the way on reform, with clear stepping stones. I congratulate the whole committee on its depth of analysis and its understanding of the extent and reach of social care, impacting 10 million of us at any one time. The report focuses on giving disabled people drawing on care and support the same choice and control over their lives as other people, on fair pay and recognition for care workers, and on support for unpaid carers. These are the key fundamentals of social care reform which we fully support.
I welcome today’s contributions by so many noble Lords, including eight other Select Committee members, and in particular the contribution from my noble friend Lord Bradley, who spoke from these Benches with his usual wisdom and expertise. Contributions have ranged across key social care issues; we could not have had a more comprehensive debate. I hope the Minister will make sure that he promises to follow up with a written response on any issues he does not have time to address, and will forgive me because I have so much to say and do not have the time to say it.
I want to underline five key issues. First, the Lords committee’s report underlines the imperative for a fundamental rethink and a change in society’s perceptions of and attitudes to social care. It builds on the current legislative framework for care eligibility and entitlement achieved through cross-party support for the Care Act 2014 and promotes social care’s positive benefits as an essential service which benefits individuals, society and the economy, not just as an ancillary to the NHS, as my noble friend Lady Andrews has so ably stressed.
In this context, I welcome the Reimagining Care Commission reflections of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle, which strongly reinforce the Lords committee’s ambition of making social care the national imperative it needs to be. In particular, the commission demonstrates the breadth and reach of social care across communities, and I applaud the vital work that faith communities do which helps to plug the enormous gaps locally in social care provision. In the words of Labour’s shadow Minister for care, Liz Kendall, the report is “refreshingly bold”, which is exactly what is needed. I also commend the commission’s work on the national care covenant, and look forward to continuing dialogue on this.
Secondly, I emphasise the importance of choice and control by disabled adults over their care and support, which was strongly supported by speakers from across the House, in particular in the forceful contribution by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, underlining what she has been saying for years, and especially the importance of coproduction. Of course the care of older people is vital, but working-age adults with disabilities make up one-third of social care users and half the budget for social care.
The committee’s spotlight on the more than 1 million people living on their own, without families or children, is also welcome. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, spoke strongly on this, as did a number of other noble Lords. As a carer, I know how thoroughly the current system relies on advocacy, usually by relatives who are unpaid carers navigating their way for their loved one’s entitlement to care services, which so often fail to speak to each other. I always fear for people living on their own who are receiving domiciliary social care; they are often without other visitors or friends and are utterly dependent on the system working well and seeing to their needs. Their well-being has to be a key part of what a good service looks like.
Thirdly, it is important to value care workers with proper career progression and the pay, training, and terms and conditions that they deserve. Every speaker has made a strong case for this and for the comprehensive workforce plan that is urgently needed. We have today had added expertise and weight from the former general secretary of the TUC, my noble friend Lady O’Grady, and the former general secretary of UNISON, my noble friend Lord Prentis. Record levels of staff vacancies, with the highest rates in domiciliary care, for registered managers and for nurses, need an urgent and long-term solution, not just short-term funding or reliance on local councils to raise funding to meet costs, with all the difficulties and inequities that brings.
Fourthly, I strongly echo the deep concerns of all noble Lords, especially my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley, that unpaid carers are at breaking point. In reality, they have received very little concrete support to date, apart from government backing for the Private Member’s Bill giving them one week’s unpaid leave from work. How are the Government going to address unpaid carers’ huge daily problems of poverty and exhaustion, and the lack of available and affordable respite care?
Fifthly, the key message from today has to be that reform and change for social care must be whole-system wide: a long-term, joined-up comprehensive plan. On residential care, for example, which a number of noble Lords mentioned, every day it becomes glaringly obvious that urgent reform and fundamental changes are needed to the current business model, and this must be an essential part of any comprehensive national plan. Only last week we saw reports of councils spending half a billion pounds over the past four years, buying up beds in care homes rated as inadequate or as requiring improvement by the Care Quality Commission, driving up profits and dividends for private investors at the same time as residents suffer unsafe treatment, mostly because the homes cannot fill their chronic staff shortages in many areas. Poor-quality providers which put private profits before care should not be tolerated. Does the Minister consider that the current business model for residential care is fit for purpose? What are the Government’s plans to ensure that public money is spent caring for residents?
This situation starkly underlines the precarious position local authorities continue to find themselves in as providers of care, care homes and domiciliary care. As noble Lords have said, this is all in the context of a 29% overall reduction in funding since 2010—one-third of the funding has been lost.
The Government have had 13 years to deliver on providing a concrete future for social care, but their measures have, for the most part, been disjointed, stop-start, short-term crisis reactions. They have failed to identify and deliver on the root causes of the issues facing older and disabled people. Demand for social care is now hitting a record high, and the current picture was graphically painted by noble Lords today. The King’s Fund’s excellent briefing sums it up by stressing that key trends in social care are all going in the wrong direction: demand up, access down, financial eligibility tighter and charging reform put back, the costs of delivering care rising with local authorities paying more for care home places and home care support, the workforce in crisis, unpaid carers receiving less support, and public satisfaction with social care lower than ever.
A national plan for social care has to be just that: national. It must be comprehensive, long-term and cross-system to provide joined-up integrated care in the home and community, tackle fundamental inequalities in the current system, and deliver a new deal for care workers and support, care and respite for unpaid carers. Step-by-step investment and reform is the only away to provide the stability, certainty and long-term planning to achieve the fundamental shift towards early intervention, prevention and rehabilitation that is so desperately needed.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Markham) (Con)
My Lords, it is my pleasure to respond to the excellent debate today, to follow so many distinguished speakers and, probably most of all, to hear, in my noble friend Lord Polak’s words, the politics being taken out of care. Today has been an excellent example of that, and I hope I can follow in that vein.
I regret that our social care report has not been published today. As noble Lords will be aware, we were hoping it would be published yesterday, and we were going to offer an embargoed copy of the report so that everyone could contribute. That is the reason for the delay in responding to both committee reports. I undertake that we will respond to both reports after we publish our social care report, and I personally offer a round table to everyone who is interested, where I will seek to bring the relevant officials along as well. I hope we can have a productive conversation in a similar vein to this one, where we all get around the table as people who care about this issue and, as mentioned, take the politics out of care.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for securing today’s debate, all noble Lords across the Chamber for their thoughtful and considered contributions, and all those who have sat on the committees that have been mentioned. I feel that they have really added impetus to this whole debate. I hope the report that we offer will answer many of these points, build on the progress made so far in this space and bring a vision into reality.
Before I go into detail and respond to the reports, starting with the Lords Select Committee report, I would like to say how fitting the words “gloriously ordinary life” are. I was struck by the whole sense that, if I caught the phrase right, we can live in a place we call home, with the people we love and the things we care about. That is something that we can all agree with and commit to as our North Star and vision for what we hope to do.
Not only is it vital that we allow people to live in the way that they want but it is a vital part of our health service, as mentioned by my noble friend Lady Shephard and the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, who had many brave words to say today. We all know it is vital to unblock the system. Some 13% of our beds are blocked at the moment, to answer my noble friend Lady Shephard’s point. As the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, said, it is often as difficult to get out of hospital as it is to get into it. We have put in funding to help with this issue: £700 million of funding this year alone to help with discharge and £1.6 billion over the next two years. This whole debate shows that it is vital not just to the well-being of our people that we have a good system of social care but to our health service in improving the whole flow of the system.
On that, I reassure noble Lords that the Government recognise the importance of responding to the Lords Select Committee report. As mentioned, we will release a response shortly after the social care report is published—I hope, as I say, next week. I assure the committee that the Government agree with the vision in the report. We particularly welcome the committee’s view that social care does not have the voice and the visibility that it deserves. That often means that people are not supported to meet their ambitions. By rethinking attitudes to care and support, we can ensure that people access the care and support that meet their needs.
Equally, I thank the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle and the Commission on Reimagining Care for its recent report, Care and Support Reimagined: a National Care Covenant for England. I was struck by the words, “care based on faith and values”, where we recognise that we all have a mutual responsibility in delivering that. That struck a chord with me, along with the idea of the need to develop a national care covenant, where we all look to do our part in delivering the system. I look forward to developing those thoughts more at the round table.
It is important that we recognise the important contribution that communities and faith organisations make to adult social care. We echo the commission’s vision for care and support that is inclusive, universal and fair, and recognises our mutual responsibilities as citizens. The Government are keen to work collaboratively to make change a reality, and, having spoken to Minister Helen Whately, I know how much she enjoyed the meeting she had with the commission and how keen she is to drive forward the report.
I turn to the Government’s vision for adult social care. Again, I apologise; I feel that my hands are slightly tied behind my back, having to make this speech prior to the publication of our report. As we all know, back in December 2021 the Government published People at the Heart of Care. This set out a 10-year vision that put people at the centre of social care to make sure that everyone who draws on care and support feels empowered to have the choice, control and support they need to live independent and fulfilling lives. This is a vision that aims to make social care fair, accessible and of high quality, and to lead to better outcomes for people who draw on, work in and provide care and support. This Government remain committed to that vision.
I am pleased to report that the Government’s upcoming plan will outline how we will make progress towards this vision. It will also provide the clarity asked for by this House on key policy areas, including outlining how we plan to allocate the funding set aside for reform. Ahead of that publication, I would like to share some of the progress that the Government have made so far.
I start with the workforce, the importance of which the noble Lords, Lord Lipsey and Lord Prentis, and the noble Baronesses, Lady O’Grady and Lady Tyler, to name just a few, focused on. This was a point reiterated by our Prime Minister the other day. We all know that the social care workforce is one of our biggest assets, but we recognise the challenge we have right now to recruit a workforce of the right size, with the right skills, that feels appropriately motivated and rewarded. The Government have taken action to boost workforce capacity with recruitment opportunities both at home and abroad, with over 55,000 visas granted for care workers and senior care workers last year. This is complemented by our national recruitment campaign, Made with Care.
To respond to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, our upcoming plan for adult social care will include proposals for a new adult social care workforce pathway, building on our commitments in the People at the Heart of Care White Paper to give a career structure for people in this vital sector. Our chief nurse champions and raises the profile and visibility of nursing in social care, working alongside the Chief Social Worker for Adults to increase the recognition and appreciation of all our care workers.
On funding in this space—this is a point noble Lords have heard me make many times before but it is worth reflecting on—the £7.5 billion increase over the next two years will flow through to workers. The vital point is that it will largely flow through into the workforce.
Many noble Lords talked about technology. We all know that to increase workforce capacity we have to significantly increase the use of digital tools. Last year, we made £35 million available to the integrated care systems to support sector digitisation, including the adoption of digital social care records. As a result, approximately 52% of providers now have a digital social care record, up from 40% in December 2021, and we have plans to extend this much further. These records can provide up to 20 minutes per care worker per shift, and allow more time to provide care and support. Good data is fundamental to the delivery of high-quality care and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, mentioned, sharing that data is vital as well. Our use and understanding of adult social care data is better than it has ever been, but we know there is a lot more to do.
From next month, our flagship client-level data project will become mandatory for local authorities in England. This will transform our understanding of people’s experiences and outcomes. For the first time, we will be able to track an individual’s journey through the health and care system to aid with navigating its difficulties—again, as mentioned by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and my noble friend Lord Polak. Also as of Monday, the Care Quality Commission will begin to assess local authorities’ delivery of their Care Act duties, including those for unpaid carers. This will make good practice, positive outcomes and outstanding quality easier to spot locally and share nationally, while identifying where improvement and additional support is needed. But as much as data and technology could help, I totally agree with the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett: there is no substitution for the loving care of a human.
To ensure that care and support is personalised to people’s needs, our White Paper rightly sets out our ambition to support high-quality, safe and suitable homes, recognising that they can help people of all ages stay independent and healthy for longer. That is why, alongside the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, we will shortly launch the older peoples’ housing taskforce. It will bring together experts from across the sector to make recommendations on how people can access the housing they need.
I turn to the area of unpaid carers, which we all agree is the backbone. As noble Lords are aware, it is something that I have personal experience of. The point was brought out very well by my noble friend Lady Fraser, among others, because it is important that we recognise the vital role that unpaid carers play in our communities. We all owe them a debt of gratitude. Under the Care Act 2014, local authorities are required to undertake a carer’s assessment for any unpaid carer who appears to have a need for support, and to meet their eligible needs on request from that carer. This year, we have earmarked over £290 million for unpaid carers through the better care fund, including to provide short breaks and respite services. It is a step in the right direction; I use those words advisedly because carers are a vital area, as many noble Lords, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, have recognised, and there is a lot more that we need to do.
I hope that I have addressed many of the questions as I have gone through. I will try to pick up a few others and, as ever, follow up in writing in detail. It will be after the reports are published next week—and, to answer the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, yes, we are planning to publish more on people at the heart of social care next week.
In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, yes, the ICBs will be at the forefront of this system for the planning and provision of social care. However, I will need to come back in writing on his question around the role of the DWP in analysing and reporting in this space.
In answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, we definitely embrace the principles of co-production. I hope that will come out in the report itself, as we work with 200 stakeholders in the provision of it all. We really hope to see the ICBs at the forefront of this and the better care fund being a key part of co-production.
I was struck by the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, about 90 year-olds caring for 70 year-olds. I await my next Oral Question after the Recess.
The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, asked about help for providers on energy funding. Again, I hope noble Lords would agree that we have provided significant help. I am glad to see that, the last time I looked, gas prices were lower than last summer, when the action was prompted. They are moving in the right direction, but it is probably an example of needing to watch this space, while being mindful of the issue at stake there.
I hope that I have answered many of the questions raised. In conclusion, over the past year, the Government have invested significantly and have secured another £7.5 billion of funding for over the next two years—but this is only the start of the journey.
Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)
Before the Minister sits down, can he provide an answer to the question about the media reports on cuts to the £500 million workforce budget?
Lord Markham (Con)
This is one of the areas covered in the report that will be published next week. At this stage, I can say only that the need for the training and development of our social care staff is understood and recognised in that report. I hope that it will give a response to the noble Baroness’s question, and that she understands why I cannot say more at this point.
Taking the words of the Select Committee’s report, I hope that these actions show that we are moving in the right direction
“to live in the place we call home, with the people … we love”,
based on faith, value and our own mutual responsibility in delivering that aim. Once again, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for securing the debate and this valuable opportunity to discuss the future of adult social care. I reiterate the hope that we can all gather at a round table to discuss this once the report has been announced and we have responded to the various other reports. Finally, I extend my thanks to everyone who works in the social care sector and to the unpaid carers for everything they do to support others.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for his response, for the compassion he shows and for the shared values we clearly hold across the Chamber. He had a difficult job trying to sum up and satisfy the consensus of opinion and expertise across the House while not being able to tell us what the national plan will contain. We regret that it will be published in the Recess. We would like an immediate opportunity to debate it. I hope that business managers will give us that opportunity as soon as possible when we come back, and that we can have a substantial debate on it, as well as on the Select Committee’s report. In the meantime, I think that everyone would be very grateful to join him and officials around a table, not least because it signals the inclusivity which marks the debate and marks what my noble friend Lord Turnberg called the “noise” that has been associated with the debate for so long. We want to take up that offer.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Polak, for identifying the need to take politics out of social care, because that is only too evidently what needs to happen. We must be as committed to finding the investment, particularly in the workforce, as we are to making sure that we understand the values we share.
I thank everyone who has taken part; it has been an exceptional debate. I thank noble Lords for their generous response to both reports. It was very good that we had the opportunity to listen to the most reverend Primate and the right reverend Prelate on the notion of a covenant and the very specific overlap in the consensus about what needs to be done—it has been an incredibly valuable opportunity because of that.
There have been very valuable speeches from across the Chamber, including from my noble friend on the Front Bench. It has been a comprehensive debate, but it has been as broad and rich as it has been deep because of the personal experience that it has called up, as well as the range of professional experience and the types of caring that people know about—learning disabilities, elderly care, disabled people. We heard from the trade union perspective the challenge of reconstructing a workforce that is modern and fit for the future. We heard from the unpaid carers’ perspective.
It has been an extraordinarily important debate for the Minister, because the challenges that have been articulated and the detail have been rooted in real experience over many years across this House. This House has a very long memory, having been here before, time and again. This is the time for change. Whatever is in that national care plan will be tested to destruction against our experience of 20 to 30 years of waiting and hoping for something better and bringing it to the boil in different ways. Nothing about this is easy and nothing will be particularly quick, but let us have some clarity, total transparency and reality, but let us also have that vision. The most reverend Primate started by asking who is responsible. That is such a fundamental question, and the answer is that we all are. That is something that has come out in the inclusive nature of this debate as well. With that, I beg to move.
Climate Change in Developing Countries
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Lord Naseby
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to introduce new economic policies to address the challenges of climate change in developing countries, particularly those that are members of the Commonwealth.
Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, earlier this month the United Nations launched its latest global warming report, claiming that there needs to be a cut of 80% in CO2 emissions by 2040 in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade. If it should go beyond 1.5 degrees centigrade, the impact of heatwaves, drought and sea level rises will become significantly more extreme. That report, compiled by 93 of the world’s top climate scientists, was approved by UN members at talks at Interlaken in Switzerland. It says that cash flows to help developing countries cut their emissions must be raised by six times over current levels.
In the next few moments, I will talk about mini case histories of countries that I have visited and know in a bit of depth. As it happens, on Saturday 18 March, I went to my old college, St Catharine’s, and listened to Professor Willis talking about Antarctica. Not too many people live there: indeed, none are recognised as living in Antarctica. Professor Willis is a glaciologist. He and his colleagues measure the effects of changing glaciers and ice sheets. They believe it is exceptionally important that the planet moves to net zero as soon as possible and tries to keep the planet’s global average temperature rises below 1.5 degrees to avert devastating impacts on human and economic life and climate change. They have done some measuring of glaciers and global sea level: the sea level is rising at an accelerating rate. Between 1901 and 1971 it rose 1.3 millimetres a year, but between 2006 and 2018 it rose 3.7 millimetres a year—nearly three times as much.
