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Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Paul Scully)
We know that digital skills are a vital building block for developing the workforce of the future, so we are working across Government with educators and employers to grow the pipeline of individuals entering the digital sector. Steps that we have taken include the launch of the Government and industry Digital Skills Council, the introduction of artificial intelligence and data science conversion courses with the Department for Education and the creation of new visa routes with the Home Office to attract international tech talent. We worked with the Department for Education on the launch of skills bootcamps in England and the Government will be investing up to £150 million in the programme, with free, flexible courses lasting up to 16 weeks in subjects such as software engineering, with a guaranteed job interview at the end.
Bill Esterson
In contrast to what the Minister says, more than £600 million of apprenticeship levy funding has been returned to the Treasury in the last year alone, enough to have funded more than 60,000 new apprenticeships. Labour will reform the system to create a growth and skills levy that can be used on a much wider range of training that businesses say they need. Will the Government address the chronic shortage of skills, match Labour’s ambition and give tech businesses what they need to thrive?
Paul Scully
I gave a long answer the first time, so I can give a shorter one this time. We are already acting in that space. On the apprenticeship levy, we always work with employers and supply chains throughout this country to ensure it works as effectively as possible for what businesses need.
Simon Fell (Barrow and Furness) (Con)
The submarine programme in Barrow will deliver thousands of jobs and generations of work, but we are struggling to grow our own. We have Furness STEM and UlverSTEM, which do good work, but this is an international endeavour with AUKUS and a national endeavour with Dreadnought. What discussions has the Minister had across Government about how we lean in to that skills challenge?
Paul Scully
My hon. Friend is right to champion Barrow’s industry. We talk regularly with the Department for Education, colleagues from the Department for Work and Pensions, tech sectors and academia to ensure we get it right. We must remember that domestic and international talent are so important in this space.
Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation (George Freeman)
To support innovation across the whole of the UK, a central pillar of our innovation nation mission, the UK Government are investing £52 billion in public research and development over these next three years. We have made a groundbreaking commitment in the levelling up White Paper to increase the percentage of Government R&D outside of the greater south-east, which is, of course, home to some of our historic research institutes, by 40%. We have an active programme—through the Catapults, the innovation accelerators and cluster support—all around the UK to that end.
Wendy Morton
Innovation is in the DNA of the businesses in my constituency, including Surespan, a leading manufacturer of roof access hatches, and Phoenix Tooling and Development—after all, our region was the birthplace of the industrial revolution. I support the Government’s levelling-up mission, but will the Minister bring forward individual regional targets for rebalancing research and development funding, as recommended by a House of Lords Committee report?
George Freeman
Let me first pay tribute to Surespan and Phoenix. Two weeks ago, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I were in Coventry in the west midlands with the Chancellor, and I have been working closely with Mayor Andy Street on his excellent programmes. We have an advanced manufacturing Catapult in the west midlands. Coventry and Warwick are rapidly becoming world-recognised centres in a whole raft of materials and in robotics. We are working on the Birmingham innovation district, and we have put one of our three innovation accelerators—£30 million—into the west midlands. My right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) makes an important point, though, about regional R&D clusters; that is public and private sector money. We will set out this autumn our digital cluster map showing all the private and public funding, and how we intend to increase it by region.
Sir Edward Leigh
The Government recently launched a call for space infrastructure projects, and West Lindsey District Council has proposed plans to work with the Satellite Applications Catapult, which the Minister mentioned, at RAF Scampton, as part of a £300 million levelling-up deal. What is the logic of one part of Government talking about levelling up and innovation and another part talking about putting a migrant camp in the middle of it, preventing all that infrastructure?
George Freeman
My right hon. Friend will appreciate that, as the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation, I cannot comment on Home Office plans to deal with refugees, but I can pay tribute to the work of Scampton Holdings Ltd and the very innovative proposal for the regeneration of that site with a whole raft of facilities, including in innovation support. I very much look forward to coming up in due course, once the refugee issue is sorted, to support him in taking that forward.
Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)
Metro Mayors have an important role to play in driving innovation in the regions. Can the Minister give an assurance that he will work closely with them?
George Freeman
Yes, I am absolutely delighted to do so. The Metro Mayors are key parts of our innovation ecosystem, and the three innovation accelerators that have we put in place are fundamentally co-created and led from the bottom up in Glasgow, Manchester and the west midlands. I am actively reaching out to work with the Metro Mayors, as well as with devolved Science Ministers, on extending our science investment to unify all regions of this country and strengthen those urban economies.
Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)
But the problem is that in my constituency in the Yorkshire coalfield, there are 20 times fewer people employed in science and technology innovation than in Cambridge. We can be proud of what Cambridge has achieved, but why should areas such as mine be so left behind? There is no economic reason why the golden triangle between Greater London, Cambridge and Oxford should be preferred over the rest of the country, so is it pure politics?
George Freeman
I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman could not be more wrong; it is quite the opposite. The truth is that the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle is golden for a reason: it is home to two of the world’s top three universities and five of top 15. Our central mission is to ensure that we grow an R&D economy all around the country that nurtures and invests in research, including a fantastic cluster in Yorkshire: the Yorkshire bioeconomy, advanced manufacturing in Sheffield, and Doncaster. We are investing in all that, but one does not create the Oxford-Cambridge triangle overnight; it requires us to invest with local leaders, as they are doing across the north-east in County Durham and Northumbria, in the innovative companies of tomorrow. This is a historic moment for the former coalfields.
Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
I declare an interest as the chair of the all-party group on photonics and quantum. The Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics at the University of Strathclyde has played a leading role in the industrial strategy challenge fund, collaborating with more companies and projects than any other organisation, and it has been praised as a key strength in the national quantum strategy. The centre is supported by the Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise, but despite its being established at the UK Government’s invitation, the UK Government have provided no core funding. What discussion has the Minister had with Treasury colleagues on providing that core funding to a vital part of the quantum technology landscape?
George Freeman
I have to say, that is a bit rich given that the incredible strength of Scottish science and research is built largely on long-term UK block funding across life sciences and other areas. As I said, I have just been in Glasgow, where we put one of our three innovation accelerators. That has been transformational, particularly in quantum, where we have set out our plans for the £2.5 billion quantum strategy. It is just not fair or true to say that the UK Government are not investing in the Glasgow cluster; we are, and it is transformational.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
The Minister for Data and Digital Infrastructure (Sir John Whittingdale)
The Government recognise that this is a difficult time for families across the country who may be struggling with their bills. Social tariffs are already offered by 21 broadband providers, covering 99% of the UK. We continue to urge the providers that do not yet do so to bring forward offers to support low-income households.
Helen Morgan
My North Shropshire constituents eagerly anticipate the roll-out of Project Gigabit, for which a contract has been awarded, but obviously not everybody in a rural area is well off, and broadband is an essential part of daily life. Will the Minister explain what steps he will take to ensure that that provider will offer social tariffs to my constituents?
Sir John Whittingdale
As I say, the vast majority of providers offer social tariffs already. I am not sure what the broadband provider the hon. Lady refers to will be, but we will certainly look at that. We will also do our best to encourage take-up, because while that has increased fourfold since January 2022, we recognise that a lot of people who are eligible have not yet taken advantage of these schemes.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
Oh, thank you, Mr Speaker.
But this is not just about social tariffs, is it? It is also about when the whole broadband system goes down. Recently there was a break in the broadband circuits in Lichfield and no offer was made to any subscribers for any form of compensation. What is my right hon. Friend’s view on that?
Sir John Whittingdale
There are schemes that will ensure that if there is a lengthy take-out of provision, compensation will be available. I am very happy to look at the specific example of what happened in my hon. Friend’s constituency and to advise customers there what is available to them.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Chloe Smith)
Our White Paper was clear that we will regulate AI through a flexible framework underpinned by five important principles. That proportionate and adaptable approach has been welcomed by British business and will include new risk monitoring functions to ensure that the UK leads the world in AI safety, as well as anticipating the introduction of a statutory duty on regulators in time. We would welcome hon. Members’ views on that consultation.
Alan Brown
In terms of risk, I am sure that the Minister will be concerned that Snapchat’s My AI chatbot recently encouraged a journalist who was posing as a 13-year-old girl to meet up with a 35-year-old man, suggesting ways to hide the meeting from parents, gave tips on hiding bruises from social workers and gave sex tips to a supposedly 13-year-old boy who was proposing to meet an older woman. What specifically are the Government doing to beef up online safety regulation to protect children from the emerging risk of AI?
Chloe Smith
I am concerned to hear the examples that the hon. Member gives. That is exactly why this House and the other place have spent considerable time going over the provisions in the Online Safety Bill, which goes to the heart of the issues that he raises and includes AI in its scope.
Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that when it comes to AI regulation, two things are important? The first is that there is a significant international dimension, and I congratulate her and the Prime Minister on what they have already achieved in setting out this country’s stall to be a global leader in AI regulation. Secondly, does she agree that the lesson to be learned from the Online Safety Bill, which she mentioned, is that we must regulate swiftly, rather than waiting for the technology to develop and attempting to retrofit the regulation on to the technology?
Chloe Smith
I welcome my right hon. and learned Friend’s contribution—he knows a great deal about these matters. First, I acknowledge his welcome for the approach we will be taking internationally. It is exactly right that the UK can and should lead in this space, as the Prime Minister has set out, and that is what we will do with our global summit on AI safety. Secondly, on his point about the Online Safety Bill, I can understand his argument, but in this context I would draw the House’s attention to the distinction between regulation and legislation. We intend to use our existing and established regulators to make sure that we have a flexible and adaptable approach to AI.
Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)
The rapid growth of AI has the potential to revolutionise the economy and our public services, but with no industrial strategy to speak of and their White Paper already out of date, this Government are behind the curve and risk leaving our workforces behind as AI becomes more prevalent. Exactly what is the Secretary of State doing to ensure that nobody is left behind, and that workers are trained in the digital skills needed to gain high-quality jobs that harness AI’s potential and opportunities?
Chloe Smith
I think the hon. Lady is on the wrong track here. I must say that I have not seen any substance to Labour’s approach in this field either, which perhaps will not come as a surprise—no doubt it will be covered more in 10 minutes’ time. What I would say is that we are taking the approach of ensuring that we do have the skills of the future: for example, we are investing £30 million in conversion courses to enable people from disadvantaged backgrounds to come into AI, so that they can be part of the technologies of the future, and there is a great deal more besides.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation (George Freeman)
Over the past six or seven years since 2016, this country has seen extraordinary growth in investment in our science and technology sector. Members do not need to take it from me: they can take it from those who track the investment. The UK has nearly 20 times more venture capital than its level of funding in 2011, and I am delighted to say that a majority of that—the fastest growth—is around the country. The east midlands and Northern Ireland have seen the sharpest increases in investment in the past four years, with growth in the east midlands topping at 300%. Something extraordinary is going on in this economy, and far from using Brexit as an opportunity to talk the country down, we intend to use it as an opportunity to lead in the smart regulation of the economies and sectors of tomorrow.
Chris Stephens
I thank the Minister for that answer, but the UK Government are pushing for a discount on membership in the Horizon programme, arguing that UK researchers have been disadvantaged by two years outside that programme. Does that not amount to the Conservative party openly admitting that cutting the UK off from Europe was damaging, and that we must return as a matter of urgency to European projects such as Horizon?
George Freeman
To be very clear, we negotiated membership of Horizon, Copernicus and Euratom specifically in our Brexit deal—it was the EU that held us out. Secondly, while we have been waiting, we have deployed over £1 billion of extra funding here in the UK to support our sector, and now that the Prime Minister has secured the Windsor framework, the negotiations are actively going on. I know that the Secretary of State will want to say something about that later. We intend to collaborate deeply with Europe and use our regulatory freedoms in the new sectors of tomorrow.
Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is as important to the EU as it is to the UK to have good science co-operation, and that the benefits of our wonderful companies such as Johnson Matthey in Royston and the big companies we have in Stevenage demonstrate the importance of international co-operation in business? That should happen in universities as well. It is for the EU as well as us.
George Freeman
My right hon. and learned Friend makes an important point. One of the attractions of Horizon is that we get back most of what we put in, and it funds research collaborations across our system, but the negotiations are important. We have been out of the system for two years; we need to get a fair deal, as the Prime Minister has made clear, and to make sure that the UK is not paying for stuff that it has not been able to access over the past two and a half years. I am sure that His Majesty’s Treasury is well equipped to have that negotiation on our behalf.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
It is now 127 weeks of uncertainty, delay and broken promises since the Conservatives took us out of the world’s biggest and most prestigious science fund, Horizon Europe. Our scientists, universities and businesses have paid the price in lost jobs and investment, so will the Minister confirm or deny the reports that negotiations to rejoin Horizon have stalled because his Government are pushing for a reduced fee to reflect what they believe is a lasting reduction in grants won by UK scientists? If they have permanently damaged our success rate, should the Minister not be trying to fix that, rather than claim a discount?
George Freeman
I refer the hon. Member to the answer I gave a few moments ago. We have negotiated access to Horizon—it was the EU that kept us out. The Prime Minister has unblocked that through the Windsor framework. We have invested substantially through the funding guarantee for all Horizon programmes and through £850 million-odd of additional UK expenditure. We have also increased UK research and development to record levels. We will be at £52 billion by the end of this three years. There is no cutting of UK R&D as a result of this issue. We are actively negotiating to make sure that we get a good deal.
Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)
The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Chloe Smith)
I have been playing an active part in London Tech Week talking to Britain’s boldest businesses. We have launched our £1 billion strategy to support our semiconductor sector. We have launched our cutting-edge life sciences sector package. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) who we recently appointed as our rural connectivity champion. May I also update the House in relation to our international leadership that I have been chairing the global forum on technology at the OECD?
Sarah Olney
Copyright protections are fundamental to the success of the UK’s world-leading creative industries. However, creatives are routinely seeing their content being used to train artificial intelligence platforms without giving their permission and without receiving payment. Does the Secretary of State believe that AI developers’ ingestion of creative content that is protected by copyright without obtaining a licence is infringement under UK law?
Chloe Smith
The hon. Lady raises an important matter, on which my Department and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport are working closely together. Can I draw her attention to information that I know my right hon. and learned Friend the Culture Secretary will be bringing forward shortly? I reassure the hon. Lady that intellectual property is at the heart of our approach to support the creative industries in this country.
John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)
The Minister for Data and Digital Infrastructure (Sir John Whittingdale)
First, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work he has done to promote the use of smart data across the economy. The Minister for Enterprise, Markets and Small Business, my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) is working with Departments, regulators and industry to agree common principles for future smart data schemes in different sectors. Individual Departments will set out when and how they will use the powers, following appropriate consultation and impact assessments.
Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the Secretary of State agree with the Prime Minister that her AI White Paper is now defunct? Also, the data Bill does not even mention AI. The Online Safety Bill is hardly an advert for speedy action and the semiconductor strategy was slammed by an expert as “quite frankly flaccid”. Does she accept that to show international leadership, the Government need to get their act together at home?
Chloe Smith
As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister set out this week at London Tech Week, we will be leading at home and overseas and leading change in our public services. That is the right approach. It is pro-innovation. We will capture those benefits for British businesses and British citizens, and I think that the Opposition could do an awful lot better than what they have just presented.
Greg Clark (Tunbridge Wells) (Con)
On 30 December 2020, during the pandemic, the then Prime Minister met the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford and promised £150 million in funding for the university’s pandemic sciences institute. In evidence to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee this morning, the institute’s director Sir Peter Horby said that not a penny of that money has been received. Will the Secretary of State meet me to see how we can unblock that so that this vital work continues?
Chloe Smith
Yes, I would be happy to meet the Chair of the Select Committee.
Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation (George Freeman)
As the Prime Minister has made clear, we are putting maths at the heart of our curriculum. I am ensuring that maths is properly funded to our research ecosystem. I will happily meet the hon. Member and talk to her about it.
Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)
Britain is rightly regarded as a technological and science superpower, but the foundations of our science and technology are technicians and their work and contribution. What more can my hon. Friend do to give them more recognition, more status and, even, more funding to carry on the work they do?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Paul Scully)
My hon. Friend has a formidable reputation himself in championing, and from having worked in, that area. We are increasing investment in further education and skills by £3.8 billion over the course of this Parliament, because we need technicians to access high-quality training.
Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
The Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak)
I know the whole House will want to thank the emergency services for their ongoing response to the shocking incident in Nottingham yesterday. Our thoughts are with those injured and with the families of those who lost their lives. Today is also the sixth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire. We remember the 72 people who lost their lives, and remain as committed as ever to ensuring that such a tragedy can never happen again.
This morning, I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House, I shall have further such meetings later today.
Ms Brown
May I associate myself with the words of the Prime Minister? Our hearts are with the city of Nottingham. We also remember the 72 people killed at Grenfell and support those still fighting for justice and safe homes.
According to the Office for National Statistics, in January food prices were rising at 16.8% a year. The most recent figures show food prices rising by a whopping 19.1%, making a mockery of the Prime Minister’s pledge to halve inflation. Does he honestly think that people will not notice?
The Prime Minister
Of course, I acknowledge that the cost of living is rising for families, and that is why my first priority at the beginning of the year is to halve inflation. I am pleased to say that inflation is now falling, and in the latest estimates we remain on track. With regard to food prices, we are not alone in experiencing high food price inflation, like many other countries in Europe. That is why the Chancellor has already spoken to the Competition and Markets Authority, which is looking at the grocery industry. We continue to support families with the cost of living, notably by paying half their energy bills.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out Labour’s poor record on jobs. Yesterday’s figures showed that the UK economy is resilient, with the number of people in employment now at a record level. We are by no means complacent, but the inactivity rate continues to fall and the unemployment rate remains at historically low levels. That is a Conservative Government delivering for our country.
Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
I join with the Prime Minister in his comments about the terrible attack in Nottingham yesterday, and in tribute to the work of our emergency services. The thoughts of the whole House are with the victims and the people of that great city. I also join him in remembering the 72 people who lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire. The victims and their families are always in our hearts, but six years on, the justice they are fighting for is long overdue.
All across the country, people are worried about their bills, the price of the weekly shop and the spiralling mortgage rates, so why has the Tory party spent this last week arguing over which of them gets a peerage?
The Prime Minister
My points on this are very clear. In line with a long-established convention of previous Prime Ministers having the ability to submit honours, I followed a process to the letter, in convention with long-standing process. It is, by the way, a long-standing convention that Prime Ministers on both sides of this House have followed in the same way that I did.
Keir Starmer
The truth is that for all his tough talk after the event, the Prime Minister did sign off the honours list. That means that those who threw a Downing Street party the night before the late Queen sat alone at her husband’s funeral will now receive awards from the King. If the Prime Minister is so tough, why didn’t he block it?
The Prime Minister
As I said, I and the Government followed due process and convention. Prime Ministers of both parties have always upheld the convention of non-interference on political honours. My predecessors may not have agreed with Labour’s choices of Tom Watson or Shami Chakrabarti, but the same precedent stood then as it does now. I would expect a knight like the right hon. and learned Gentleman to understand that.
Mr Speaker
Order. I think we will have more if we carry on—it will be outside rather than in here. I call Keir Starmer.
Keir Starmer
Honours should be for public service, not Tory cronies. Is it not the case that the Prime Minister was too weak to block Johnson’s list? That also means that those who spent their time helping to cover up Johnson’s lawbreaking are rewarded by becoming lawmakers for the rest of their lives. Is his message to the British public, “If you don’t like it, tough”?
The Prime Minister
It is right that we use the honours system to recognise people—almost 2,000 a year—from members of the England Lionesses to the first Asian police officer in Greater Manchester. The right hon. and learned Gentleman talks about putting people in the House of Lords, so perhaps he could explain why he put forward for a peerage the former Labour MP Tom Watson, who spread vicious conspiracy theories that were totally and utterly untrue, damaged public discourse, and inflicted misery on innocent people.
Mr Speaker
Order. The Prime Minister should not criticise other Members, and he is not responsible for the other parties. The Prime Minister is answering, not asking, the questions—[Interruption.] Order. Does somebody want to challenge my decision?
I call Keir Starmer.
Keir Starmer
The truth is that the country is paying the price of this endless cycle of chaos and distraction. The Tory economic crash means that millions of mortgage holders will pay thousands of pounds more next year, and the blame lies squarely at the door of a Government who are more focused on the internal wars of the Tory party than the needs of the country. Does the Prime Minister not think that those responsible should hang their heads in shame?
The Prime Minister
As I said right at the beginning of the session, our No.1 economic priority is to reduce inflation so that we can restrain the increase in interest rates. One thing we know we need to do is to reduce our borrowing and debt. That is how we will bring interest and mortgage rates down. Last week what did we see? Labour confusion. The shadow Chancellor attempted to water down Labour’s plans to borrow £28 billion more a year, and she was promptly overruled by the shadow Energy Secretary, the former Leader of the Labour party, who said that Labour was “100% not abandoning” its pledge. It really looks like Labour’s offer never changes. It is uncontrolled borrowing and more “Chaos with Ed Miliband.”
Keir Starmer
There is only one party that broke the economy: they are sitting opposite. They cannot fix the problems facing the country because they never take responsibility for the damage they have done. It is not just Johnson but the Prime Minister’s immediate predecessor who hopes to reward those who made her reign such a rip-roaring success. On her honours list are the masterminds of that kamikaze Budget and the economic extremists of the Institute of Economic Affairs—those whose disastrous ideas crashed the economy and left the country to pick up the pieces. Will the Prime Minister block that honours list, or will he buckle to her as well?
The Prime Minister
If you want disastrous economic ideas, all you have to do is Labour’s economic policy on energy. It is an energy policy that seeks to ban all new British oil and gas drilling, jeopardising 200,000 jobs and our energy security at a time of international conflict. Despots like Putin are the only people who will welcome such a policy. The Leader of the Opposition’s predecessor once said that he wanted British jobs for British workers—his policy is British jobs for Russian workers.
Keir Starmer
If the Prime Minister spent as much time focused on the economy, the NHS and the asylum system as he does haggling with his predecessors about who gets honours, the country would be in a far better state, but once again he has lost control, and once again it is working people paying the price. If he disagrees with that, why not put it to the test: end the boasting, the excuses and Tory chaos and see if he can finally find somebody—anybody, anywhere—to vote for him, and call a general election now?
The Prime Minister
The Leader of the Opposition talked about asylum. Just this week, it was the Labour party that voted against plans to tackle illegal migration. Just this week, it was the Labour party that voted against plans to tackle disruptive protests by its eco-zealot funders. We are getting on and delivering for the country. We are delivering record employment and the fastest wage growth in years. It is clear that only the Conservatives are going to deliver for the people of Britain.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
The Prime Minister
We recognise that the current police funding formula no longer accurately reflects demands on policing. That is why a review is carefully considering local factors for each police force. Our priority is to deliver a robust, future-proofed funding formula, but it is important that we take the time to get that right. I know that the Home Office will continue to keep the House updated on our progress.
Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)
I echo the sentiments of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in relation to the terrible incident in Nottingham. Our thoughts are also with all those still reeling from the tragedy at Grenfell all these years later.
During the Prime Minister’s ill-fated leadership bid late last summer, he warned of the perils of mortgage rate rises. He stated:
“It’s going to tip millions of people into misery and it’s going to mean we have absolutely no chance of winning the next election”.
Given that mortgage rates continue to rise, does he still agree with his own electoral analysis?
The Prime Minister
Which is absolutely why our economic policy sets reducing inflation as our No. 1 priority. By the way, interest rates have also risen in pretty much every developed economy around the world; more so in places like America and New Zealand and similarly in other countries like Australia. But in order to reduce inflation, it is important to have control over borrowing, which is why, unlike the SNP, we are disciplined with regard to the public finances.
Those are the issues that we should be focused on. I saw that yesterday the SNP had a meeting to discuss its future, but the only thing it managed to decide was that it should send Nicola Sturgeon some flowers. Will the hon. Gentleman tell us: did he sign the card?
Stephen Flynn
Respectfully, I think the Prime Minister needs to grow up.
There is an elephant in this here Chamber when it comes to the dire economic circumstances facing the UK, and that is Brexit. Those on the Tory Benches do not want to accept it, and the Labour party does not want to talk about it, but whether it is on food prices, energy prices or indeed mortgage prices, households in Scotland are being shafted by Brexit. Will the Prime Minister apologise for the cycle of misery that Westminster has caused?
The Prime Minister
While the hon. Gentleman’s party leader calls Nicola Sturgeon the most impressive politician in Europe, we are getting on with delivering for the people of Scotland: paying half of their energy bills, making sure pensions rise, making sure there is direct support with the cost of living for those who need it, and, crucially, ensuring that we secure over 200,000 jobs by supporting Scotland’s North sea oil and gas industry—something opposed by his party.
Karl MᶜCartney (Lincoln) (Con)
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is a fantastic advocate for his constituents. I am glad that he and City of Lincoln Council were successful in their £20 million levelling-up fund bid. The scheme will see two new bridges built across the railway line, improving access and reducing congestion. I very much look forward to seeing the plans progress. He and I share an ambition to make sure we level up not just in Lincoln but across the country.
Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)
The Leader of the Opposition recently ventured out of London, visiting my constituency to deliver a one nation British Labour vision of Scotland. However, he neglected to mention that he intends to continue London’s plunder of Scotland’s vast energy wealth, just like the Tories; continue the economic vandalism of Brexit, just like the Tories; and deny Scotland’s right to self-determination, just like the Tories. Perhaps the Prime Minister can tell me which London party leader is the greatest threat to Scottish democracy: the Tory to my right or the Tory to my left.