These scientists try to predict the future of the planet and their view is that there is a particular case that they believe is possible within the confines of what I have already mentioned, whereby, by going to net zero by 2050, we will just about survive. These scientists are quite adamant, though, that it is exceptionally important for countries to move to net zero by 2050, otherwise the effects will be totally devastating for the life of all of us on this planet.
That is Antarctica. Secondly, I will say a few words about the Falklands. I had the privilege of representing Parliament 10 years after we recovered the Falklands. They have gone on and done a good bit of work, and all praise to them. They have had a plan, since 2018 through to the current year, which they call the comprehensive environment strategy. Every time a decision is taken in the Falklands, they look at the environmental impact. That is not a bad place to start. They recognise, though, that this may mean that some of the traditional, practical side of life may have to change there, but they are a small country—just 3,000 people—and they need help from us.
My third case history is Samoa, right in the middle of the Pacific, which, again, I had the privilege to visit. It comprises nine small islands in the middle of nowhere. Its Prime Minister stated recently that while we are all impacted, the degree of the impact in Samoa’s circumstances is enormous. In Samoa, there are already communities who have moved from one low-lying atoll to another to ensure that they can live safely. They know full well that, unless something happens, rising storms will remove Samoa from the world.
I will say a few words about the Cayman Islands. I declare an interest: my youngest son works there. They know what hurricanes are like. I have seen the results of hurricanes, on the ground in the Cayman Islands. The results were horrific. Every year, they worry particularly in the hurricane season, around September. I wonder why His Majesty’s Government are providing some special resources to Antigua, Barbuda, Jamaica and Saint Lucia, providing a person called a climate advisor, whereas the Cayman Islands, with 66,000 people, the Turks and Caicos Islands, with 3,900, and Bermuda, with 62,000, at the moment get nothing.
Finally, I will look at some bigger countries. I will start with the Maldives—I have had the privilege of chairing the all-party group on that country, although I am not currently the chairman—and Sri Lanka, which has a population of about 21.6 million, about one-third of the UK. I have been involved with Sri Lanka since 1975, when I started the all-party group. The Sri Lankans know what disaster is. A few days after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, my wife and I went out there to try to help. One thousand people were killed in a single train; thousands were killed just by two waves that came in at a huge height, and demolished the south and the south east, roughly speaking, so the Sri Lankans know what disaster means.
I am very proud to read what the current Prime Minister of Sri Lanka said when he was at COP 27. He made it quite clear that his is a country that admits it is in financial difficulties. It was hit hard by Covid and, sadly, has experienced war, and it is now seeking the help of the IMF. Nevertheless, it is trying hard to do something in relation to what I have just been talking about. He claims that Sri Lanka has commenced the process of reducing carbon emissions. It has initiated marine spatial planning and established a climate office, which in itself is a good thing to do. It is leading the Commonwealth blue charter action group on mangrove eco-systems, and overcoming the obstacle of communication, in that it thinks it would be valuable if there was an international climate change university. He has offered to set it up in Sri Lanka and work with an ancillary university in the Maldives, so there is co-ordination.
However, the Sri Lankan Prime Minister also pointed out recently:
“It’s ironic that the $100bn pledged annually has not been available in the coffers to finance climate challenges”.
Understandably, the Sri Lankans would like some action on that front. In their view and mine, the developing countries are worst affected by the rise in emissions from the industrialised world, and they really need to be compensated for that degree of loss.
I conclude with a brief summary. The time has come for us to sit down together, stop the talking and take some practical action. I should like to see the Commonwealth, assisted by His Majesty’s Foreign Office, to create a task force with the varied skills to give advice, help and motivation for the plans for the small dependencies and countries such as those I referred to. They need a clear policy framework to know what is possible and what can be financed. I know there is a joint fund, split between the FCDO, the Department for Business and Trade and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but, frankly, it is too cumbersome and is not targeted precisely enough. My right honourable friend in the other place said that finance is key to deliver the trillions of dollars needed for climate change, but I do not think we have that structure at the moment.
We have not listened carefully enough to the likes of Professor Willis, who was the man I listened to the other Saturday. It is so important to the world to move to net zero by 2050, and doing so will limit global warming and sea levels rising to more manageable levels. If we do not, it will be the biggest crisis ever faced by humanity.
Baroness Blackstone (Lab)
My Lords, of the 54 members of the Commonwealth, 32 are small states and 25 are small island developing states. As I have no doubt the Minister will say, the Government accept that many of these are vulnerable to the effects of climate change and natural disasters. Many are low-income countries with poor access to basic services and subsistence farming. The effects of climate change can be catastrophic in these circumstances.
Moreover, as a House of Commons Select Committee said,
“climate change … exacerbates … inequalities and amplifies risk and deprivation for the most vulnerable, including children.”
According to the UN, women and children are 14 times more likely to die in a disaster than men. With every disaster, women’s rights and progress towards gender equality are threatened. “Loss and damage” is the term invented at COP to focus on vulnerable countries suffering from the unavoidable negative impact of climate change that cannot be prevented with adaptation methods. Examples are sudden violent storms and floods, as happened in Pakistan, or slow-onset changes, such as sea level rises, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Naseby. They are taking place because of the global failure to mitigate them and the need for considerable financial resources and investment in the green economy to address them.
Although there was a breakthrough at COP 27, which established a new fund for loss and damage, the question remains as to how it will be implemented. The UK has a seat on the UN transitional committee examining this, so what do we intend to do to ensure sufficient funds will be made available to meet the needs of poor countries, particularly those in the Commonwealth with which we have historic ties? So far, there has not been enough commitment from rich and polluting countries, including the UK. Can the Minister tell the House what was agreed at the very recent meeting of this committee in Egypt? Will he accept that the only specific loss and damage commitment made so far is a promise to pay £5 million under the Santiago network—a miniscule amount given the recent estimates that developing countries could face more than $500 billion in annual damage by 2030 and that by 2050 the economic cost of loss and damage could reach $1 trillion?
Although the UK has made a larger commitment under the international climate finance programme, UN predictions suggest that this is not nearly enough. Given that the ODA budget is seriously squeezed by the decision to move from 0.7% to 0.5% of GNI and now by the huge inroads into this budget being spent within the UK on refugees from Ukraine and elsewhere, is there not a case for finding resources for climate finance focused on mitigation and adaptation from outside the ODA budget? Also, should not the UK take the lead in mobilising new finance more widely in the spirit of Alok Sharma’s argument that there is a need—
“to incentivise every aspect of the international system to recognise the systemic risk of climate change”.
He included multilateral development banks and the private sector. The Commonwealth is one of the forums where this should be done. The start the UK made in helping to form the Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub needs to be taken forward, with an emphasis on developing green economies in the most affected countries. What are the Government’s plans, especially but not exclusively in small island countries?
Lastly, what steps are being taken to obtain contributions from the private sector, notably fossil-fuel companies? The industry is heavily subsidised around the world, and in the UK it has been making excessive profits. Is it not now time for taxes and levies on these profits to be used on the “polluter pays” principle to address loss and damage?
The Archbishop of Canterbury
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, for tabling this Question. In his travelogue, he mentioned, to my alarm, the areas for which I am directly responsible—I suppose because they could not go anywhere else—notably, the Falkland Islands, Antarctica, Sri Lanka and Bermuda; I do not know what is going to happen to Kent.
The OECD’s most recent States of Fragility report found that, in 2022, 23% of the world’s population were living in fragile contexts, often linked to climate change, but 73% of the world’s extreme poor were. This figure is projected to rise to 86% of the world’s poor on the lowest incomes by 2030. For the Anglican Communion, within 165 countries over 150 of them are affected by such changes.
Climate change is one of the three chief causes of fragility highlighted in the OECD report. Climate change is not in and of itself the driver of violent conflict; however, it is a significant force multiplier, and violent conflict is the easiest way of preventing people from taking any action on climate change by making such action impossible. Drought, flooding, food shortages, desertification, other natural disasters, and even the disappearance entirely of some land, all increase the chances of large numbers of people having to move to survive—and their movement creates conflict. In 2019 alone, 24.9 million people around the world were internally displaced by climate-related disasters; that is more than the total number of refugees in 1945.
Global faith leaders meeting at the Vatican just before COP 26 were told by the head of the IPCC that at our present rate of progress, climate change-driven migration could increase to as much as 800 million or more by 2050. Environmental peacebuilding suggests that partnerships will be required to mitigate conflict and enable the control of changes to the environment. What action are the Government taking to consider the current and future risks of climate change-driven conflict, and will they look at opportunities for environmental peacebuilding and at where reconciliation approaches might best take root between competing and conflicting groups?
The Integrated Review Refresh 2023 uses the words “peace” 14 times, “climate change” 16 times—but only once in terms of threat multiplication—and “reconciliation” zero times. In the past, the Government were committed to preventing conflict through a mediation unit set up in 2018 or thereabouts, but during and since Covid that unit has been run down to two people and gets no mention in the review. Will the Minister undertake to address this issue? We would be glad to work with him on this, using our considerable global experience and expertise. Following our introductions, the UN’s Mediation Support Unit has been mentoring and training Anglican bishop peacebuilders in northern Mozambique and is starting in South Sudan and possibly the DRC. The UK Government used to be ahead here but are now far behind in this much cheaper and more effective means of dealing with conflict than any other means.
Secondly, there is an urgent need for developing countries facing the brunt of climate change to develop resilience. For example, Malawi’s maize yields could fall by a fifth by 2050 without action, but with climate-smart policies, its production could increase by more than 700%. Kew Gardens is also developing climate change-resistant coffee for west Africa. Will the Minister outline how much money the UK contributes each year towards climate resilience in developing countries? Will he give an update on when it is likely that we will return to our 0.7% target for ODA, as promised? The deployment of the additional 0.2% on supporting developing countries to adapt in the face of rising temperatures and climate-related disasters will be far cheaper for this country in the long term than dealing with the consequences of such disasters.
Finally, for the poorest and most affected countries, it is too late to adapt to climate change. Finance for loss and damage, which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, was agreed in principle at COP 27, but much work needs to be done to pin it down. The fund should make grants, not loans; it should be comprised of new money rather than that taken from existing or reduced pledges; and it should be allocated on the basis of need, paid for by countries that have contributed most to climate change. Will the Minister update the House on the UK’s involvement in providing finance for loss and damage and how it fits with our other funding commitments?
Lord Brennan (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I agree with all the speakers thus far. I want to concentrate my remarks on the Commonwealth in particular and how we should be helping it. The noble Lord, Lord Naseby, specifically asked the Government what the plans are for new economic policies—not a rehearsal of what we have done in the past but what we can do in the future.
Some 2 billion to 2.5 billion people live in Commonwealth countries. They have a special rapport with our country. We have undertaken, in general terms, to deepen co-operation with them on climate change, nature loss and environmental depletion.
I endorse the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, about Sri Lanka, with which I am also very familiar. As the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, remarked, we have lands in the Commonwealth, and islands, but Sri Lanka is a noble combination of the two: a massive block of land that is an island similar to ours. We must not underestimate a country of 20 million people that has one of the highest literacy rates in Asia. They are capable of doing well and are now receiving IMF special funds, subject to restrictions and conditions, following Covid.
I turn to the current situation in the Commonwealth from our point of view. We were the head of the Commonwealth Heads of Government unit from the time of the 2018 CHOGM. We produced a Foreign Office communiqué last year, updating three things we have undertaken to do. The Climate Finance Access Hub is still going, but to what extent or how is not known. There is the Commonwealth Blue Charter—co-operation on ocean-related issues—and the funding of dedicated climate advisers to island countries, particularly in the Caribbean: £38 million for 23 programmes. Finally, there is a strategy for funding international development. What else is on the books? What are we prepared to spend, and when and how do we propose to implement it? These are questions properly to be asked by our citizens, not just the citizens of Commonwealth countries who are suffering more than us.
On 13 March—two weeks ago—the integrated review concerning the environment was dealt with in the other House. The summary of the matters that were discussed was dealt with by the Foreign Secretary. The Opposition particularly criticised him for a lack of emphasis on co-operation with the Commonwealth. He replied with these remarkable words:
“I reassure the House that even if not written down explicitly, it"—
Commonwealth co-operation—
“is absolutely interwoven throughout this document.”—[Official Report, Commons, 13/3/23; col. 555.]
If anybody can understand that, please come and explain it to me afterwards. “Absolutely interwoven”: do we now have a new species of documentary telepathy that we are supposed to use to interpret public policy? Surely, we can have some frank talking: what are the plans, how much, and when?
Action is required now. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to which the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, referred, took eight years to compile its report. It is probably one of the most profound examinations of these issues that has ever been undertaken, anywhere in the world. A critic of our Government says in the report that the window for rescue is shrinking, especially the limiting of global warming to 1.5 degrees, thereby avoiding risk to us and our descendants. United Nations Secretary-General Guterres said that the climate time bomb is ticking. This report is our survival guide to living, for all of us.
I have here, to show noble Lords and noble Baronesses, a copy of the Environment and Climate Change Committee report produced by this House; it is one of the thickest I have ever seen and one of the most comprehensive I have ever read. It called for action six months ago. The Climate Change Committee in the Commons said the need for a plan was critical. Action now—but when, how much and how far?
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, both for initiating this debate and for his excellent speech. I also thank noble Lords on all sides for their excellent contributions. I declare my interest as the chief executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger.
There are three principal arguments that I want to make today. The first is that, although the UK—under Governments of all colours—has been in the vanguard of climate leadership, there is still a huge gap between where we are and where we need to be. The fact that the gap is even greater for some other industrial nations is no excuse for us.
Secondly, the people who are on the front line of the world’s failure to act are those who have contributed least to climate change and are most vulnerable to its effects. Unless the UK and the rest of the industrialised world radically adjust our economic approach, we are going to bring further misery upon those countries and their people and, ultimately, ourselves.
Thirdly, there is a real danger that “green” is becoming a dirty word in many front-line climate states, where there is growing anger at the rich world’s failure to act, our tendency to lecture and our refusal to take responsibility for the damage that has already been and continues to be done.
The facts, as we have heard, are stark. According to the World Meteorological Organization’s report, Provisional State of the Global Climate 2022, the rate of sea level rise has doubled since 1993 and the 10-year average warming for the period 2013 to 2022 is now estimated to be 1.14 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline, compared with 1.09 degrees Celsius between 2011 and 2020. Further, ocean heat was at record levels in 2021—the latest year that it was assessed—and the upper 2,000-metre depth of the ocean continues to warm, a change that is irreversible on centennial to millennial timescales. The World Bank estimates that climate change could push an additional 100 million people below the poverty line by 2030. The Pentagon describes climate change as a “threat multiplier” and a “key driver of fragility”. Stanford University research estimates that climate change has increased economic inequality between developed and developing economies by 25% since 1960.
Meanwhile, millions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are being pushed into food crises by extreme climate events, the frequency of which has doubled since 1990. Indeed, in the short time that we are taking for this debate alone, 354 children will have died of malnutrition. This crisis is being exacerbated by climate change; and of course, as the most reverend Primate highlighted, the climate is having an impact on migration and conflict.
Yet no country is acting with anything like the urgency that the situation demands. Today, we have had an announcement from the Government that has, I am afraid, only underscored the chasm that exists between rhetoric and reality. As I say, in the front-line climate states, there is a growing sense of anger and cynicism as a result. I was recently in South Africa as part of a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association delegation, and I was struck by how insulated we are from that sense of anger and injustice, which is felt not just in South Africa but across the continent.
Countries are tired of being told to keep their carbon wealth in the ground by people who got rich off the back of burning theirs and continue to do so, and who refuse to compensate developing economies for keeping theirs in the ground or to help finance the transition to new energy sources. These countries want climate justice, which for them means recognition of loss and damage, and compensation, not just concessionary finance or no finance at all. As Oxfam’s briefing pointed out, while COP 27 achieved a historic breakthrough in establishing a fund for loss and damage, how this is operationalised will be critical.
The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, mentioned our membership of the Transitional Committee and how important it is that we play a progressive role in that. However, as a country, we have yet to make a financial commitment for loss and damage, and our climate finance, which was meant to be additional to overseas development assistance, has come entirely from our depleted ODA funding. The UK International Climate Finance Strategy, published today, seems to continue to take this position. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us whether the £11.6 billion mentioned in the statement is new money or money coming from existing resources?
We need to get real. We need to think much more profoundly about what things such as the Just Energy Transition Partnership with South Africa mean, and what climate justice means. Certainly, many in South Africa feel that “justice” and “partnership” are far more evident in rhetoric than in reality. For a long time, we have talked as if climate change were something that might happen if we did not sort things out soon. But it is not; it is something that is happening now. The water is literally heating up around us, and the tragedy is that the first victims are those least responsible and most vulnerable. That surely is a morally unsustainable position. As the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, concluded, it is time to stop talking and start acting with the urgency required. Otherwise, humanity faces its greatest calamity.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, for initiating this debate, which makes the case that global development and climate action are intrinsically linked. The APPG on the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development made the point at the end of last year that delivering the sustainable development goals can also address climate change. This was evidenced by the most reverend Primate in his contribution.
In terms of how we set the example, what steps are the Government taking to incorporate the SDGs into the nationally determined contribution plans under the Paris Agreement? As my noble friend Lady Blackstone reminded us, of the 54 Commonwealth members, 32 are small states and 25 are small island developing states. As we have heard in the debate, many of these countries are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and natural disasters. Last year, the Commons International Development Committee identified climate change as one of the three recent drivers of poverty around the world. The others of course were the Covid-19 pandemic and the increased levels of conflict. The committee also described climate change as a threat multiplier, arguing that it exacerbated existing inequalities and amplified the risk of deprivation of the most vulnerable, including children.