The Prime Minister
Mr Speaker, I apologise, because I did not hear fully the hon. Gentleman’s question, but from what I could gather, I think he probably agrees with me that the Leader of the Opposition is not the right person to lead our country.
Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)
The Prime Minister
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this important issue. While we are getting on providing significant support to families with the cost of living, the Labour Mayor of London, to whom transport is devolved, is busily putting it up, imposing the ULEZ charge against the overwhelming views of residents and businesses. It is disappointing that he is not listening to the British public and the public in outer London, but what is more, his plan to raise costs on working families is totally backed by the Leader of the Opposition.
Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
I gently point out to the hon. Lady that there are, in fact, 400,000 fewer children in absolute poverty than in 2010. We know that work is the best route out of poverty for families, so with employment at record levels, as we saw yesterday, I am pleased that there are now over 600,000 fewer children in workless households than in 2010. The specific policy she raises actually ensures fairness by asking families on benefits to make the same financial decisions as families supporting themselves solely through work.
Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)
The Prime Minister
I very much welcome the work of the APPG on coalfield communities and, indeed, the breadth and ambition of its policy contributions. We are committed to levelling up the UK by spreading opportunity more equally across the country and by investing in and empowering places that need it the most, including coalfield communities. I look forward to discussing this with my hon. Friend and to hearing from him further.
Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)
The Prime Minister
I will happily ensure that the appropriate Minister writes to the hon. Lady with a specific response on her constituent, so that we can try to resolve that issue.
Gary Sambrook (Birmingham, Northfield) (Con)
The Prime Minister
The failings identified in Birmingham are wholly unacceptable. The regulator of social housing has made it clear that Birmingham must take immediate action to address those issues, and it will be monitoring the council’s progress closely. I understand that the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has requested a meeting with Birmingham City Council and will be holding it to account.
Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
It would not be right for me to comment on the circumstances of any individual company, but I make absolutely no apology for respecting what local communities want in their local areas. While the Labour party may want to ride roughshod over the views of local communities, impose top-down housing targets and carpet over the green belt, that is not something that this Government will do.
Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)
As we speak, the Royal Air Force is operating the Hercules farewell flypast over all parts of the UK. For more than 107 years, my constituents at 47 Squadron have defended our country, including by operating the legendary Hercules for more than 50 years. As this amazing squadron stands down, will my right hon. Friend join the whole House in paying tribute to its remarkable record of service? They are all men and women who have made their country proud.
The Prime Minister
I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to 47 Squadron. Its association with the Hercules now stretches to 45 years. Although its vital work at the heart of defence has often been unheralded, this squadron has served with professionalism and distinction throughout. I think that the whole House will join me in saying that the personnel and crews can be rightly proud, and they have our full thanks.
Taiwo Owatemi (Coventry North West) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
I am very sorry to hear about Sarah’s father, and I hope that he speedily gets all the treatment he needs.
We are investing record sums in the NHS, and there are also more doctors, more nurses, more diagnostic scans to identify cancers earlier and elective surgical hubs to get the wait lists down. We are starting to see progress, having practically eliminated 18-month waits, but there is more work to do. I am pleased that the NHS is fully supporting our plan and getting on with delivering it for people.
Elliot Colburn (Carshalton and Wallington) (Con)
I thank the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care for the recent announcement that Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust can proceed with plans to improve and upgrade St Helier and build a brand-new hospital in Sutton. The NHS trust is further along than other trusts in the cohort, so can the Prime Minister assure me that when the trust is ready to go, the Treasury and the Government will be ready to give it the green light?
The Prime Minister
I thank my hon. Friend for all his campaigning and focus on this issue for his constituents. We remain committed to the new hospital scheme for Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust. It will deliver brand-new, state-of-the-art facilities as part of our hospital programme. I know that the Department is working closely with the trust to make sure that we can progress work as soon as possible, and we expect the new hospital to be delivered by 2030.
Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his thoughtful and powerful question. He is right about the aim of next week’s Ukraine recovery conference summit, which we are proud to be hosting. Indeed, the theme of that summit is how to bring in private capital to help rebuild Ukraine after the devasting war. I join him in paying tribute to all those companies who are providing essential services to the people of Ukraine, in the face of the onslaught they are seeing. They deserve our absolute admiration and support.
Sally-Ann Hart (Hastings and Rye) (Con)
Last week, we acknowledged and celebrated carers, of which there are thousands across beautiful Hastings and Rye. Will the Prime Minister join me in thanking them all for their priceless value, and congratulate Hastings Voluntary Action and the Isabel Blackman Centre on receiving carers awards for their support for unpaid carers in our community, and the outstanding Care Quality Commission-rated Radfield Home Care in Hastings on winning a national award?
The Prime Minister
I join my hon. Friend in congratulating carers in her constituency on all their awards. I am incredibly proud of our health and care staff across the country, and recognise their extraordinary commitment. I pay tribute to unpaid carers and young carers for all they are doing in Hastings and across our nation.
Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
We are investing record sums in NHS capital; I can tell the hon. Gentleman that we are putting more money into mental health services and taking more action than any previous Government. At the heart of the NHS long-term plan is the largest expansion of mental health services in a generation. I will ensure that the appropriate Minister writes to him with an update on the conversations with his trust about its local capital plan.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
What assessment has the Prime Minister made of the eurozone being in recession and the UK economy experiencing growth?
The Prime Minister
As we have seen recently, it is not just the Office for Budget Responsibility but the OECD, the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund that have all upgraded the growth forecasts for the UK economy. While the Opposition may want to talk that down, it is the Conservatives that are delivering.
Claire Hanna (Belfast South) (SDLP)
The Prime Minister
I join the hon. Lady in saying that it is absolutely right that we do everything possible to stamp out violence against women and girls. That is why the Government passed the landmark Domestic Abuse Act 2021, set up a 24/7 victims line and quadrupled funding for victim support. She is also right to highlight that the people of Northern Ireland are not getting the local government that they need and deserve. I want to see that as much as she does, and I will continue to work hard to bring it about.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
One of the socialist landmines that the Prime Minister has inherited from the former Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip— I am sure the Prime Minister remembers him: he is the one who said that we should be more Conservative; if only he had had a majority of 80 and been Prime Minister, he might have been able to do something about it—is the banning of “buy one, get one free” and other special offers on products that the Department of Health and Social Care thought were unhealthy. At the best of times that is an idiotic triumph of the nanny state, but during a cost of living crisis it is utterly bonkers. Will the Prime Minister intervene, pursue a more Conservative agenda—as the former Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip would want him to—and scrap this ridiculous policy?
The Prime Minister
I thank my hon. Friend, who has long highlighted this policy. As he knows, after I took office, given the concerns that he and others had raised about the impact on the cost of living of this policy, we postponed its introduction. No final decisions have been made, but I will continue to take what he says very seriously in all our deliberations.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
The Prime Minister
Our No. 1 priority is to halve inflation so that we can reduce the upward pressure on interest rates. The hon. Gentleman’s constituents should know that what would make that task absolutely worse is his party’s plans for tens of billions of pounds of unfunded borrowing, which would just exacerbate the situation. What I will say, however, is that homeowners who are worried can ask for help through the support for mortgage interest scheme, which has recently been adjusted. That support is available to them. And my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has spoken to the Financial Conduct Authority to ensure that banks treat all those in difficulty with the fairness and compassion that they need.
Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)
Last week I was pleased to deliver my report on the opportunities provided by deep geothermal energy, and I look forward to my visit next week to the opening of the Eden project’s deep geothermal plant, championed by my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double). Will the Prime Minister join me in meeting Members who want to emulate my hon. Friend by enjoying the benefits of a deep geothermal plant in their own constituencies?
The Prime Minister
I thank my hon. Friend for his work on that report: I know that he is rightly passionate about this area. The Government support the development of geothermal projects in the UK, provided that it can be done at an acceptable cost to consumers and in an environmentally friendly manner, and I will ensure that he gets a meeting with the relevant Minister to discuss his report and ideas further.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
Nottingham is devastated by the senseless attacks that took place on our streets yesterday. The thoughts and prayers of the whole city are with the family and friends of those who were killed, and with those who were injured. It is absolutely heartbreaking to see the pictures of Barnaby and Grace, the University of Nottingham students whose young lives, so full of potential, have been tragically cut short. As ever, we thank the emergency services, who acted quickly and courageously to save lives. Will the Prime Minister ensure that his Government provide the police, the universities and others in our city with everything they need to support our constituents following these horrendous events?
The Prime Minister
Like the rest of the country, I have been moved by the heartbreaking tributes from their loved ones. This is an extraordinarily difficult time and every parent’s worst nightmare. The hearts of the whole country are with the families and all those who have lost their lives. The hon. Lady will, I am sure, understand that I cannot comment further at this stage, given that there is an ongoing situation, but the Home Secretary will be making a statement after Prime Minister’s questions.
David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
My constituents in Ickenham and South Harefield benefit enormously from the work of the police based in the nearby Uxbridge police station, which remains open only because of the campaign by the Conservative-led council to stop the Mayor of London closing it down. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, as we invest in more police, those police need good local police stations to work from?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend puts the point very well. Whether it is campaigning to keep open their local police station or opposing the ULEZ charge that would put up costs for hard-working families, it is the Conservatives in Uxbridge who are delivering for their community.
Nottingham Incident
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Suella Braverman)
With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement about the horrific events in Nottingham.
Nottinghamshire police have confirmed that a 31-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after three people were killed in Nottingham city centre early on Tuesday morning. The same individual is suspected of stealing a van and then running over another three people who are now being treated for their injuries, one of whom remains in critical condition. We know that a knife has been used in these attacks. Two of the victims were students at Nottingham University. The third victim was the owner of the van that the police suspect was stolen and used to run down those pedestrians.
I know that the whole House will join me in expressing our sorrow and that our thoughts and prayers are with the victims’ families, friends and all those affected. All of us extend the hand of friendship to the people of Nottingham. I am of course being kept fully informed by law enforcement on the ground and receiving regular updates.
The House will appreciate the critical importance of following due process at all times. It is completely natural to seek answers immediately when something terrible happens, but it is also vital that those answers are wholly accurate. Speculating out loud is never helpful and runs the risk of being counterproductive. The police have asked for patience while inquiries continue.
I can tell the House that the police are working flat out to establish the full facts and provide support to everyone affected. They are currently keeping an open mind as to the motives behind these attacks, but I can confirm that Nottinghamshire police are being assisted in their inquiries by counter-terror police, although this does not mean that it is currently being treated as a terrorist attack. I am grateful to all our emergency services for being on the scene and dealing in a professional manner with a deeply distressing situation; we all owe them a huge debt of gratitude.
At awful moments like these, it is vital that we come together as a country and I have no doubt that we will. The city of Nottingham and all its people are at the forefront of all our minds, and every resource of the state is at their disposal. I commend this statement to the House.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I thank the Home Secretary for her statement and for advance sight of it. I join her and the whole House in expressing our deep sorrow and shock at this truly awful attack.
The families of those who have been killed have expressed their tributes to their lost loved ones, and I join them in paying tribute to Barnaby Webber and Grace Kumar, two young, talented students who had hugely promising futures ahead of them. We have seen the tributes from their heartbroken families and from the local and national sports clubs they played for. We also pay tribute to Ian Coates, a school caretaker. We have also seen the tributes from his family and from the school he worked for, which said he, “always went the extra mile.” Our condolences, thoughts and prayers go to their families, their loved ones, their friends and their colleagues.
Our thoughts and best wishes also go to the three other people who have been injured in the same terrible attack and to their families, who will be so deeply distressed at what has happened, worrying for their loved ones. We stand in solidarity with the people of Nottingham and the University of Nottingham, where the two young people were studying. They are all so shocked and devastated at what has happened, but also so determined to come together in the face of tragedy. People who gathered at the vigil last night heard the sober words and tributes from the council leader, local MPs and local faith and community leaders. Everyone will particularly join in thanks to the emergency services that have had to respond to this awful attack, saving lives and keeping people safe.
As the Home Secretary said, an individual has been arrested and this is still a major, ongoing investigation. It is not appropriate for us to speculate or say anything that would interfere in that investigation, but I welcome the involvement of counter-terror police at an early stage of this investigation. That does nothing to pre-empt any conclusion about the potential motive behind this attack, but I have previously raised the importance of having CT police expertise involved at an early stage while motives and circumstances are investigated, rather than being brought in at a much later stage, once relevant material has been gathered.
Can the Home Secretary confirm it is a sensible approach for the expertise and assistance of counter-terror police to be drawn on at an early stage, even before any conclusion has been reached? Can she tell us whether she has been given any timetable for updates on the issue? She will know there are wider concerns about the need for properly co-ordinated and appropriate sensitive support for the victims of major incidents, including terror attacks. Can she set out what support is available for the families and friends of those affected, and for the emergency services and people in Nottingham?
Doubtless there will be countless more questions from the community and Parliament once more is known about this dreadful attack but, for now, we send our support to Nottinghamshire police and their investigation. All our thoughts and solidarity go to those who have lost loved ones and to the people of Nottingham at this difficult time.
Suella Braverman
I thank the right hon. Lady for her comments and for the sentiment with which she makes them. Nottinghamshire police are leading the investigation, which is at a very early stage. They have carried out a number of searches and inquiries across the city, and they will continue to gather evidence over the coming days. Police and other agencies are working flat out to establish the full facts and to provide support to everyone affected. As I said, the police have asked for time, space and patience while those inquiries continue. I am being kept regularly updated by the police and agencies on the ground.
The families of all the victims have been informed and are being supported by specialist police officers. As there are casualties and three fatalities, there is a real need for emergency care for those families, as would be imagined, and specialist support is being put on for those directly affected. I echo the sentiment of the House, as expressed by the Prime Minister: we are all saddened and shocked, and our hearts are with those affected: the victims, their families, friends and communities, and the city of Nottingham.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
When a despicable incident of this sort occurs, be it at the gates of Parliament or on the streets of a university town, the community looks to the security agencies to be able to investigate and establish the motives for the attack, the background of the attack and whether any other people were involved. Does the Home Secretary agree that it is therefore both important and understandable that the intelligence community has the capacity to investigate people’s online life and the high-tech companies that provide these communications services have a duty, both morally and legally, to co-operate with the security community, so that horrible episodes such as this can be fully investigated and the findings established?
Suella Braverman
My right hon. Friend makes some very pertinent observations. The emergency services work together to respond to suspected terrorist attacks, through the joint emergency services interoperability principles—JESIP—which are designed to improve joint working among all the emergency services. The JESIP doctrine complements the single-service and specialist multi-agency guidance. When a particular attack has an online element, which he refers to, we will enact our crisis response protocol, an element of practice that has been designed to deal with situations of that character.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
I thank the Home Secretary for advance sight of her statement. On behalf of the SNP, may I extend our condolences to the family, friends and loved ones of Barnaby Webber, Grace Kumar and Ian Coates? Our thoughts are also with those injured and the people of Nottingham more widely. I would also like to express our thanks to all the emergency services and those providing ongoing support to those affected at this time. What more is being done to provide reassurance to all parts of the community in Nottingham and to prevent the spreading of speculation, which she mentioned in her statement? I appreciate that things are at a very early stage, but what process will she put in place to ensure that all lessons are learned from this shocking incident so that it cannot happen again?
Suella Braverman
Nottinghamshire police, working with local authorities and agencies, are working intensively to ensure not only that the investigation work is carried out effectively, but that those directly affected by this terrible incident are getting all the support they are entitled to.
Darren Henry (Broxtowe) (Con)
Yesterday’s horrific attacks in Nottingham city have devastated our county. Three innocent lives have been lost, and I would like to offer my deepest condolences to the families of those who have died and my thoughts to those who are injured. I thank the emergency services for the work they have done. The town of Beeston in my constituency has a large student population. They and many members of the public will be feeling shaken and afraid. I ask the Secretary of State for reassurances that all will be done to support the families, our student population and our communities at this very difficult time.
Suella Braverman
It is particularly galling that a vibrant, youthful university community will be so tragically affected by this tragic incident. The university is supporting the students’ family and friends, as well as staff and the student body. It is working closely with the authorities on the ongoing investigation into the incident. The Secretary of State for Education has been in touch with the vice-chancellor of the university to offer any support that might be needed from the Department for Education.
Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
I thank the Home Secretary for making this statement today and for the information that she has been able to pass on to the House. I look forward to further updates in the coming weeks. I also extend my thoughts and prayers to all those who were killed and injured, and their families and friends. Of course, we all recognise the vital role of the emergency services in dealing with these very fast-moving incidents. Can the Home Secretary say whether she has identified any additional support that Nottinghamshire police need at this time?
Suella Braverman
I am in personal and regular contact with the chief constable of Nottinghamshire police, and I have made that offer very clear to her. We stand ready here at the Home Office to help in whatever way she requests, but, to date, this operation is being led very effectively by the chief constable and her team in Nottinghamshire.
Brendan Clarke-Smith (Bassetlaw) (Con)
As a proud Nottinghamian, I have to say that it has been a very difficult couple of days for us all, particularly for those who represent people in the areas affected. Will the Home Secretary join me in praising the emergency services for the work they have done and for reacting so quickly? Will she also praise not just the whole community of Nottingham, but our students and our universities, and join with us as a House to do everything that we can to support them going forward?
Suella Braverman
My hon. Friend speaks for his constituents and the people of Nottinghamshire when he sets out our thanks, admiration and gratitude for those on the frontline and in the emergency services who are responding right now to the tragic consequences of this terrible incident. They are heroes and we must thank them day after day for their fantastic work.
Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)
I send my deepest condolences to the families and friends of the victims of yesterday’s attacks and wish a full recovery to those injured. I also thank those in the emergency services who have been working tirelessly in responding to this tragic incident, including the first responders who battled to save lives at the scene. Nottingham is devastated by the deaths of three residents of our city: Grace Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates. It was incredibly moving to join the vigil yesterday at St Peter’s church where hundreds of people came together in grief. Among them were many students who lost two much-loved members of their community. Will the Home Secretary join me in paying tribute to the people of Nottingham and to their unity and resilience at this painful time?
Suella Braverman
The hon. Lady speaks with passion and care for her constituents and I echo the sentiment that she has expressed. The people of Nottingham will be shaken beyond belief over the events of the past few days. We are with them as a nation. We stand by them and with them, and we will support them in all ways that they need.
Tom Randall (Gedling) (Con)
Nottingham is a great city with a proud history and a bright future, so to see that these crimes have unfolded across my home city has been deeply upsetting. I am sure the whole House will join me in sending the deepest condolences to the victims, their families and friends and the injured. I thank the police and the emergency services for the work that they have done and will continue to do. As we begin to take stock and to cope with what has happened, I know that support is available for those who have been affected from Nottinghamshire Victim CARE service, for example. Will the Home Secretary join me in encouraging those who have been affected in any way to seek the support that they need as we begin to take stock and to begin that slow process of recovery from this dreadful incident?
Suella Braverman
There has been a magnificent response from the local authorities and the local emergency services. There is a wide range of extensive support on offer for the families and those who are affected by the incident. Those who are affected should not hesitate to get in touch with the local authorities to seek that support.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
Everyone in Nottingham was shocked by yesterday’s senseless attacks. Barnaby and Grace were just walking home after a night out. Ian appears to have been on his way to work. Today, many people in our community are feeling incredibly frightened, fearful even to walk down their own street. Will the Home Secretary give a commitment to our city that she will ensure that Nottinghamshire police have the resources they need not only to keep our city safe, but to provide all our residents with the reassurance that they need to live their lives without fear today and in the weeks and months ahead?
Suella Braverman
I thank the hon. Lady for her words. She is absolutely right: the people of Nottingham will feel grief, fear and profoundly disturbed by what has happened in their homes, their places of work and where they come from. It will affect people in many, many ways. We want to keep them safe. That is my job. That is the police’s job. That is why the police are working intensively right now not only to secure the environment, but to make sure that an investigation is conducted effectively. We need to support them in their work.
Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Con)
I speak as a man who has lived in Nottinghamshire all his life. Nottingham is a beautiful city with wonderful people. I doubt that the people of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire will ever come to terms with this vile and cruel act. The public want answers, but, more importantly, they need to know that they are safe on the streets of Nottinghamshire. What reassurances can the Home Secretary give to the people of Ashfield, the whole of Nottinghamshire and Nottingham city especially that they are safe and that the police are getting all the resources that they need?
Suella Braverman
People can feel safe in Nottingham going forward. I know that that is difficult for many people to feel in the immediate aftermath of a terrible incident of the type that we have just seen. They must know that the police are working flat out to get to the bottom of this. Ultimately, we all want justice. We are also backing the police and all the other professionals to ensure that they can do their operational work as effectively as possible.
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
Our community has been shaken by these devastating events. Yesterday, we stood together at a vigil in St Peter’s church. It was a sad and poignant act of reflection for the loss and pain that our city is feeling. Our city’s thoughts are with those who have lost their lives, their loved ones and those who have been injured, and our gratitude is with our emergency services.
Nottingham is a beautiful and vibrant city. We are a diverse community where people of every culture and background live together peacefully. That cohesion will be more important than ever. We will need our partnerships that characterise that cohesion to come together—the faith community, civil society, academic institutions that have been so rocked by the loss of members of their family, our statutory services and the public more widely. Will the Home Secretary commit her Department’s support to these important efforts?
Suella Braverman
I say simply, yes. The hon. Gentleman speaks with devotion and care for his residents and constituents. Frankly, there are no words to describe the pain and anguish that people in Nottingham are feeling right now. But, exactly as he says, communities, faith groups and professionals coming together to support one another in a spirit of recovery and unity is the way that we will rebuild from this.
Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)
Many Erewash residents work and socialise in Nottingham. In fact, just last Friday I drove to Nottingham along the Ilkeston Road, where two young people who had such bright futures ahead of them sadly lost their lives. I know the area very well. I know, too, that Erewash residents will want to extend their thoughts and prayers to everybody affected—the victims and their families and also the wider population of Nottingham. What more can be done to support the people who are perhaps hidden victims, who will not necessarily come forward for support—so perhaps not the students or the ones who were there at the time, but those who are now fearful to go out, to go to work or to go into the city centre? Will my right hon. and learned Friend look at ways to extend that support out of the community, and to make that support very visual and accessible as well?
Suella Braverman
My hon. Friend makes a good point. There will be hidden victims and those in the shadows, so to speak, who will be profoundly affected by what has happened. It is important that they come out of the shadows and seek support—and it is there: the local authority is working intensively to ensure that the right support is provided for people, the medical services are there if people need extra care and of course the law enforcement services are working intensively to ensure a good and effective police investigation.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
I thank the Home Secretary for her statement. On behalf of my party, the Liberal Democrats, I want to pass on our deepest condolences to everyone affected by this horrific incident, our thanks to all the emergency services and, most especially, our thoughts and prayers to the families who have lost precious loved ones. When you send your child off to university, it is with hope, pride and excitement for the future. That it should have ended this way for the Webber and Kumar families is horrific, and our thoughts are with them. As the Home Secretary says, it is too early for speculation, but can she reassure the House that, when we know what was at the root of this incident, we will learn every lesson possible from it and ensure that the families feel that justice has been done for them?
Suella Braverman
I am personally very moved listening to the hon. Lady. What those families must be feeling, going through and experiencing right now is unimaginable for most of us; it is the nightmare that every parent dreads. We need to allow the police to complete their investigation, but, subject to what they unearth and put forward, yes, of course, every victim of crime wants to see justice done. That is ultimately what the rule of law is about.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
I align myself completely with everything that has been said about the people of Nottingham and the difficulties they are going through now, but Grace O’Malley-Kumar, one of the two student victims, was resident in Woodford. I remember she had been part of Woodford Wells cricket and hockey club—and she was a star: England under-16s, England under-18s, and destined for a great future. It is very important to remember that not only are the communities in Nottingham and the families affected, but all those people who got to know her and had high hopes for her will have had those dashed as well. Can we make sure there is a degree of outreach to all those people who worked with her and helped her to grow? The terrible devastation of this terrible act is not just a lost life, but a lost future that might have changed other lives for the better.
Suella Braverman
My right hon. Friend puts it powerfully. The ripple effects of this tragedy will be felt far and wide, and it will take considerable time for many people to recover and move on with their lives. This is a tragedy of an enormity that the people of Nottingham have not seen, but it is also a tragedy for many other groups and communities around the country.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Home Secretary very much for her statement and her clear compassion for those who grieve today. It is heartbreaking to hear of the tragedy and the cruel, vicious, devastating deaths of two young aspiring students and a man in his 50s. On behalf of the Democratic Unionist party and myself, I send our sympathies and condolences to the family and friends of all the victims and to the good people of Nottingham. Fear stalks the streets of the United Kingdom, so will the Home Secretary ensure that any details relating to the motivation behind the attack will be revealed to the general public, so that future predators and murderers can be identified and swift action can be taken to preserve life?
Suella Braverman
Decisions such as that are for the police. Once they establish the facts, if and when they bring charges and if there is an ensuing prosecution, the facts will be aired in the proper course of justice.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
Nottingham is usually thought of as a vibrant city, full of joy and excitement, and it is close to my own constituency. On behalf of the people of Loughborough, I offer my heartfelt condolences to the city, to the families, to the Nottingham Members of Parliament and to everyone who has been involved in or impacted by this shocking and senseless act. Will the Home Secretary join me in underlining the fact that the whole House is united in condemnation of what has happened?
Suella Braverman
Absolutely. This tragedy, this despicable act, cannot be condoned but must be condemned in the strongest possible way, and I think on that this House is united.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which shows that I am a member of the board of Essex Cricket, based in my Chelmsford constituency. Grace O’Malley-Kumar played cricket for Essex from the under-11s to the under-15s and was highly talented with bat and ball. She captained the team. She was a massive talent, a respected captain and an awesome teammate. The club is devastated. I know Barnaby Webber was also a very keen and talented sportsman with a great future. I am sure that there are people all over the country who played at the England level with Grace and played cricket with Barnaby and who will miss them so deeply. As well as sending our condolences and our love to their families and friends at university, please can we also remember all those young people who shared their love of sport?
Suella Braverman
My right hon. Friend speaks very powerfully on behalf of those affected at the cricket club. All I will say is that she mentioned the word love, and she is right: we are sending our love to the families, the friends and all those people who knew the victims.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
Obviously at this time we all express our condolences to the families, friends and everyone who knew the victims of this terrible tragedy. It would not be right for any of us to speculate on the motives or rationale for such a dreadful attack, but one clear issue that will be of concern to the people of Nottingham and beyond is whether they are safe now. Did this individual act alone, or in concert with others who will then represent a threat to other people? Will the Home Secretary give an assurance to this House that, as soon as the police are able to inform the House of the position, she will relay that widely? Will she also, once the investigations are complete, update the House on the reasons and rationale for this attack and what the history of the individual may have been?
Suella Braverman
Nottinghamshire police are doing a good job of regularly updating the public and have already made several public statements as the investigation progresses. I do not want to look behind that or undermine that process. I must allow them to carry out their investigations in the fullest and safest way possible. We would not expect anything less of our police.
Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)
On behalf of everybody in the new city of Southend, I want to pay tribute to all those who are senselessly murdered and offer our sincere condolences to the victims’ families and friends. I hear that we must not jump to conclusions, but we do know that a knife was used in these attacks, and I know that tackling knife crime is one of the Home Secretary’s top priorities, which is why she has recently been consulting on reforming our knife laws. Will she use this opportunity to underline that commitment, and possibly to give an update on the consultation and when it might be published and implemented?
Suella Braverman
My hon. Friend speaks with considerable power in expressing her condolences towards those affected by this tragic incident. The Government have made £130 million available this year to tackle serious violence, including murder and knife crime. We have increased powers in particular pieces of legislation. Fundamentally, however, this is about a tragedy, and we must keep working relentlessly to ensure that incidents such as this do not happen again. That is what we are working to do at the Home Office.
Mr Speaker
I think the House is always its best when it comes together, and it has certainly come together today. We all pay our respects to those who have died and all our thoughts are with the victims, the families and those people who have suffered in the city of Nottingham.
Point of Order
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Has the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport indicated that they are to come before the House to announce their intention to discuss with the director general of the BBC the fact that licence-fee payers are to pay all costs and compensation for a series of recent tribunal cases, particularly those involving two female former BBC employees in Northern Ireland? There has to be accountability—
Mr Speaker
Let me help the hon. Gentleman. I have got the gist of what he is asking, and the answer is no.
Healthy Start Scheme (Take-Up) (No. 2)
Wednesday 14th June 2023
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Healthy Start Scheme (Take-Up) (No. 2) Bill 2022-23 View all Healthy Start Scheme (Take-Up) (No. 2) Bill 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate
A Ten Minute Rule Bill is a First Reading of a Private Members Bill, but with the sponsor permitted to make a ten minute speech outlining the reasons for the proposed legislation.
There is little chance of the Bill proceeding further unless there is unanimous consent for the Bill or the Government elects to support the Bill directly.
For more information see: Ten Minute Bills
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to ensure that families eligible for the Healthy Start Scheme are registered to receive it; to confer certain powers on government departments and agencies and public bodies for that purpose; to provide for an opt-out where the family wishes; and for connected purposes.
I am sure that we can all agree, across the House, that every single child deserves the best start in life, and that in those very early years, a nutritious diet is essential for growth and development. That is why the last Labour Government introduced the Healthy Start scheme, which provides financial assistance in the form of a prepaid card to under-18s who are pregnant, and families with young children claiming certain benefits, to help with the ever-increasing costs of fruit, vegetables, formula milk and vitamins. The scheme is available in pregnancy and until the child’s fourth birthday. Yet the scheme is beset with problems—problems caused by this Government that can easily be fixed by this Government. That is what my Bill would do by offering the Government a simple cost-neutral solution so that no baby or infant goes without.
As I present the Bill, there will be mothers and fathers who, instead of excitedly preparing for their newborn or enjoying those early years with their little ones, are worried and distressed about how they will provide for them. The all-party parliamentary group on the child of the north, which I co-chair with my friend, the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson), heard in evidence that children in the north are more likely to die before reaching their first birthday. Desperate mothers are seeking abortions because they simply do not know how they will feed their babies. It has been widely reported that some parents have, in desperation, resorted to theft of baby milk and formula, or are watering it down. The fact that that is happening in a country as rich as ours should not only shame those on the Government Benches, but spur them into action to help those in need.
Healthy Start take-up is low. The Government’s 75% target has been achieved only in two of England’s 553 constituencies. The comparative scheme in Scotland has reached 88%. In some areas, the take-up is as low as 50%. Sustain estimates that that amounts to approximately 200,000 babies, infants and pregnant women missing out, leaving £53 million unclaimed. The past 13 years have seen the cruelty of austerity, inaction on low-paid and insecure work, the dismantling of the welfare state and the decimation of vital public support services, and have led to disgraceful and avoidable levels of child poverty. Food inflation is now above 19%, so food banks, baby banks, faith groups and charities have become embedded parts of our welfare state, including the Key to Life food bank in my constituency, which reports a 300% increase in demand coupled with a decrease in donations. It is highly unlikely therefore that that £53 million is unclaimed because people do not need it.
There is a very clear need for the scheme, but, as I have been told time and again, awareness is low among the public and professionals. That is why, in 2021, the national food strategy recommended that the Government implement a communications plan related to Healthy Start. But they did not. Instead, each time they are asked, they repeat:
“The NHS Business Services Authority is committed to increasing uptake of the scheme”.
I politely remind the Government that a commitment is not a plan, and that they are the ones who are responsible for this.
In 2021, I and others raised concerns about plans to fully digitalise the scheme by 2022, so that paper applications and vouchers would no longer be accepted. Some years back, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty investigated the growing deprivation in the UK, and warned the Government:
“The British welfare state is gradually disappearing behind a webpage and an algorithm, with significant implications for those living in poverty”,
and that, by assuming that all claimants had the digital skills needed to complete the form, the Government had “built a digital barrier”. Sadly, they ignored his entire report and ploughed ahead. The result for Healthy Start was that more than 34,000 people who were previously in receipt of the vouchers are no longer receiving them.
The NHSBSA then admitted to technical issues meaning that applications were being declined, resulting in parents and pregnant women struggling to get through to the helpline and having their payment cards rejected. As it stands, the applications routes are overly complex and varied. When an application is made online, an automated message claims that a response will be given within two days. That rarely happens. Some mothers report that they have never heard back, and, after multiple attempts, have given up.
The Healthy Start phone number provided is not freephone and is fully automated. There is no option for callers to speak to anyone unless they need an interpreter or have inquiries relating to their card. The absurdity of an automated system asking if callers have problems with cards they do not yet have is not lost on anyone in this Chamber. Worse still, if the application is refused, it does not state why, and the parent is directed to the phone line, where, again, they cannot speak to anyone. Research by Manchester Central food bank highlights that those on legacy benefits or with no recourse to public funds have to apply via paper or telephone, but that is completely at odds with the Healthy Start phone line and website, which state that applications must always be done online. That confusion is totally unnecessary.
Repeated questions to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care about funding for the scheme and future take-up have been equally frustrating. The Government refuse to say how much money they allocate to the scheme each year. They claim that it is allocated on a forecast of take-up, but will not say what the forecast is. A cynic would conclude that if the Government forecast low uptake, it is against their interests to do anything they can to boost it, as they will not have budgeted for it. Or, if they are forecasting higher uptake but are not reaching it, millions of pounds that could be spent on feeding children is being spent elsewhere. Either way, once again, hungry babies and children are losing out.
All I am asking is for the Government to change to from an opt-in system to an opt-out one. Automatic enrolment is possible. The Government know who is eligible and claim that they have the funds. Automatic enrolment would increase take-up, ensuring that the millions of pounds sat in the Treasury, allocated to those mothers and babies, is exactly where it should be.
I thank in particular my friend the former Member for Stretford and Urmston, who first proposed this Bill and has always championed children’s welfare, as well as Feeding Britain, which has supported the Bill from the outset. They, along with many other well-respected organisations and MPs across this House, are urging the Government to back this Bill, because we believe in a healthy start for all.
I know that the Bill is not a panacea. I know that the scheme’s value does not cover even the cost of the cheapest tub of infant formula, and that, unless we have a change of Government, life will continue to be a struggle for so many. But in the interim, I will, as I have always done in my time in this House, try anything that the Government might accept to make the daily grind and struggle for parents and children who are going hungry a little less agonising.
Finally, I thank all the parents who have shared with me their stories and their pain. They should always be at the forefront of our minds, because nobody should feel such desperation and hopelessness that they can see no way other than stealing to feed their little baby or seeking to terminate their pregnancy. The fact that they do should be to the absolute and utter shame of this Government.
Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck, Paul Maynard, Sir Stephen Timms, Tim Loughton, Ian Byrne, Derek Twigg, Kim Johnson, Dr Dan Poulter, Ben Lake, Barbara Keeley, Debbie Abrahams and Rachael Maskell present the Bill.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck accordingly presented the Bill.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 24 November, and to be printed (Bill 324).
Business of the House (Today)
Ordered,
That, at today’s sitting, notwithstanding paragraph (2)(c)(i) of Standing Order No. 14 (Arrangement of public business), business in the name of Dr Philippa Whitford may be entered upon at any hour and may be proceeded with, though opposed, for three hours; proceedings shall then lapse if not previously disposed of; and Standing Order No. 41A (Deferred divisions) shall not apply.—(Mike Wood.)
Opposition Day
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Cost of Living and Brexit
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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16:16 - The House divided: - Ayes: 43 / Noes: 260 - Question accordingly negatived.
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
I beg to move, Committee Number of Members Business and Trade 3 Energy and Net Zero 3 Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 3 Health and Social Care 3 Home Affairs 3 Levelling Up, Housing and Communities 3 Northern Ireland Affairs 5 Scottish Affairs 5 Transport 3 Treasury 3 Welsh Affairs 5 Women and Equalities 3 Work and Pensions 3
That this House agrees that increases in the cost of living are having a detrimental impact on businesses and families across Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom; notes that the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union has played a significant role in driving those increases; further notes that the devolved administrations do not possess the full financial powers required to effectively mitigate the increases in the cost of living in the devolved nations; accepts that finding solutions to the cost of living crisis deserves dedicated parliamentary time to investigate all matters relating to increases in prices and of the contribution of exiting the European Union and of Westminster economic policy to those increases; and resolves that the following shall be a Standing Order of the House:
Cost of Living Committee
1. There shall be a select committee, to be called the Cost of Living Committee, to examine the causes of and possible solutions to matters related to the cost of living in the United Kingdom, the consequences of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union and the cost of living, how the effect of changes in the cost of living affects the economy, and other connected matters.
2. The committee shall be chaired by a Member from the second largest Opposition Party and shall additionally consist of 22 Members from the Government party and 22 Members from opposition parties, drawn from the following Committees
3. The committee shall have power—
a. to send for persons, papers and records, to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House, to adjourn from place to place, and to report from time to time; and
b. to appoint specialist advisers to supply information which is not readily available or to elucidate matters of complexity within the committee’s order of reference.
4. Unless the House otherwise orders, each Member nominated to the committee shall continue to be a member of it for the remainder of the Parliament.
5. The committee shall have power to appoint a sub-committee, which shall have power to send for persons, papers and records, to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House, to adjourn from place to place, and to report to the committee from time to time.
6. The committee shall have power to report from time to time the evidence taken before the sub-committee.
7. The committee shall have power to order the attendance of any Member before the committee and to require that specific documents or records in the possession of a Member relating to its inquiries be laid before the committee or any sub-committee.
8. The quorum of the sub-committee shall be eleven.
The cost of living crisis is the No. 1 issue for most of our constituents: how to keep a roof over their head with the rising cost of mortgages or rent; how to put food on the table when food inflation in the UK is the highest in Europe; how to pay energy bills that double in just a year; and how to cope with overall inflation, which is far outstripping wage growth. It therefore deserves serious focus by this Parliament to find solutions. The Government are already patting themselves on the back that inflation has eased from 10.1% to 7.8%. Of course, that does not mean that prices are falling, just that they are increasing at a slightly slower rate.
There is no question but that the covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine have contributed to the current crisis—particularly through the latter’s impact on global energy prices—but the UK is the only G7 country not to have recovered to pre-pandemic economic health, and consumers in the UK have faced the biggest energy price rises in Europe.
Despite the current easing of the inflation rate, it is still higher than in the OECD, the EU and the US. So why does the UK have the highest inflation and the poorest growth projections among similar economies? It is simple—the disaster that dare not speak its name: Brexit. As we approach the seventh anniversary of the referendum, one of its key architects may have just left the stage, but Brexit’s disastrous legacy will impact people across the nations of the UK for years to come.
I know as a doctor that the first step for someone in dealing with any problem is to admit that they have one, but both the Government and the Labour party appear to be in complete denial about the contribution of Brexit to the cost of living crisis.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
The Labour party is keen to regain seats in Scotland from the Scottish National party. We obviously hope they do not, but why does my hon. Friend think the Labour party is ignoring the impact of Brexit even in Scotland, when the overwhelming position of the Scots is that they want to remain in the European Union?
Dr Whitford
I thank my hon. and learned Friend for her contribution. It is quite clear: we saw the discomfort of the Labour party on Brexit for quite a number of years, because its approach to Brexit had flip-flopped backwards and forwards, so it simply avoids the topic.
Until recently, people would think that there had been an omertà in the mainstream media when discussing the UK’s poor economic performance. Despite previously campaigning against Brexit, the Labour leader, the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), is now clear that he will not consider rejoining the EU, the customs union or the single market, yet he claims that he can somehow reduce the trade friction that has cut exports by 15% and cost 4% of GDP.
Just as Brexiteers claim the problem is just that Brexit is not Brexity enough, we now have Labour claiming that they will “make Brexit work”. It cannot work, but if the Labour leader wants to reduce some of the damage of Brexit, he should support the idea of a Committee to identify proposals that could be put to the EU prior to the review of the trade and co-operation agreement in 2026. Otherwise, what is the plan—close his eyes, click his red heels together and make a wish? Talk about not reading the room.
Just as polls show that a majority across the UK recognise that Brexit is a mess and would support rejoining the EU, the supposed official Opposition have lashed themselves to the mast of the floundering Tory Brexit ship. I am not quite sure why they are called the official Opposition when they do not seem to do much opposing and just go along with the policies of this Tory Government, whether that is on Brexit, immigration, outsourcing the NHS in England to private companies or denying the right of the Scottish people to choose their own future.
Labour may have abandoned almost all its previous pledges, and does not offer much real change after the next election, but the politicians who have caused the current damage to the UK economy are those with their bahookies squarely planted on the Government Benches. Tory austerity may initially have made the Treasury balance sheet look better, but 13 years of benefit cuts and public sector pay freezes have sucked money out of local economies, leading to dead high streets and rising poverty, particularly among children, pensioners and disabled people.
Austerity also meant that health and care services were already struggling when covid hit, and the workforce shortages that hamper all four UK health services have been exacerbated by the loss of freedom of movement, meaning that they are all struggling to catch up on the backlog.
The cost of energy is a major contributor to the cost of living crisis, but while global energy prices have risen due to the Ukraine war, the problem has been exacerbated by the Tories’ policy over decades. It was their poster girl, Mrs Thatcher, who put the profits of oil, gas and electricity into private hands. That has left the UK fully exposed to global price rises, despite the UK and Scotland’s energy potential. We are unlike France, with its nationalised power supplier, which has been able limit price increases to 4%. The UK has been unable to do that.
While the energy support payments were welcome, they had a limited impact on energy bills, which had doubled in a year. The UK Government did not follow other European countries such as Germany, Spain, Ireland or the Netherlands in substantially cutting VAT on energy bills, even though rising prices means that such a VAT cut could have been revenue-neutral.
Brexiteers actually promised cheaper food—it is hard to believe—but that has turned out to be a complete crock, with food inflation in the UK at more than 19%, the highest in Europe. The costs of basic foods and supermarket brands are rising even faster, meaning that those on lower incomes face a dramatic surge in food costs, with more people resorting to food banks or missing meals. Almost 30% of the UK’s food comes from the EU, so there will be another surge in food prices next winter when the UK introduces full customs checks on foodstuffs being imported from the EU.
Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is also an absolute scandal that during a cost of living crisis, when we are seeing prices such as those she described, we have produce going to waste in Scotland because we do not have enough people to actually pick the fruit and veg?
Dr Whitford
I thank my hon. Friend for that point. While soft fruit is a particular issue in Scotland, this is an issue right across the UK because of the lack of European staff in harvesting. As my hon. Friend says, the sector is seeing food rotting. We are also seeing this issue in other sectors; there is hardly a sector that is not struggling for workforce.
With regard to the checks on incoming foodstuffs from the EU, the former ill-named Brexit Opportunities Minister, the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg), delayed the checks for the fourth time last year. At the time, he suggested that they would cost £1 billion, and described them as an “act of self-harm”—duh! I could have told him that in 2016. On top of that, the now-infamous mini-Budget that tanked the pound and the stock market while the then Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng), was still on his feet, sent mortgage costs spiralling. The relentless rise in interest rates in response to inflation is making home ownership unattainable for young families, as well as pushing up rents.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
My hon. Friend has rightly pointed to the disastrous mini-Budget that was imposed on us by our previous Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss). Does the leader of the Scottish Conservative party group in the Scottish Parliament, the hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross), who initially demanded that the Scottish Government implement those disastrous policies, and now demands that they spend billions of pounds to mitigate their effects, have any credibility?
Dr Whitford
It would be a more appropriate response by the Scottish Conservatives to get down on their knees in the Holyrood Chamber and apologise for the abuse they gave the Scottish Government for not following such crazy policies.
Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
I had the honour to be a Member of the Scottish Parliament for some 12 years, and the Minister served in the Scottish Parliament. I know a good deal about the committee system; indeed, I chaired one. Members of the Scottish Parliament who were not members of a committee could come and speak at it—it was almost never not allowed.
I am not a member of any Committee in this place. Given the size of my party, only three of our Members are on Committees. Due to the structure of the proposed Committee, the door would be locked against me applying for a place on it. I feel disenfranchised, and I do not see why my constituents should not be given the chance for their representative to have a voice. I cannot vote for the structure of the Committee as it stands—it is very sloppy work.
Dr Whitford
That is incorrect: there will be Members from the three devolved nations. It will be—as described—a large Committee, which might provide a place for the hon. Member or one of his colleagues from a devolved nation. It is nonsense—there is no exclusion.
David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)
Will my hon. Friend might lend me her Order Paper? The one I have might be out of date, but it does not show an amendment from the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), or his party, to change the composition of that Committee. Am I reading the Order Paper wrong, or is the hon. Gentleman perhaps a little bit out of touch?
Dr Whitford
I do not think my hon. Friend is reading the Order Paper wrong.
The combination of rising energy, food and housing costs, on top of years of benefit cuts and stagnant wages, means that, for many families, the sums simply do not add up. The Scottish Government are trying to use their now very limited powers of devolution to mitigate the crisis, particularly for those on the lowest incomes. However, the Scottish budget for the day-to-day running of services is less in real terms than it was in 2010, with no uplift for inflation and—as we all know—no significant borrowing powers. Despite that, the Scottish Government have provided additional funding for the fuel insecurity fund and the Scottish welfare fund. Low-income families are now supported through five childhood grants, including the Scottish child payment, which together provide £10,000 of support during the early years and will provide over £20,000 by the age of 16.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
Does the hon. Member agree that the way to improve the situation for everyone, not just in the devolved nations but throughout the United Kingdom, is for those who are elected to the Scottish Parliament to work hand in glove with those of us who are elected to this Chamber, and particularly with the other Government for Scotland in the United Kingdom? Rather than set up another cumbersome Committee, which is a process, would it not be better to work together for the benefit of everyone in the United Kingdom?
Dr Whitford
The hon. Lady knows well that on issues such as trade deals and Brexit, we see very little genuine consultation between the Government here and the devolved Government. She is also well aware of how devolution is being rolled back and hollowed out, with legislation that has been passed blocked and undermined.
Dr Whitford
No, I am sorry. I have just given way to the hon. Lady.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ analysis of the Scottish tax and benefit system showed that it was more progressive, with almost 30% of low-income families £2,000 a year better off in Scotland, but Scotland aspires to something more radical than just mitigating Westminster austerity such as the two-child limit or the six-year benefit freeze. Our vision is to be a fairer, greener nation. The Scottish Government founded the Wellbeing Economy Governments Group in 2018 with Iceland and New Zealand, and Finland and Wales joined later. A wellbeing economy does not just focus on GDP, which includes the profits of damaging sectors such as the tobacco industry, but invests in the physical and mental health and social, economic and environmental wellbeing of every citizen. It is a holistic approach that recognises that our society and economy depend on the success of every individual, every family and every community.
Therefore, in addition to the targeted anti-poverty measures, the Scottish Government invest in the wellbeing of all those living in Scotland, from the baby box that welcomes the birth of a child and university tuition that allows our young people to reach their full potential to the free personal care that allows older people to stay in their own home for as long as possible. However, with the tightening limitations of devolution, the Scottish Government do not have the power over their own economy or the control of taxation and social security that are required to deliver the wellbeing economy we aspire to. We all know that we need a different type of economy by the end of this decade, or we will leave our grandchildren to face climate collapse. The pandemic brought everything to a standstill, which gave us a unique opportunity to decide what kind of economy and society we wanted to rebuild.
Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)
Before my hon. Friend goes on to talk about the kind of economy we want to see, will she make the observation that in an important debate on the cost of living and its evil twin Brexit, on the day after an urgent question on the Tories’ mortgage crisis, we have one Tory Back Bencher and two Labour Back Benchers in the Chamber? Does that not tell the Scottish people everything they need to know about how little Unionism really cares for ordinary people?
Dr Whitford
The proposal for this economy, as I said at the beginning of my speech, is not just for the people of Scotland: it is for the people of the four nations of the UK. The review of the TCA will come up in 2026, and while it is not possible to make Brexit work, it is possible to mitigate some of its worst effects. For that, though, we need to understand what Brexit is doing to the UK’s society and economy and have proposals that we can bring to the EU to ask for change.
Unfortunately, the opportunity to change to a different economy and society has not been taken. We already see poverty and inequality rising, and the climate emergency being pushed off the action list—including by Labour, which has just U-turned on its pledge to invest £28 billion in the transition to a green economy. Unfortunately, the climate crisis cannot wait. Scotland is blessed with extensive green energy potential, from wind and tidal power to green hydrogen and pump storage hydro. The current Government have failed to support Scotland’s green energy potential, and sadly there is now little reason to expect much change under Labour, either.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
My hon. Friend talks about Scotland’s energy opportunities, and green hydrogen is indeed one of the key ones. Does she agree that it is perhaps illuminating that the Foreign Secretary himself does not even know about those opportunities, nor has he taken the opportunity to engage with the US on its Inflation Reduction Act regarding the supply pipeline for green hydrogen? Does she think that is absolutely indicative of the relationship of the Government of this place with the needs of the Scottish people?
Dr Whitford
I sit on the Scottish Affairs Committee: we have done an inquiry into hydrogen, and we have also covered some of the other issues around green energy. It has been clear from the UK Minister that the UK Government do not support the Scottish vision of being able to export green hydrogen. We know that Germany is desperate for green hydrogen, particularly in the Ruhr area in Nordrhein-Westfalen, because it is crucial for heavy industry, but the UK Government are not interested, so Scotland’s potential for such a lucrative export will be held back.
David Duguid (Banff and Buchan) (Con)
The hon. Member has raised an issue that we have discussed at some length in the Scottish Affairs Committee: the future of hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and suchlike. However, given that energy policy and international trade are both reserved functions, does she believe that it is appropriate for Scottish Government Ministers and officials to be having direct discussions with federal German Government Ministers and officials on that matter?
Dr Whitford
Obviously we are just continuing the Scottish Affairs Committee diatribe from Monday, but the job of the Scottish Government, Scottish Ministers, MSPs and Scottish Members here is to promote Scotland in the world and to attract as much business and investment into Scotland as possible. Because of that, and because of the efforts of Scottish Ministers and MSPs, Scotland is second only to London in foreign direct investment, and that is how we intend to keep it.
To summarise, the key reason to have independence is for the powers that enable us to tackle problems. Independence does not sprinkle fairy dust, but it would give us the levers to tackle poverty, for instance. It would also enable us to invest in our incredible natural resources for the benefit of all our citizens. Most importantly, independence would enable us to be in control of our own future. Being independent would mean that we would never again have a disaster like Brexit forced on us against our will. Those living in Scotland would get to choose their own Governments and therefore drive decisions about our future. With more than 70% of Scots supporting membership of the EU, I have no doubt that our most prosperous future is as a modern, independent European country, just like many of our successful neighbours.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (John Lamont)
I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in the debate this afternoon. Cost of living increases are impacting households and businesses right across the country. It is right that this Parliament should be concerned about how we mitigate those impacts to ensure that the people of Scotland thrive. However, a debate that starts from the unfounded position that the UK’s exit from the European Union is to blame for any and all woes is not the best use of this House’s time. Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine coupled with the economic aftershocks of covid have caused huge disruptions to the global economy. No country is immune from that. However, we are benefiting from the swift action taken by this United Kingdom Government to mitigate the worst of those impacts. [Interruption.] I will make some progress if I may.