Multilateralism is key to agreeing policies which can help the world, including developing countries, to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Of course, the United Nations provides great opportunities for the United Kingdom to lead on climate action. Do the Government agree that climate should be promoted as the fourth pillar of the United Nations? The Commonwealth is also vital to multilateral action and as an institution that can tackle climate change. As the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, reminded us, the final communiqué of the London CHOGM included a commitment to take urgent action to mitigate climate change, reduce vulnerability and, as the most reverend Primate said, increase resilience.
Last year’s FCDO update on progress in meeting that commitment highlighted the support through the Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub and the Commonwealth Blue Charter with funding, as the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, said, to support the deployment of dedicated climate advisers in Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica and St Lucia. In their strategy for international development, the Government stated that the UK would help small island developing states develop both “economic and climate resilience” through international aid and climate finance support, with the goal of enabling these countries to no longer need United Kingdom aid by 2030. What is the Government’s current assessment of meeting that target?
The integrated review refresh made a commitment to strengthen the resilience of the most vulnerable Commonwealth members to climate change, nature loss and environmental degradation. In presenting that refresh Statement to the Commons, the Foreign Secretary said that he would be meeting the leaders of Commonwealth countries that week. What was the outcome of those discussions? What progress was made?
Earlier this month, I met the senior team at BII, which is nearly midway through its five-year strategy. They committed by 2026 that at least 30% of total new commitments by value will be in climate finance, making it one of the world’s largest climate investors in Africa. I was struck by two programmes that they highlighted to me. One was the new investment partnership to scale sustainable forestry across sub-Saharan Africa; the other was a new investment in Bangladesh which aims to accelerate transition of critical economic sectors, such as the garments industry, to more resource-efficient production. Both are good examples of where development finance can effectively deliver against the twin challenges of climate change and economic development, both vital if we are to achieve the STG agenda.
In conclusion, can the Minister tell us what discussions he or the department have had on the progress of the BII strategy, mid-way through, and what prominence will be given to climate change in developing the next five-year plan?
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, for securing this debate. As he illustrated with frightening clarity, climate change and biodiversity loss are the defining challenges of our time and many developing countries including Commonwealth members are particularly vulnerable.
This is not a futuristic scenario. This is not all about predicting where we are going to end up, much as that matters and is important, but, as the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out, it is happening now. He made that point forcefully and extremely well and it was picked up and echoed by the noble Lord, Lord Collins.
Just in the last year we have seen drought in Australia, flooding in New Zealand and record weather patterns in Pakistan, causing mayhem for millions of people. We have seen heatwaves in India claim lives and wipe out livelihoods. The recent report, which has been mentioned a few times, from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that nearly half the world’s population live in the danger zone of climate impacts. It is also estimated that climate change will push 100 million people into poverty by 2030. As the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, made clear, the pain will be felt and is being felt disproportionately by women and girls. I reassure her that this is recognised and reflected in the programmes we are developing and have already developed.
Meanwhile, extreme weather and damage to nature are fuelling a raft of other problems—food insecurity, water scarcity, pandemics and, as the most reverend Primate said, conflict and instability to name just a few. Unprecedented global action is therefore needed to tackle climate change and to protect and restore nature on a scale that we have never seen before. This must be coupled with full-scale economic transformation, the global shift to net zero, and climate-resilient and, crucially, nature-positive economies. It will require trillions of dollars of investment. I will come back to that point in a few moments.
In this, the UK values its strong relationship with our fellow Commonwealth members. In an increasingly turbulent world, this family of free nations continues to work together to advance our common values and address our shared challenges. Key among them, the thread that runs through them all, is a terrible concern about what we are doing to the world’s climate and environment.
As was pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, in total the Commonwealth represents 2.5 billion people, so this is an incredibly valuable club and we can get more out of it on this agenda. However, the Commonwealth has long been a strong advocate for the concerns of its most vulnerable members. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Collins, that this includes the 25 small island developing states. Although they are not part of the Commonwealth, I include the British Overseas Territories, which were referenced earlier, in response to my noble friend Lord Naseby. I believe that I am the first Minister to have the overseas territories mentioned in my title and I intend to do everything I can to be their champion in government. The Foreign Office, or FCDO, is like air traffic control for the OTs; the levers of delivery are across Whitehall. I have been bombarding colleagues across government with very bossy letters about the need to step up and support our overseas territories much more than we are doing at the moment.
At the last Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, leaders including the UK stressed the urgency of enhancing climate ambition and action in this current critical decade. At CHOGM 2018, leaders adopted the Commonwealth Blue Charter, which has already been mentioned—an agreement to tackle marine environment problems. The UK is a member of six of the 10 action groups set up to deliver the charter and has provided support to progress the work of all the groups. The UK will continue to use its voice on the international stage to advocate for Commonwealth countries. That includes placing action on climate and nature at the forefront of our international agenda.
We know that the commitments that we secured at COP 26 will count for nothing if they are not delivered. Under our presidency, developed countries made some genuinely strong new commitments on climate finance, with many doubling or even quadrupling their support. The UK is leading by example in delivering our commitment to double our international climate finance to £11.6 billion by the financial year 2025-26. The Government fully expect to be held to account on that promise and will not leave the next Government, whoever they might be, with an impossible task in the final year. I am very pleased to make that commitment today.
Our commitment also includes investing at least £3 billion in solutions that protect and restore nature, and tripling adaptation finance from 2019 levels to £1.5 billion. I think I am responding here to a question from the noble Lord, Lord Oates, but I cannot read my own writing. He raised 0.7% again, and he is right; I agree. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury made the same point, and he is right too. I would love to see us return to 0.7%, but it is not something that I am capable of doing. I am very keen to see it happen as soon as possible, but I am afraid that I cannot say anything more useful about it.
The noble Lord, Lord Oates, also talked about the UK in the world. We can do much more, but it is not fair to say that we are isolated. We are seen by numerous countries around the world as the primary champion among rich countries on nature, forests, climate, indigenous people in local communities and making sure that small island and climate-vulnerable states get more finance. That is a general view and it is merited, but I acknowledge that we need to do much more.
The noble Lord, Lord Collins, mentioned that he had a meeting with BII a few days ago. I think that BII has the capacity to be an incredibly valuable tool; it can leverage a lot of extra money. I strongly encourage BII to focus more on small island states and climate-vulnerable nations. It is harder to do, which is why the government bank—if you like—is well placed to intervene in those kinds of countries, as the private sector will not. I would encourage it to do much more of that and to focus on the natural environment much more, because there is no pathway to solving climate change that does not involve nature. But I agree with the noble Lord’s broader points about that.
Our refreshed integrated review, published this month, places our work to tackle climate change, environmental damage and biodiversity loss as the first thematic priority. Today’s plan is another step forward. It outlines how the Government will boost the country’s energy security and independence, reduce household bills and maintain a world-leading position on net zero. We will also continue to lead internationally, building on our COP 26 presidency. Two documents we are publishing today are the 2030 strategic framework, which I really do encourage people to have a look at—I suspect it will be ignored by the media, but is one of the most important documents that the Government have produced; it really intelligently identifies the importance of nature in this challenge, not just climate change but poverty as well—and the international climate finance strategy. They show what this leadership actually looks like.
We are delivering on our commitments, including the £11.6 billion that contributes to the $100 billion global climate finance goal each year. The international climate finance strategy sets out our ambition to support the clean energy transition, protect and restore nature and biodiversity, facilitate adaptation and build resilience, and develop sustainable cities, infrastructure and transport. Since 2011, our international climate finance investments have helped, we believe, more than 95 million people in developing countries to cope with the effects of climate change. Since that same year, we have spent over £1 billion in climate finance for Commonwealth countries. That includes programmes such as our UK Caribbean infrastructure and reconstruction fund, which is helping to build around 15 major climate-resilient economic infrastructure projects, and the Africa clean energy programme, which is also supporting the rollout of clean, affordable energy.
A number of noble Lords mentioned access to finance. We really are doing what we can to champion better access to finance. We know there is a problem; we know that small countries find the multilateral system almost impenetrable and impossible to navigate—that is clearly true. We are a major contributor to the multilateral system, and I have personally spoken to my counterparts among the other big contributors to ask them to join the UK in adopting a much more muscular approach. I do not think that our contributions to that system should just be unconditional; they should be conditional on it doing the stuff that the private sector cannot or will not do.
We are also pioneering innovative financial tools such as climate-resilient debt clauses; I do not have time to go into details here, but there are a number of really wonderful projects around that in the world. I am happy to talk to anyone who is interested.
We are working with forest countries, with a particular focus on the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Indonesia, to catalyse a step change. We committed £1.5 billion as part of the pledge we secured from COP 26. In fact, at COP 27, we created a structure to ensure that every COP will now have a leader-level moment where forest countries and donor countries report back on the progress that is being made.
The UK will continue to support countries to adapt to climate change, and to avert and address the loss and damage it causes—a point that has been made by most speakers today. I would just add one thing; I am not going to repeat the moral case, which I think the noble Lord, Lord Collins, made very well. There is a gigantic gap financially between where we are and where we need to be, but that gap will not be filled by ODA; that is just not going to happen. Total global aid is $163 billion, and the cost of loss and damage, as well as repairing our relationship with the natural world, is five to seven times more than that, so it will have to come from other sources as well.
The noble Lord, Lord Collins, identified the central role of climate as the fourth pillar in the UN. He will know—and I am going to have to be so brief—that Vanuatu, one of the smallest countries in the world, achieved a global sensation when it secured its resolution at the UN General Assembly whereby climate irresponsibility now becomes a potential avenue for litigation, which is a huge achievement. I really do pay tribute to Vanuatu.
I know I have basically run out of time. I am so sorry; there is so much to say on this issue. I will just finish with one point. As we recognised that commodity production is responsible for almost all deforestation, some time ago we created a dialogue, the FACT dialogue—the forest, agriculture and commodity trade dialogue—between all the key consumer and producer countries. We had our first face-to-face meeting today. We are all committed to breaking the link between commodity production and deforestation. Today’s was the most positive meeting I have ever had on that subject, and I would love someone to ask a Question at some point about this so that I can go on a bit longer. I am going to have to conclude because I am out of time. I thank noble Lords.
Baroness Blackstone (Lab)
Before the Minister sits down, could he possibly answer my question about the private sector and the role that fossil fuel companies could play in helping to narrow this enormous gap between what is currently available in financial terms and what is needed?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I am so sorry; I know there are other questions that I also did not answer, but I spoke as fast as I physically can. We need vast amounts of money, as I said—trillions. That will largely come from the private sector—not just fossil fuel companies but the private sector across the board. Fundamentally, the challenge is not just to raise money for climate and nature. Our challenge as a species is to ensure that every decision, every investment and every political decision that is made takes into account the value of nature and the cost of destroying it. That is how we move from where we are today to where we need to be. That includes things such as subsidies. Some $700 billion a year subsidises the bad use of land and destructive land use. Imagine if that was shifted towards renewal and regeneration. That would close the nature gap immediately. There are those kinds of opportunities that we need to look for. I apologise.
Junior Doctors’ Strikes
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Markham) (Con)
My Lords, I shall now repeat in the form of a Statement an Answer to an Urgent Question given in another place. The Statement is as follows:
“I am grateful to the honourable Member for his Question. I know that colleagues and constituents are concerned about the planned 96-hour walkout organised by unions representing junior doctors.
The honourable Gentleman asks about its impact. We know that during the previous walkout by junior doctors earlier this month, 181,049 appointments had to be rescheduled. With this four-day walkout, the disruption and the risks will be far greater not only because it lasts longer but because it coincides with extended public holidays and Ramadan, with knock-on effects before and after the strike action itself and because a significant proportion of junior doctors will already be on planned absence due to the holiday period.
NHS England has stated that it will prioritise a number of areas, including emergency treatment, critical care, maternity care, neonatal care and trauma, but has been clear that it cannot fully mitigate the risk of patient harm at this time. That is concerning and disappointing. Patients should not have to face such disruption, and I have invited the BMA and the HCSA to enter formal talks on pay, with the condition that they cancel strike action.
The BMA’s junior doctors committee’s refusal to engage in conversations unless we commit to delivering a 35% pay increase is unacceptable at a time of considerable economic pressure and suggests the leadership adopting a militant position, rather than working constructively with the Government in the interests of patients. None the less, we remain determined to find a settlement that not only prevents further strikes but, equally, recognises the important work of junior doctors within the NHS, just as we have done with the Agenda for Change trade unions in their disputes. We will continue to work in good faith, in the interest of everyone who uses the NHS.”
Baroness Merron (Lab)
My Lords, junior doctors are being asked to do the work of many. The NHS is short of more than 150,000 staff, yet the long-promised NHS work plan remains just that—long promised. We are still waiting for the general practice plan, the review of integrated care services and the social care update. Do the Government intend to get those plans out over the Recess when Parliament is unable to scrutinise them? With a quarter of a million appointments and operations potentially facing postponement because of the forthcoming strikes, when will the Health Secretary get back around the table with the BMA, this time to take talks seriously to stop the damage to patient care?
Lord Markham (Con)
We have taken the talks incredibly seriously. We have proven in other areas with the Agenda for Change unions that, with good will on all sides, we have managed to reach an agreement. I think most people would agree it is not a reasonable position to go in saying that, unless they get a 35% pay increase, they are not willing to have any further talks. That is not something that I believe many of us could support. We are always open to reasonable negotiation, as we have proved in the other cases, and we remain open to having that reasonable negotiation now.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
My Lords, many hospital trusts are having to bring in more senior doctors in this period to cover the strikes, at what must be considerable expense. Given that quite a few trusts are already going into deficit due to inflationary pressures, will the Government be making provision to cover these additional and unexpected costs? We know that working as a junior doctor is physically intensive, but it is also a mentally exhausting line of work. The decision to strike will have put serious mental stress on junior doctors; they did not train for years to go on strike and cause this. So who is looking after the mental health and well-being of our junior doctors?
Lord Markham (Con)
I think we all agree that the mental health and well-being of everyone in society is paramount. At the same time, I would hope that junior doctors did not feel the need to take this action. As I say, in other areas relating to Agenda for Change we have reached a good outcome. We sat down with the BMA junior doctors committee hoping to have the same constructive conversations around settlements that we had already reached, but unfortunately that was not forthcoming. So my main response to concerns in that space is this: please do not strike. Please sit down with us again and engage constructively.
The Lord Bishop of Carlisle
My Lords, we know that a major cause of the strikes that we have recently seen in the health service relates to staff who are overstretched. That is the result of chronic shortages, which suggests a lack of adequate workforce planning. We have just heard that there are currently over 124,000 reported vacancies, according to the NHS Confederation. I repeat a question that was asked earlier, or shall at least reinforce it: when will the workforce plan be published? Without it, healthcare staff will continue to struggle to provide the level of care that they would like.
Lord Markham (Con)
As I have mentioned many a time and am happy to mention again, the workforce plan will be announced shortly—soon. I wish I could give an exact date, but it is there. However, I am sorry to say that I do not believe that can be used as an excuse for the strike action that we are talking about now, which puts patients at risk. I know that, in other areas, the Agenda for Change unions have worked constructively with NHS trusts on derogations to protect patients, but I regret to inform the House that that is not the case now. There is lots that we need to do in the workforce space, and there is lots that we want to do around recruitment, motivation and making it a good place to work, but I would like to think that none of that means that the delay of a report is a reason to take this sort of action and put patients’ lives in danger. I do not think any of us would agree that that is a suitable reason.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
My Lords, perhaps I could invite the Minister to respond to my first question, building on the points made by the right reverend Prelate. In addition to the NHS workforce plan, which we await, I remind the Minister that we are also waiting for the general practice plan, the review of integrated care services and the social care update. Could the Minister take this repeated opportunity to say whether the Government will be publishing these over the Recess? If this is so, it is obviously of concern that Parliament will not have the chance to scrutinise the plans.
Lord Markham (Con)
Like all noble Lords, I absolutely agree that Parliament has to have every opportunity to fully assess, discuss, debate and scrutinise the plans. As noble Lords know, I cannot say when the report will be released, so I cannot say with all honesty whether it will be over the Recess or afterwards. I can only repeat the words “soon” and “shortly”, and say that there is not a definite plan to announce it over the Recess. What we fundamentally agree on is that these plans are being produced with stakeholders and a lot of consultation, and they will absolutely be subject to a lot of scrutiny, as we would expect. I expect to answer on the plans in this House, as I expect my ministerial colleagues in the other place to have to do as well.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
My Lords, I rather cheekily snuck two questions in, and the Minister did not give me an answer to the first one, which in many ways is very important. Will the Government look at and support those trusts that risk going into deficit because of inflationary pressures?
Lord Markham (Con)
I thank the noble Baroness for reminding me of that. I will need to confirm it but my guess is that, although trust are having to pay more for consultants to cover positions, unfortunately a lot of junior doctors will not turn up and so there will not be the same level of pay because there are far fewer consultants than there are positions to cover. I wish there was not that problem, candidly. I think we all wish there were enough consultants to cover the exact number of junior doctors. My hunch is that, because of that, the wage will end up being a bit less. I will check if I am wrong, though, and correct it.
Higher Education: Financial Pressures
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Lord Knight of Weymouth
To move that this House takes note of the financial pressures on Higher Education and the impact on (1) local communities, (2) the United Kingdom’s science and innovation exports, and (3) the impact on delivering the Turing Scheme.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to open this debate. The Minister is taking her seat, and she knows that I am a bit of a schools policy obsessive, so I come to this area of education somewhat afresh—and I am pretty alarmed by what I have found.