Announcements made at the spring Budget 2023—[Interruption.] Madam Deputy Speaker, this is a serious subject, but SNP Members laugh and shout down the Government’s representative as we try to respond to some of the points that they have made.
John Lamont
I will make some progress. Rather than shouting and laughing, I encourage SNP Members to listen to the points I am making. We are benefiting from the swift action that this United Kingdom Government are taking to mitigate the worst of these impacts. Announcements made at the spring Budget 2023 bring the UK Government’s total cost of living support to £94 billion over the current and next financial year, averaging at more than £3,300 per UK household. Those interventions will not only help ease some of the pressures on those most in need, but stimulate the economy and contribute to our long-term recovery from these unprecedented global challenges that we have faced in the past few years.
As has been said in the House previously, Government Members would warmly welcome a serious debate on ways to build on those foundations and to improve Scotland’s economy, because Scotland’s economic growth has lagged behind that of the UK during the SNP’s time in Holyrood.
Several hon. Members rose—
Christine Jardine
The Minister knows that he and I will never agree on Brexit and its impact, not just on Scotland—[Interruption.] We do not agree on that. Does he share my amusement that the SNP cannot see the irony in complaining that Scotland was dragged out of the European Union—a successful political and economic union—yet wants to drag Scotland out of an even more successful and economic Union?
John Lamont
Indeed, there is little consistency in the SNP’s position, particularly given the importance of the rest of the UK market to Scotland’s economy. We cannot blame the poor performance of Scotland’s economy on our departure from the EU. Export figures from the Scottish Government show that the rest of the UK remains by far Scotland’s most important market. Around 60% of total exports are destined for the rest of the United Kingdom, accounting for approximately three times the value of exports to European Union countries. In the opposite direction, around two thirds of Scotland’s imports originate from the rest of the UK.
Drew Hendry
The Minister will know as well as I do that, looking at the figures from the Scottish Government, the vast majority of Scotland’s manufactured goods—the things we make in Scotland—are exported outside of the UK to the US, European markets and other places. The figure is some 63%. He will also know that the vast majority of exports to the rest of the UK are financial services, insurance and things such as gas, oil, water, renewable energy and so on—things that people down here would not like to do without if they were taken away.
John Lamont
I am very disappointed that the hon. Member is belittling these important parts of the Scottish economy and how much they contribute to the economic growth of Scotland through trading with and importing from the rest of the UK. More than half of Scottish firms sell to other UK nations, compared with a UK average of just a third. The success of the Scottish economy is dependent on the rest of the UK market.
Clearly Scottish businesses value seamless access to the UK market too, but that could not be guaranteed under the SNP’s plans to attempt to rejoin the European Union. Make no mistake, Madam Deputy Speaker—I do not underestimate the challenges facing the people of Scotland, but it is simply outrageous to suggest that leaving the EU is responsible for driving those challenges.
To give another example, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and a number of other countries in Europe have all seen food price inflation of more than 20% recently. That is driven by global factors, such as the loss of grain supply from Ukraine and unseasonable weather in places such as Spain and Morocco. Do SNP Members really want us to believe that Brexit is responsible for bad weather, too?
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Coming back to the Minister’s opening comments, he complained yet again about the SNP bringing forward a debate. He never seems to agree, whatever debate topic we bring forward. If it is independence, he stands up and says, “Why are we debating independence? We should be debating the cost of living.” Now we are debating the cost of living and he is complaining about that. If he fundamentally disagrees that Brexit is having a negative impact, will he start explaining the benefits that Brexit has given us?
John Lamont
I have not complained about the SNP bringing forward this debate. The cost of living is an issue facing every single one of us in this House and each one of the households and residents we represent here. What I am complaining about is SNP Members laughing and trying to shout down Government Members just because they do not agree with the points we are making. I also disagree with the fact that, when we should be talking about the measures that both Governments in Scotland are taking to address the cost of living, SNP Members choose to talk about independence, rather than anything else. Your obsession—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. I do not have an obsession. If the Minister is saying that he is not going to take interventions, Members should please not just stand up and shout at him. I am sure the Minister will indicate if he wants to give way, but Members should not keep standing up for too long, because otherwise it is difficult to hear what he is saying.
John Lamont
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. My frustration is with SNP Members’ continual focus on independence, rather than on the measures that both Governments of Scotland—the UK Government and the Scottish Government—should be taking to address those challenges that all our constituents are facing. Yet again, SNP Members focus on independence.
The SNP argues that the Scottish Government do not have the financial powers required to mitigate the increases to the cost of living. I strongly suggest that that is simply not the case. The UK Government are providing the Scottish Government with a record block grant settlement of £41 billion a year. In real terms, that is the highest settlement since the start of devolution for Scotland. The spring Budget provided the Scottish Government with £320 million over the next two years, and that is on top of the £1.5 billion of additional funding we provided at the autumn statement in 2022. This funding is still set to grow in real terms over the spending review period.
David Linden
Going back to the substance of the motion we have brought before the House, can the Minister briefly outline the Government’s objection to each of the eight paragraphs of the proposed new Standing Order?
John Lamont
If the hon. Member shows a little patience, I will deal with those points head-on further on in my speech.
People in Scotland benefit from being part of a strong United Kingdom, with the pooling and sharing of resources that that brings. The strength of the United Kingdom, and Scotland’s place within it, is even more important during these challenging times. The UK Government will continue to support Scotland and the rest of the UK as we recover from the economic shocks I have mentioned.
The UK Government are also directly investing in Scotland through programmes such as the city and regional growth deals, the levelling-up fund and the UK shared prosperity fund. That is on top of the £52 million of UK Government funding for the creation of two freeports centred on the firth of Forth and the Cromarty firth. Together, these two freeports aim to attract over £10 billion in public and private investments, and to create an estimated 75,000 jobs. I am also pleased to report that I am seeing great progress on investment zones, with our two Governments working together to co-create an approach in Scotland. Each zone will be backed by £80 million of UK Government funding.
Amy Callaghan (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
Will the Minister explain to my constituents in East Dunbartonshire, who voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union, what sum of the £40 billion Scotland’s economy has lost he thinks they should be grateful for?
John Lamont
The hon. Lady’s constituents also voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the United Kingdom, and I suspect they are very frustrated that the SNP Government and the SNP continue to push for further division, rather than focusing on dealing with the cost of living pressures that households are facing. All the initiatives I have outlined will help stimulate growth and ensure Scotland’s economy is more resilient to future shocks, whether they stem from overseas conflicts or global health crises.
The SNP likes to claim that the Scottish Government do not have the policy levers required to mitigate the impacts of the cost of living increases. I would suggest otherwise, and I respectfully ask what the SNP Government have been doing to grow the Scottish economy, with Holyrood’s extensive powers on education and skills, economic development, transport and planning. Instead, SNP Members continue to talk down Scotland and the United Kingdom and to talk up their own separatist ambitions with our European partners, which only damages investor confidence in Scotland. Despite what the SNP says, Scottish exports and foreign direct investment continue to increase to above pre-Brexit levels, during which time the UK Government have secured trade agreements with 71 non-EU countries and the EU worth £808 billion in 2021. Surely that demonstrates the advantage of Scotland being an integral part of the UK market, with the trading power that that creates for the entirety of Scotland.
I have a challenge for SNP Members: would any of them like to tell us what the impact of splitting Scotland from the rest of the UK would be on the cost of living crisis? How would prices be helped by a hard border at Berwick? How would mortgage rates fall if a new untested currency was introduced? How on earth would energy prices be brought down by closing down development in the North sea sector, as Humza Yousaf, the First Minister of Scotland, seems to want to do?
John Lamont
I give way to the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden), who I am sure can answer those questions.
David Linden
One impact is that in a normal independent country, we would not have more food banks than branches of McDonald’s. That is precisely why we want to ensure that our constituents are not going to food banks as a result of a cost of living crisis on which the UK Government are asleep at the wheel.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. Excuse me, but before the Minister has even answered that point, it is not really fair to ask him to give way straightaway.
John Lamont
Scotland is already a normal country, despite what the hon. Member for Glasgow East might suggest. Talking down Scotland is not something I am here to do; I am very proud to promote Scotland. If the SNP Government in Edinburgh perhaps used some of the powers they are responsible for, then some of the challenges in the Scottish economy and in other aspects of Scottish society that we are dealing with would not be as great as they are. I am very clear that what this Parliament should be focused on is how the Scottish Government, along with the other devolved Administrations, could and should work with this United Kingdom Government to build a better future for the people of Scotland.
The SNP motion to establish a Select Committee to look at the cost of living crisis is not only unnecessary duplication of other work by this Parliament, but a complete waste of taxpayers’ money. The total anticipated cost to the House of Commons of this crackpot idea is in the region of £463,000 per annum. In addition, there would be extra costs to adapt Parliament’s Committee Rooms to accommodate this massive new Committee. I suggest that that would be a complete and utter waste of taxpayers’ money.
Sarah Atherton (Wrexham) (Con)
SNP Members bleat on about the cost of living, but would the Minister please explain why the SNP Government wasted £500 million on two ferries that do not float?
John Lamont
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Thankfully, it is not my job to defend the decisions of the SNP Government and the huge mistakes they have made in relation to ferries. What I do know is that this is having a huge impact on many of our island communities in Scotland and on economic development in those communities, because of a complete cock-up by the Scottish Government in delivering those ferries.
Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
I notice that the memorandum by the accounting officer that was released for this motion states at paragraph 3:
“Current select committee meeting rooms are not equipped for a committee of the proposed size and would need to be adapted to accommodate the Committee. The costs stated in this memorandum do not include the additional costs associated with such adaptation.”
Do the Government have any idea how much this adaptation would cost, or perhaps someone from the SNP could intervene and say?
John Lamont
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight that. As I have pointed out, the estimated cost simply to set up this new Committee is almost £500,000 per annum. As he has correctly identified, there is the additional cost of adapting the existing Committee Rooms. I know many of my constituents in Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk will be asking why on earth the SNP are proposing this when there are so many pressures on budgets for households and businesses. The SNP is proposing to spend more taxpayers’ money on this crackpot idea, which is a complete and utter nonsense.
The people of Scotland want their two Governments to be focused on tackling the cost of living, ensuring our future energy security and investing to support growth, and they want us to work together to do so. I therefore respectfully suggest that the SNP motion before us is not what we should be focusing on, and I urge right hon. and hon. Members to reject it.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. Before I call the shadow Secretary of State, let me provide a little bit of guidance. This debate has to finish by 4.20 pm, so I suspect the wind-ups will start at about 4 o’clock. That means speeches of about 10 minutes each would be a good guide to make sure that everybody gets in. I call the shadow Secretary of State.
Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)
I am pleased to be able to speak in this SNP Opposition day debate on the cost of living crisis. It is only a few weeks since the SNP called a similar debate, but for millions of people across Scotland and the whole of the UK, this is the most important and difficult issue they face in their lives. In many instances, the situation is getting worse, so I am very pleased that the SNP has called this debate on a similar subject. It is worth noting that the SNP’s previous debate on this issue did not stay on the cost of living crisis for very long. It quickly descended into a debate about independence, and today we are seeing a debate about independence or a debate about the Government’s Brexit versus the SNP’s Scexit.
Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)
I apologise once again for being late for this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I have now given up my opportunity to speak in it. I was talking to four women who are currently on hunger strike to raise attention for children living in poverty throughout the United Kingdom, and they asked me to ask the Minister if this Government would consider following the Scottish Government’s example of “cash first”, so that we can eradicate food banks throughout the United Kingdom. Does the hon. Member agree that we should be working towards eradicating food banks?
Ian Murray
We should absolutely be eradicating food banks across the whole country. The very fact that people in this country cannot afford to eat is an indictment on both Governments. I hope the hon. Gentleman will encourage his colleagues in the Scottish Parliament to support Rhoda Grant’s Right to Food (Scotland) Bill, which the SNP Government have so far refused to do. I hope he gets an opportunity to speak in this debate, and a chance to put those points forward. He makes an important point about food banks, but he misses the point about poverty, particularly child poverty. The previous Labour Government lifted millions and millions out of poverty, and that has been all but reversed, and more. That should be of eternal shame to this UK Government and to the Scottish Government.
Jamie Stone
Does the shadow Secretary of State share my astonishment that in this ramshackle proposal for a Committee there is no mention of the Education Committee? Do children not get caught in the poverty trap and the cost of living crisis? Of course they do. This is an example of a badly drafted proposal, and I suggest that the Scottish National party ought to have done its homework a bit better than this.
Ian Murray
Indeed, the Education Committee is not represented. Given that it deals with skills, access to employment and the biggest contributor to our economy, which is children’s education, I would have thought that it would be represented on the Committee. However, given that 375 Members or so are already projected to be nominated to this Committee, I am not sure we should have any more. If we do have more, perhaps we should sit as the whole House, as that might be the best way to deal with such issues. SNP Members have not thought this through properly. Perhaps they are frightened of education, because the defining mission of the former First Minister was to close the attainment gap in Scotland. Given that it has got wider, perhaps they do not want to talk about that.
Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Education Committee in this place covers only England? There would therefore be no point in having an appointee from that Committee.
Ian Murray
I am not sure I understand that point, given that this is about a UK parliamentary cost of living crisis Committee. It would not be a Committee dedicated just to Scotland; it would be dedicated to the cost of living, I would have thought, and we cannot determine not to have other Committee members serving on it, on the basis that something is an England-only Department. Education is critical across the whole United Kingdom and in terms of the cost of living crisis. Perhaps we can have an explanation for why the Education Committee is not listed—it was not my question; it was a question from the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone).
Dr Whitford
The hon. Gentleman made a point about the failure of Scottish education, but the attainment gap in Scotland has closed by two thirds at higher level, and by two thirds at positive destinations. That is in contrast with what has happened south of the border, where figures in November showed that the gap had widened.
Ian Murray
It always surprises me when SNP Members think that just slightly beating England is an achievement. The attainment gap in Scotland is an unmitigated shame for us all, and the way they have treated education in Scotland should also be a shame.
Several hon. Members rose—
Ian Murray
I have not even got through the first page of my speech, so if hon. Members do not mind I will take no further interventions for now.
The cost of living crisis is loading unbearable stress and anxiety on to millions of people. Just last week, a woman came to my surgery with her family. Her mortgage is up for renewal on 31 August this year. Her current two-part mortgage is on a 1.29% fixed rate, and a 2.15% fixed rate, which are both up on 31 August. Those two parts look as though they will be renewed at around or above 5%, alongside large product fees. Her monthly mortgage becomes unaffordable, and with the cost of everything else increasing, including the weekly shop, she does not know how she will keep her family home. They have a Tory premium on their mortgage running to thousands and thousands of pounds.
I genuinely ask the Minister, who I know personally cares about those issues, what advice he would give to my constituent, and to the millions of other mortgage holders who are coming off fixed rates and being met with interest rates that are eye-watering in comparison with their family budgets. He voted for the former Prime Minister’s Budget, which crashed the economy and left mortgage holders and rent payers with that Tory premium. He voted for all the measures that the Government proposed in that Budget that made the situation worse. What does he now say to people who will be sitting around dinner tables tonight worried about losing their homes? Those are the family and real-life scenarios of this Government’s decisions.
We should never forget that this crisis, which impacts on millions across the country, was created and made worse in Downing Street. This is a Government-made crisis where political choices are having a direct impact on people’s mortgages—and subsequently on rents, as the mortgages of landlords also become unaffordable. The Prime Minister is absolutely culpable.
This crisis is not just the result of one disastrous mini-Budget that the Government backed; it is the result of 13 years of this Government’s decisions—13 years of little to no growth in the economy, 13 years of stagnation, 13 years of party before country, and 13 years of appeasing Tory Back Benchers rather than looking after the country. Thirteen years of failure—unless, of course, you are looking for a seat in the House of Lords. Even now, this Government are more interested in protecting the profits of the oil and gas giants than in helping ordinary families with their energy bills. At the same time, this Prime Minister, when he was Chancellor, imposed the highest tax burden for 80 years on those very same people, taking more money out of their pockets when they need as much as they can get. We have the highest inflation in 40 years.
I agree with the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), who I thought was fair to suggest that part of the blame is down to Ukraine and other factors, but in the UK we have stubbornly high inflation, higher than most of our peers, and certainly much higher than in the United States and the European Union. Food inflation is more than 15% and shows no sign of falling any time soon. Some food inflation on the most basic of goods bought by the poorest in society is touching 20%, and it is all compounded by the disastrous 13 years of policies on energy that have left us exposed to shock and crisis in the energy sector.
The SNP motion talks about the damage caused by the Tories’ Brexit, and on that we agree. The Government have failed to negotiate a good deal with the European Union, despite their promises at the last election, and instead they have left the country with a deal that is only marginally better than no deal at all. It is a deal to ensure that the Prime Minister’s party was happy, rather than in the national interest, and every month that goes by, the Government continue to undermine the relationship with our European neighbours and friends, which is having dire consequences on jobs, businesses and this country’s place in the world. That has to stop.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
I know the hon. Gentleman cares passionately about Brexit—so much so that he nearly left the Labour party for Change UK but cancelled the press conference. In the debate on article 50, and the vote against triggering it, he said:
“I will do so in the knowledge that I will be able to walk down the streets of Edinburgh South, look my constituents in the eye and say to them that I have done everything I possibly can to protect their jobs, their livelihoods and the future of their families.”—[Official Report, 1 February 2017; Vol. 620, c. 1052.]
With the chaos unravelling just as he feared back in that debate, and Labour’s current position on Brexit, can he still look those same voters in the eye?
Ian Murray
I love it when the SNP quote my own words in debates, because I am very proud of what I and my party did in trying to resolve the savages of Brexit. I am delighted with the way that we pushed the Government all the way in trying to ensure that the country was put first and not their party. Let us not forget that when the Division Bell rang on 19 December 2019, we backed a deal that we knew was thin, but we saw that as the floor not the ceiling. The SNP decided that no deal was the best way forward. Let me put that into context. If it is the case that Brexit under the current deal is having an impact on the cost of living crisis—I have just said we agree with that—surely that would be magnified by many multitudes by having no deal at all. The record shows that the SNP supported and backed no deal.
The hon. Member for Central Ayrshire spoke, rightly, about the history of this place when we debated the Brexit process, but when the House had the opportunity to back a customs union that would give us frictionless trade with the European Union, SNP Members decided that was not for them and the vote was lost by six. That is on the record as well as my own words, which I stand by 100%. [Interruption.] I will give way to the SNP again. Perhaps they can try to explain why they preferred no deal over any deal.
David Linden
Will the hon. Gentleman outline, for the importance of context and the record, how many Labour MPs also abstained on that vote on 19 December?
Ian Murray
I do not agree with the hon. Member—he is justifying his abstention on the basis that other people abstained as well. I did not agree with them at the time, and I still do not. No deal would have been an unmitigated disaster for the country.
Again, I go back to the point—SNP Members might want to reflect on this—that if, as is the case, Brexit with the deal that we have got is a contributor to the cost of living crisis, surely having no deal with the European Union would have magnified the cost of living crisis even more. They cannot say one without the other, and, as the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) just confirmed, they backed no deal when the deal came to the House.
Ian Murray
I am happy to give way, given that the hon. Member opened the debate.
Dr Whitford
The shadow Secretary of State is going back to 2019 with the customs union and single market votes. Why is that not Labour policy now?
Ian Murray
Unlike the SNP, the Labour Party is trying to be honest with the public on what is in front of us. SNP Members’ proposition to the public at the moment is to have their cake and eat it. They want a separate currency while using someone else’s currency, they have a deficit well in excess of what the legal treaties of the European Union would allow them, and their own First Minister is saying that there will not be an independence referendum anytime soon because the Scottish people do not want it, yet they are promising the public, against the very treaty rules in place—they are there in black and white—that they can have everything they want and still get easy access to the European Union. That is fundamentally dishonest. Labour will not be dishonest with the British people.
On day one of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) being Prime Minister, he will have to deal with the principles in front of him, and we will ensure that the Brexit proposition is done on the basis that we can have better trade and better agreements. In the 2025-26 trade and co-operation agreement renegotiation, we can build on that agreement and ensure that we repair our damaged and tattered relationship with the European Union. As I said, we see that agreement as the floor and not, as the current Government suggest, as the ceiling.
The SNP is clear that its solution to Brexit—in its words, as well as mine and those of many others, it was a bad idea—is to have Scexit, which would be many magnitudes worse than Brexit. It wants to repeat the same mistakes and do the same thing while being dishonest with the British people. Labour will not be dishonest with the British people about the position we are in as a country. Regretfully, we have to deal with what is in front of us, not how we would wish to dream it up. The SNP does not have to deal with that, so it can take any position it likes.
The key point is that while SNP Members keep blaming Brexit—they are right that Brexit has contributed to the cost of living crisis—by saying it is all Brexit’s fault, they are letting the Government off the hook. It is not all Brexit’s fault; it is the Government’s fault, given the decisions they have made on Brexit, on energy, on the economy, on wages, on growth and on tax, and the impact of every single thing they have done in the last 13 years. Let us not let the Government off of the hook by blaming their botched Brexit. Let us keep them on the hook for Brexit and for everything else that they have subsequently done.
The motion talks about setting up a cost of living Committee. That may seem like a sensible idea, but when we look at the small print, the flaws of the proposal become clear. I am left wondering whether the real reason for proposing it is to try to get one of the SNP group’s many disgruntled Members an additional salary payment for being the Committee Chair, as stated in the motion. Perhaps the SNP is trying to campaign to get the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) a Committee Chair position after campaigning so heavily against him for the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee position in the House a few weeks ago.
I am also left wondering why, if the SNP thinks this is such a great idea, it does not use its coalition majority in Holyrood to create a similar Committee in the Scottish Parliament. Perhaps it does not wish to do that, but it does want to spend upwards of half a million pounds here on a Committee with 45 members that would not include members of the Education Committee. The Committee would include three members of the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, even though the cost of living crisis is no doubt driven mostly by the energy crisis. Is the SNP aware that the biggest spark of the cost of living crisis is spiralling energy bills for families and businesses?
The Committee would have five members from the Scottish Affairs Committee, five from the Welsh Affairs Committee, yet none from the Education Committee. The justification is that the English Education Committee does not have anything to do with Scotland, but neither does the Welsh Affairs Committee, yet it will provide five Members while the Education Committee will provide none. I do not think that the SNP has thought this through. There will also be no representation from the Defence Committee, which is a UK-wide Committee. Perhaps SNP Members are not aware of the many stories of soldiers having to rely on food banks because of the cost of living crisis.
The SNP’s motion fails to mention that the SNP has already been in charge of the Scottish economy for 16 years. The Scottish economy is now indisputably the creation of the SNP Government. A Scot who was finishing school when the SNP came to power 16 years ago will now be in their mid-30s—they will probably have one of those fixed-term mortgages, and perhaps even a family of their own—and they will have seen that, much like for the UK Government, economic growth has been an afterthought for the Scottish Government.
The Scottish Government are responsible for a huge number of issues and policy areas in Scotland, including the creation of jobs in the renewable sector. I have said this many times in the House and will continue to do so: we should congratulate the SNP Government, because they have created tens of thousands of jobs in the renewable sector—but unfortunately they are in Denmark, Indonesia and elsewhere. When they had the opportunity to sell what they called ScotWind licences for offshore wind in Scotland, they told us that they could not demand that bidders had their supply chains in Scotland due to EU state aid rules, even though we had left the European Union. They are right to talk about the damage of the Tory Brexit, but they cannot say that and, at the same time, hide behind state aid rules when we know that was not the case. They could have conditioned all those licences for Scottish jobs, but they decided that it would be better for those Scottish jobs to be overseas.
Labour has a fully costed alternative to the Conservative crisis. We would first introduce a proper windfall tax on the oil and gas giants—the SNP and its new leader opposed that until they realised it was popular—by backdating that to January 2022, as we have always called for, closing the loopholes and taxing it at the same rate as Norway. That would raise an extra £10 billion that would go towards people’s energy bills and put an end to the injustice of the oil and gas companies raking in billions on the back of people’s energy bills. The money raised would help families directly and pay for a plan to help the energy-intensive industries such as food manufacturers and processors with the cost of energy and, therefore, potentially reduce prices in shops for ordinary people.
Labour would reverse the Government’s decision to hand the top 1% of savers a tax break in their pensions while introducing specific measures to help doctors and the NHS. We would close the non-dom tax loophole, much to the frustration of the Prime Minister himself. We would cut business rates for small businesses, paid for by taxing the online giants such as Amazon, which are not held to the same rules as our high street businesses.
The hon. Member for Central Ayrshire said that there is no difference between the Conservatives and the Labour party. However, we have already announced that we would fund the Scottish Acorn project, and we would set up a publicly owned GB Energy, which the SNP used to believe in until it dropped that. So it does matter what colour of party is sitting on the Government side of the Chamber.
The new First Minister claims that absolutely none of it matters. Incidentally, he is the first SNP First Minister not to be arrested—but, when he is, I am sure we will send him flowers and thank him for his service. He would threaten to bring down a Labour Government over his obsession with the constitution. The consequences of what he said at the weekend are clear: vote for an SNP MP and they will block the transformative change that a Labour Government would seek to deliver. Vote SNP and see SNP MPs walking side by side through the No Lobby, with the very hard Brexiteers they have been slagging off this afternoon, to block a Labour Budget. That is what he said.
The conclusion that we can all come to is that SNP candidates at the election will be a barrier to change in this country. Why is the new SNP leader taking such a destructive stance? It is because Labour opposes rerunning the 2014 referendum. He could not have been clearer. He said:
“at the moment, for example, it’s pretty obvious that independence is not the consistent settled will of the Scottish people”.