I must start by underscoring that higher education is critical to Britain. For individual learners hoping to prosper in the future labour market, we know that, as technology and the greening of the economy deskills and demands new skills, future prospects will require higher levels of learning for more people. Employers are desperate for talent with strong cognitive and collaborative ability, and are relying on a thriving higher education sector to deliver that. For university towns and cities, the sector creates and sustains-high quality jobs. Many are anchor institutions for the local economy. They bring large numbers of students to pay rent and spend money in that economy. Universities are major property owners and developers, and their research translates into spin-outs, start-ups and consultancies. Nationally, we have a persistent problem in the economy of low productivity that needs more of these highly educated individuals who can work well with both technology and each other. Britain also needs to continue to be at the forefront of applying academic research to maintain any competitive advantage we have left post Brexit. In export terms, international students alone generated £19.5 billion in export earnings in 2020.
According to Universities UK, the sector contributes £95 billion to the economy and supports 815,000 jobs. We are the third most popular destination for international students globally and we have the highest degree completion rates in the OECD. Then last week, I woke up to the news that Cambridge University, my alma mater, alone contributes £30 billion a year to the UK economy. I have also just been reading about the impact of the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre in Manchester and the potential of the venture science doctorate being developed by Deep Science Ventures.
A healthy, vibrant higher education sector is essential as this country seeks to grow and thrive. That is why I was so alarmed to see news from places such as Norwich and Wolverhampton, and then to read last year’s National Audit Office report and the response from the Public Accounts Committee. This paints a picture of serious financial stress in the sector. The report found that the number of higher education providers with in-year deficits has risen from 1% to 15% in the last five years and that 20 have been in deficit for at least three years. In 2020-21, 43 out of 254 higher education institutions were reporting deficits and the net operating cashflow of the sector had halved. These problems cover the full range of types of higher education institution, suggesting a set of systemic issues that cannot be written off as a hangover from Covid. So what is going on?
Put simply, it appears that the university business model is teetering. Universities rely on four sources of income: government funding, tuition fees, research grants and other income such as property investments, IP exploitation, conferences and endowments. These are just the kinds of things that allow the rich, such as Oxford and Cambridge, to get richer while the rest struggle. The balance between tuition fee income from UK students and UK government funding has shifted significantly in the last decade, and this is the core of the problem. In 2010, funding from government was close to three times the level of tuition fee income. Ten years later, following the raising of tuition fees to over £9,000 and cuts in government funding, fee income was almost 2.7 times the level of government funding—an almost straight swap. This reliance on fees for half of income is so important in understanding the problems.
For good reason, the Government have capped fees since 2017 and they are now fixed until at least 2024. But galloping inflation means that, in real terms, the fee of £9,250 is now worth just £6,585 and government funding has not then filled the gap. Ours is the lowest level of government funding for universities in the OECD, hence the financial pressures. Teaching domestic students is now done at a loss, so recruiting more UK students to fill the gap does not necessarily help. That has led some to rely on international students; income from this source has been growing rapidly, by around 12% per year—but I do not believe that this can continue for ever. Students pay the highest fees in the OECD and are starting to get less in return. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that spending on students fell by 18% in real terms in the last 10 years, as universities try to make savings.
I take over as chair of the Council of British International Schools in May. Four hundred schools around the world are members, educating over 165,000 students, and their recent survey was revealing. It found that 96% of their pupils go on to university: 44% of them in the UK, 19% in their host country and the remainder shopping around globally. What is striking is that the UK is becoming less attractive, with 29% of schools reporting it as a decreasing choice of destination for their students. Why is that?
When asked, the students give a variety of reasons. For 65%, it is the cost; 35% mention Brexit; and 26% mention the cost of the visas and the post-study work entitlement. What a massive lost opportunity. Public First recently did some work for Universities UK and found that 64% of the public believed that the UK should host the same number of—or more—international students. Given that the continued growth of overseas students is crucial to relieving the financial pressures on universities that I have set out, can the Minister update us, in her response, on whether the Government plan further restrictions on international students? Can she confirm the Government’s commitment to the graduate visa route and whether they remain committed to their international education strategy? The Turing scheme is a relative success and nurtures an important global mindset by facilitating international student exchange. Therefore, it makes no sense for us not to do our utmost to reciprocate by hosting more students in this country.
Alongside the increasing income from students, it is reasonable to ask whether there is more that universities should and could do in terms of savings. There are problems here with the impact on staff leading to further industrial action, but there are also questions of what that means for students themselves. Students are already struggling with the cost of living crisis and a student maintenance package that is the lowest in seven years. They are borrowing money, half of which will never be repaid. Teaching has been cut and accommodation is hard to find for too many. Post Covid, many students are struggling with mental health problems and have lost out on teaching contact time due to strikes, so dropout rates have increased, further hitting university finances. This is especially important for our public services. Of the MillionPlus members, 66% of university graduates work in the public sector, and they tell us that applications for nursing are down by over 18%, when we need an increase of 20% to meet our targets. As the Minister knows, there is a similar story for teachers, where applications from those wanting to enter teacher training are down by over 15% and are much worse in priority secondary school subjects. I do not believe that further savings that impact on the student experience are sustainable.
The other pressure on our university system comes in the critical area of research. The research function of British universities punches well above its weight. We have one of the lowest levels of investment in the OECD, yet the academic impact of our work is ranked the highest in the G7. Funding is based both on overall university performance and on grant funding for specific projects. However, it is not designed to recover the full cost of undertaking the research. In 2020, only 71% of research costs were recovered, which means using income from teaching funding and elsewhere to fill the gap. I have already discussed the problems in that area. Clearly, the lack of access to the €84 billion Horizon scheme has added to these problems as one of the self-inflicted harms of the Brexit deal with the EU. I am delighted that the Windsor agreement allows that to be reopened. Can the Minister update the House on the progress of those negotiations?
All of that said, the state of university finances looks a bit of a mess. Government policy deliberately shifted universities to a reliance on fee income. The reality of that creating unsustainable levels of debt has meant capping that source, so this vital sector is now in some trouble. We need innovation and change; there is no easy solution. Having seen the economic reality of gambling with our money, thanks to Liz Truss, we also know that there is no magic money tree. While we are waiting for change across our education ecosystem to create something fit for purpose for people and the economy, we also need an answer to give confidence to the sector. We have seen, through councils such as Croydon and Thurrock, that, when push comes to shove, the Treasury will intervene to stop our local authorities from going belly-up. I hope that I have made the case that our universities are too important for us to allow them to be vulnerable.
The Government did the right thing in protecting customers in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month. Can the Minister assure us that, somewhere between the Office for Students, the Department for Education and the Treasury, someone is working on a plan B so that students and staff at our universities will be assured that they will not be left high and dry, as the business model for our universities looks like it might be running out of road? I beg to move.
The Earl of Dundee (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, on introducing this very timely debate. I will briefly mention three aspects: international co-operation between universities; the extent to which reciprocal university programmes can also be supported by their cities, regions, industries and communities; and the relevance of public/private partnerships in funding, both here and abroad, studies and learning, including in higher education.
International co-operation between higher education institutions is able to reduce financial costs by sharing human resources, while achieving improved education and research results, thus preparing students better for their future professional challenges in a globalised world. There are two immediate facilitators. First, EU Horizon grant funding for research is still available, for a short while, for United Kingdom institutions in their own right. Secondly, Horizon funding of partnerships will continue to apply to an institution in the United Kingdom, provided its partner is within the EU. One example is the proposed partnership between the Scottish University of the Highlands and Islands and the University of Zadar in Croatia. In helping to put this together, I declare an interest as recent chairman of the Council of Europe’s Education and Culture Committee and as current chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Croatia.
The second point relates to the ways in which corresponding cities and regions also gain from reciprocal university programmes. Of course, the more advantages accrue not just to the universities but to their regions and communities as well, the more university costs themselves can decrease as a result. UHI and Zadar University each happen to be researching new technologies for greener energy in any case, on the Cromarty Firth and the Adriatic coast respectively. Equally, they are each researching into improved conditions and opportunities for people living in their similar locations of remote areas and islands. However, joint efforts will assist those universities and their localities to a greater extent, while also expediting, earlier than otherwise, constructive outcomes from research. Here, then, are obvious examples of how, at reduced costs, universities and communities alike stand to benefit considerably from international partnerships and their focused designs.
In this context, together with the Department for Education, what plans does the Minister have to encourage partnerships between United Kingdom universities and others within the EU, thereby ensuring that the United Kingdom has access to EU funding for higher education and research as a third country and non-EU member state—purposes which, in its present form, the Turing scheme cannot facilitate? Does she also agree that revised entitlement to funding, such as for the Horizon scheme, should apply uniformly, without differentiating across the United Kingdom?
Then, as an active member of its intergovernmental committee, there is the United Kingdom’s position as a key operator within the human rights affiliation of 46 states of the Council of Europe, which in Strasbourg has prepared the European outline convention for cross border co-operation at local level. Higher education institutions in the United Kingdom will wish to take up this opportunity. How will the Department for Education assist them to do so?
Online learning proved its worth during the Covid pandemic. It is still essential for thousands of displaced Ukrainian students and for a great many others elsewhere. Yet apart from in emergencies, online learning remains extremely relevant, owing to its enabling of reduced costs for education, research and students. Does the Minister therefore consider that online learning has a major part to play in reducing financial pressures on higher education?
During its fairly recent G7 presidency, the United Kingdom committed to help promote education in the third world and elsewhere in countries where education systems do not fully operate. What actions have the Government taken since then? Which combined initiatives are in progress? And at all teaching levels, further to promote and provide education overseas, where it is required, does my noble friend agree that, in terms of both quality and cost control, by far the most effective deployments are distance learning online programmes?
Such delivery connects to the need for public/private partnerships in various fields, yet certainly including higher education. In the city of Dundee, for instance, the online games industry works with universities. Increasingly, and in any event in the interest of their own employment recruitment, most sectors of industry have a reason to support good education. Does my noble friend concur that education deliveries through public/private partnerships are cost effective, timely and of sustained quality? If so, what steps are the Department for Education taking to advance and increase these partnerships?
In summary, the best approach to reduce financial pressures upon universities is a proactive one. That applies to all manifestations of the problem and how to tackle them. Yet, not least do the three aspects just outlined reveal why an innovative approach is essential. They illustrate the need for stronger government encouragement to international partnerships between universities, the associated advantages to their localities, and the separate case for supporting public/private partnerships to assist education both at home and abroad. These are some of the necessary prescriptions for raising standards, lowering costs and benefiting communities.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, as a former teacher, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak on this issue. As noted in the register, I am the chair of trustees of the Council for Dance, Drama and Musical Theatre.
I do not need to tell noble Lords taking part in this debate about the strengths of the UK’s higher education sector. Whether it is our fantastic HE colleges or our world-famous universities, the teaching and research they give us should be a source of immense pride. That is why it is so important that the Government are alive to the risks the sector faces, and that they take a proactive approach to supporting providers and their students to weather them. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Knight for bringing these matters to the attention of the House through this debate. Indeed, universities and higher education institutions face a perfect storm of rising costs, with EU structural funds ending and an increasingly combative Government raising fears about capping international students.
In June last year, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published a concerning report into the financial sustainability of England’s HE sector. The number of institutions with an in-year deficit has risen more than sixfold, from 5% in 2015-16 to 32% in 2019-20. It would not be fair to draw attention to any particular provider, but we know that when organisations look to balance their books, they often have to cut staff and subjects. This can be devastating for students and regional economies alike.
I am sure that noble Lords across the House will speak in more detail than I intend to on the second and third aspects of the debate, and I am certain they will do a sterling job. I wish to focus on the threats to local communities, and particularly the key role the Office for Students must play in supporting providers, considering the central contribution they often make within their surrounding economies. There is value in probing the regulatory role of the OfS, particularly how well it monitors the financial sustainability of the sector, and its role in protecting students from fallout when things go wrong. As my noble friend highlighted in the blog he published last week prior to this debate, the university sector brings much-needed skills to local communities: 73% of UK university students study locally, or go back to the region they grew up in to work. However, when the sector struggles, the impact on the local community is widely felt.
I will mention an institution that I relied heavily upon when teaching at Hawthorn High School, in Pontypridd. The University of Glamorgan, now the University of South Wales, generously gave of its time and facilities to my A-level students in preparation for their radio coursework submissions. It allowed us access to a fully equipped radio studio, when all I had in school was a double cassette recorder. This engagement not only allowed students to produce the best technical examples of their work but took youngsters from backgrounds where university was not part of their experience into the campus itself, where they saw that they too could look to engage with a university education in their future lives. It was an important aspect of the university within the community, and I could share many more examples, if time allowed.
The National Audit Office report noted that it collects a great deal of data on institutions to check the validity of the economic model, but smaller institutions question why they have to give the same amount of information as large ones. Perhaps the Minister could address this concern in her remarks and say whether the Government agree with the remarks of smaller institutions regarding information overload. When they speak to the Office for Students, perhaps they could ask how this could be reviewed and refined. I believe that the OfS is trying valiantly to refresh its comms approach. I hope it will improve the situation, and I trust it will set robust metrics to measure its success on this. What is the Government’s view on whether the OfS is communicating effectively.
As well as having clearer comms, the National Audit Office review recommended that the OfS should
“improve where necessary and then reauthorise student protection plans for all providers to ensure they remain adequate and can respond to new risks.”
The Office for Students must get this right. The “responding to new risks” part of the recommendation is absolutely crucial. Threats to the sector are evolving all the time, so the OfS must see its role as proactive: to foresee these risks and see them off before a university fails. Although the OfS sees the risk of multiple provider failures remaining low, the consequences for an area of its local college going under are simply too catastrophic for the regulator not to do everything in its power to set the conditions for success.
On this basis, I have several questions for the Minister. Are the Government satisfied that the OfS has the appropriate clout—I mean the regulatory tools and powers—to monitor the financial health of institutions effectively? Does the Minister believe the OfS is sufficiently alive to the financial instability of many institutions, and does it see its role as preventive or simply reactive? Should a provider fail, is the regulator confident it could mitigate the damage to the undergraduates and staff, and to the surrounding local economy? What is the Government’s overall assessment of the financial stability of the sector, and what are they doing to support it?
Over the next five years, it is predicted that universities alone will help set up more than 20,000 new businesses and provide more than £11.5 billion of support and services to industries and not-for-profit companies. Instead of the worrying trend of treating the sector as a convenient political arena for a culture war, it is imperative that the UK Government do everything they can to protect the jewel in the UK’s crown.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for this debate. I am very pleased to speak on this very important subject which is close to my heart.
The UK’s universities and colleges are world-regarded, as the noble Lord has already set out. However, like much of the country at the moment, they are under extreme financial pressure to do all that they need and would like to do, but are deprived of the resources to do it. I thank all those who have sent us briefings—Universities UK, MillionPlus, Horizon, London Higher and others I shall mention later. I will concentrate my remarks on a couple of issues: the Turing Scheme and part-time education, which of course impacts local communities.
First, I turn to the Turing Scheme. It is a poor replacement for the wonderful Erasmus, which the Conservative Government assured us would be kept after Brexit—another broken promise. We have heard from the British Council and the University Council of Modern Languages of their concerns. Modern languages are more important than ever since Brexit. Our European neighbours no longer need to speak English as we are no longer in the club, but British ability to speak French, German, Spanish, Italian and other languages has been seriously depleted since a GCSE in a modern language is no longer regarded as important. It was good to hear the King speaking in German on his visit to Germany, and I gather that, had he been allowed into France, he would have spoken French too—a great example. But what about Mandarin and Arabic, arguably the languages of the future? How can we communicate, trade and understand each other without other languages, and how will this impact on international relations?
As we know, unlike Erasmus+, inward mobility is not supported by the Turing Scheme, nor does it provide funding for staff placements. Significantly, the scheme does not cover tuition fees, and these are expected to be waived by host universities—how is that working, I wonder? Erasmus+ helped to enhance language skills and ensured that UK-based students and staff could work across different cultures and within a diverse workforce, as well as establish critical international partnerships. Following the loss of this Erasmus+ opportunity for UK study, and the introduction of a student route points-based immigration system, students from the EU, EEA and EFTA face increased costs due to the change in the home fee status and eligibility for tuition fee loans. Before the transition period ended these students were able to study in the UK without a visa, which will now cost them money that they may well not have.
Additionally, the financial settlement for the Turing Scheme is to be renewed on a yearly basis, so HEIs can no longer assure students applying for their degree that funding will be available for a year abroad. This creates considerable uncertainty for students, particularly for those whose degrees would historically have been expected to include a year abroad component—for example, language degrees. Can the Minister say what plans the Government have to ensure a long-term commitment to funding the scheme and make sure more certain levels of funding are available, so that students can plan and universities can commit to students of modern languages and others who would like to study abroad?
By the time funding is confirmed with institutions and then with individuals, students need to have planned their period of residence abroad. This makes planning difficult for universities and causes significant anxiety for students, who plan their year abroad with no guarantee of financial support. However, we know that the value of modern languages for trade and general economic competitiveness is widely acknowledged. Furthermore, the uncertainty of funding disproportionately affects the widening participation of students.
I should also like to raise part-time higher education in England, which has long been the Cinderella of the HE sector, where financial pressures are very acute. Wonderful organisations such as the Open University and Birkbeck have long opened opportunities for adult learners, or indeed younger people who choose to study at their own pace. I need to declare an interest as a fellow of Birkbeck and a long-time supporter of the Open University. Enrolment has dropped. We know that all students are struggling with the cost of living, but pressures will be particularly felt by part-time students. They tend to be older—seven out of 10 are aged 25 and over—and, as a result, are more likely to have significant financial and caring responsibilities. Part-time students in England are also unlikely to be eligible for government support with their living costs. The vast majority—90%—are excluded from maintenance support, and part-time students are unable to access support offered to students who are parents via the parents’ learning allowance and the childcare grant. Financial burdens are also likely to have an impact on student well-being and mental health, again feeding through to a heightened risk of non-continuation.
Part-time higher education is a critical enabler for flexible lifelong learning. It is desperately needed to spread opportunity to all and boost productivity, but it needs support and incentivising, with government policies and funding. Why is it, for instance, that part-time distance learners are still locked out of maintenance support in England, apart from a very small minority who have a serious enough disability to be able to claim it? That is clear in the Government’s response to the lifelong loan entitlement consultation, but there is no reason why. However, this support can be accessed by part-time students in Wales. At this morning’s meeting of the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee, we heard that Wales is leading the way in a number of educational initiatives—I am sure that is music to the ears of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox. If it is good enough for Wales, why is not good enough for England?
The LLE feels optimistic. We Liberal Democrats proposed a skills wallet that would provide grants, not loans, which are more acceptable for adults with many calls on their purses. We are very pleased to see an end to the ELQ rule, and trust that the new per credit fee limit will be applied as the rule and not the exception.
In her reply, can the Minister offer any assurances on the future of modern languages in the UK and the future of part-time learning? Both are significant for our economic prosperity, our well-being and our place in the world.
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Knight for initiating this debate and for his comprehensive introduction. I worked as a university administrator for 33 years, and I have a pension from the USS. There were not the commercial incentives in universities when I worked there, although there would have been limits to the possibilities anyway. The Institute of Education, where I worked, was entirely postgraduate, and although heavily involved in research, there is not much money in teacher training and education. As the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, has already said, institutions with a significant proportion of part-time students—such as the institute or Birkbeck or the Open University—were always Cinderella services when it came to funding.
Universities have always had a hierarchy in funding and research grants, so I am not going to claim that some golden period of access, standards, student support systems or value for money ever existed. However, what we have now is the worst of all worlds, with tuition fees falling in value by 15%, student loans reduced by at least £1,000 since 2020-21, overreliance on overseas student fees, commercialisation threatening standards, and damaging limits on the number of training places for doctors, nurses and teachers.
Until last month, I was a member of the Industry and Regulators Committee, which has launched an inquiry into the role of the Office for Students. So, as a mark of respect to that excellent committee, I will refrain from making rude remarks about the Office for Students, tempting though it is.
My first question for the Minister is: what plans do the Government have for funding more university places for doctors, nurses and teachers? It is not a great money-spinner for universities, but it would help. It would also meet a desperate need for more homegrown doctors, nurses and teachers and reduce the need for overseas talent.
Although we know that 44% of student loans are subsidised by government and some say the system is broken, I will leave it to others to elaborate on that. However, do the Government have any plans to unfreeze tuition fees before the next general election, as this represents a substantial cut in university income, or will it have to wait until after? Do the Government propose to place a cap on the number of overseas students and compensate universities for any lost income?
I have heard noble Lords on the Government Benches deploring the fact that the student experience at university has deteriorated, but they do not seem to accept that increased commercialisation might have something to do with it. I have real concerns that there is a growing backlog of repairs and maintenance in universities and much-needed capital expenditure, which will not only impact on the student experience but will have health and safety implications for the future.
In his introduction, my noble friend Lord Knight referred to the value to local and regional areas of having a university, and I support that statement strongly. I am thinking of a town which is crying out for a higher education institution. It would provide much-needed jobs and income and transform the community. When the Government are talking about their levelling-up agenda, they might consider the transformative impact of setting up a university in such a town.
Some have said that the financial pressures might lead to the closure of some university institutions. I hope that we never have to face these dilemmas, but a worse fate would be the inexorable decline in standards throughout the whole system. We have such a lot to lose in the UK, with our deserved reputation for centres of excellence, but the uncertainties around Erasmus and Horizon funding and the inadequacy of Turing funding are already showing a downward trend in the international league tables. It was the height of irony for the Government to name the scheme after Alan Turing, a genius who was tortured by the state and whose name will now be linked to a poor-relation funding scheme.
Returning to the fall in value of student loans, I point out that the recent Education (Student Fees, Awards and Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2023 were considered by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. It referred to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies stating that
“the value of loans has been reduced by more than £1,000 in real terms compared to 2020–21”.
The DfE has accepted that these proposed changes will, overall, have a negative impact for students. Although there was some mitigation via hardship funds and the Office for Students, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee concluded that
“the mitigating actions outlined by Department will not compensate for the loss in the real value of maintenance loans”.
The equality impact assessment stated that the 2023-24 uprating
“will likely lead to a further erosion of students’ purchasing power”
and that women, mature students, those on low incomes and ethnic minority students would be particularly
“adversely affected by the real term decrease in the value of the loan”.
This result will achieve the exact opposite of widening access and levelling up. Reeling off a series of one-off government funding announcements does not disguise the Government’s failure to recognise the importance of higher education.
I have run out of time, so all I can say is that I agree wholeheartedly with the comments of the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, on the importance of international co-operation between universities.
Viscount Chandos (Lab)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth for securing this important debate and in paying tribute to his powerful introduction to it. I strongly endorse his analysis of the intense financial challenges faced by the higher education sector and add my voice to the questions he asked the Minister. I declare my interest as vice-chair and trustee of the drama school LAMDA and as a co-opted member of the investment committee of Worcester College, University of Oxford—a rich university with a poor college within it.
I am also privileged to have taken the place of my noble friend Lady Donaghy as a member of the Industry and Regulators Committee of your Lordships’ House. I am therefore currently involved in the inquiry into the Office for Students. I would be as unpopular pre-empting the conclusions of the committee as I would be giving a plot spoiler to the current series of “Succession”—which stars, in Brian Cox, a distinguished alumnus of LAMDA—but some of the points that I will make this afternoon have been formed by the evidence about the HE sector that has already been heard by the committee.
Academic politics is
“the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low”,
wrote Professor Wallace Sayre in the 1950s. He may have been reflecting the views of President Woodrow Wilson, and subsequently Henry Kissinger has characteristically claimed the analysis for his own. Senior common-room debate can be impassioned on a wide range of subjects, and the intellectual self-confidence of members of the academic community undoubtedly makes the governance of universities and HE institutions challenging.
Professor Sayre’s dictum may accurately represent one aspect of academic life, but it would be completely wrong to interpret it more broadly as implying that the stakes in higher education generally are low. They could not, in fact, be more important. That importance is based on the education and training provided to UK citizens of every age, but particularly as young adults; the research and innovation undertaken of national and global scope; the economic benefits of a vibrant HE sector nationally; and, as my noble friend Lord Knight and others have highlighted, the benefits for local communities. It also includes the contribution to the UK’s international standing and relationships through the foreign students who are drawn to the excellence of our institutions. Where these are all interconnected, students benefit from being taught by academics at the forefront of research and from their interaction with overseas students, for instance.
I believe that there should be greater clarity in defining the priorities and objectives for HE policy. I would argue that it should be first and foremost about providing that education and training to UK students in order to create a productive workforce and a civilised society. The economic benefits arising directly from the sector, such as £20 billion of export earnings, £100 billion of GDP and the driving economic force in many local communities, are hugely important, but they are a welcome by-product of the central objective of providing the best possible education for current and future generations. Research is of course vital but, whereas teaching is universal to all HE institutions, research is more concentrated—not, I should emphasise, in Russell Group universities alone but wherever specialised expertise resides.
I believe that thinking about HE policy in this way is essential for any fair and successful reform of funding. Not only is it necessary to increase the overall funding for the sector in real terms, it needs to be implemented in a way that ensures, as far as possible, that the costs fall fairly and proportionately on the different stakeholders. For instance, there is disagreement about the extent of cross-subsidies between teaching and research most of all, but this issue must be resolved as part of any sustainable changes to the funding of the sector. With the cap on tuition fees for domestic undergraduate courses frozen in nominal terms, and therefore falling in real terms at an accelerating rate, there is increasing divergence between the fees for domestic undergraduates and what the market for foreign students may be able to bear. There must be an increasing risk that, however much vice-chancellors and their governing bodies are committed to the mission of teaching UK students—as I have heard them say—an unreformed system will inexorably increase the pressure to further emphasise the recruitment of foreign students for narrow financial reasons.
In my remaining time, I will touch briefly on the importance of smaller, specialist institutions. LAMDA, of which I am the vice-chair, is one, along with other world-leading drama schools, music conservatoires and the Royal College of Art, which has been rated the number one art and design college in the world for eight consecutive years. Through the OfS, the Department for Education provides additional funding for some specialist institutions in recognition of the higher costs involved in teaching these specialist courses, as well as the proportionately higher costs that come from being a small, stand-alone institution. Sir Michael Barber, the first chair of the OfS, has recorded the importance that he attached during his term of office to protecting and enhancing the position of such institutions. That support is very welcome and, I believe—I would, wouldn’t I?—fully justified. The world-leading reputation of these institutions and the quality of the education and training provided are fundamentally based on their small size and independence; I say that without denigrating the excellent courses in these areas provided by larger, multi-faculty universities. Can the Minister confirm that the Government remain committed to supporting smaller, specialist institutions at historic levels or higher?
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
My Lords, central to this debate is the failure to invest enough in our higher education system. Consequently, we have to restrict the number of domestic students relative to the number of those from abroad, because universities lose money on domestic students. In other words, UK universities are supporting the nation’s science and further education ambitions through the income that they receive from international fees. This is inherently an unpredictable and risky platform on which to provide a higher education system.
There are more particular problems. The noble Baroness, Lady Garden, referred to the uncertainties surrounding the Turing scheme. This particularly affects students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are particularly vulnerable to this uncertainty. Universities face myriad funding pressures in pursuing their mission and sustaining academic excellence, but having fees frozen at £9,250—which, as my noble friend has already explained, in real terms is now equivalent to only £6,500—means that they simply do not have the money to cover the cost of courses, in particular the cost of STEM subjects. The fact that student fees have been stuck at this level for some years, for the reasons that we understand, coupled with inflation, mission creep—additional responsibilities being placed on institutions—the pressure from industrial action, and so on, means that universities are experiencing a damaging squeeze on their finances. Coupled with the cost of living crisis, the lack of resources means that that there is inevitable damage to the important objectives of increasing social mobility and local community engagement. This is despite universities’ regulatory requirements to spend part of their tuition fee income on widening participation.
There is a growing risk to social mobility if, for pragmatic reasons, universities have to make hard decisions to recruit fewer domestic students relative to international students or have to spread their limited bursary and hardship funds over a thinner entry. The ability of universities to collaborate with local government and third-sector partners is also being strained, in large part by the budgetary pressures on would-be partners, particularly in deprived communities with lower social resilience capacity, during this cost of living crisis.
Turning to research and innovation, there are intense funding challenges on universities in sustaining their infrastructure and talent pools. The challenge that we face is that virtually all forms of research run as a loss-making activity that must be supported by teaching and, in turn, as has been explained by myself and other speakers, that is dependent on overseas students. Having an internationalised learning community brings immense cultural and academic benefits to campuses, but there are systematic risks of universities becoming overly dependent on particular countries’ markets at a time of rising geopolitical tension and geostrategic competition. The risks are clear. For example, if relations with China were to deteriorate, we would be in a very challenging position. Does the department have a plan to cope with this situation if we hit such problems?
Sir Paul Nurse’s recent review recommended increases in the full economic cost recovery provided by competitively allocated research grants and an uplift in the block grant QR funding. He also highlighted underlying issues with the precarity of early career research pathways that are in large part a corollary of short-termism in the way public funding works, leading to pressure and stress on those involved.
As the Financial Times has reported, universities are having difficulties in the initial phase of the Turing scheme, with shortfalls in expected annual allocations and delayed payments, in some cases leading to places not being taken up. The inability of universities to provide certainty about funding to students only compounds the problems for those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, undermining their willingness and ability to pursue opportunities.
Finally, it is vital to a world-class UK research and innovation endeavour that the UK enjoys broad access to Horizon Europe. The real prize here is not access to the funding pool, but the huge, collaborative multiplier benefits of working with leading scientists and researchers across Europe and leading on multi-country researcher consortium bids. As the House will be aware, British universities have already experienced challenges in recruiting world-class researchers because of the enduring climate of uncertainty over participation. It is not just Horizon that has given problems; the sudden withdrawal from collaborative research funded by the Official Development Assistance programme two years ago also hit the UK’s reputation. As has been pointed out recently in the Times Higher Education supplement, much of the damage, coupled with the broader effects of Brexit, has already been done and will be hard to recover from. Nevertheless, a return to Horizon in a timely and efficient manner is vital to the UK’s ability to attract and retain leading British and global research talent and investment.
Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
My Lords, I intend to talk about the internal consequences for universities of their financial crises. The number of universities running financial deficits has increased in recent years. The proportion of providers with a yearly deficit has increased from 5% in 2015-16 to 32% in 2019-20; the figures for the subsequent academic years will undoubtedly be far worse. The deficits can be attributed to the declining values in real terms of the fee income received from students and of the grants from central government. The finances of universities have been sustained by the fees paid by overseas students, as we have heard. It had been feared that in consequence of the Covid pandemic there would be a major loss of the income from this source but, remarkably, it has been maintained.
However, it is by no means assured that the numbers of overseas students will be maintained. The recent increases have been attributable mainly to students from China and India, but our relations with the Governments of these countries are deteriorating and their students might be encouraged to go elsewhere. The number of students from the European Union has plummeted: there was a decline of 40% in applications for undergraduate study in the UK from EU countries in 2021-22, and the decline has continued.
A natural advantage of British universities, their use of the English language, is being eroded rapidly. It should be recognised that the majority of postgraduate courses in European universities are now taught in English. The fees demanded by those universities are much lower than British fees. Therefore, European universities are liable to be more attractive at the postgraduate level, at least to overseas students, than British universities, which also face competition from universities in other English-speaking countries.
The financial outlook is extremely worrying. A further factor in the financial difficulties of our universities has been a consequence of the Government’s decision, or desire, to make them compete among themselves in the recruitment of students. Instead of competing via the level of fees, universities have chosen to complete via the amenities they offer students. This has led them to capital expenditures that few can afford.
University administrations have reacted to the financial stringencies that have prevailed over many years by endeavouring to reduce their salary bills. University lecturers have, on average, lost 25% of their real incomes since 2009. I believe that that figure is way out of date as a consequence of current inflation. Meanwhile, the disparities in their incomes have increased, with the top earners moving rapidly ahead.
The collapsing value of the USS pension fund has led to the expectation that the retirement income of academics will be reduced by 35% relative to previous expectation. Whereas security of employment was a traditional compensation for the relatively modest earnings of academics, their employment has become increasingly insecure, with a large proportion of staff on short-term contracts. Academics who previously would have benefited from tenure are now subject to dismissal when the administrators judge that they have become surplus to requirements in consequence of restructuring plans.
The commercialisation of higher education has led universities to become increasingly responsive to consumer demand, and they have adapted their teaching accordingly by alleviating or abolishing difficult or demanding courses which are often at the core of the disciplines. The managements have aimed to expand the more profitable activities at the expense of the less profitable ones. Thus, at the University of Leicester, at which I am an emeritus professor, business studies, which represent a profitable cost centre, have been expanded while the mathematics department has been affected by numerous redundancies. This surely flies in the face of a widely recognised national priority to foster STEM subjects.
The academics have reacted to their loss of income and pension rights, and to their excessive workloads, by striking. In some cases, the reaction of the management to the strikes has been grotesque. Queen Mary University, my erstwhile university, has enjoined its students to report striking staff, while threatening to dock full pay for 39 days if those named fail to reschedule their missed teaching. Last July, it deducted 21 days’ full pay from more than 100 staff who had refused to mark students’ work in June as part of a national boycott. Their intention had been only to delay the marking. Staff have been resigning in protest.
Universities in the UK are chronically understaffed on the academic side, albeit the number of administrators has grown to outnumber the academics. The lack of academic manpower has been met by employing postgraduate students to teach classes, which is not always done adequately.
The governance of universities by professional administrators is in marked contrast to the circumstances that prevailed when I joined the academic ranks in the 1970s. Then, the administration of universities was in the hands of senior academics and academics who had opted to serve their universities in an administrative capacity instead of pursuing a research career. Such people are no longer available for this role; the likelihood is that they have been weeded out in consequence of their poor research performance. The hypertrophy of the administration has largely been a consequence of the audits demanded by governments in pursuit of transparency and accountability. There is a research excellence framework, a teaching excellence framework and, latterly, a knowledge exchange framework, each of which has engendered its own bureaucracy.
Academics no longer have any ownership of the processes they mediate, and their loyalty to their institutions has largely been destroyed. Nowadays, the academics and the administrators constitute mutually hostile factions. What has transpired is an old-fashioned and atavistic struggle of the management against the workers. We are witnessing the rapid decline of British universities.
Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests and, in particular, my work with Dudley College and the Warwick Manufacturing Group. I also thank my noble friend Lord Knight not just for calling this debate but for the huge contribution he makes, and has made for years, to improving education in the UK.
I want to make the case I have been making for years, which is that we have to make education and skills, at all levels, the UK’s number one priority. Improving education is the answer to our country’s biggest challenges, as it brings new investment, new industries and good, well-paid jobs to areas that have lost traditional industries. It tackles poverty and improves social mobility, builds a stronger economy and boosts productivity. It not only enables young people to lead more fulfilled and prosperous lives but reduces the costs of inequality and poverty on the NHS, on housing and on benefits.
Young people today will work with technologies that have not yet been invented and have jobs not yet imagined. The old days when you learned skills to equip you for a job for life have gone for good. Instead, the pace of change will get quicker and quicker, so young people must learn how to adapt, how to learn and how to acquire new skills. This is why investing in education and skills is the most important investment any of us can make as individuals, communities, the Government or the country as a whole.
At the outset, I want to lay to rest the idea that we send too many young people to university. If I may so, it is total nonsense. For the people who say this, if I may say this as well, it is never their children or young people from their community who they think should not be going to university. When they say it they are talking about young people in places like the Black Country.