Previous SNP leaders have always avoided speaking that truth for a reason. It begets the question: if the SNP’s preferred change is not what the people want, what is the alternative? After the SNP leader’s interview, we know that he will block the change that Scots want by undermining a Labour Government, in his words,
“at every corner and every turn”,
to demand something that he has admitted Scots do not actually want. I think that the people of Scotland can see through that position, and I am sure they will do so at the election.
Scotland wants a Labour Government, and a Labour Government will deliver for Scotland. When the mood shifts in politics, it shifts fast, but as ordinary working people sit around their dinner tables discussing how they will meet the weekly shopping bill, praying for mild weather, worrying about their families, neighbours, colleagues and friends or dreading the next email from ScottishPower or a bill dropping on their door mats from British Gas, the Tory Government and the SNP are devouring themselves with their own psychodramas. The cost of living crisis is a misery for millions in Scotland, but both of their Governments are responsible for making it worse and sit back to do little to help. Voters agree: 60% say that the Government are not taking the right measures on the cost of living crisis. The public deserve so much better and, at the election, they will get it.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Before I call the next speaker, just a reminder, as there is quite a lot of intervening going on: if a colleague makes an intervention on another Member, it is important to stay for the whole of that Member’s speech and to have been present at the beginning. It is just courteous.
David Duguid (Banff and Buchan) (Con)
I would like to start with a comment on what I believe to be the real motivation behind the motion. I invite the responding Minister to say whether he agrees. It was made evident in the opening speeches, despite its not being mentioned in the motion itself. It is a blatant and cynical attempt by the SNP, in its usual grievance-driven holier than thou manner, to push its own political agenda on a subject that is very real and immensely worrying for many people right across the whole United Kingdom.
On the actual motion, as is often the case, it starts off reasonably non-controversially:
“That this House agrees that increases in the cost of living are having a detrimental impact on businesses and families across Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom”.
Nobody can argue with that. However, it then goes on to state:
“the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union has played a significant role in driving those increases”.
There is no mention at all of the covid pandemic or Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has had an infinitely more significant impact on the current cost of living issues we are facing. This is straight from the SNP’s playbook: every problem is Brexit; every solution is independence. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] As if to prove the point; thanks very much. In her opening speech, the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) mentioned independence and those other issues, as other Members have, but again it was entirely predictable that—
David Duguid
I will give way in a second.
It was entirely predictable—as was the case in the previous SNP Opposition day debate, which again was on the very important and serious topic of the cost of living—that it soon became about how Brexit is bad and independence is good. I will quite happily give way to the hon. Member.
Dr Whitford
For the hon. Gentleman to suggest I merely mentioned covid and Ukraine is inappropriate—I did discuss them. But covid is easing and other countries have recovered after covid. Unfortunately, Brexit remains with us. That is what we are discussing today.
David Duguid
I am not going to deny that the act of leaving the EU does not have an impact. It was always going to have an impact. It was a major event. The people of the UK showed their settled will on what they wanted the UK to do. However, I would severely disagree with their saying that it is ongoing and in some ways maybe even getting worse, trying to present it as a reason for breaking apart the United Kingdom. I will come on to talk about the impact of Brexit, but for the moment I want to dispel the repeated myth from the SNP that all the issues faced by people, businesses and communities, particularly in Scotland somehow, are all a direct result of the United Kingdom leaving the EU. They may grumble about that, but in every conversation I have with anybody from the SNP, in any panel, session or public meeting in my constituency where SNP Members at any level of Government are present, it is always about Brexit. Brexit is always the problem and independence the solution.
I welcomed the intervention from the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire who led the debate, but I was expecting an intervention on the old chestnut of how 62% of Scots voted for the United Kingdom to remain in the EU. I was not among the more than 1 million people in Scotland who voted for the United Kingdom as whole—not Scotland, one way or the other—to leave the EU. I voted remain, as I am sure many other Members did. However, as a democrat, I accepted the result of that referendum, realising of course that the concept of accepting the results of referendums is lost on SNP Members. Subsequently, particularly having been elected as the MP for Banff and Buchan a year later, I have done everything I can to make sure that we make the most of the opportunities leaving the European Union presents to all of us, right across the whole United Kingdom.
People right across the world are struggling with rising prices and higher energy bills, mostly due to the aftermath of covid and Putin’s war in Ukraine. The impact of covid not just on this country, Scotland and the United Kingdom but on the whole world as we all started to recover from the awful pandemic and the lockdowns it created, should not be understated. We were still only beginning to recover from that when Russia invaded Ukraine. The overall issue of cost of living is precisely why this Conservative Government paid for half of families’ energy bills last winter and extended the energy price guarantee until March 2024. This Conservative Government are committed to restoring economic stability, while delivering fair and compassionate support for the most vulnerable households as, among other priorities, we halve inflation, grow the economy and reduce debt. It is no accident that the Prime Minister’s top three priorities are to stabilise the economy.
Thanks to the action taken by the UK Government, the Bank of England predicts that inflation is expected to fall sharply to around 5% by the end of this year. The energy price guarantee set the unit cost of energy so that typical households pay around £2,500 for their energy bills until the end of this month. An Ofgem price cap, which comes into action at the end of this month, from July, is just over £2,000. Some 686,000 individuals in Scotland will receive our £900 means-tested cost of living payment this financial year. Some 639,000 disabled people in Scotland will receive a £150 payment to support them in the face of rising prices. Some 973,604 winter fuel payment recipients in Scotland will receive an additional payment of up to £300. Benefits have been increased in line with inflation for 2023-24. More than 10 million households across the UK in receipt of working-age and disability benefits will see an increase in their benefit payments, with an average uplift of around £600 for households in receipt of universal credit. [Interruption.] I hear the grumbling from the SNP Benches saying, “Is that all?” When we take all those numbers into consideration and add them together, it is not insignificant. Despite Opposition Members gleefully predicting that the triple lock on pensions would not be protected, the state pension was increased in line with inflation of over 10%. That means the basic state pension will increase to £141.85 a week and the full rate of new state pension will increase to £185.15.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He mentioned that inflation is an important issue. Food inflation is 19.2%. What does he expect that figure to be by the end of the year?
David Duguid
The Government’s objective is to halve all inflation, which would take that into account. I do not have the number off the top of my head and I do not know what the Bank of England’s prediction for that is.
David Duguid
I would like to continue with my remarks. I will give way later, if time allows.
David Duguid
I will in a second. I am aware of the hon. Gentleman and I will give way once I have made some progress.
The £2 billion household support fund was created to support vulnerable families across the whole UK. From 1 April this year, the national living wage increased by 9.7% to £10.42 an hour for workers aged 23 and over. It was previously for workers aged 24 and over. That represents an increase of over £1,600 to the annual earnings of a full-time worker on the national living wage and is expected to benefit over 2 million low-paid workers right across the country.
David Duguid
I want to make some progress and get through this massive long list of improvements that people will experience as a result of this United Kingdom Government. The 80p cut to the taper rate and the £500 increase in the work allowance represent a combined tax cut that will next year be worth £2.2 billion, or an extra £1,000 per person, for 2 million low-income families.
David Duguid
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman at this point, because I know he has been waiting.
David Duguid
That is an excellent point, but it has to be taken wholly in the round with the concerns of our own food and drink producers. It is not just about what we pay to get food on our plate. If our primary food producers do not make enough profit at the farm gate, we will not have any food produced in this country at all.
Decisions taken in the 2022 autumn statement and the 2023 spring Budget have resulted in an increase of more than £1.8 billion in Barnett consequential funding for the Scottish Government. That takes the total UK Government funding for the Scottish Government to £37.1 billion annually by 2024-25.
Under this Conservative UK Government, the economy is improving in a range of different ways. There are a record 33 million people in work in the UK, which is up 382,000 over the past year and by 4 million since the Conservatives came into power in 2010. The employment rate of 76% is near record highs and is up by 0.3 points over the past year and by 5.8 points since 2010. Figures show that the unemployment rate is at 3.8%, which is near its lowest rate since 1974 and down by 4.4 percentage points since 2010.
The benefits of Brexit include removing unnecessary red tape and regulatory burdens, ensuring that rules and regulations work for British businesses and consumers. The first package in a series of deregulation announcements expected this year is expected to save employers more than £1 billion a year in today’s money. Our first post- Brexit trade deals with Australia and New Zealand have already come into effect. The deals will—[Interruption.] Again, SNP Members are grumbling about trade deals. They have never, ever voted for a trade deal, either in this place or in the European Parliament. They are anti-trade, and they make no secret about it. As the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) said earlier, they voted against our deal with the EU after we left. In effect, they voted for a no-deal Brexit.
Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
David Duguid
I give way to the Chair of the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee.
Angus Brendan MacNeil
A few moments ago the hon. Gentleman said that border checks are important for food producers. In a sign of there being no joined-up government, does not the Australia trade agreement kick away the stool he was standing on only a couple of minutes ago?
David Duguid
Again, everything needs to be looked at in the round. Our fantastic food and drink producers have export opportunities, and not just with Australia and New Zealand. Our trade deals with Australia and New Zealand are a stepping-stone to—[Interruption.] In fact, I was just about to come to this point. We will become the first European country to join the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership, which is now worth £12 trillion.
David Duguid
I will come back to the hon. Gentleman once I have finished this point. With 500 million people, trade with CPTPP countries will boost our economy by billions and support thousands of jobs in this country. Of course, no discussion of the benefits of leaving the EU could pass without mentioning fishing, but before I do so I will give way again to the hon. Gentleman.
Angus Brendan MacNeil
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising CPTPP. He will be aware that his own Government’s figures show that Brexit has damaged UK GDP by 5%, but the gain from CPTPP is 0.08%. That is equivalent to going to a horse race with £500, coming back with £8 and telling everybody that you backed a winner—but you have lost, and you have lost big style.
David Duguid
The 5% has gone up from the 4% that was reported previously, but what is not taken into account when those calculations are made is what it would cost for the UK to be in the EU. We are not in the EU any more, but we have a comprehensive trade agreement with the EU.
As I was saying, we have left the common fisheries policy and taken our place as an independent coastal state, which is well established as having been of great benefit to the fishing industry. [Interruption.] I would be delighted to take any argument on that. If SNP Members do not want to believe me, they can believe Elspeth Macdonald, the chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, which has confirmed that the UK Government and Scottish Government Ministers have a far stronger negotiating position at bilateral negotiations than we ever would have had as one of 28 member states of the EU.
Dr Whitford
A fishing fleet in my constituency on the west coast predominantly catches lobster and langoustine, because virtually all the quota in Scotland has been hoovered up in the north-east. The fleet used to get that into the Paris market in less than 24 hours, with 85% of its produce going there. Boats have already been sold and scrapped, and local fishermen in my area are not convinced that there will be a fleet by the end of this decade. On the idea that there is a sea of opportunity for fishing, the hon. Gentleman must know that that is not true for inshore fishing.
David Duguid
The hon. Lady has spoken on behalf of her constituents, so I am sure she will forgive me for speaking on behalf mine. There are a large number of pelagic and white fish vessels in my constituency, and lobster and other static gear fishing industries are also represented. They experience the same problems with access to exports as anyone else on these islands. I was in the Scotland Office at the time we left the EU and there were initial issues with access to markets. There was new paperwork that everyone had to get used to. Many in the seafood export industry got established and were ready for the new conditions, but many were not. If the hon. Lady would like to intervene again, I would love to know what the SNP Scottish Government did with the £180 million Brexit preparation funding. How much of it was spent on actually helping our Scottish fishermen prepare?
David Duguid
If the hon. Member would like to comment on that, I welcome him to do so.
Angus Brendan MacNeil
How far does the hon. Gentleman think £180 million would go given that the cost of moving product to the European Union from my constituency off the west coast of Scotland has trebled? It was about 30p a kilo, but it is now over £1 a kilo. That is down to the red tape of Brexit. How far would £180 million go to mitigate that? It would not get anywhere near it, and this is costing people a lot.
David Duguid
I apologise, but the most engagement I have with the fishing industry is with that in my own constituency. I am sure that nobody would want to debate that. Remember that it was during the months after we left the EU that covid hit us, and it is covid, above all else, that has had the biggest impact on exports because the whole hospitality sector across the continent—the biggest market for our langoustines, lobster and other shellfish—had shut down.
I want to move on because I know that you want us to be relatively brief, Madam Deputy Speaker. On the motion’s proposal for the formation of a Committee, the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), who is no longer in his place, made a very good point that the Education Committee is not included on the list. It might be possible to argue that there is no good reason for it to be included, but as he pointed out, our young people and skills are extremely important for the recovery of this economy. We need the overall economy to recover if we are going to get a hold of our cost of living issues. I was surprised when the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) said that the Education Committee should not be there because education is a devolved issue. I thought that this motion was a motion for this Parliament, which represents the whole United Kingdom, so I found that a strange justification. I agree with the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, and would like to hear what other justifications there may be.
Finally and in conclusion, as everyone will be pleased to hear, I will finish with a few more benefits of having left the EU. I must re-emphasise—we are still trading with the EU. We did not leave without a deal, as was predicted. In fact, as I said earlier and as others have said, at the time of the referendum, SNP Members voted to not have a deal when we left the EU at the end of 2019.
David Duguid
Well, I voted against Brexit, but as a democratic country, we moved on and left the EU. As the hon. Member for Edinburgh South said, to leave the EU without voting for a deal—[Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. I completely understand that there are a lot of interventions, but I am conscious that many other people want to speak. Some of those who are standing now wanting to intervene have not put in to speak. It is quite a long time since the hon. Gentleman started his speech and he has taken a lot of interventions.
David Duguid
Thank you for your clarification, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I thank the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) for bringing me a glass of water. I was glad of it because, as hon. Members will have noticed, I have a bit of a frog in my throat today.
To finish, I will repeat some of the main issues that are often misrepresented in our ongoing relationship with the EU. Compared to 2018, when the UK was in the EU, we are about even on trade exports to the EU—a fraction below in goods, but considerably higher for services. The biggest factor in any fluctuations in UK trade exports to the EU in the intervening years was due to coronavirus.
UK trade exports to the EU have increased year on year by 24%, which is part of the post-covid recovery that demonstrates that covid was the biggest factor in those trade issues. That was 24% year on year for UK trade exports, but Scotland’s exports to the EU have increased by 28%, including record exports in whisky and salmon—other fish are available, as I often remind people—so Scotland is actually doing better than the rest of the UK in the ongoing trade with the EU.
It is crucial for Scotland and the UK’s interests to increase exports, not only in the EU but around the whole world, and not focus solely on Europe. We could not commit to both EU and non-EU free trade agreements when we were a member of the EU. Outside the EU, there is a huge opportunity and presence to increase trade exports with Latin America, including Chile, as well as with India, Mexico and Malaysia, and other states in the CPTPP. Going to non-EU countries seizes more untapped market space and more export growth than going to any EU country, where we already have, and continue to have, a significant presence.
With that, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will finish my remarks, with great disappointment, but I really have to have another drink of water.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. We are now down to about nine minutes for each speech.
Owen Thompson (Midlothian) (SNP)
We can all agree that the cost of living crisis is connected to other social and economic disasters, but public services have been undermined by more than a decade of austerity, with devolved Governments, social security benefits and the National Health Service bearing the brunt.
The UK’s dependence on fossil fuels, under-investment in renewables, reduced gas storage and failure to regulate the energy market meant the nations of these islands faced unprecedented price rises from early 2022, despite being much less dependent on Russian gas than our European neighbours. Inflation triggered by reopening the economy in the aftermath of the covid-19 upheaval was augmented by supply chain disruption, with food particularly affected. We have had too many years of Torynomics, looking out for the wealthy at the expense of those who can least afford to live, and that was before the bombshell car crash of a Budget experiment towards the end of last year.
I see the effects of these decisions every day in my Midlothian constituency. New figures have laid bare the full scale of the problems facing my constituents in Midlothian. Last year, there were more than 4,500 children living in poverty in my constituency, according to End Child Poverty. Last month, more than 1,300 people were claiming unemployment related benefits. Around 250 of these claimants were aged 18 to 24. Up to 21,000 adults living in Midlothian cannot afford to turn on the heat in their homes to keep warm or to eat a balanced meal, a report found.
We heard about some of those issues on Monday, at the launch of the all-party parliamentary group on coalfield communities, of which I am a vice-convener. This is not a new phenomenon in our coalfield communities but a legacy of Thatcher that we have never recovered from and that successive Governments have done nothing to tackle.
It is estimated that as many as 34,000 people were worried about energy bills. The same survey found that in one month alone, 8,000 adults went hungry because they did not have enough money to buy food. Those figures, presented to a meeting of Midlothian Council last month, come from an independent study ordered by that council’s cost of living taskforce, set up last summer. With residents facing this cost of living crisis, it is clear that has quickly become the biggest priority for our SNP-led council and why it has invested more than £1.3 million in direct help to residents across Midlothian. It is hard to imagine a much worse scenario, but then there is Brexit.
Even the usually staid publication, The Lancet, says the Brexit fiasco is one of the central elements at the core of this cost of living crisis. It impacts not just our constituents and their households, but the Scottish Government, other devolved Governments and local government across the country. They are all facing the same inflation costs, increased costs of capital projects and increased energy bills that are all a drain on limited and fixed budgets. That is certainly the case with the Scottish Government, who do not have the borrowing power of this place or even of local government.
As well as laying bare the massive public health impacts of the cost of living crisis, a recent article in The Lancet says:
“There are several factors driving this crisis. The most immediate trigger is high inflation, partially a consequence of trade disruption associated with the conflict in Ukraine, superimposed on the impact of Brexit and associated fall in the value of the pound, which is leading to a rise in the costs of energy, food, and other essential resources for life.”
The Lancet also makes the ominous point that this is just the beginning and there is more to come. We have heard others talk about the impact on mortgage rates. Because of the tendency to set fixed rates, many people are still to come up against the worst of the increases.
My hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) talked about the impact of staff shortages on our public services. How can we have a situation where impactful decisions taken in this place can have such a direct consequence for communities across our isles? Those are chilling words from The Lancet, which make it ever more baffling that the Government persist with the failed Brexit project, and even more so that Labour want to continue to do more of the same.
As the SNP’s armed forces and veterans spokesperson, I am acutely aware of the impact that the cost of living crisis has on our men and women in uniform. Serving military personnel and their families have been forced to use food banks and there are serious questions to be answered around the pay offer to our armed forces.
This week, Sky News revealed that an unofficial food bank even exists at a Royal Air Force base in Lincolnshire. The voluntary facility at RAF Coningsby, home to Typhoon fast jet squadrons, was set up by an aviator to collect food donations from servicemen and women to support civilians in their local community, but a defence source claimed it is now being used by RAF personnel too. Despite the much-vaunted armed forces covenant, we now have a situation where service personnel need to choose between food or fuel. The crisis is impacting on so many places where people would never have thought that would be the case. According to the reports, one aviator, a single mum, was forced to go without a hot meal for four days because she had spent her last money on baby milk formula.
This place, the Tories and their Brexit-supporting Labour pals, need to take responsibility for this utter clusterbourach. In Scotland, we are fortunate that we have a path out of the chaos. We can become independent. I know the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid) will be delighted that I have said that, because he was waiting for it. We have the opportunity to elect progressive Governments that can implement all the levers that a normal nation can in taking forward their own destiny as a member of the European Union. As we work towards that goal, we desperately need an inquiry led in this place to reveal the full extent of the devastation wrought by Brexit and the cost of living crisis. Why would we not want to get to the bottom of why these problems are happening? That is the only way for Scotland to weather this perfect storm. I look forward to the day when we can get the answers we need, but much more important, I look forward to the day when we can make our own decisions in Scotland.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I now have to announce the results of today’s deferred Division.
On the draft Animal By-Products, Pet Passport and Animal Health (Fees) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2023, the Ayes were 284 and the Noes were 14, so the Ayes have it.
[The Division list is published at the end of today’s debates.]
Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)
I welcome the opportunity to speak, again, about the cost of living crisis and the motion tabled by my Scottish National party colleagues.
I strongly agree with the opening words of the motion: increases in the cost of living are having a devastating impact on our constituents throughout the United Kingdom. I also agree that
“the devolved administrations do not possess the full financial powers required to effectively mitigate the increases”.
Certainly, in Wales, I believe that Labour in government, under the leadership of Mark Drakeford, is driving a modern socialist agenda to do all that it can with insufficient resources. However, I also feel that, in focusing on the impact of exiting the European Union on the current crisis, the scope of the motion is too narrow. Yes, Conservative policies on Brexit and the failure to sufficiently replace regional development funds are causes of the crisis, but outwith Brexit, the crisis is also down to Tory economic decisions and austerity policies before and since the Brexit referendum.
Dr Whitford
Although the proposal in the motion is for the Committee to understand the extent to which the problem is due to Brexit and to come up with solutions, other issues that are identified regarding policy from this place will also become clear and can therefore be challenged.
Beth Winter
I thank the hon. Lady for that explanation.
As others have pointed out, the frontline remains in the everyday lives of our constituents: in the energy bills that come through their doors, at the supermarket check-outs, and in the payslips detailing wages that are much too low. In Cynon Valley, far too many people are struggling. About a year ago, I conducted a cost of living survey to which hundreds of people responded: we were overwhelmed by the response. It showed that 72% of respondents expected to cut down on their heating in the following 12 months, and almost half expected to cut down on essentials. Like other Members present, I hear harrowing stories of families having to use food banks—there has been an exponential growth in their use in my constituency—and kettle packs.
Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
I was interested to hear the hon. Member’s ideas about a socialist Government in Wales. I look forward to that. According to research by the London School of Economics, the impact of Brexit on food prices has cost households across the UK £6.95 billion, because 28% of food consumed in the UK comes from the EU. Does she recognise that being wedded to Brexit is an absolute policy disaster, not only for the Government but for her party as well?
Beth Winter
I do not disagree that Brexit is an issue. I have made that comment already. Food price inflation is a major issue.
I thank all the community groups and the trade unions back in south Wales who do such fantastic work to try to mitigate the worst elements of the cost of living crisis. We recently raised a significant amount for the food banks in my constituency in conjunction with the trades council. Despite all the constraints being placed on us by this UK Tory government, local people are stepping up. They should not have to do that, but it demonstrates the importance of community spirit.
There is a problem with pay, and there is a problem of profiteering. Only yesterday, we saw data from the Office for National Statistics showing that real pay is down by £35 a week compared with 15 years ago. Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies described these data as “staggering statistics” and spoke of
“a completely unprecedented period with no earnings growth.”
That is thanks to this Tory Government’s policy of holding down public sector pay and using that to drive down private sector pay. This is a strategy they have pursued regardless of Brexit.
As a result of Brexit, however, there is certainly a loss of funding. The levelling-up fund and the shared prosperity fund fail to match the resources of the EU regional development fund. We famously heard that there would be
“not a penny less, not a power lost”,
but as a result of the shortfall in EU structural funds and the loss of rural funding, the overall shortfall to the Welsh budget is more than £1.1 billion. That is shameful. The UK Government rode roughshod over devolution when it cut out Welsh government to deal with local authorities. My constituency remains one of those that have seen nothing from the levelling-up fund. In the context of that disregard for devolution, it is welcome that we have new thinking, from Gordon Brown's commission on the future of the UK to Mark Drakeford and the Welsh Government’s Comisiwn y Cyfansoddiad or Constitution Commission. Indeed, in the last couple of weeks the two came together with the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, in the new Alliance for Radical Democratic Change to advocate the changes that we need to strengthen what the First Minister of Wales refers to as our “solidarity union”. I look forward to becoming involved with that work.
In Wales, as Mark Drakeford explained at the Welsh Labour party conference, that has meant progressive policies such as trialling basic income, expanding universal free school meal provision, and delivering the living wage for care workers. I could say more about those progressive policies, but I know that we are short of time. In contrast, the UK Tory Government have only made people’s lives worse, forcing hardship and suffering on millions of people. We are the fifth richest nation in the world—I am tired of saying that—and we have the wealth, but it is in the hands of the few and not the many. There are alternatives, such as a wealth tax, fundamental reforms of the social security system, and inflation-proofed pay rises. I also want to see a commitment to reforming funding for devolved Governments that recognises Wales’s dependence on public services. We urgently need a revision of the Barnett formula to deliver a needs-based allocation of funds. We need the provision of prudential borrowing powers for the Welsh Government.
The solution to this crisis is being advocated by grassroots community groups and the labour and trade union movements, which speak of the need for higher pay, more universal service provision and for increased wealth taxation, and that is what the TUC General Secretary told the parliamentary Labour party this week. The most pressingly needed solution to alleviate the cost of living crisis is the election of a Labour Government so that we can achieve a greener, fairer, socialist future for everyone.
Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter). I agreed with pretty much all that she had to say; it is disappointing that her party leadership does not agree with the two of us.
I will focus my remarks on some of the concerning aspects of our current political landscape: the implications of Brexit in creating what is now an endemic cost of living crisis, and the impacts of Westminster rule on Scotland’s potential. Brexit ideology is supported by both the Tories and the Labour party in Westminster. That ideology has turbocharged the cost of living crisis for so many people across Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. It is damaging and insular, and has more than a whiff of racism about it. In fact, it is exactly the kind of thing we have come to expect from the Conservative party.
But what of the official Opposition? What has been their position when the Westminster Government’s ideology has ensured that the UK’s GDP is down by 4%, that trade and exports have been reduced by 15%, that there has been a loss of £29 billion in business investment and of £100 billion in output, and that a third of our NHS workforce has gone as decent hard-working contributors leave the UK in droves? What has been the resistance to all that from the self-styled party of the ordinary man and woman—the Labour party—with its knight-of-the-realm leader? What has the Leader of the Opposition given us? The only thing that comes to my mind is a xenophobic trope about British kids speaking Polish.
The reality is that the Labour party has been fully complicit in and a willing enabler of this deeply damaging ideology. It is an ideology shared between the Labour party and the Tory party. It is not just us in Scotland who see the folly of these Brexit ideologues. The former US Treasury chief and top economist Larry Summers recently said that Brexit will be remembered as a “historic economic error”, adding that he would be “very surprised” if the UK avoided a recession in the next two years. He also noted that the UK’s economic situation was
“frankly more acute than in most other major countries”.
The sentiment that Brexit has been disastrous for the UK economy is well known to the people of Scotland, and it is now being reflected by people right across the rest of these islands. A poll from April 2023 shows that 53% of people now think that leaving the EU was the wrong decision. They know that Brexit was a lie and they know that it is contributing significantly to the scale of the day-to-day cost of living crisis that they are experiencing. Research shows that households in the UK have paid nearly £7 billion since Brexit to cover the extra cost of food imports to and from the EU. Food inflation alone sits more than 19% higher today than it did on this day last year.
The forecast is not good. Better days are not ahead. The vice-president of the European Commission recently said:
“Trade can no longer be as frictionless and dynamic as it was before. This means additional costs for businesses on both sides... Over time, increased divergence will bring even more costs and it will further deepen the barriers to trade between the EU and the UK.”
That is the reality. The Labour party should have been in unison with us in the SNP as a voice for the ordinary people who are so affected by Brexit and the cost of living crisis. Labour Members should have joined us in opposing this madness; instead, they endorsed it. They stood shoulder to shoulder with the Tories and they continue to ignore Scotland’s democratic will.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
My hon. Friend is making some powerful points. Does he not find it extraordinary that Labour continues to insist that it will somehow make Brexit work? Very recently, we heard from the European Commissioner that even in the forthcoming review of the trade and co-operation agreement, there would be no fundamental change. Is that not ultimately very deceptive?
Steven Bonnar
It is very duplicitous, and it is pretty much standard from the Labour party. My hon. Friend supplements the point that I am making, and I thank her for that.
The reality is that families across Scotland are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, with the cost of their rent or mortgage now sky high and the cost of food and energy putting the most basic necessities beyond the reach of many. Eight in 10 charities have experienced an increase in demand from families in the last three months alone, and half of them are not expecting to meet that demand in the next three months. Food banks across my constituency simply cannot meet the demand, and referrals are increasing day after day. In the United Kingdom today, baby food is being kept in anti-theft boxes in local shops. This is the cost of the Union.
In Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill, 15% of people are living in poverty and another 10% are experiencing employment depreciation. The figures are much higher here in Tory England, where up to 44% of children in deprived areas live in poverty. Workers’ rights, consumer standards, environmental regulations and many other safeguards have been eroded or lost entirely. We knew that Brexit would put these crucial protections in jeopardy. We warned that people would suffer and lose their rights over pay and conditions, pensions and opportunities for development. We warned that people’s prospects would be reduced.
My constituent, Mr Monteith, contacted me recently with his concerns about surviving as a single parent navigating the cost of living crisis. He is struggling to meet his soaring food and energy costs, and his employer has him on a zero-hours contract with no consistent hours, no set income and no job security, and with no consideration for his young family as a lot of his shifts start at 2 o’clock in the morning. He is stuck. He is scared to miss a shift when it is offered, for fear of not being able to put a meal on the table. His is just one of many such cases, but in many of these cases, all we can do is join our constituents—these hard-working men and women, the breadwinners of their families and the backbone of our community—and watch as yet another of their rights is taken from them by these callous ideologues before their very eyes.
What about the choices and chances left for our young people? The CEO of Barnardo’s said recently that young people
“seem to be losing hope and do not feel optimistic about their futures”.
I simply ask: is it any wonder? Is it any wonder, when the vast majority of young people in the United Kingdom voted to remain in the EU but were ignored? Is it any wonder when they know that their Government have damaged their educational opportunities, dented their employment and career prospects, and hindered their cultural and social integration opportunities?
It is disheartening and frankly sickening that any Government would continue on such a road of self-sabotage. But we know that when the time comes to rid ourselves of this Tory Government—that day is fast approaching—the new Tory-lite replacement will continue on the same futile path of destruction. There can be no doubt that the Labour party’s support for Brexit and siding with the UK Government from that day until this day is a betrayal of its core principles and a real disservice to the working class people it claims to represent, whether it relates to the damage of Brexit, the party’s brutal approach to social security or its persistent U-turning on promises.
The Leader of the Opposition has U-turned so many times that I do not know which way he is facing these days. Is Labour going to abolish the Lords? It tells us it will, but the next week it is putting mair people into it. It is also failing to stand against the universal credit cut imposed on struggling families by this Government. In my book, the worst thing of all is that it is offering the people of Scotland no say, no voice and no protection from the worst of Brexit. Labour knows fine well that the Scottish people did not vote for Brexit or for Labour. Yet, come election time, when this untrustworthy, unreliable lot are kicked out of office, Labour will expect and implore the people of Scotland to trust it again. But why should we and, more to the point, why would we?
Mhairi Black
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is shocking, and an indictment of this Minister, that for the first time we have a generation who do not believe that they will be better off than their parents and the generation before them, regardless of who is in charge?
Steven Bonnar
It saddens me that that is the reality of the situation. As I was saying in relation to the chief exec of Barnardo’s, the young people of today realise that their future has been dented by this Government. How sad.
Why should the people of Scotland trust the Labour party again? The reality is that the people of Scotland know that while we in the SNP are not perfect, we believe in them and we will stand up for them every single step of the way. We will stand up for them compared with any of the British parties that take their lead from this place. The people of Scotland know that no Tory Government and no Labour Government will protect Scotland, because the reality is that no Westminster Government have or ever will put Scotland’s interests first. Only an independent Scotland among our European friends and neighbours can ensure a brighter, more secure, greener future for all as we unleash our potential. A future for the many, not the few.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
I take any opportunity to raise the cost of living crisis in my constituency and beyond. The cost of living crisis started before the Ukraine war in 2022, before the 2019 pandemic and before Brexit in 2016. It started with austerity, which has been affecting people for more than 10 years, and let us remember that austerity is a political choice. It is a choice made by Ministers, past and present, and they were told at the time that it would not work. Even the United Nations told them that their ideological austerity experiment would not work, but the Government continued, and we are all worse off because of it. Bizarrely, I know the Chancellor agrees with me. He said that some cuts went too far when he was Health Secretary, but he is now Chancellor and can reverse those cuts, so why has he not?
I attended this morning’s debate on hospices, which are at breaking point. There is a massive funding gap between what the Government are offering and what hospices need, and the same is true of dental care, which I have mentioned many times in this place. My constituents cannot get an appointment, and they cannot go private because it is so expensive. I could go on.
Child poverty is now rife in my constituency. The number of people fed by food banks has increased, and inequality is worsening. What is happening to our country? Why are the Government allowing this? The austerity policies of David Cameron and George Osborne hollowed out our welfare state and left us unprepared for when covid hit. They both owe the public an apology.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy). I agree with what she says, and she certainly gave the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid) a lesson in what “relatively brief” actually means. I am still reeling from his zinger accusing the SNP of pushing a political agenda. Who knew that politicians advance their own arguments and beliefs? It is news to me.
As always, the Minister said that Scotland has all the powers we need—the typical Unionist mindset. Will he explain to me why Northern Ireland has powers over energy, pensions, the civil service and the welfare state, but Scotland is somehow blocked from having these powers? Why is that? Why does Scotland not have better borrowing powers? There is no way that we have the powers we need. It is a weak Unionist argument.
John Lamont
It is unfortunate that the hon. Gentleman is making comparisons with Northern Ireland, which clearly has a very difficult and very different history compared with Scotland. The history of Scotland cannot be compared to the history of Northern Ireland, thankfully. The point I was making in my opening remarks was that, despite all the levers they have, the SNP Scottish Government are failing to expand economic growth or to look after the most vulnerable in society. They continually blame Westminster and ask for another independence referendum, which frustrates me and my constituents.
Alan Brown
The Minister does not explain why Northern Ireland has these powers and Scotland cannot have them. Of course I recognise the difficulties caused in Northern Ireland by the Democratic Unionist party, his brothers in arms. It would be good if it helped to get the Northern Ireland Executive up and running.
We might have thought that Brexiteers, who claim that Brexit is a good thing, would welcome this motion to set up a new Committee. When the Committee looks at the impacts of Brexit, perhaps it will unearth the Brexit dividends that the Minister and the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan have not been able to explain.
We know that Labour and its Front Benchers are not in favour of the motion, hiding behind the fact that the Committee would be too big for a room in Parliament and would cost too much money—the Minister said that, too. Well, I have an idea: we could abolish the House of Lords and the Committee could sit in there. That would save money, too.
As for the omission of the Education Committee, perhaps we should accept members of the Education Committee—Labour could have tabled an amendment—because that would allow greater insight into the impact on higher education in Scotland of the Tories’ student visa rules and of not being in Horizon for two years. Having members of the Education Committee on a cost of living Committee might be quite helpful.
Labour obviously does not support the Committee because it would expose Labour’s mantra of making Brexit work without rejoining the internal market, rejoining the customs union or restoring the free movement of people. Their mantra is a vacuous statement. Their position, like the Tory position, means continuing labour shortages in the health and social care sector. It means crops continuing to be left unpicked, and it means the home-grown food stock will shrink because farmers will plant less in future. It means continuing rules of origin issues that affect manufacturing in the automotive industry. And it will mean food prices increase further, given the imminent checks that will be made on food imports.
Shane Brennan, the director of the Cold Chain Federation, has said:
“It is crazy that one week the government is holding a crisis meeting in Downing Street to discuss out-of-control food inflation and the next is willing to nod through a multimillion new import tax on EU food imports.”
Meanwhile, despite what Conservative Members have said, farmers will have to compete with Australian and New Zealand lamb imports, thanks to the deal that a former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has said was an absolutely duff deal pushed through by the former Prime Minister.
The biggest issue created by Brexit and Tory Government policy is the cost of living crisis, which has too many aspects to quantify and discuss. That is why a cross-party Select Committee would be kept meaningfully busy.
Another great Brexit lie is that energy bills would be cheaper if we left the EU. That one has aged as well as Scotland being told in 2014 that our energy bills could only remain as they were, or be lowered, by staying in the UK. We have acknowledged that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is, of course, the main factor in soaring energy bills, but there is a quantifiable Brexit impact. By leaving the single electricity market and creating a standalone trade and co-operation agreement, the post-Brexit cost of trade in electricity is higher. Energy UK estimates that these arrangements cost more than £1 billion a year, which is added directly to our electricity bills. There is a so-called Brexit dividend: higher energy bills. We were promised that VAT on our energy bills would be cut post Brexit, which is another broken promise that has not materialised.
This is in stark contrast to the 2016 Vote Leave briefing on taking control of energy, which said:
“Because of silly EU rules”—
Vote Leave loved that phrase—
“EU energy regulation will cost the UK economy about £90 billion… Instead of spending money on patients, the NHS has to instead spend millions every year on energy costs.”
Can anybody with any credibility tell us that, post Brexit, the NHS is saving money on energy and other matters? And where is the mythical £90 billion saving we are supposed to see?
Another Brexit dividend and cost impact on both energy and wider goods comes from the drop in the value of the pound. This means higher costs on imported goods, and the fact that oil and gas are traded in dollars means another financial hit for the UK. The EU is moving much quicker to decouple gas and electricity prices, to bring down the cost of electricity, and it has also taken much stronger action to try to combat the US Inflation Reduction Act.
And what do we hear from the Energy Secretary? “Oh, everyone else is 10 years behind the UK, so we do not need to do anything because the US is playing catch-up.” The reality is that investors are looking at moving elsewhere. If the Government will not do anything about it, it will have another long-term impact on the green transition.
The Government argue that they have led the way on renewable energy, and they have been a leading light at some points in the deployment of renewable energy, but the reality is that there have been so many missed opportunities in supply chain development. We are always told that it was the EU that prevented contracts for difference auctions from incentivising UK and local content in the supply chain, which is, frankly, utter rubbish. Over the years, their narrative was always that EU procurement rules meant lowest price only. People said that other countries did not stick to the rules, unlike the good old Brits, and that that hampered us.
We are talking about the same leavers who now want to break international treaties. The reality is that tender assessments can consider wider impacts and quality. More than 20 years ago, I was procuring civil engineering contracts under EU laws, so I have always been well aware that if a robust scoring assessment system is in place, the argument that we need to go only for the lowest price is false.
The notion that the EU is forcing imports from the far east because of competition laws is also palpable nonsense, because that is where so many of the components come from. So it is high time that the procurement process for the contracts for difference auctions suitably incentivises the creation and establishment of a UK-based supply chain. What is the point of talking about energy security when so much of the renewable energy deployment and so many of the ongoing grid upgrades depend on imports and there are waiting lists of years for some of the components?
The UK Government have at least finally acknowledged the need for some change in supply chain development, but they have cut the overall CfD budget for allocation round 5 by 30%, at a time of rampant inflation. That is happening with projects already struggling to hit allocation round 4 strike prices. That is further proof of their saying one thing and doing another. Tidal stream technology needs to be backed; with 80% of its supply chain content being UK based. However, the ringfencing for that has been halved.
Alan Brown
I am sorry, but I am not going to give way.
If we look at Westminster energy policies over the years, we see that the biggest disgrace is the lack of a sovereign wealth fund from oil and gas. Norway has the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world, and it only started that in the 1990s. That shows what can be done when a country looks after its assets and plans for the future. When Labour came to power in 1997, oil dropped to $12 a barrel. When Labour left office in 2010, the price was close to $100 a barrel. Why was there no creation of an oil sovereign fund then? Where is that legacy of that price increase bonanza that Labour had? It was completely frittered away. Governments of any colour down here take Scotland’s assets and resources and fritter them away, with no long-term planning.
To add insult to injury, we supply the energy, yet those who stay in the highlands and islands help pay for the gas grid, even though, in general, they are not connected to it. They see the renewable energy going south, but they pay a supplement in their electricity bill. They are also more likely to be energy poor. The situation is unbelievable.
Our hands are being tied by being part of the UK. It is time we were able to make decisions for ourselves, like any normal independent country. This Committee, if established, would expose that and the fact that independence, in the EU, is the best way forward for Scotland.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. I am conscious that there are four more speakers and the wind-ups will start at 4 pm. Please bear that in mind. I call Brendan O’Hara.
Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)
I would like to begin by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) for the way she opened the debate. In her time in Parliament, she has deservedly gained a reputation as being one of those Members people listen to when she speaks. Across this House, she is recognised as speaking with authority, experience and great knowledge of her subject. I am delighted that she upheld her own very high standards this afternoon.
My hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire was absolutely right when she said that the cost of living is the No. 1 issue for all of our constituents and that regardless of how often the Leader of the Opposition says it, it is simply impossible to “make Brexit work”. I have the vision of the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) saying to King Canute, “No, you cannae hold back the tide, but I can; I’ll show you how to do it.” This is utterly delusional because, as she says, we cannot make this work. She laid out brilliantly the case as to why this House should have a dedicated Select Committee, one that will be able to investigate all matters relating to the soaring cost of living and of the contribution made to that cost of living crisis by the UK’s disastrous exit from the European Union.
It is not often I will say this, but I am looking for a Lib Dem—
Brendan O’Hara
The hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) intervened earlier to complain bitterly that his party was not to be represented on this Committee and that that would be the Lib Dems’ excuse for not supporting this motion. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) said, this is an amendable motion and if the hon. Gentleman felt that passionately about it, he could table an amendment. I wish he was here so that I could remind the Lib Dems that when they proposed the creation of the EU withdrawal Committee, their proposal awarded the SNP precisely zero seats, despite our having the vast majority of Scottish seats. Perhaps the Lib Dems do not want to address this issue and are throwing smoke bombs right, left and centre because they do not want to be reminded that they are where they are because of the dirty deal they cut with the Tories in 2010. I just wish the Lib Dems were here to stand up and face the consequences of it.
No one can deny the detrimental impact that increases in the cost of living are having on businesses and families across Scotland and the United Kingdom, and only the most blinkered Brexiteer would deny the role that leaving the EU has had in driving those increases. Unfortunately, the powers available to the devolved Administrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast mean that it is this place that must find a long-term solution to this crisis. As much as I commend the work done in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff, it is this place that has to find those solutions.
That is why we must, with some urgency, establish this Committee. We must put in motion a process whereby the people of these islands can see and understand why food price inflation is through the roof and why mortgages are becoming increasingly unaffordable for so many. The evidence that will come to this Committee and the reports that will come from it will, we hope, furnish this hapless Government with the facts and evidence they need to see where they are going wrong and perhaps allow them to do something about it.
Let us be clear: the economic disaster of Brexit has not just fallen out of the sky. It has not just miraculously appeared. I am reminded of an exchange I had with the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg) almost exactly a year ago, when he was Minister for Brexit Opportunities—I try to get through that title without laughing. I took the opportunity to remind him of his 2019 promise that the “broad, sunlit uplands” of Brexit were just around the corner for the British people and British business. Last year, I described the case of a small Scottish cosmetic company, Gracefruit, whose owners had told me that, because of red tape, soaring costs and loss of markets, they no longer had the mental or emotional strength to make a success of what had been a thriving business. Gracefruit was emblematic of so many small and medium-sized enterprises across the islands whose business had been destroyed by Brexit. In his reply to me, the right hon. Member for North East Somerset said:
“We are freeing people in this country from red tape because we look at the United Kingdom playing a global role—trading with the globe, being as economically productive as anywhere in the world…That is why the EU is a failing economic option and why we sing hallelujahs for having left it.—[Official Report, 9 June 2022; Vol. 715, c. 933.]
That was the Minister for Brexit Opportunities. I thought at the time that his reply was vacuous and glib. Twelve months on, I see it as deluded, arrogant, negligent and dangerous. If there is one reason why the creation of this cost of living Select Committee is essential, it can be found in that single reply. It was he and his well-heeled City chums who sold the people of England a pup in 2016. They sold it as a dawn of a new era of freedom and prosperity and of taking back control, but, instead, we live in a time of uncertainty and grave economic hardship, suffered, ironically, by those who bought into the fantasy that Brexit would be good for them and who have been left with the grim reality that Brexit has been a major driver of spiralling food costs, soaring mortgages and lower wages.
The pain of Brexit has been felt most acutely in our rural communities—communities such as my Argyll and Bute constituency, which had benefited from decades of EU membership and the support that it gave to our agricultural sector and the market that it provided for our outstanding seafood and shellfish sector. All of us who represent rural constituencies such as Argyll and Bute know that incomes are lower and costs are higher. Nearly 70% of households in my constituency are at risk of fuel poverty or extreme fuel poverty. As the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) said, 56% of my constituency are off gas grid. To avoid fuel poverty, an average all-electric household would need an income of £72,200. To avoid extreme fuel poverty, they would require an income of £39,600. This is in the context of a median household income of just £33,000. Anyone can see the crisis of fuel poverty that is coming down the line, as indeed there will be with so many of my constituents.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh released a paper, “The cost of living: impact on rural communities in Scotland”, which recommended that any piece of legislation related to the cost of living should be “rural-proofed” and I heartily agree. It also recommended that the UK Government recognise the contribution of rural communities—whether it be through their whisky, tourism, timber or fish farming. In areas such as Argyll and Bute, the contribution made by my constituents to the UK Exchequer through whisky production alone is gargantuan compared with what they receive.
Rural Scotland has been hit hard by the cost of living crisis, which is why the people of these islands need the Committee to be set up. They need to have confidence that the decisions that we make here are done with all the available evidence that we can possibly muster. That is what the Committee would do. I say to Members, whether they be from the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats or the Conservatives, to vote this motion down on the minutiae—[Interruption.] The Minister may laugh, but this was an amendable motion, which his party, if it had any real commitment to the cost of living crisis, could have amended. To vote down this motion on the minutiae would be disingenuous in the extreme, because this is a genuine attempt on behalf of our constituents to address the biggest crisis in their lives at the moment. The Government and, sadly, the other opposition parties are playing political games with what should be a motion that unites all in the House.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I am calling the wind-ups at 4 o’clock and there are three others wanting to speak, so I ask Members to do the maths and be generous to their colleagues.
David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara). As the junior deputy assistant viceroy was chuntering from a sedentary position about crackpots and a few hundred thousand pounds, I was reminded of Baroness Michelle Mone in the other place, who I am sure he would probably think is great value for money. However, this is a serious motion for a serious issue. Given that the cost of living remains by far—by a country mile—the single biggest issue that my constituents continue to raise on the doorsteps, I am somewhat intrigued that the Government and, indeed, the Labour party have once again largely boycotted this Opposition debate.
I understand that the Government’s focus is perhaps elsewhere—for example, sorting out a peerage for the positively sycophantic right hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries)—but I am very surprised at the British Labour party’s boycott of today’s debate. I thought it was only picket lines that it boycotted, but I guess variety is the spice of life.
As I have said before, the cost of living crisis has been a persistent issue on these islands for several years, with many people struggling to make ends meet despite working full-time jobs. However, it is important to recognise that the cost of living crisis is not a new thing; it is the culmination of 13 long, cold years of Tory austerity from a Government who Scotland did not vote for. Yes, the issue has certainly been exacerbated by a variety of factors, including stagnant wages and rising housing costs, but the UK’s exit from the European Union has caused significant economic disruption and uncertainty that has further worsened the situation for many of those I represent in the east end of Glasgow.
Prior to Brexit, the free movement of goods, services, people and capital in the single market and the customs union were a benefit to our economy. The arrangement helped to promote economic growth and prosperity on these islands, making it easier for businesses to trade and for consumers to access a wide range of affordable goods and services. However, the UK’s decision to leave the European Union—a decision not consented to by the country I represent—has created significant challenges that have had a profound impact on the cost of living crisis that people across these islands are experiencing.
Since 2016, the value of the pound has fallen significantly against other major currencies, making imports far more expensive and causing inflation to rise. That has had a particularly acute impact on the cost of basic necessities such as food and fuel, which are heavily reliant on imports. According to the Office for National Statistics, consumer prices inflation surged to 3% in September 2017, up from 2.9% in the August and well above the Bank of England target. That was before the war in Ukraine and before covid. That increase was largely attributed to rising food prices, which jumped by 4.1% in September 2017, and to fuel prices, which rose by 2.5%. The weak pound also led to an increase in the cost of travel abroad, making it more expensive for families going on holiday or for those travelling for business.
Another area where Brexit has exacerbated the cost of living crisis is in the labour market more generally. With the loss of free movement of people around the EU, many industries in the UK face labour shortages, which in itself puts additional strains on business. I know from speaking to many businesses in the east end of Glasgow that they are facing additional costs associated with Brexit such as increased bureaucracy and red tape, tariffs, customs duties and the need to comply with new regulatory requirements. Those costs are often passed on to consumers in the form of increased prices, further exacerbating the cost of living crisis for many people.
Scottish businesses are set to be hit with even more Brexit pain, as the Tories have put on the table new inspection charges on food entering the UK from the EU. Plans drawn up by the Government would see a charge of £43 for each shipment of food coming in from the continent. It is not just my party warning against those plans: the former Glasgow Labour MP, now head of trade policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, William Bain—I think he is known in Glasgow as Willie—warned that the changes would hit small businesses particularly hard, as they would be bringing in “smaller, lower-value shipments”.
While supporters of Brexit argued that leaving the EU would enable the UK to negotiate better trade deals and reduce the cost for consumers, the reality is that the process has been fraught with uncertainty and complexity. So far, the UK has managed to agree two rather measly trade deals—we would say capitulations—with Australia and New Zealand, plus a pile of roll-over deals. That has been the sum total of Britain’s achievements on free trade, and let us not forget that the cost to farmers amounts to some £145 million. Negotiations have been slow and difficult, and there is still so much uncertainty about that future relationship between the UK and the European Union.
Meanwhile, people are struggling to make ends meet, and that is the biggest issue that constituents raise at my surgeries in Cranhill, Easterhouse, Baillieston and Parkhead. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the number of people in the UK living in poverty has risen for three consecutive years, with 40 million people now living in poverty, including, most shamefully, 4 million children.
Ultimately, the cost of living crisis is a complex issue that requires a multifaceted solution. It requires changes to social security policy, and I would argue it also requires short-term price controls on food, diversification of energy supplies and much more. That is precisely what the Committee in the eight-paragraph motion before the House would look at.
Dr Whitford
Does my hon. Friend agree that that Committee could propose what other European countries have done in reducing VAT on energy? If prices have doubled, we could halve VAT and it would still be revenue-neutral.
David Linden
I would never disagree with my hon. Friend—life is too short for that. The point is that Brexit was about Parliament taking back control. What Parliament has sought to do, via this Opposition day motion, is say, “Right, we have identified an issue with Brexit and the cost of living crisis. We want to empower Parliament to look at this issue further.” Yet the Minister—the deputy assistant junior viceroy—seems opposed to that.
Before I finish, I will touch briefly on rising mortgage rates, which are another aspect of the cost of living crisis that persists—one that will get worse and dominate our inboxes far more. Government inaction on that will mean that millions of households could, by next year, be thousands of pounds a year worse off owing to frankly unsustainable rises on their mortgage payments. On new-build estates in my constituency, such as Broomhouse, Gartloch, Belvidere and Eastfields, many young families are living in fear of fixed rates expiring in the coming months.