There are communities that have routinely sent more than half their young people to university for years. There are schools, families and communities where going to university is, and has been for decades, the normal, expected thing to do. Then there are towns across the country that have no university campus, where school standards have not been good enough and which have sent a small minority of young people to university. Yet these are the places that most need higher skills, and the new industries and jobs that those skills can attract. The truth is that we need to ensure standards at school improve, that more young people stay on and go to college and sixth form, to apprenticeships or to university. We need to do all these things to equip our country for the challenges of the modern economy.
The point I want to focus on is the contribution that universities make to their local communities. You only have to get off the train at Cambridge to be stunned at the level of investment that its link to science, education and research has made in that city. If you go to Coventry and Warwickshire, you will see industries, companies and jobs that have resulted from the world-beating partnerships between academia and industry at the Warwick Manufacturing Group. Then you travel 30 miles up to the road to the Black Country, which has struggled to replace jobs lost in traditional industries over the last 40 or 50 years.
This is the approach we have adopted in Dudley, with a brand new £100 million town centre campus, which includes a new institute of technology and plans for a university centre focused on healthcare technologies. We are making education the borough’s number one priority, to strengthen the local economy. But one of the challenges that towns in the Midlands and the north that have lost traditional industries face is that they often have no university to boost skills and drive growth.
For example, the Black Country is an area of four boroughs and 1.1 million people, but just one local university, the University of Wolverhampton. As I will explain, like other modern new universities, the University of Wolverhampton does a brilliant job of serving local people, but the boroughs in the area are some of the largest places in the country with no university campuses. The region as a whole has less higher education provision than other areas, which is one of the reasons why we have higher levels of unemployment.
This is why, where we once built communities around factories, we must now build them around universities and colleges. That is why universities like the University of Wolverhampton need more support from the Government and must be able to attract and teach more students. Look at the facts: research in 2019 showed that the university, its students and their visitors—as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said earlier—supported nearly 4,000 jobs locally, while MillionPlus’s report last year, Staying Local to Go Far, showed it contributes almost £200 million to the local economy and that modern universities generate £1.17 billion in the wider West Midlands.
More than eight out of 10 of Wolverhampton’s 21,000 students come from within 25 miles. One in every three undergraduates is on subjects allied to medicine, training to become nurses and health professionals. Almost nine out of 10 of the graduates from the most recent cohort were in work or further study, according to the latest Graduate Outcomes report, and six out of 10 UK students went on to highly skilled rates. Compared with other universities, more of Wolverhampton’s students not only are recruited locally, as I said, but remain in the local area, contributing to the local economy and driving its improvement after graduation too.
Wolverhampton is not unique in this regard. Lots of the modern universities are like this and have a high proportion of students from poorer backgrounds, who have been in care or on free school meals, who are from families that have not sent other people to university or are from neighbourhoods with fewer students and graduates. Universities such as Wolverhampton—all of these modern universities—are critical to the Government’s levelling-up ambitions, to tackling poverty and to building a stronger economy. They are critical for the important role they still play in working collaboratively with local stakeholders, such as the NHS, businesses and local government, to drive regional development and strengthen the social fabric of the cities and towns in which they are located. It is vital that the Government ensure that universities and communities such as these, in the towns of the Midlands and the north that have lost their traditional industries and which desperately need to attract new investment and new jobs, receive more support. This is not just important for them but vital for the country as a whole.
Lord Leong (Lab)
My Lords, I declare my interests in education and training and as chair of the Council for Education in the Commonwealth as set out in the register. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth, whom I hold in the highest regard in this field, on securing this debate. This subject not only is very close to my heart but draws attention to serious concerns in the HE sector, many of which have been raised by Members in the Chamber this afternoon. I have so much to say that there was a danger that this speech would become like a sprawling undergraduate essay: full of enthusiasm for the subject, but ultimately unfocused and ineffective. So I will address one very specific topic, which, if it were an essay question, would be: “Compare and contrast the merits of Erasmus+ and the Turing scheme and identify what steps you would recommend to deliver the best outcomes for the students and institutions involved.”
Here are the facts. Erasmus was formed in 1987 and evolved into Erasmus+ in 2014 through the consolidation of various other mobility programmes for people who were not at university. The UK was one of the 11 founding members. One common misconception, even among many of its supporters, is that Erasmus+ is exclusively a scheme for EU members and students. This is not the case. It is a global success story, yet the UK is no longer part of it because this Government decided to end participation from 31 December 2020—Brexit day. Non-EU countries, both within Europe and elsewhere, are eligible to join. Norway, Iceland and Turkey are full members of the programme. Others, from Morocco to Armenia to Ukraine, are eligible as programme partners. More than 80 countries around the world participate in one or more Erasmus+ scheme.
Secondly, since the programme operates over a seven-year funding cycle, students and institutions can promote and plan their participation in a relatively stable environment. In the period 2014 to 2020, the UK received nearly €1.1 billion for 6,892 projects involving 331,765 participants. This represents 7.8% of the total Erasmus+ budget and 6% of all participants out of 80-odd countries. Our involvement was considerable.
Some might argue that it is unfair to contrast Erasmus+ with the Turing scheme, which was announced in 2020 and commenced in September 2021, as it is not yet quite two years old and was launched into an educational environment still reeling from the impact of the pandemic. However, even allowing for these mitigating circumstances, initial comparisons do not reflect well. Although institutions are glad that at least something is on offer, the Turing application process is considerably more bureaucratic, evaluation is less transparent and, as it runs on an annual basis, it is inherently less secure for planning and promotion.
Moreover, as the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, has already mentioned, Turing is structured as a one-way scheme, supporting UK students who wish to study abroad but with no reciprocal offer to students from the EU or anywhere else in the world to come to the UK. For several reasons, including the world-leading reputations of many UK universities, and the fact that most other countries learn English as their second language, the UK hosted many more visiting students under Erasmus+. This enriched courses in the UK with cultural vitality—students from more disadvantaged economic backgrounds could apply—as well as the obvious benefits from money spent in the UK economy while students were living here. There is no such opportunity under the Turing Scheme.
Lastly, I come to the issue of unnecessary divergence. UK qualifications are already moving away from European qualifications framework standards, which means that eventually UK qualifications will not be equally recognised by the EQF and our young people will be further disadvantaged and disfranchised from studying on the continent. Given all that, why the Government decided to leave Erasmus+ and replace it with the evidently inferior Turing Scheme remains, if noble Lords will forgive me, a complete enigma—one that even its namesake would struggle to resolve.
Labour has been clear that, when we are in government, our education mission will be to:
“Break down the barriers to opportunity … preparing young people for work and for life.”
We recognise that, in an increasingly interconnected world, the greater the educational opportunities that we provide for our students and young people, the brighter our nation’s future will be.
Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, on securing this debate and introducing it with considerable erudition and eloquence. This debate has become important in a post-Brexit age. It is because we have gone through the baptism of post-Brexit, and because of what is to follow, that we are concerned about the issues that it raises. I therefore want to ask myself what new issues it has raised, what the context is in which we are debating them and how old problems appear in new forms.
I shall concentrate on three issues that are important but, for obvious reasons, have not been discussed. The first has to do with the whole idea of student loans. Let us remember that a student comes out of university with a debt of, on average, £45,000. Even before he comes out with that debt and is still at university, he has to provide for his maintenance costs, which he does by relying on personal savings, with part-time work and in various other ways. There are many reports telling us how many students do not have food to eat, suffer hardships and undergo an enormous amount of pain in order to be able to graduate with some degree of decency.
Student loans do not serve the function of redistribution, which is what they are supposed to do. Levelling up must begin with, if anything, student loans, but that is not being done. Every penny that is given in loans has to be paid back, unless one is unable to do so after so many years and having earned below a certain amount of money. This does not happen in many of our competitive economies. For example, in France, tuition fees are pretty low; in Germany, they are non-existent in some Länder and very low in others. What is no less important is that the differential between the overseas student and the home student is much less than it is in our country. My feeling is that, rather than think of overseas students as a cow to milk and asking how they can help us bridge the gap in our own resources, we should be asking ourselves how the levelling-up scheme can be applied to them as well. In other words, the idea of the student loan needs to be rethought.
The second important subject I want to concentrate on is how the idea of the student loan has built in to it an element of structural bias in favour of overseas students having to pay more. If there is a teaching budget deficit, the expectation is that we will turn to overseas students, charge them £10,000 more than we charge domestic students and hope that they will bail us out. Our students cannot afford that kind of money, and they go to low-tariff universities. So there is a division between low-tariff universities, where our students go, and high-tariff universities, where overseas students go—a class division is almost built in to the student community. I do not think we fully appreciate how much resentment and hatred it causes among many of our students. I can say this with some confidence, having been a university professor for about 40 years.
The third element we need to think about is the Turing Scheme. There has been a lot of vacillation about Erasmus—should we join it or not? The Prime Minister said we should not and we finally decided—I think in December 2020—to go with the Turing Scheme. Why did we decide not to join Erasmus and to go for the Turing Scheme? We wanted to go global. What does that mean? It means that we should not be tied to any particular group. What does that mean? It means that we should be free to choose a country with which we associate. What does that mean? How are you going to take the mighty leap and launch out into the world at large, rather than connect with various groups with which you are already affiliated? I should have thought that, rather than take this mighty jump and pick and choose partners, we should be thinking about collaborating with those with whom we have already been connected and then gradually spread out into the rest of the world.
More importantly, there remain difficulties with the Turing Scheme. For example, the amount involved is much less than what we would have got if we had been part of Erasmus—I am told about £83 million. The scheme is subject to the spending review, and therefore there is no continuity, because the amount of money can change year to year. There is no funding for staff exchange or for pupils coming to the UK. We are not clear about language learning facilities. There is also unease about the time it could take to process visa applications for overseas students, and the question of not sharing best practices or learning resources.
I therefore want to end by putting three questions to the Minister. First, is there any attempt to look at the student loan in the context of an opportunity to level up? Has any thought been given to that? Secondly, should we not be thinking of overseas students just as much as we think of our own? Should we be thinking of all of them as Arabs and rich Nigerians and Indians, or should we not also think of those whom I encounter regularly—those who are poor and want to benefit from our education? Thirdly, is any attempt being made to reconsider the Turing scheme?
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)
My Lords, like others I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Knight for securing this timely debate. It is quite clear from it that a great deal is expected of our higher education institutions: excellence above all, in teaching and research, and certainly in providing students with a life-changing experience. Successive Governments have also wanted them to be engines for economic growth, to provide the skills needed for the economy, to be leaders and stimulators of innovation and a means of social mobility by widening access to opportunities for graduate jobs, to be anchors in their communities, and to be flexible in their response to changing needs while embracing new technologies, among lots of other things.
Not all can respond to all these demands and one of the hallmarks of the UK system is its variety. However, to provide all of these things and more, financial security is essential. To maintain what everyone agrees is our worldwide reputation for excellence, stability in policy-making, as well as resourcing, is fundamental. Universities UK has listed some of the sector’s achievements, as noble Lords have in this debate. They are certainly impressive: its £95 billion contribution to the economy; its outstanding international reputation for teaching, as we are the third most popular destination for international students globally; its excellent teaching and world-leading research. This debate has forced us to ask: are we in danger of throwing away this hard-won international reputation for excellence?
In a 2022 report on the financial sustainability of the HE sector, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee expressed concern that the proportion of providers with an in-year deficit has increased in each of the last four years—from 5% to 32% in 2019-20, and that number is expected to increase. Fees are a key factor. They have been stagnant, with the £9,250 headline fee for English universities now worth £6,585 to them. The fee income available in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is even lower. Yet England and Wales also have the highest domestic undergraduate fees in the OECD, including the semi-privatised US system. Looking at our international competitors, the UK has the lowest share of public funding in tertiary education among OECD member countries.
English universities have, so far, managed shrinking income
“through sensible and prudent financial management”,
according to the Office for Students. Part of this has come from generating income from other streams—particularly, although not exclusively, recruiting international students. It is clear, however, that under increased funding pressure and rising costs, as UUK has said, universities will be faced with
“compromises in teaching or research, damaging our hard-won international reputation and putting pressure on students and staff.”
This of course compounds other pressures on students. Just as the cost of living crisis is hitting students, their maintenance package in England is at its lowest value in seven years. Students are now also eligible for much lower maintenance loans than when the system was first designed. Under recent changes, more students will repay their full loan than under the 2012 system, with the highest earners paying less than before and low and middle earners paying more. On research, the HE sector provides the skills, talents and facilities that drive the UK’s capabilities in science and technology, yet without long-term and stable investment the UK is bound to fall behind.
Universities are having to use teaching funding to shore up a lack of investment in research, or to reduce or stop research activity altogether. Our universities generate growth and opportunity across the UK. They bring jobs, investment and facilities to our local communities, as we have heard right across this House, and they will be at the heart of addressing economic and social disparities. Yet increasing financial pressures are affecting universities’ capacity to engage.
I sit on the board of Nottingham Trent University, which has made superb efforts to maintain its financial stability. While the finances of some universities are stable in the short term, that cannot last. As this debate has made clear, many are now facing huge financial pressures, which will not be addressed without impacting significantly on the student experience and the capacity to undertake research and innovation. Many are located in the very communities where students need the most support to acquire the skills they need, and where companies most need research and innovation to grow. Given the long-standing freeze of fees for home undergraduate students, most universities are relying on increased international student numbers to deal with inflationary pressures, and any moves to restrict these would have a further major impact on the viability of the sector. Can the Minister confirm the Government’s commitment to both the graduate visa route—a real attraction to international students—and the international education strategy?
All these factors need to be addressed if universities are to be able to respond to the positive steps the Government are taking—for example, the lifelong loan entitlement, which could transform the adult education landscape in England. I hope the Minister can give the sector some reassurance that its excellence is valued, and that they recognise the vital importance of long-term investment.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, none of us has felt the need to declare our interests, but I will declare a family interest as both of my children are currently working in research-intensive universities in this country, and both have been offered salaries considerably greater than they are currently earning. My son, who leads a systems biology laboratory at a Russell group university, is working in one of this country’s strategically important STEM areas. He came back from the United States after 10 years there on a Marie Curie scholarship—a European Union scheme that encourages researchers in North America to come back to Europe, and which, of course, no longer exists in Britain. He has had a series of temporary contracts and has just, at the age of 41, been offered a long-term contract. But he is still earning slightly less than what I understand most train drivers are earning. A hedge fund with quite close associations with a major donor to the Conservative Party offered him several times this salary some months ago—which was, naturally, a little tempting.
We should not assume that the situation in British universities can be maintained for very long. Some Members may have seen the article in the latest Times Higher Education supplement which suggests that Britain’s reputation as a science superpower is very shaky. It quotes Douglas Kell, the former executive chair of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council:
“Funding has dropped in real terms”
for research in STEM subjects
“by 60 per cent since 2009”.
It adds that, if you look at the data on who is producing the best scientific papers, the argument that UK science is so much better than European science, so we can look to partner with Asian and American institutions instead, is rather shaky too. Therefore, we should not take our current situation for granted.
I was shaken some months ago after talking to one of the younger colleagues with whom I used to work. He had moved from Oxford to Berlin because, he said, the institutions he now works with in Berlin are more intellectually rigorous and more pleasant to work in. That is worrying.
There are two narratives about UK universities that one hears from the Government and the Conservative Party. The first is that our universities are a major national asset, a crucial element of soft power and the basis of our claim to be a scientific superpower, as Boris Johnson was very proud of saying. They are also crucial for innovation, national economic growth and regional regeneration, and thus, as several Peers have said, for levelling up. Universities are also hubs for city regions and sources of skilled workers and cultural leadership for their regions.
The second, alternative narrative is that universities are nests of left-wing intellectuals, hostile to common sense and the instincts of ordinary voters, intent, to quote the Sunday Telegraph on “indoctrinating” their students with leftist or even Marxist ideas. It is the Policy Exchange perspective, if you like. University staff are alleged to be structurally biased. Even worse, they are “experts”, whom we all know are not to be listened to. They are “people of nowhere”, in the David Goodhart-Theresa May definition, dismissed as people who prefer foreign food and foreign friends to being proud of all things English. Particular fury has been directed at the humanities and the social sciences as offering irrelevant and frivolous courses. I find that a very dangerous narrative. I note that it comes from the anti-intellectual arguments produced by Republicans in the United States, and I hope that the Minister, who I know cares passionately about education, does not share it. Sadly, some of her colleagues do. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, remarked that it is a convenient arena for a culture war, if one wants one. We do not want one; it is the last thing we need in this country.
The Government have wobbled between these two narratives over the past eight years. They have squeezed university funding as severely as funding for schools and preschool education. They have frozen tuition fees, and they have left the EU, and thus Horizon and Erasmus, and also the structural funds, some of which flowed to universities in the poorer parts of Britain.
The incoherence of policy has been really quite remarkable. That is partly because of the high turnover of Ministers. In the five years since January 2018, we have had successive reorganisations of ministerial responsibility and witnessed seven Secretaries of State for Education come and go; six Secretaries of State for Business and Industrial Strategy, and now a seventh for Business and Trade; seven Ministers for Higher Education; and, thankfully, only five Secretaries of State for Science and Innovation. None has stayed in post long enough to master their brief; policies have drifted, with the overall assumption that the UK should distance itself as far as possible from the European continent and that, as far as possible, public spending on education and research should be held down. This is not the way we need to go, and we very much need to reverse course.
I add that the role of the Office for Students, which has been mentioned by several people in the debate, is itself in question. It is unclear whether the Office for Students is there to help support the university sector or to police and regulate what are seen as the dangers of the university sector. That is another area at which we need to look.
Several Members have talked about the freezing of tuition fees. Their value has dropped by well over 20% and the current inflation makes it worse. If we were now to have a collapse in the intake of students from east and south Asia, there would be a financial crisis in many of our universities. We have not talked much about maintenance grants and social mobility, but the squeezing of funds for foundation courses is a real squeeze on social mobility. Some universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are now working very hard to find bright but undereducated young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
I suggest that, now that we are returning to rather a calmer sort of government—we hope—the Government might like to think about setting out another independent review of what we need to do about university funding when the current arrangements end in 2024-25, after the next election. The Minister will remember that, in 2008, the Labour Government kicked the issue of tuition fees past the election by setting up the Browne review. I recommend that the Government consider doing the same now, so that at least when the next Government come in there is some sort of consensus about where we need to go from here.
We have talked a little about international research networks. All research is essentially international and cross-border. We benefit enormously from links with European countries, North America and beyond, and we all recognise that leaving the European Union has damaged those links very considerably. Incoherence is there again across Whitehall. I have heard British academics working in the United States say that that they do not wish to come back to Britain because they know their American wives will be in the queue at the Home Office and that they will have to pay a lot of money to get them into this country. My son brought his American wife back and did pay the money he needed to pay to do it.
Some 20% or more of most universities’ staff come from abroad, and the tightening of Home Office policy on visas means that, when they accept a post, it is harder and harder for them to get their families into this country. That damages the culture of our universities as well. Getting the Home Office, the Department for Education, the Treasury and the Department for Business to have, together, a sense of understanding about what is needed for our universities to flourish is something the Government might usefully spend time on.
Others have spoken on Erasmus and Turing, so I need to say little, except that moving back towards a more sensible and rational relationship with our neighbours must include rejoining not only Horizon but Erasmus. Rejoining Horizon will not be easy and there are those who say, “Good heavens, we are going to have to pay for this”. Of course we are going to have to pay. We gained more from Horizon when we were members of the European Union than we paid in for the scheme, but that was because this was part of an overall balance between contributions and obligations to the European Union. Now that we are outside—and saving our £350 million, or whatever it is, per week—if we wish to rejoin these schemes, we will have to pay. There are advantages for us.
We are, I hope, an international country. We are escaping, I hope, from English nationalism, from which we have suffered so badly in the last few years. That means we need to maintain a university network which benefits enormously from its international ties but which contributes fundamentally to the prosperity of this country. I think the Minister shares all these objectives; I only wish the rest of the Government did.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
My Lords, like others, I thank my noble friend Lord Knight for calling this important debate today. I am pleased to be able to take part in what has been an informed and informative debate. I apologise to the House for being slightly late at the start of the debate; a rookie mistake but one which, in the context of a debate about learning, I promise I will learn from.
British higher education has historically rightly been held in high esteem. The UK has welcomed, and benefitted from, the large number of overseas students wanting to study here, and from overseas academics contributing to research and teaching. British universities are known and respected round the world. We have some fantastic higher education colleges, delivering top-rate courses. Many of us in this House, including me, have benefitted in our lives and careers from superb education from these world-class institutions. However, as this debate has shown, we cannot take this for granted.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and others highlighted the sometimes insecure and comparatively low-paid nature of academic life, and the risks this creates. As so many of the contributions have noted, the financial sustainability of our higher education is one we should not take for granted. It is clear, and this point was raised by so many noble Lords today, that it cannot be right that the higher education system has a current financial model that finds so many institutions in deficit.
I repeat the concerns raised by my noble friend Lady Wilcox, which surely must concern this whole House, that in just four years under this Government the number of institutions with an in-year deficit has risen more than sixfold, from 5% in 2015-16 to 32% in 2019-20. That is about a third of all higher education institutions. In any other sector, this would be regarded as a crisis.
Do the Government agree with the Office for Students that there is no major risk of one or more higher education institutions failing due to financial issues? If so, why are they not concerned? Is it complacency or is it just that the Government are hoping the problem goes away, or do they have a plan for resolving the issue? I would be interested to know whether any higher education institutions have raised specific concerns with the Government, or the Office for Students, about their financial sustainability? What assurances have the Government sought in relation to the sustainability of the sector?
I was particularly struck by the contributions of my noble friends Lord Knight, Lord Hanworth, Lord Davies, and others, on the fact that universities make a loss on UK students. My noble friend Lady Warwick gave a welcome focus on the student experience, and I particularly note the point made by my noble friend Lady Donaghy that there is a significant and almost greater risk than the failure of an institution of a decline in the quality of courses provided to students. With respect to the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, I fear that this might be increased were online courses, as he proposed, not confined to where they are appropriate but extended more widely simply to save cost.
Our British higher education institutions have a proud history of innovation. Over the past few years, at the exact same point at which the financial stress on universities has been starting to show, we have seen British research contribute to the fight against Covid, not least in relation to the development of some of the first vaccines. Can the Minister tell the House how the Government intend to make sure that the UK can continue to be at the forefront of innovation through the higher education system? Will they look, as my noble friend Lord Davies and others suggested, to rejoin Horizon, and will they take up the suggestion of my noble friend Lady Donaghy to provide financial support to universities for courses in much-needed expertise, such as medicine, nursing and teaching, to ensure we can get home-grown UK graduates into key roles?
As has been noted in this debate and by Universities UK, the economic contribution of the HE sector in England is considerable, contributing £52 billion to GDP and supporting more than 815,000 jobs. As someone who grew up in a university city, I know that a university town or city depends on these jobs—quite simply, the service industry or tech industries that grow up around a university would be unlikely to thrive without the university being there. As the noble Lord, Lord Austin, said, a university or higher education institution can also renew areas where traditional industries have declined or vanished by introducing valuable new jobs and skills.
My noble friend Lady Wilcox described the potential consequences for a community of their local college going under as simply too catastrophic for the regulator not to do everything in its power to set the conditions for success. In relation to the sector’s dependence on overseas students, the Government simply cannot have it both ways. We gain in so many ways from having the rich exchange of ideas and cultures that overseas students and academics provide—a rich exchange that, as my noble friend Lord Leong made clear in his passionate speech focusing on Erasmus and Turing, ideally works both ways, with UK students and academics having the opportunity to go overseas, as well as people coming here.
Many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and my noble friend Lord Davies noted concerns about Turing. Overseas students studying in UK higher education here, as this debate has demonstrated, provide financial benefits to our universities and colleges—arguably to a much greater extent than is appropriate. As the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, pointed out, this carries significant risks.
What is unarguable, however, is that the Government cannot assume in one department that overseas students will shore up the finances of our higher education sector, when in another they try to make it considerably harder or less attractive—even through rhetoric—for overseas students or academics to come to the UK. As my noble friends Lord Davies and Lord Hanworth said, this income from overseas students is also at risk from wider geopolitical issues and concerns. Can the Minister reassure us that government departments are talking to each other and agreeing a strategy in this regard?
The final point I would like to make—although my notes go on for a bit, so it is not necessarily my final point—is in relation to the role of higher education in social mobility, or “levelling up”, as a number of noble Lords have referred to it. Last year, as highlighted in the Financial Times this week, the number of people applying to university through UCAS was 767,000 and UCAS is predicting that by 2030 this will rise to 1 million, cue to the mini-boom in the birth rate that will lead to an increased demand by the end of the decade. It is understandable and right that students and their families aspire for children to achieve their potential, to do well at school and to go on to university; we value education not just for its own sake but for the opportunities it provides.
Does the Minister agree with the Minister for Higher Education that the new places to ensure that the increased number of applicants can access higher education may not be for undergraduate degrees but could well be within further education or apprenticeships? I could not have agreed more with the noble Lord, Lord Austin, on the points he raised about the rhetoric on limiting the number of children going on to university, and the fact that the children who do not go on to university, in the minds of the people who are saying this, are not their own.
What are the Government intending to do to make sure that the higher-status courses—those that often lead to higher-paid opportunities—are open to all, irrespective of who prospective students are and where they come from? I would be concerned if these students did not have access to a supply of high-quality opportunities. As the chief executive of UCAS has made clear, the interests of disadvantaged students must not lose out or be forgotten during the period of increasing competition. She rightly pointed out:
“This is an economic challenge as much as an educational one”—
and it is a challenge for opportunities.
I would ask the Minister to do whatever she can to respond to this point, and to other points raised in this debate. The future of our higher education institutions, and the towns and cities they are part of and support through their presence, is at stake. Critically, the life chances of their current and prospective students depend on this Government taking the issues raised today seriously and not simply hoping that the problem of higher education financial sustainability will go away. The price is simply too high.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for bringing to your Lordships’ attention the important matter of financial sustainability in the higher education sector, and for securing this important debate. As we have heard this afternoon, higher education is of vital importance to this country’s prosperity. Many of our institutions are world leading and provide a top-class education which equips students with the skills they need to get great jobs and to make sure that we have an internationally competitive workforce. For these reasons, higher education providers will continue to play an integral role in supporting this Government’s aim of levelling up productivity and employment.
We know that the finances of HE providers are sound when we look at this at a sector level. The income in the sector has increased from just under £35 billion in 2018-19 to just over £37 billion in 2020-21. But the sector is not uniform, and it might be helpful to step back slightly and look at some of the longer-term structural changes in the sector. We have seen a very significant growth in the number of students over the last five years to 2.34 million in the last year, but we have also seen a very significant increase in the number of institutions, from 153 five years ago to 248 in 2020-21. That includes roughly a doubling in specialist postgraduate providers and almost a quadrupling in smaller specialist providers. So I do not want to suggest that funding is not an issue in all of this, but there are some structural changes in the sector, including the size of some institutions, which are also relevant to your Lordships’ debate.
As your Lordships have mentioned, the number and profile of providers in deficit is not uniform. It is unchanged for high-tariff providers, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency data. It is down slightly for medium-tariff universities, whereas the number in deficit among specialist providers was up from two to 21 between 2017 and 2021, and for low-tariff providers it was up from 47 to 70, so we have seen a very significant shift. I say this because higher education providers are autonomous and independent. They are responsible for the decisions they make about their operating model and for their day-to-day management and sustainability. My understanding is that your Lordships believe that that is very important.
The Office for Students is the independent regulator of higher education in England and monitors the financial viability and sustainability of providers registered with it. Next month, the OfS is expected to publish its next report on the financial health of the HE sector, based on the analysis of providers’ financial forecasts and annual financial returns for 2022. Officials in the department meet regularly with the OfS, as do Ministers, to oversee the climate of higher education provider financial sustainability and to identify emerging risks and issues for the sector.
At this point, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Austin of Dudley, for highlighting the need for more educational opportunities in areas that traditionally have not had them. That important point was also raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross. I am delighted to hear the noble Lord’s enthusiasm about the local institute of technology in his area. As he will know, we have increased the number of institutes of technology—which are partnerships between colleges, universities and employers—from the original 12 to 21 institutes, and we are investing close to £300 million in them.
On the final point the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, made—which was not long at all and was very important—about making sure that higher status courses are available to disadvantaged students, I think we all feel that status has traditionally sat with the most academic courses. However, there is a real need to recognise the importance and value of technical courses as well as some academic ones. I think a shift in the narrative is happening about what represents status, and that should be accessible to all. She will be aware that the proportion of disadvantaged students accessing higher education has been on a welcome upward trajectory, but her challenge about making sure that it is always in relation to the highest-quality courses is very welcome.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Wilcox and Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, all raised a number of wider issues in the sector and different aspects of financial pressure that I will try to address. The noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, raised a specific point about specialist institutions. As I am sure he knows, the OfS concluded its review of small and specialist providers in December last year, and those providers that were judged to be world-leading will retain that status for five years. The OfS intends to keep its funding allocations fixed during that period, subject to affordability.
A number of noble Lords raised the issue of tuition fees, including the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton. The Government’s principal priority for students is to ensure that their best interests are protected, and we have taken a number of measures relating to student finance to try to ensure this. To deliver better value to students and to keep the cost of higher education under control, we have frozen the maximum tuition fees for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years. By 2024-25, maximum fees will have been frozen for seven years. We believe that continued fee freeze achieves the best balance between ensuring that the system remains financially stable, offering good value for the taxpayer and reducing debt levels for students in real terms, but we also understand that, of course, this puts pressure on some providers and requires their business model to evolve. I will touch on that more in a moment.
The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, touched particularly on maintenance loans and the pressures that students face. In addition to the tuition fees freeze, we have continued to increase maximum loans and grants for living and other costs for undergraduates and postgraduate students each year. This academic year saw a 2.3% increase, while a further 2.8% increase has been announced for the academic year 2023-24. The Government recognise the additional cost of living pressures that have arisen this year and have impacted students. However, decisions on student finance will have to be taken alongside other spending priorities. This will ensure that the system remains financially sustainable and that the costs of education are shared fairly between students and taxpayers, not all of whom have benefited from going to university.
The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, asked whether the Government planned to unfreeze tuition fees before the next election. The maximum tuition fees will be frozen until 2024-25, and Ministers will review those fees for 2025-26. The noble Baronesses, Lady Donaghy and Lady Twycross, asked about funding more university places for doctors, nurses and teachers. Teaching and nursing places are not capped by the Government. Medical student number targets are set by the Department of Health and Social Care, based on the workforce needs of the NHS and the availability of clinical training placements. Along with the postgraduate teaching apprenticeships, the Department for Education and IfATE are currently co-designing a degree-awarding apprenticeship that will confer an undergraduate degree alongside qualified teacher status, with a view to launching this as soon as possible.
A number of your Lordships asked what the Government would do in response to a university failure. If a provider were at risk of an unplanned closure, our priority would be to act with the Office for Students, the institution and other government departments to make sure that students’ best interests are protected.
The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, referred to some of the changes in the student finance and loan repayment system, and asked whether the Government were looking at levelling up in relation to the student loan system. We would argue that the system is already shaped in such a way as to protect those people who do not end up on higher incomes. Today, only 20% of student borrowers who entered full-time education in the 2021-22 academic year are forecast to repay their loans in full, with the remainder paid for by the taxpayer. The Government believe that this has to change, which is why we have reformed the system so that 55% of borrowers entering full-time higher education in the 2023-24 academic year will repay their loans in full.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, asked whether we saw the Office for Students as preventive or reactive. The Office for Students’ approach is very much about identifying in advance where there might exist material risk in a provider, and we have introduced new registration conditions that facilitate that.
The noble Baroness also asked about the proportionality of regulations. The Office for Students has a duty to be proportionate in its approach to regulation under the Regulators’ Code, and it takes that duty seriously. If the noble Baroness has specific examples of concerns that she would like to share, I will happily take them back.
The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, asked how we can stay in front as an R&D nation. The Government are committed to increasing R&D funding. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is responsible for most of the Government’s spending on R&D. This includes an allocation of £25.1 billion for UK Research and Innovation over this spending review period to invest in innovation, foundational research, infrastructure and talent. I hope that the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, accepts that some of that spending will also help the environment for staff within universities, which he described so clearly.
UKRI’s allocation includes £6.2 billion for Research England, which will directly support research and knowledge exchange in UK universities and other higher education institutions, as well as £2 billion for a new pooled approach to talent programmes. This funding will help to maintain the world-class reputation of UK research. We have four of the top 10 research universities in the world and our research councils are the envy of the world. With less than 1% of the world’s population, the UK’s share of highly cited publications is 13.4%, placing us third in the world. I thank the son of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for his contribution to those numbers—every individual counts.
Earlier this month, the Prime Minister launched the Government’s plan to cement the UK’s place as a science and technology superpower by 2030. The Department for Business and Trade is delivering this vision by harnessing the combined power of our export of and investment in our science and technology sectors. Our science exports are already strong. Life sciences, for example, is one of the UK’s top exporting sectors, with pharmaceutical exports valued at £24 billion in 2022 and medical technologies exports valued at £4.1 billion.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight, my noble friend Lord Dundee and a number of other noble Lords asked about our work in relation to the Horizon programme. Obviously, the Government welcome the EU’s recent openness to discussing this issue after two years of delay. Both the UK and the EU have been clear that they are open to taking forward discussions on UK association, as was set out at the Partnership Council on 24 March.
Along with our life sciences exports, higher education is obviously an important export. The latest figures show that it generated £19.5 billion for the UK economy in 2020, growing even through the pandemic. The Government recognise the cultural and economic importance of international students to the UK and to our universities, where they enrich the experience for all students. International students are also an important part of international partnerships and research, which put the UK at the forefront of tackling global challenges. My noble friend Lord Dundee asked whether the Government support those partnerships; I am happy to say that we absolutely do.
This is about much more, perhaps, than the narrow financial reasons the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, suggested. In recognition of the importance of education exports, the Government published the International Education Strategy in 2019, and I am happy to confirm to the House that we retain our absolute commitment to it. Regarding how our international strategy links with immigration issues, I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, that we work very closely, particularly with the Home Office, obviously, on those issues.
As ever, I am running out of time. A number of noble Lords spoke about the Turing scheme, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and the noble Lord, Lord Leong. I am not sure that I have been in a debate with the noble Lord before, but it was a pleasure to listen to his speech, which was a lot better than any of my rambling undergraduate essays—when I even wrote them. As your Lordships know, the Turing scheme is the Government’s global programme to study and work abroad. It has allocated nearly £130 million in grant funds for over 52,000 student placements from higher education providers since 2021. We have confirmed funding for continuation in 2024-25, but obviously we then enter a new spending review period.
The noble Baroness, Lady Garden, asked about the Turing scheme in relation to modern foreign languages. Every country in the world is eligible as a destination for UK students, but of the top 10 most popular destinations in the 2022-23 academic year, only four are English-speaking. I hope that gives the noble Baroness some reassurance. I would like to reject the slightly dismissive description of the scheme from the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy. I will have to write regarding the contribution of universities to their local economies. We are seeing some exciting partnerships, including one that I am familiar with from the University of Bristol, which is bringing a great deal of economic progress to the city, but there are many others.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, in his opening remarks, incredibly eloquently, as ever, set out the real value of our universities, and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, rightly questioned and probed the Government’s commitment to the wider vision we have heard from a number of your Lordships this afternoon. I hope I have in some way reassured the House that we believe strongly and passionately in the value of our universities. We see our role as being to encourage, to focus, to set out our priorities, but we absolutely respect their autonomy in delivering them.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate; I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I have learned a lot—it is not my natural home as a policy area—particularly about the ups and downs of the Turing scheme. I make special mention of my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Austin, and his comments about the importance of universities for community generation. Also, this was the first time I have heard my noble friend Lady Twycross speak from the Front Bench. Clearly, it is her natural home, so I look forward to more of the same from her.