Capital Economics reports that 3.2 million households are paying interest rates of 3% or more. By the end of next year, that will have risen to 5.8 million—a rise of 2.6 million. As we look at support for homeowners, households need particularly innovative action and solutions to avoid catastrophe. An example that I would like to see on the table is the concept of employer salary sacrifice schemes, which may provide mortgage-holders with a bit more mortgage relief. Thus far, however, as with food prices, the Treasury believes that it is up to the markets to self-regulate, and I know from speaking to constituents that that simply will not cut it. The very reason butter is security tagged at Tesco in Shettleston is because we are allowing the markets to self-regulate.
The Government are very much asleep at the wheel. The Tories have overseen record food inflation caused by their cost of living crisis and their reckless Brexit. Working people are being forced out of buying basic items while their energy bills and mortgage payments rise, too. All the while, our European neighbours are taking action to tackle food prices and price gouging. So yes, I will by all means support the motion when the Division bell rings tonight, but in truth, I would rather my Glasgow East constituents have decisions about their lives made in Edinburgh by a Government we elect, not by an intransigent Tory Government here in London whom we have not voted for—indeed, one we have not voted for since 1955.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. If someone could inform the Chair of who the Tellers for the Ayes will be when that Division comes, that would be really useful. I call Marion Fellows.
Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)
Putting the word “Brexit” in the title of the debate will have confused those on the Government Benches, because that word has been expunged from their party’s political lexicon.
When talking about the financial difficulties faced by citizens of the United Kingdom, the Government will rightly mention covid. Certain individuals may have got rich on the back of the suffering of those who experienced covid either through their own illness or that of a loved one. More than 220,000 people died of covid in the UK, and people continue to die of it today. A few folk made a bit of money out of it, because the Government awarded contracts to their incompetent mates. We squandered £37 billion on a failed test and trace system, and covid damaged the UK-wide economy. The UK Government will rightly add to the equation the war in Ukraine, which has had a detrimental effect on the economy.
The existence of covid and the Ukraine war cannot be blamed on the Conservative and Unionist Government, which is why they are so keen to place those issues front and centre. It seems, from listening to the countless interviews that have taken place over the past five years or so, that the B-word has now almost entirely disappeared, but Brexit is and has been at the very heart of the Government in that time. They misled the electorate with promises of sunny uplands, as we have already heard, and now they wish to categorise Brexit as the latest entry in the newspeak dictionary. The poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer, and until this Government face up to the consequences of their actions, they will never be in a place to address the problems that Brexit has created. With both the Tories and Labour continuing to support a damaging Brexit that has wreaked havoc on the UK economy, it is clear that Westminster offers no answers to the pressures faced by ordinary households. We need a Committee that will focus entirely on that.
The OBR predicted in March that the UK’s GDP will fall by 4% as a result of Brexit, with trade and exports reducing by 15%. Additionally, a senior Bank of England official has said that £29 billion in business investment had been lost because of Brexit, because of leaving the EU. The former US Treasury Chief and top economist, Larry Summers, recently said that Brexit will be remembered as an “historic economic error”, adding that he would be “very surprised” if the UK avoids a recession in the next two years. He also noted that the UK’s economic situation is
“frankly more acute than…in most other major countries.”
All those people know more than me about politics and economics, but I know about people, including people in Motherwell and Wishaw. When I joined this place, I knew of one food bank. During recess, I heard about two more that have opened up— those are just the ones that I heard about during recess—and I visited one of them. People in my constituency are hungry. Grown men turn up at food banks and cry because they cannot feed their families. They want to work, and do work in many cases, but they do not earn enough to pay energy bills and to feed their families.
As for the question of baby milk, how in this country have we got to a stage where a security tag has to be put on baby milk, and where parents are diluting baby milk to make it go further? A Committee looking at the cost of living could look into that sort of thing. As a grandmother, I can tell the House: that is just not on.
The Citizens Advice Scotland social justice spokesperson noted that the energy cap
“remains higher than it was last summer, bills will remain higher than the beginning of this crisis in 2021, and since then people have faced a huge squeeze on their finances.”
As SNP spokesperson on disabilities, I deal all the time with disability organisations; I listen to them and the people they represent. The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid) read out a huge list of things that the Government have done for people during the cost of living crisis, but for disabled families, it is just not enough. Scope has put a price tag on the cost of living in a disabled household as £975 a month. The support given to people who are disabled, their families and their carers has simply not been enough. That leads me back to food banks. A huge percentage of people who attend food banks, because they need to, do so because they are disabled.
I wonder whether the Minister or any Government Members know—I cannot tell the House this—how much it would cost for someone to power five machines overnight to support their disabled child. Families are living with that struggle day and daily. In a country as rich as this, we should all be ashamed of that fact. Let us think of that: five machines for someone to keep their child alive, and they are offered something from the Government—I do not deny it—but it is nothing like enough. We need a social tariff on energy, as called for by Citizens Advice. We need to support people who, through no fault of their own, cannot effectively contribute to the economy, otherwise what is the point of a place like this?
In Scotland, things are better for people with children. The Scottish child payment has made a huge difference to families with children, especially during this economic crisis. This Government really need to look at social security benefits, and to stop dealing with people who have to rely on those inadequate benefits as some form of scroungers. There have always been people who play the social security system—I would not stand here and deny it—but think on the people who play the tax system, hoik all their money offshore and refuse to pay their correct taxes. Let us let this Committee look at that sort of thing. If it is a question of money to help families, households and people in general through this cost of living crisis and make up for the effect of Brexit, let the Committee look at that. Let us have a Committee dedicated to helping end this cost of living crisis.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
The biggest single issue that has come up on the doorsteps as I have been doing the rounds back in my constituency over the past number of weeks has been the cost of living. People are absolutely terrified, especially as mortgages are increasing and people on fixed-rate mortgages are having to renegotiate those very soon. There is a palpable sense of fear, and I am absolutely astounded that once again in a cost of living debate, we have not only empty Tory Benches—I can kind of understand that, because the Tories want to hide from the consequences of what they have done—but empty Benches on the Labour side of the Chamber. Of course, Labour Members want to hide from the consequences of their support for Brexit.
You would have thought that any sane, normal institution that is interested in pushing things forward for people would want to learn from mistakes. Brexit has cost 5.5% of GDP—or 4%, if we take the estimate given by the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid). That is a massive amount. We are talking about some £40 billion a year in tax revenues, yet the excuse for not having a Committee to investigate that is that it will cost a wee bit of money, or that Parliament does not have a big enough room to put it in. That is just insane. It does not make any sense at all. Lessons should and must be learned; if they are impacting on people, those people have a right to know.
Hon. Friends on the SNP Benches have described families as being the backbone of our communities, and that is especially true in the highlands. These are people—families—who are toiling to secure a future for their children, and Brexit has made that significantly more challenging for them. Those hard-working families are now at the mercy of consequences made in contradiction to their voting preference. The people of Scotland went to the polls and voted to reject Brexit, yet we have it imposed upon us, and the other nations of the UK are feeling the effects too, so why should this not be looked at in detail in a Committee? It just makes no sense, but then this place day by day makes no sense for people, especially those in Scotland.
When it comes to Brexit, do not forget that the Tories failed to oppose the hard-right voices in their ranks. They capitulated to them, resulting in these hardships, including price hikes for people and their families for essential goods such as bread, milk, rice and cooking oil. Those things have shot up astronomically in price over the past while as a direct consequence of Brexit—that cannot be blamed on the Ukraine war. That is not the cause of these price increases—there are direct correlations between the cost of basic foods that people are paying in the shops and Brexit.
Post-Brexit immigration policies have led to skills shortages, as we have heard from my hon. Friends, especially in the highlands. The health service, local services, the care sector, tourism and hospitality are all facing difficulties due to the workforce drain, yet there is to be no examination of what has gone wrong there, what could be done differently or what could be improved, because this place decides that it wants to brush all that under the carpet. The Government want to take no responsibility for that and they want to learn no lessons, because they are arrogant enough to say every time, “It is our way or the highway”. That is what they keep saying to the people of Scotland, in direct contradiction to their democratic preferences.
In the highlands, we have record unemployment and struggling industries, which are compounding the problem of a lack of the people we need to come here to work for us. Farms lack labour, resulting in less production and higher prices, increasing the suffering of communities. Rising living costs and mortgage rates have turned homes—homes that are normally the symbol of security—into symbols of anxiety, because people are worried about how they will pay their mortgages or their rent and keep a roof over their head.
Brexit was pitched as a dream of taking back control, but it has morphed into a self-inflicted nightmare. To distract people from the impacts of Brexit, we see the ignition of culture wars to try to take people’s minds off what is happening and to throw a dead cat on Brexit. The Government try to make out that Brexit is not causing harm to people, families and children day by day, but yet again, we are not to examine that. We must not look at that, because it just might expose some truths about what has happened due to Brexit and this place’s ideology coupled to that disastrous, self-inflicted harm.
What do we get from those on the Labour Benches on this matter? They are going to make Brexit great again—that is what they are saying. They say they can fix this. If they really want to do that, why not examine it in a Committee in this House so that we can look over the problems and say what went wrong and what could be done better? Instead they say, “No, let’s ignore that. Let’s not do that. It is too difficult, too challenging and it will upset the apple cart. We cannot do that because we have been told not to by our leadership.”
The promise made of an equal partnership for Scotland has clearly and demonstrably been broken by this place—not only by those sitting on the Government Benches, but by their comrades in the Labour party. They stand in the face of the Scottish people having a democratic choice over their future and being able to make their own examination of Brexit and their own investigation into what has gone wrong and what has been inflicted upon them. The Government and the Opposition are saying no to all that. This is just another example of this place standing in the face of doing what is right for people in their homes and communities.
I come back to the start of this: cost of living is the single biggest issue for people. When people are sitting at home just now, worried about everything, they are also worried when looking forward towards this winter, when they know that things will get worse again. They know that the cost of energy has not gone down very much, they know that prices are still continuing to rise and they know that mortgages will continue to rise. They are looking into that abyss just now and seeing the difficulties. It is affecting not just those who have already been thrust into abject poverty by decisions taken here in Westminster, but people who would have considered themselves relatively well off just a short time ago. Now they face this calamity—this coming together. When the Government talk about all the support they are bringing forward for people in their homes across Scotland and the other nations of the UK, what they are describing may sound a big figure, but it is like pouring a watering can on the bin fire they have set in this economy.
The only way for people to escape this madness, get things looked at properly and get things dealt with in the right way is for them to take the real control that they need, which is to have their democratic voice acknowledged, to have their say on the future of Scotland and for Scotland to regain its place in the European Union as an independent country.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I am anticipating a Division no later than 4.21 pm. We now come to the wind-ups, and I call the SNP spokesperson.
Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to wind up this SNP debate on the cost of living. There have been a number of excellent contributions from my colleagues and some other speeches from across the House, and surely we can all agree that the cost of living crisis is something we need to work together to solve. I am very grateful to the Clerks of the House who worked with us in drafting the motion, because it is an innovative proposal—we acknowledge that—but we are in extraordinary times and people need solutions.
I believe that politicians should work together. I spent 16 years in the European Parliament. [Interruption.] As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn) says, I seldom mention it, but I spent a number of years working with people, putting the badges to one side and finding solutions. Usually there is 20% over here that we will not agree on and 20% over there that we will not agree on, but there is 60% in the middle where we can find a solution. Surely to goodness, the people we all serve, who are struggling in their daily lives, need to see politicians working together and finding solutions. It really has been quite disappointing to hear that described as a “crackpot idea”, which I think is unworthy of this discussion.
We are looking to find solutions, and the first step is to admit that there is a problem. The fact is that too many people are struggling with real-life problems, and we can treat those problems. We have heard a number of points relevant to Scotland on which both Governments—the UK and Scottish Governments—are helping to ameliorate the situation. However, what we are trying to do is to get to the root cause of how we got here, where these problems come from and how we can stem them. People are struggling with their energy costs, their food costs and their rent or mortgage costs. We are all struggling with inflation, and we are all struggling with wages that are too low. Businesses are struggling with all of that, as well as with a labour shortage, a skills shortage, energy costs and finance costs. It is a perfect storm that needs brave measures and courage, and I really have been saddened to hear some of the hackery and the boneheaded, specious arguments against the establishment of this Committee.
I encourage colleagues to raise their game, because I am deeply alarmed—we will all have been having these meetings in our constituencies—at how many people are struggling and fearful right now in all our communities. Food import checks are going to be implemented from October, so food price inflation is likely to get higher, not better than it has been. As people come off fixed-rate mortgages—this point has been made—the rises they are looking at are utterly unmanageable for tens of thousands or millions of households and individuals. On top of that, we have the global instability caused by climate chaos, uncertain harvests worldwide, political instability, war in Europe and potential difficulties in south-east Asia, and the global food supply chain—the global supply chain full stop—is under unprecedented strain, so now really is the time to put the badges to one side and find solutions.
The causes of the cost of living crisis are interlinked. The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid) made the significant point that the motion does not, of course, deal with covid or Ukraine, but that is because covid and Ukraine were external shocks that we all needed to react to. Brexit is self-inflicted, and Brexit is also an ongoing process.
I am a Member of the EU-UK Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, and the trade and co-operation agreement that governs the relations between the UK and the EU is up for review in 2025. There is also the Windsor framework, which we supported. The SNP did not need to support the Windsor framework, but we did, because peace in Northern Ireland is too important. We supported that when we did not need to. We supported the Government in finding solutions to a problem that was brought about by the TCA, and indeed the lack of engagement and intellectual honesty that we saw from the UK Government in ignoring the problems that the Windsor framework goes a way to solve. We are going to come back to those. However, the TCA is up for review in 2025, and there are important solutions to be found.
We have heard that a committee of inquiry is an unusual thing, but actually it is not. In the Irish Parliament, the Oireachtas Éireann had a committee of inquiry into the banking crisis between 2014 and 2016. Obviously the banking crisis had deep significance in all our countries, but that was especially the case in Ireland and there were lessons to learn. The Danish Folketing had a commission of inquiry into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2012, because that major foreign policy decision needed to be learned from properly. The European Parliament had the special committee on the financial, economic and social crisis between 2009 and 2011—I know because I was on it—to learn the lessons of how the financial crisis came to be, and what we needed to do to stop it happening again. The idea that Brexit can be written off as an historical thing, when our citizens are dealing with the consequences of it day in, day out, does not withstand analysis. I understand that Government Members might be sick of experts, but I am quite a fan of them. A key provision of the proposal is that the Committee will be able to hear from experts and identify problems, so that we find solutions.
Brexit has impacted on the cost of living in a number of ways. As we have heard, there are other interlinked factors, but we believe there is a particular issue with how the UK left the European Union, which has made those things more difficult. We are willing to put our ideology to one side. We almost heard an argument that Members will vote against this Committee because SNP Members are in favour of independence. Well yes, damn sure we are. I am absolutely secure in my view that Scotland’s best future is as an independent state back in the European Union, and part of a global A-team of 500 million people. I also think that if the UK cannot do that, the best future for it is to get back into the single market, but I urge colleagues to read the motion—that is not what this is about. This is a suggestion for us all to work together, put the badges to one side, and find solutions to the problems that our people are experiencing.
The impact of Brexit on all those things merits further analysis. I am not interested in hackery about the other positions or parties, or who did what when. We are all in a problem that we need to fix, and we all need solutions. I will work with anybody to improve the lives of the people of Stirling, and to improve the lives of the people of Scotland. I want to see the people of the UK do well as well. Brexit, and the way it is running through, is making life more difficult on a daily basis for all our citizens. We have heard today about the benefits on which it was sold. I never cease to be amazed at the extent to which Government Members get giddy with excitement about hypothetical upsides and the gains of trade deals with various places and far-flung bits of the world, but ignore the 4% GDP hit that we have taken. There is a real need for intellectual honesty, and we think that this cross-party Committee would allow us to get there.
SNP Members believe that Brexit has made food more expensive—and wait until October. We believe that energy, particularly electricity, is more expensive—and wait until winter. We believe that the economy is weaker, trade is more difficult and the labour force is diminished, and that has impacted on and affected all our citizens whom we all serve. We owe it to them to put the badges to one side, roll our sleeves up and work together, and this Committee is an attempt to do that. We are willing to work together to find solutions to this problem, and I hope the other parties will raise their game and join us in that effort.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Dr James Davies)
I thank Members across the Chamber for their contributions to this debate on the cost of living. We have heard extensive and thoughtful contributions from those on the Front Benches, as well as from an array of Beck Benchers, including my hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid) and the hon. Members for Midlothian (Owen Thompson), for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter), for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Steven Bonnar), for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy), for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown), for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara), for Glasgow East (David Linden), for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows), and for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry)—I agreed with some of them more than with others.
Although I am pleased that we are having this debate, I emphasise that the cost of living challenges faced by people across the United Kingdom are a global challenge. We are not alone, and countries across western Europe and, indeed, the rest of the world are seeing the same trends, driven largely by Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine, and the aftermath of the covid pandemic—that has been acknowledged by many if not all Members.
The Conservative Government have been taking action to help people by providing cost of living payments. This year, we have provided £900 for households on means-tested benefits, £300 for pensioner households and a £150 payment for people receiving disability benefits. In Wales, those payments have supported more than 400,000 people through some challenging times. In fact, last winter, the UK Government paid almost half of household energy bills through the energy price guarantee and by providing £400 off those energy bills. In addition, last year we provided £650 for households receiving means-tested benefits, £300 for pensioner households, £150 for the disabled, a £150 council tax rebate for households in council tax bands A to D, a 5p cut to fuel duty, which has been extended to 2023-24, and a permanent increase in the amount that someone can earn before national insurance contributions are charged. That is, of course, on top of a 40% real-terms increase in the personal allowance since 2010. Going forward, the removal of the premium paid by those on prepayment meters will save 4 million of the poorest households £45 a year. All in all, the Government’s cost of living support amounts to an estimated £94 billion.
Of course, we as Conservatives believe that work is the best way out of poverty. We are extending the support that our jobcentres offer to low-paid workers so that they can increase their hours and move into better paid, higher quality jobs. In the Budget, we on the Conservative Benches confirmed the biggest expansion of free childcare in living memory. That will reduce costs for parents, who can get back to work, and ensure that a career break does not become a career end. Alongside that, we will see universal credit provide childcare costs up front. We are supporting people with the largest ever increase to the national living wage.
Alan Brown
I thank him for giving way. Rather than just reading his pre-prepared speech, will he answer any of the points raised in the debate? For example, I pointed out that Energy UK has observed that post-Brexit energy trading arrangements are adding £1 billion to our energy bills. What Brexit dividends are offsetting that £1 billion that has been added to our bills?
Dr Davies
I will come to the benefits of Brexit in due course, if the hon. Member will kindly wait.
We have increased the national living wage to £10.42 an hour in recent times, which is an increase of 9.7%. We have also cut the universal credit taper rate and increased the work allowance. We are supporting those on the state pension and those receiving pension credit and working age and disability benefits with a 10.1% uplift to match inflation.
What have the Opposition parties done? The SNP’s motion fails to recognise the support given by the UK Government to people across Scotland and commits instead to spending almost half a million pounds of taxpayers’ money every year on an unnecessary Select Committee. SNP Members say that they want to investigate matters relating to increases in prices, but while we know that global factors are at play, they seem to blame Brexit alone. That is the same Brexit that has enabled us to take back control of our laws, our money and our borders, and the same Brexit that is enabling UK fishermen to catch an additional £146 million-worth of fish a year.
David Duguid
Without rehearsing the earlier debate on whether Brexit is good or bad for fisherman, does my hon. Friend agree with the chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation who has said that
“whatever issues the industry has with Brexit and labour issues”—
those were mentioned earlier—
“these pale into insignificance if fishermen are banned from fishing”,
as they would be through the SNP and Green Scottish Government’s shambolic plans for highly protected marine areas?
Dr Davies
My hon. Friend is quite right. He champions the Scottish fishing industry, and rightly so.
The Procurement Bill, which we considered yesterday, will allow SMEs across the UK more easily to access £3 billion-worth of revenue and let us rewrite the rules on support for places and regions—including in Wales and Scotland—to deliver levelling up. The same Brexit has allowed two new freeports each for Wales and Scotland, and allowed the UK to lead the way in the roll-out of the covid vaccine, saving lives and putting the country back on track.
Dr Whitford
The hon. Gentleman must be aware that June Raine, the head of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, pointed out in December 2020 that covid licensing was done under the rules of the European Medicines Agency and was nothing to do with Brexit.
Dr Davies
We will have to disagree. This country showed the way on the management of the pandemic and the development of vaccines.
The SNP wants to discuss the cost of living, but it would rather import oil and gas from overseas than support tens of thousands of jobs in Scotland.
I would also like to look at the solutions proposed by the Labour Government in Wales. They seem to think that charging people to use motorways, bringing in a tourism tax and scrapping meal deals is the way to help people. Let us not forget the money squandered by the Welsh Government on a racing circuit never to be built, an airport where barely any planes take off and £150 million on a report into the M4 relief road which was then axed. And let us never forget Labour’s record on the economy. No Labour Government have ever left office with unemployment lower than when they came to power. It would perhaps be remiss of me not to remind the House that when Labour left office in 2010, the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury wrote, “I’m afraid there’s no money left.”
We will take no lectures on tackling the cost of living crisis from the Opposition parties. The UK Government are delivering an unprecedented package of support across the whole of Britain. The Prime Minister has been clear that it is his priority to halve inflation, ease the cost of living and give people the financial security they want and deserve. While the Opposition play politics, we are getting on with the job and delivering for the people of the United Kingdom.
Question put.
Business without Debate
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Delegated Legislation
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Global Military Operations
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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The Minister for Armed Forces (James Heappey)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered global military operations.
It is fantastic to be able to have this debate on global military operations in Government time. Looking back in Hansard—as I have done on many occasions—I noted that there was once a time when the House had an annual debate on each of the three services. Those debates were well subscribed and Members enjoyed them. While of late we have had a number of opportunities to discuss Ukraine specifically, I think it is some time since we have had the chance to discuss the totality of military operations around the world. I look forward to hearing speeches which, I suspect, will range across geographies and issues. It will be great to hear defence matters considered so widely and prominently—
James Heappey
—not least by my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee.
Mr Ellwood
I am sorry to intervene so early, but my right hon. Friend has raised an important aspect of the debate: namely, the mechanics of what we are discussing. I was pleased to hear him refer to the debates that we have had in the past, when there was more of a steady drumbeat. I hope that his words—which, I am sure, will be repeated by other Members, and I look to the Chair as well—will be heard, and I hope that the message that we need more debates and a greater understanding of what is going on in the world and our role in it can be sent to the usual channels, so that that can actually happen.
James Heappey
My right hon. Friend is entirely right, but he need not worry: the Ministry of Defence is a favourite of the Whips Office. Whenever the Whips come calling for us to take the opportunity to debate defence matters in the House, we are only too keen to do so, and I am delighted to have been provided with that time today.
The “Integrated Review Refresh 2023”, published in March, was clear about what we needed to do to respond to the deteriorating global security situation. It was about shaping the global strategic environment, increasing our focus on deterrence and defence, addressing the vulnerabilities that leave our nation exposed, and investing in the UK’s unique strengths. Defence is obviously at the centre of that ambition.
Ukraine has dominated defence matters over the past couple of years, so I thought I should make some mention of that, given the work that the UK has been doing in supporting the Ukrainians in their fight back against the Russian illegal invasion. Really, the update that it falls on me to provide to the House is that there is no update to give. Instead, I offer a word of caution. These are the very early stages of a necessarily complex plan, given the scale of the challenge that Ukraine faces. It will take a number of weeks until anyone can make a credible assessment of the success of the offensive. But it is under way; that much is clear. It is clear that there have been some early gains for the Ukrainians. In some parts of the Russian line, the regiments are performing credibly and holding their ground, but in many other parts of the line there is evidence of abandonment and mutiny.
But that should in no way encourage us to believe this is some war movie that ends with a wonderful, glorious, decisive victory. That might happen; it is perfectly possible, as the Ukrainians have shown time and again that they are brilliant at exceeding what normal military laws should expect. But it is also possible that a successful counter-offensive will still bring with it the requirement to go again next year. It matters enormously to our Ukrainian friends—just as it is important that Putin hears—that the international donor community is ready to rearm, retrain and go again next year, and the year after and the year after. If Putin thinks he can wait out the west, he is wrong. This counter-offensive will be successful—of that I am sure—but whether it will be decisively successful does not matter, in so much as the international community is ready to stand by Ukraine for as long as it takes.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
The Minister is setting out the situation facing Ukraine very accurately. The most worrying recent intervention has been the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant, which has caused massive disruption not only to the infrastructure but to the wider area. Is he able to say anything about the UK response to that and whether there is anything further the UK can do, given its logistics experience, to support the Ukrainians to get the plant working again and help those affected by the disaster?
James Heappey
The dam was in Russia’s control when it was damaged, so the opportunities to get in and assist with rebuilding in the immediate term are quite limited. It is probably too early to say for absolute certain who did it, but I think everybody in this House will probably have the same view on who did it and why. There is only one side that had any direct advantage in doing it at that point, and it is a war crime. The destruction of a dam like that with the impacts on the civilian population beneath it is a war crime. I cannot offer the hon. Lady the reassurance she seeks on the UK’s intent to rebuild—that would be premature—but we have been clear with the Russian Government that it is those sorts of actions that cause us to consider whether we should increase our support to the Ukrainian armed forces. What we saw was disgraceful, and her comments have been noted.