It is good to hear that across the House we are proud of our higher education sector. We want to allow it to continue to pursue excellence, as well as community renewal, and that requires a solid financial foundation. I noticed that in her fine speech, the Minister talked about the seven-year freeze in tuition fees allowing the sector to remain financially stable. I gently put it to her that, having shifted to half the income for the sector being reliant on tuition fees, to then have a seven-year freeze at a time of double-digit inflation is not the best recipe for financial stability.
However, with that note of caution—I do not want to depress anyone—it is still a vibrant sector and is still hugely important, and we are all committed to helping it.
Baroness Barran (Con)
With the permission of the House, I quoted one figure incorrectly and would just like to set the record straight. I said that, according to the HESA data, the increase in the number of low or unknown tariff higher education institutions that were in deficit in 2016-17 was 11 and in 2020-21 it was 21. I quoted earlier the number of institutions, which rose from 47 in 2016-17 to 70 in 2021. I would just like to get that right and not have to put it in yet another letter.
Afghan Resettlement Update
(1 year, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Coaker (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Government for their Statement, although serious questions remain around this Afghan resettlement scheme. Let us start by reminding ourselves that our nation promised those who put their lives at risk to serve alongside our Armed Forces in Afghanistan that we would relocate their families and give them help, as well as rebuild their lives.
Our operations depended on courageous Afghan interpreters and guides, and we made commitments which we have a moral duty to accept and honour. Can the Minister explain why, 18 months after the airlifting of Afghan families to the UK, 8,000 people are still in hotels and thousands await processing in a backlog? The Government have announced new money to tackle the 8,000 in temporary accommodation; is this available immediately and how long will it take to relocate those people?
In the other place, the Minister said in the Statement:
“We will honour our commitment to those who remain in Afghanistan.”
Can our Minister say what is our estimate of this number, how they will be brought here and whether the Illegal Migration Bill have any impact on any of this?
Can the Minister tell us why on earth the Ministry of Defence said that applicants to ARAP could come to the UK only if they had Taliban approval? Some 10 days after apologising for that error and committing to changes to its practice, what do we learn? An applicant under the other scheme, the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, was told to retrieve documents from the Taliban or risk rejection. Can the Minister confirm that the need to seek Taliban approval under the ARAP or ACRS schemes has been immediately stopped? The Minister in the other place said:
“I will not stand here and defend the system”. —[Official Report, Commons, 28/3/23; col. 843.]
That is fine, but who then is responsible and who is sorting out the mess if the Minister has said he is not going to defend it?
To clarify figures mentioned in the other place in response to questions, how many Afghans brought over on these schemes have been permanently housed and how many remain in temporary accommodation? Johnny Mercer MP, the Minister in the other place, said that, under the ARAP scheme, 4,300 entitled personnel remain in Afghanistan. What is happening to them? On the ACRS, he said that we have promised 20,000 places and so far only 7,637 have arrived. What is happening to ensure that the Government achieve that figure given by the Minister?
These people cannot wait indefinitely in Afghanistan, neither can those who arrive wait indefinitely in hotels. The Minister’s Statement in the other place focused on Afghans who have reached here. Can the noble Baroness the Minister tell us what we are going to do about the 1,000 people accepted by the schemes—that figure is from the Minister’s Statement in the other place—who are waiting to get to the UK but are stuck in hotels in Pakistan?
This all needs to be sorted out, so what is the action plan to do it? If all is well, how on earth is it possible to read in today’s paper that, under existing legislation, an Afghan pilot could be sent to Rwanda? Yes, he arrived on a small boat, but this Afghan pilot flew 30 combat missions against the Taliban on our behalf. Is it correct that somebody like that will face deportation?
There are a number of questions that urgently need to be answered by the Government. We need these schemes to work more efficiently and more effectively. These are people who stood shoulder to shoulder with this country when they were needed. They fought, and in some cases died, alongside our Armed Forces. They supported us and now look to us to support them. Clearly, we must do better—above all, because it is the right thing to do and because our reputation and standing in the world demand that we do so.
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, I support everything that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said. As so many times on issues to do with defence, and on the ignominious retreat from Afghanistan, we speak with one voice. It is right that we give asylum and a home to those from Afghanistan who fought with us and alongside us, served as interpreters, worked for the British Council and taught English in Afghanistan.
The commitments of His Majesty’s Government’s under the ARAP and the ACRS are laudable but, as the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, just made clear, even on their own admission they are failing. There were many thousands of people left behind in August 2021, and there are few obvious safe and legal routes for them to get from Afghanistan to the United Kingdom. In his Statement in the other place, Johnny Mercer kept stressing the government mantra about being open to those who come via safe and legal routes. If those people who are left behind in Afghanistan could get here via safe and legal routes, does anybody think they would still be in Afghanistan? Of course they would not be; the reason they are not here is because there are no safe and legal routes out of Afghanistan. For those who have been given the right to come through the ARAP or the ACRS, there are very few routes out of Afghanistan.
What are His Majesty’s Government proposing to do to assist those people who are still in Afghanistan, but who do not have the passports and paperwork, to leave the country? It is all well and good to say that we will find accommodation for those who get here via a safe and legal route, but how do they do that?
People have been left for nearly two years in a vulnerable situation; if they were vulnerable in the middle of August 2021, how much more vulnerable are they in March 2023? Many of these people thought they had found safe houses, but a safe house can suddenly become unsafe. They move from place to place, with ever-diminishing resources. Some of them have passports but many of their dependants do not. It costs maybe $10 to get a visa legally, but how does one get one? It is almost impossible, so brokers are used and they might cost $1,100, and it is $3,000 for a passport through a broker.
Could the Minister reassure the House, and anyone with colleagues and networks back in Afghanistan, that those people who have managed to find the resources to pay for passports and other documentation through brokers, and have got to Pakistan, would be deemed to have done so legally? Would they be deemed to have got to Pakistan legally? Will they be reassured, if they have got to Pakistan, that they have a safe and legal route from Pakistan to the UK? That is vital.
It is disappointing that His Majesty’s Government seem to feel a need to focus on the people who are already here by saying that if they are in a hotel, they must move out. Of course nobody wants people to be stuck in hotels and it is wholly right that we should want to rehouse those people who are here as refugees, but Johnny Mercer’s Statement almost seemed to suggest that people were staying in the Ritz—that somehow they are staying in such wonderful hotel accommodation that they decline suitable offers of accommodation. If His Majesty’s Government are giving suitable offers of accommodation to people who are already here and they decline it, could the Minister perhaps look for ways of explaining to people how the accommodation is suitable? Maybe there has been a misunderstanding—or is it perhaps that there is a lack of suitable accommodation? In which case, what are His Majesty’s Government doing to ensure that suitable accommodation is available? Just saying that another £250 million has been made available does not do the job.
We need to understand that the accommodation is available to rehouse people; we need to find a way to get the thousand people out of hotels in Pakistan and over here, and we need to ensure that the other 8,000 people left behind can find a way here. Even if they do not come out of Afghanistan through safe and legal routes, if they come here through other routes, we should still open our doors to them. We owe them that.
The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)
My Lords, it might help if I reiterate one or two of the key points made by my right honourable friend the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs when he made his Statement. Perhaps I could start by saying that I agree with the noble Lord on the moral duty to look after these people who fought alongside our soldiers in Afghanistan. There is a closeness and a bond of friendship that we should never forget. That is one of the reasons why the Government are taking action, being corralled by my right honourable friend in the other place, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs.
I am talking about measures we are taking to support these Afghan friends who have come via safe and legal routes into settled accommodation that will allow them to put down roots in communities and build the new lives that we want them to build in the UK. Since the start of Operation Pitting, the Government have welcomed over 24,500 vulnerable people to the UK from Afghanistan. Many of them, of course, put their lives at risk because they served alongside our Armed Forces. Due to the scale of the evacuation, while some of our friends were able to enter directly into settled accommodation, we warmly welcomed others into temporary hotels. This ensured that they had safe and secure accommodation when they arrived, but hotels were never designed to be a permanent solution; I think the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, acknowledged that. Dedicated teams across central and local government have—and this answers one question, I think—ensured that over 9,000 people have been supported into settled homes, and about 8,000 still remain in hotels. That has obviously prevented many of these Afghans properly integrating into communities and has cost £1 million to the taxpayer a day.
That is why we put together a new package of measures—it is a step change—to support those who have arrived, either under ARAP or under ACRS, and who remain in hotels. I remind the House that the package includes £35 million of new flexible funding to enable local authorities to address the key private rental sector affordability issues faced by the Afghan cohort. But they have the right to work, they have entitlement to benefits from day one, and—this is perhaps the most important of all—trained staff will be based in hotels and will provide support on the ground, including information on how to rent in the private sector and how to find jobs, and help with English language training.
We are also taking steps to increase the stock of housing. Across England, the local authority housing fund will be expanded by £250 million, with the majority of additional funding used to house Afghans currently in bridging accommodation and the rest used to ease existing pressures on the homeless. We continue to honour the commitments we have made to bring future arrivals to the UK via the ARAP and the ACRS. Our priority is ensuring that they can go directly into appropriate accommodation rather than costly temporary hotel accommodation.
A number of questions were asked about those still waiting in places such as Pakistan. On the figure that was given of 4,300 ARAP-eligible people still in Afghanistan, I understand from the Home Office that it is actually 650 still in Afghanistan, with the remainder of the 4,300 in third countries. We have made it absolutely clear that we will honour our commitments to bring people to the UK, but the use of hotels for lengthy periods of time is simply not sustainable or appropriate. Our priority is ensuring that they can enter suitable accommodation, which is the right thing for these families to do. Where people are waiting in those countries, there is help with accommodation and welfare support. We are working at pace to source suitable accommodation and help. In the meantime, our advice is that they should not come by illegal routes.
To pick up the point about the Afghan pilot, the Prime Minister has promised to review his plight, and on Monday he asked the Home Office to look into the situation. I reiterate that we will honour our commitments to bring people to the UK who are eligible through the ARAP route. Those who are eligible should wait in a safe third country until they are granted leave.
On the point about the Taliban and documentation, this message does not reflect departmental policy. We do not expect Afghans eligible for resettlement under the ACRS to provide every document requested. We ask only that they provide the documentation which they are able to provide.
Finally, where we can make an offer, we will. This is for those who are here in the UK. If the offer is rejected, another will not be forthcoming because we want to move from the bridging position in hotels to getting our Afghan friends into communities and into proper jobs, and their children into permanent education. The package we have put together, with the help of a whole load of different government departments, is designed to make a step change and to move things forward in a way which I think should be welcome to everybody.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
Could I address, in particular, the aspect my noble friend touched on about alternative accommodation? Is the accommodation for Afghans going to be extended to other asylum seekers and refugees rather than the use of former military accommodation? The reason I ask is that the Government abandoned the scheme that was proposed at the former RAF base in Linton-on-Ouse for the simple reason that the population of only 700 people in the village was going to be dwarfed by double that amount—1,500 male refugees—being placed there. When will the Government be in a position to give more detail? I am familiar with the site proposed in Essex, as it used to be in my European constituency, but it is a similar arrangement there. It is a small village of only 1,200 residents. Is it appropriate to put families, or maybe in the worst-case scenario only male refugees, there? When will we have more details of the arrangements?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I am sure my noble friend will correct me if I am wrong, but I think she is asking a follow-up question to the Statement made in the other place yesterday by my right honourable friend the Minister for Immigration. This is a separate issue. There was a lively debate in the other place that was extensively reported in Hansard. I refer her to the answers given by my right honourable friend Mr Jenrick.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
The Statement refers to “perfectly suitable accommodation” being available. From many Questions in your Lordships’ House, we know there is pressure on housing. Many people who are in work and trying to enter the private rented sector find that prices are enormous, while people who came to this country years ago as refugees and who have been naturalised as British citizens are still in the bidding process with local councils to get out of temporary accommodation and into proper social housing. The Minister has mentioned the private rented sector, but either there is not enough supply or landlords will not rent to people who are dependent on housing benefit, so where is this “perfectly suitable accommodation” going to be found? Could she please provide some more detail?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I shall make two points. First, I draw my noble friend’s attention to the UK-wide fund of £35 million that we are providing to local authorities and others to provide casework teams to support this move from hotels into settled accommodation. They are going to be working together with the Home Office, the DWP and local authorities. The £250 million housing fund is very flexible so it can be used, for example, if you need to knock two houses together to accommodate a family of 10, because some of the Afghan families who have come over are quite extensive.
Secondly, those caseworkers will be sitting in the hotels. As the process starts, individuals will be written to but they will also have caseworkers in the hotels to help them find accommodation. They will be liaising with local authorities and seeking out appropriate accommodation, and in many cases that will include the rented sector. The fund will also be able to help ease things, perhaps to find a deposit to help a family move into rented accommodation.
This is not easy, but we are in a difficult situation and we need to move it forward. That is why we have come forward with this very special package for this very special group under the corralling dynamism of the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs.
The Lord Bishop of Derby
My Lords, I share many of the concerns that have been expressed about the routes into this country and the nature, safety and appropriateness of the accommodation for those who make it here—those to whom, as we have already noted, we have a moral obligation to extend sanctuary and welcome in this very particular circumstance.
My question relates to those who do manage to get here and who are settled. Regarding the provision of care offered to those households, I am sure the Minister will agree that the integration into local communities of Afghans who make it here is key to their flourishing and to our benefiting from the extraordinary richness they can offer us. We particularly need to ensure that the women of those households can be locally integrated. Will the Minister therefore assure the House that specific and targeted funding is being made available to Afghan women in their households in order to ensure that they are able safely and appropriately to access the support and resources being made available, such as support for English as a second language, access to education and training and access to health and mental health care for them and their children?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I thank the right reverend Prelate for her comments, which I very much agree with on the whole. The work we are doing with the Afghans, and will be doing through these case workers, does indeed focus on exactly the sorts of things she was highlighting: on training, healthcare and helping them learn English, which is incredibly important for successful long-term settlement in this country, both for the individuals and their children as they grow up in English schools. She makes a good point about women, and I am sure they will be treated very much better here than, sadly, the women left in Afghanistan are being treated.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, I hope the Minister will forgive me; I had not intended to speak. I want to raise an issue on behalf of my noble friend Lord Coaker on the Front Bench, and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith. The Statement yesterday says:
“All the numbers are publicly available. We reckon that about 4,300 entitled personnel remain in Afghanistan and want to get over here”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/3/23; col. 844.]
Yet the Minister said that the number was around 600. It is very difficult for Opposition Members to respond to a Statement if we get given different figures on the day, so could the Minister clarify whether the figure in Hansard is correct?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I think the easiest thing is for me to take the point away. There is a lot of scope for confusion between the different schemes and the asylum numbers. We are certainly trying to give noble Lords the right numbers. I have a table which I can probably share; it is all quite complicated. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for intervening and seeking clarification. I think what I said was right, but of course I will look into it. I apologise for trying to repeat the points that were made in the Statement. I do not find it entirely satisfactory that we do not repeat the Statement a couple of days later, because some of the points that were made are agreed on across the House. We all want to go off on our Easter break, but we are debating important points. I will clarify the figures, and I thank the noble Baroness for raising the question.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)
My Lords, I wonder if I could follow up on that, and indeed on the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in his opening comments. When the dust settles and we have gone through and fulfilled our moral duty, what is the Home Office’s estimate of the number of people who will be here? I am not asking for a single figure, but the Home Office must have a range, probably in the Minister’s briefing documents, and if not there then certainly somewhere in the Home Office. When she comes to reply to the noble Baroness whose name—I am sorry—I have completely forgotten, could she also provide the range that the Home Office anticipates, after all these schemes and all our moral duty has played out?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My noble friend Lord Hodgson and I always agree on the need for numbers—and numbers of the right kind, relating to the right dates. I do have numbers for ARAP and ACRS, but I think he might be asking a broader question, so I suggest that I share the numbers I have, answer the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, and write to noble Lords. This evening we are talking about Afghanistan, and I am not clear whether the noble Lord is also interested in numbers from elsewhere.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)
I am interested in the overall number from Afghanistan. What is estimated? I understand that it is not going to be a point figure; it is going to be a range. Someone in the Home Office must have said, “We must anticipate from x to y”. What are the x and y figures? As part of clarifying the debate that has been going on, with all sorts of numbers being bandied around, it would be helpful for the House to have that number when my noble friend comes to write to all who participated in the debate today.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)
My Lords, I note from the Statement that half of the people who need to move out of hotels are children, and a proportion of them will be in school. If they are given three months’ notice at the end of April, I have worked out that that would take them to the end of term. Can priority be given to ensuring that children who are in school are rehoused before the beginning of the next term and are found suitable schools to go to? That is really imperative for the integration of the younger people who have come.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for raising the point about education, because it is very important. It is one of the reasons that we have chosen April as the date, because that helps with coming to the end of the school year. My understanding is that the responsibility for providing school places rests with the receiving local authority, which has a legal obligation to allocate a school place to a child in its catchment area within 20 school days to minimise any potential disruption. The hotel closures will be staggered, region by region, so that we can help support families.
We need to get on with this step change. A hotel is not a home and we need to find homes for these people. We need to get their children into schools and we all need to welcome them into our communities, so that the Afghans who helped us in that terribly difficult time have a happy and well looked-after future in our country.