James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for the cautious note that he has sounded. Maybe later in his remarks he will agree with what I am about to propose. If we were to have a victory—if, for example, this offensive were to remove the Russians from Donetsk or even Crimea; who knows—that would not be the end of it. They are not going to turn around and say, “Okay, fine, never mind. Sorry about that, chaps. You’ve won.” Equally, we cannot possibly let them do anything other than remain where they are, so by far the best thing we can hope for is a very long, stretched-out stasis where neither side wins. Is that not a reasonable assessment?
James Heappey
No, I actually disagree with my hon. Friend on that. If the conflict were to freeze with some sort of Russian territorial gain accepted, implicitly—
James Heappey
Okay, I might have misunderstood my hon. Friend’s point, in that case.
James Gray
To clarify the record, I am a great friend of Ukraine and it would be quite wrong to be misunderstood. No, absolutely not; we must of course remove Russia from Ukraine if we possibly can. It must not in any circumstances be allowed to hold the territory that it has. None the less, the hope that we can remove the Russian troops swiftly or easily, and that they will somehow just go away, is a fallacious vision and we must not slip down that track.
James Heappey
I completely agree, which is why I sound caution on what success looks like this summer. It must not be assumed that there must be a decisive victory in this counter-offensive. Putin must know that the west has the patience to continue to provide Ukraine with the strategic depth it needs to win eventually; and the Ukrainians must know that they retain our support and, although they must give everything in this counter-offensive, we are also ready to support them for subsequent counter-offensives. In that knowledge, Putin will see the futility of continuing to hold the ground, because the west will not blink in its support of Ukraine.
Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
The Minister is surely correct in saying that we must be prepared for a long struggle, but it is vital, of course, that the Ukrainians have a continuing supply of arms to support their war effort. Is he absolutely confident that we have the manufacturing capability and the necessary supply chains to produce the weapons required by the Ukrainians?
James Heappey
Not solely in the UK, no, which I do not think will surprise anyone. Collectively, around the donor community, yes. Bear in mind that the majority of the arms that have been provided to Ukraine by the donor community thus far have not been manufactured in or for the donor countries but are munitions and weapon systems that we have procured from the world beyond and then donated to the Ukrainians.
It is also true that, after 18 months of my colleagues and I travelling around the world to buy up all this stuff, global stockpiles are diminished and global manufacturing capacity is torn between the market for the donor community to support Ukraine and the many countries—the UK included—that want to spend more on restoring stockpiles, because we have seen the importance of stockpiles to the credibility of our conventional deterrence. There is a challenge, and it is a good time to get into the defence industry. UK-based defence companies are clearly responding to that demand signal, as would be expected.
Ukraine has been able to hold off the Russian advance and then push it back, primarily because of the courage and resolve of the Ukrainian armed forces, but also because the international economic response has constrained Russia’s capacity to rearm and resupply, while the donor community, galvanised by the UK, has mobilised to do that for the Ukrainians.
As I said, President Putin thinks he can wait out the west, which is the biggest mistake he can make. He believes we lack strategic patience, but he is wrong. The United Kingdom and our allies around the world will stand by Ukraine for as long as it takes. It is that strategic patience that gives Ukraine its strategic depth. That depth, in support of a nation motivated against an existential threat, will surely be successful, whether that is this autumn, next autumn or the autumn after. It will eventually bring the Russians to the negotiating table on Ukrainian terms.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Minister for his resolute address to the Chamber today, and we totally support his message. There is no doubt about the determination of this United Kingdom and the west to move forward. I do not know whether it is real, made up or cosmetic, but is there a difference of opinion between the leader of the Wagner Group and Putin? Does that undermine the Russians in Ukraine? If it does, perhaps other people could make it change, too.
James Heappey
From the perspective of Putin, Shoigu and Gerasimov, who needs enemies when there are friends like Prigozhin? There appears to be an extraordinary internal struggle, but the House should be clear that the position of the UK Government, and certainly the focus of the Ministry of Defence, has never been and must never be about Russian domestic politics; it must be about ensuring that Russia fails in Ukraine and is seen to fail in Ukraine, and ensuring that our actions in support of Ukraine not only restore its sovereignty but draw a line that says might cannot be used anywhere in the world to achieve foreign policy aims and to violate the rules-based international order.
The main threat to our national security, as identified in the previous integrated review and defence Command Paper, has been significantly degraded without the UK armed forces firing a shot. We have built Ukrainian capacity, both through gifting and training. We have supported the Ukrainians in their planning and guarded against wider escalation through strengthening our commitment to NATO and increasing our defence spending accordingly. In that, the underpinning principle of the last Command Paper has been proven right. However, geopolitically, geo-economically and technologically, there is much more we have seen change and that we have learned from in the past few years. The Government have refreshed the integrated review accordingly, drawing out the necessity of hard power to deter adversaries, protect our interests and project our influence around the globe.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
I draw the House’s attention to my interest. The Minister knows of the resolute support on the Labour side of the House for Ukraine and for much of what he has set out. Russia is also seeking to sow division and destabilise elsewhere, including in the western Balkans, where we have an important and significant presence with the KFOR mission in Kosovo. My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) and I visited Kosovo recently, along with the shadow Foreign Secretary. Is the Minister aware of reports in the past 24 hours of serious tensions and attacks on police officers, with the detention today of three Kosovan police officers and their removal to Serbia? What conversations will he be having with KFOR and our allies in the region to ensure that that situation is dealt with?
James Heappey
I was in Pristina just 10 days or so ago, and in Sarajevo the day before that, and I am acutely aware of the tensions building in Kosovo. I met the KFOR commander during my visit and understand the difficult line he has to walk. However, the President of Kosovo also made clear to me her belief that Kosovo has a right to govern itself as it wishes, free from interference from its neighbour. Tensions are clearly high. The UK has been and remains a strong supporter of Kosovo as an independent country. Of course, I would not want to second-guess from the Dispatch Box the work of the KFOR commander, who has an extraordinarily difficult balance to strike. We also have to be clear that Kosovo is one of the UK’s great foreign policy success stories in the past 25 years. We have been patient and steadfast in our support and we must remain so.
Mr Deputy Speaker, you asked me to take about 15 minutes, and I have done that on Ukraine alone. I wish now to gallop around the world to tee up the wider debate. Within the euro-Atlantic, the joint expeditionary force, predominantly focused around a Baltic sea geography, continues to grow in prominence and is increasingly complementary to what NATO does. The UK currently has two aviation taskforces working with the JEF, alongside exercise Joint Protector. We support our Nordic allies, and over the past couple of years we have had a number of Army exercises and joint operations with Finland and Sweden, supporting their NATO accession. We look forward to continuing to work with them on that. The UK maritime, air and commando forces participated alongside JEF and NATO allies in the Swedish-led exercise Aurora. The Royal Navy ships continue to work with allies and partners in the seas north of Norway and Finland, in an important demonstration to Russia of our insistence on freedom of navigation and adherence of international law. Rivet Joint planes based at RAF Waddington continue to make regular flights into the Baltic sea area in support of NATO operations there. Typhoon jets operating from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus continue to participate in NATO air policing over southern Europe.
I will not expand any further on Ukraine and skip instead to our persistent presence in the Baltic, which continues to be with the enhanced forward presence battlegroup. That was doubled in size to respond to the immediate moment of crisis last February when the war in Ukraine began. We have subsequently increased the size of the original battlegroup but removed the second, so the total number of troops has gone up but we have gone back to having a single battlegroup. We continue to see that as the foundation on which our contribution to the NATO regional plans will be based when the supreme allied commander launches those in the next few months.
Ships and commando forces continue to contribute to NATO exercises in the Baltic. Indeed, there is a taskforce there right now, with a landing platform dock ship as well as a number of P2000s, the smaller ships in the Royal Navy fleet, which are doing a great job alongside navies that similarly operate patrol boats. From the very largest capital ships in the Royal Navy all the way down to the very smallest, it has been good to see them finding a role in underlying the interoperability of NATO.
In Poland, we continue to contribute to the US forward presence battlegroup as well as deploying air defence to Poland to support the logistics nodes from which support to Ukraine is launched. Although this is not an exclusively Euro-Atlantic capability, it will not surprise the House that the principal threat against which we maintain a nuclear deterrent continues to be Russia. As these crews tend to be the forgotten few in these debates, it is probably appropriate to mention that their work is the underpinning of UK sovereignty. They do not speak of what they do. In fact, most people on those boats do not even know where exactly it is that they have been. We do not say for exactly how long they are deployed, because those are matters of national security. None the less, day in, day out, 52 weeks a year, year after year for more than 50 years, our submariners crewing our nuclear deterrent have kept this nation safe and underpinned our sovereignty. They are an extraordinary group of people and the humility with which they conduct their business is probably the most amazing thing about them.
James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)
I do not want to put the Minister on the spot in the Chamber, but can he update the House on any efforts to reward that service with a continuous at sea deterrent medal?
James Heappey
I will defer to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Defence People, Veterans and Service Families for his insight on that in his summing up. What I would reflect is that the Submarine Service takes an incredible pride in its work. Whereas Army, Air Force and surface sailors have rows upon rows of medals, all that matters to these crews is the colour of their dolphins, and they take enormous pride in that. I risk not being welcome in Faslane in case they want a medal as well, so all I will say is that what my hon. Friend has said is noted, and I will leave it to my right hon. Friend to come back to him on that specific point at the very end.
The challenge extends beyond the Euro-Atlantic. In the Caribbean, we continue to have a permanent presence both in terms of Army training teams and a Royal Navy ship. The work of that ship extends from counter-narcotics all the way through to humanitarian relief during the hurricane season.
In the South Atlantic, we continue to have both a garrison and a guard ship on the Falklands, as well as regular service from the Royal Air Force. Indeed, that Royal Air Force presence services the wider overseas territory network. In Ascension, for example, the refurbishment of the runway has been completed. Last week, I think, we saw a C-17 that had been to or from the Falklands, landing in St Helena, which was the first visit from a military plane for some time.
In West Africa, the UK has a growing role in answering the security challenges of the Sahel. I stress that that is not through the participation in a UN peacekeeping force and certainly not through any direct action on our part. That, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan and through the French experience in Mali, is not the way to be doing business. Instead, it is through supporting regional solutions such as the Accra initiative where we can develop the capacity of the Ghanaians, the Côte d’Ivoireans, the Togolese, the Beninois and the Nigerians, and work with the Burkinabès that we can get after the security challenges that exist in that region.
Similarly, in the Lake Chad Basin, we continue to support the Economic Community of African States multinational standby force to deal with the security challenges that exist both from Boko Haram and Islamic State, and that remains a major line of effort particularly through our partnerships with Nigeria and Cameroon.
In East Africa, the British Army has a permanent presence in Kenya, which is a training base that is very well subscribed year round, and from which we train in partnership with the Kenyans. We are grateful to the Kenyan Parliament for its recent ratification of the defence co-operation agreement between our two countries. However, in east Africa our principal concern is of course the ongoing instability and insecurity in Somalia and the challenge of al-Shabaab. We remain committed to that situation, not only as penholder at the UN, but through recognising that, as ATMIS, the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia, comes to an end, a new east African solution to Somalia may well be the right answer, and the UK will have a strong role to play in supporting that regional solution.
Even further afield, we have a growing presence in the Indo-Pacific, with two Royal Navy ships, HMS Spey and HMS Tamar, permanently present in the region, one tending to operate on a loop around the south Pacific—tough work if you can get it—and one working further north in and around the Korean peninsula. They are proving incredibly successful at flying the white ensign in parts of the world where the Royal Navy had not been seen for some time.
There is a chronic challenge in that part of the world from growing Chinese influence; not all of it is malign, it is important to say, but if we want to maintain our friendships and partnerships in the south Pacific, we need to be there and be sharing the burden alongside the Australians and New Zealanders, and that is exactly what we are doing. Similarly, for our partners in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and further north in Korea and Japan, it is important that the UK is seen in that part of the world. An enormous amount of UK trade flows through the Indo-Pacific, and if we want and expect to trade freely with those countries, it is right that a country with the global reach of the UK contributes to their regional security.
Indeed, I will go further, because I think that, if we want the United States of America to remain engaged in Euro-Atlantic security, it is entirely right that the UK and other European countries with global reach contribute to Indo-Pacific security, so that we are burden sharing across both theatres and recognising that both the United States and European countries have an interest in both.
Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I believe the Minister is going to come back to the issue of the Balkans, and the United States is somewhat disengaged from what is developing there. Apparently—maybe he can confirm this—the USA has vetoed a reinforcement of the NATO headquarters in Kosovo. That is just encouraging the Russians to carry on fomenting instability. I would not be against the UK’s reinforcing EUFOR, or European Union Force Bosnia and Herzegovina, there. We are not against European co-operation in defence, and just because it is an EU force, we should not have some religious doctrine that prevents us from co-operating with it just as we would with a NATO force—albeit we might need to make very clear that it is a bilateral arrangement.
James Heappey
It is heartening to hear that from my hon. Friend, and I agree with him. The most obvious route through which we achieve Euro-Atlantic security is NATO, but where the EU has a successful mission running, we should be perfectly willing to work with and within that mission to achieve mutual foreign policy aims. Similarly, there are plenty of parts of the world where the EU is already the framework, where the UK has no wish to be a framework in its own right but does have an interest, and again, I can see opportunity for the UK to work with and within the EU mission—take, for example, Mozambique, although I offer that as a for instance rather than any promise.
Mr Ellwood
I am grateful for the opportunity to pursue that important point. The trade and co-operation agreement, the Brexit deal, did not primarily include security. While recognising that NATO is the cornerstone of European security, the European Union plays a role in other aspects of non-state security across Europe, so would my right hon. Friend be minded to look at an opportunity for us to endeavour to strengthen our relationship and co-operation with the EU on that front?
James Heappey
Undoubtedly so; my right hon. Friend is correct. For all those countries who are on a Euro-Atlantic pathway, their aspiration tends to be NATO first, because they consider the security risks to be greatest, but for all of them that Euro-Atlantic pathway invariably means both NATO and EU membership. Whatever our views on Brexit, it is churlish to ignore that, and for countries in the western Balkans or the Caucasus who want to move away from their traditional sphere and towards the Euro-Atlantic one, we should be supportive of both their NATO and their EU aspirations.
The danger, with nearly half an hour gone, is that an awful lot of ambassadors will read Hansard tomorrow with concern about the absence of their country and region from my speech. I will sit down quickly so that the Opposition have the opportunity to respond and Members have the opportunity to contribute, but if time allowed, I would have gone on at length about the continued importance of the middle east and all our partners in that region—we value their friendship and partnership enormously. We recognise the role that we have to play in continuing to contribute to security there. We are concerned about the security challenge in the high north and continue to work with partners to address that. We recognise our responsibility to maintain a presence in the Antarctic. Quite frankly, I could probably have spoken for an hour and a half and still not covered the totality of global military operations, but 28 minutes is more than enough, so I will sit down.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Maybe that reinforces Tobias Ellwood’s point, but there we go.
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
The Minister has indeed made a powerful case for another defence policy debate in short order, as the Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), said at the start. This House always welcomes a debate on defence policy, and I look forward to the contributions that we are set to hear from all parts of the House.
As the Minister recognised, this is also an important opportunity for us to reaffirm UK unity in support of Ukraine, which he did. As the Ukrainians mount their counter-offensive, they arguably need UK solidarity, NATO unity and international support more now than at any time in the 473 days since Putin first launched his brutal illegal invasion of their country. Remarkably, they have already taken back more than half the territory that Putin seized in the early days of his war, but as the Minister quite rightly said, these are early days in the counter-offensive, and although there are early signs of Ukrainian gains, they now face Russian forces that have dug in defences and have superior air power and drone technology.
There is also no sign of Putin’s strategic aims having changed, and the Russian military is, despite the damage done by the Ukrainian resistance in their courageous fighting, far from a spent force. Putin is expanding his war effort and massing his troops and firepower, and his Russian industry is on 24/7 wartime production. Again, as the Minister noted, this is long term: Ukraine has now been fighting Russia for over nine years, not one year.
There may be a change in Government next year, but there will be no change in Britain’s resolve to stand with Ukraine, confront Russian aggression and pursue Putin for his war crimes. Let me pay personal tribute to the Minister for his efforts on this. I am proud of Britain’s leadership on Ukraine, and I want to feel the same in six months’ time, so what new support is the UK sending to Ukraine now that the offensive has begun? What are the Government’s aims for next week’s Ukraine recovery conference in London? How have Ministers stepped up production in the UK defence industry, and what use has been made of urgent operational requirements to speed that up?
This debate is also an opportunity, four days from the start of Armed Forces Week, to celebrate the service of our forces personnel. At home or on global military operations, our forces personnel are essential to our national defence, our national resilience and our national obligations to allies. Theirs is the ultimate public service. On behalf of the Labour party, I thank the serving men and women in our armed forces for all they do to keep us safe. I also want to recognise the unsung work and essential expertise of the non-uniformed staff in defence.
However, after the Minister’s speech, we have to ask: what is the Government’s purpose in this debate? Why is this happening now, before and not after the defence Command Paper is published? Where is the Defence Secretary? Where is his vision for UK leadership and contribution to NATO? Where is his apology for the failure to honour this nation’s pledge under the ARAP—Afghan relocations and assistance policy—scheme to those brave Afghans who put their lives at risk to work alongside our forces? Where is the action that he is taking to fix MOD procurement, which the Public Accounts Committee say is “broken” and “repeatedly wasting taxpayers’ money”? Where is the 2023 action plan for Ukraine that he first promised back in August last year? What has he been doing for the last six months? Part of the answer, of course, is leaning very heavily on his No. 2, the Minister for Armed Forces, as he is today.
Given that the Minister commands such respect across both sides of the House, we look to him to provide us with the reassurance that the new Command Paper, due this month, will be reported first to the House and not briefed beforehand to the media or to policy institutes. If he wants to intervene to give the House that reassurance, he would be very welcome to do so.
James Heappey
The right hon. Gentleman knows that the Secretary of State and I have the highest regard for Mr Speaker, who has been very clear on these matters. We will ensure that both Mr Speaker’s instructions and the right hon. Gentleman’s exhortations are noted.
John Healey
That is welcome indeed and noted on our side, not least because the new defence Command Paper will be a really important publication. No country comes out of a war in the same way as it went in. Ukraine will, and must, have a serious impact on how our future global military operations and our homeland defence is conducted.
Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began last year, 26 NATO nations have rebooted defence plans and budgets. Chancellor Scholz discarded decades-long German policy and boosted defence by €100 billion. President Macron has promised the same budget increase in France. Poland will spend 4% of GDP this year. Finland and Sweden have set aside decades of non-alignment to apply for NATO membership. However, there has still been strategic inertia from British Ministers over any deep rethink of international and domestic planning.
James Gray
I am interested to hear the right hon. Gentleman’s vision of the future. He believes that there will be a Labour Government in a year’s time—although I personally do not agree with him—so when there is, what commitment will he make to defence spending under a Labour Government?
John Healey
I take nothing for granted—I have been around too long for that—and we will fight hard every day to make sure that we do get a Labour Government. The hon. Gentleman will also appreciate that it is right to judge Ministers by their actions, not their words. I say to him that in the last year of the last Labour Government, in 2010, Britain was spending 2.5% of GDP on defence. That level has never been matched in any of the 13 years since under Conservative Ministers.
James Gray
I am most grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, and I am so sorry to intervene twice. The figure was indeed slightly more than 2%, if not quite 2.5%, but of course, GDP was very much smaller. The amount that the Labour Government were spending when they lost power in 2010 was significantly less—billions of pounds less—than we are spending today.
John Healey
The point about the measure—counts in terms of GDP—is that it demonstrates the priority that the Government of the day give to a particular area of necessary spend. It was 2.5% of GDP in 2010. We have got nowhere near that in any of the 13 years after 2010 under the hon. Gentleman’s Governments.
On the question of a necessary rethink in domestic and international strategy, I say to the hon. Gentleman that there were indeed some welcome changes in the 2023 integrated review: a new commitment to reinvigorating important bilateral ties across Europe; a declaration that the UK’s Indo-Pacific tilt has been delivered; and a recommitment to NATO as our overriding priority. However, that was a rebalancing of defence plans, not a reboot. While NATO is increasing the strength of its high readiness force to 300,000, the Government are cutting the Army still further, to its smallest size since Napoleon. While Germany boosts its defence budget by over €100 billion, the Government continue with real cuts in day-to-day defence spending. While Poland is buying an extra 1,000 tanks, the Government are cutting back our UK Challengers from 227 to 148—all this in direct breach of the promise the then Prime Minister made to the British people at the 2019 election, when he said that
“We will not be cutting our armed services in any form. We will be maintaining the size of our armed services.”
All this is part of the pattern of the 13 years since 2010. There are now 45,000 fewer full-time forces personnel, one in five Navy ships has been axed, and over 200 RAF planes have been taken out of service. Satisfaction with forces life has hit a new low, and our ammunition supply has been run down to just eight days. The Defence Secretary summed it up in January when he told the House that
“I am happy to say that we have hollowed out and underfunded”—[Official Report, 30 January 2023; Vol. 727, c. 18.]
our armed forces. While threats increase, our hollowed-out forces are working with fewer numbers and less training, and without the long-promised new kit that they need to fight and to fulfil our NATO obligations, such as Ajax.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is making an excellent point about the lack of investment over many years. Does he agree that today, it is particularly worth mentioning the potential capability gap with the retirement of the Hercules fleet? Given that we have quite rightly paid tribute to our armed forces, including the RAF, perhaps my right hon. Friend wants to say something about the looming capability gap—for up to two years, as I understand it—with those wonderful aircraft having been retired recently.
John Healey
My hon. Friend is right to pick up that point, and he is not the first on either side of the House to raise those questions. They have still not been satisfactorily answered by Ministers, particularly if the Government’s strategy is to have our forces persistently forwardly deployed. When the Minister responds to the debate, he might like to try again to reassure those who are still not satisfied that the A400 provides the capabilities in very specialist areas that the Hercules had been able to provide for so long.
I am conscious of the time and the number of people who want to speak, but I want to pick up where the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray), who so ably chairs the armed forces parliamentary scheme—a scheme that is so highly valued on both sides of the House—set out, with the budget that defence requires. We left government in 2010 spending 2.5% of GDP. In November, the Defence Secretary told this House that
“the inflationary pressure on my budget for the next two years is about £8 billion”,
but the Chancellor announced just £5 billion in the spring Budget, earmarked only for stockpiles and nuclear. That means no new money for pressures on the core defence budget or capability gaps, or indeed to deal with inflation.
It is not just how much we spend on defence: it is how well we spend it. Since 2010, we have seen Ministers waste at least £15 billion of taxpayers’ money through MOD mismanagement in procurement, with £5 billion wasted since 2019 when the Defence Secretary took up his post. Those failures have implications for the defence Command Paper: it risks being a defence plan driven by costs, not threats, framed by the Defence Secretary’s failure to win the funding that he has said is needed.
In the face of threats that the Government confirm are growing and intensifying, I ask the Minister these questions: will the defence Command Paper put an end to the Defence Secretary’s hollowing out of our armed forces? Will it halt deeper Army cuts? Will it pick up Labour’s plans to conduct a NATO test of major defence programmes to ensure that we meet our NATO obligations? Will it pick up our plans to establish a stockpile strategy to replenish UK supplies and sustain our support for Ukraine? Will it pick up our plan to renew the nation’s moral contract with those who serve in our forces?
In the end, the country is best served when defence can be bipartisan. We want this defence Command Paper to be a sound defence plan for the country, not just the plan of current Conservative Ministers. If the Government are willing to take these steps, Ministers will have Labour support. If not, the big decisions will have to be taken after the next election, I hope by a Labour Government.
Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)
I pay tribute to the Minister for his opening remarks and join him in paying tribute to the valiant work that our armed forces do. He gave us a tour de force of where we are represented around Europe and around the world, doing more than our fair share of making sure that we can sleep well at night, that our backs are covered and that we can stand up to the growing threats we face. I do not want to diminish his speech, but he could have just stood up and said, “We are busy, and we are getting busier,” because by any measure our world is getting more dangerous and more complex.
Globalisation, by which I mean international co-operation and the interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures and populations, is slowly dying. After the end of the cold war, Britain arguably embraced that concept of globalisation more than any other nation. As nations actively retreat, pushed forward by covid, becoming more siloed and protectionist and introducing more isolationist policies to reduce exposure and increase economic resilience, Britain’s economy and security are increasingly exposed.
When global security deteriorates, our economy suffers, as has been so blatantly illustrated by Ukraine and the price of oil and gas and food. It is baffling to hear the Treasury continue to say, “Yes, we will spend 2.5% on defence when economic conditions improve,” not realising the obvious connection that our economy and international security are directly related. Half our GDP is affected by international headwinds. We need to invest now to protect our economy and to allow our economy to grow.
Such is the deteriorating threat picture that the Government had to commission an update of the defence and security policy—the “Integrated Review Refresh”, as it was called. The Prime Minister’s opening paragraph said it is
“recognised that the intensification of competition between states was sowing seeds of instability.”
Paragraph 8 of the refresh stated:
“There is a growing prospect that the international security environment will further deteriorate in the coming years, with state threats increasing and diversifying in Europe and beyond. The risk of escalation is greater than at any time in decades”.
I have never seen such strong language in a Government paper before. It gives a clear warning that we are in for a bumpy decade. I therefore pose the question: why are we still stuck with a peacetime defence budget of just 2%? That is having a consequential impact on all three services.
At the time of the Gulf war in 1990, the Royal Navy had 51 frigates and destroyers and today it has just 18; the RAF had 36 fast jet squadrons and today it has just seven; and the British Army could muster three armoured divisions in Germany alone and one here in the UK. Today, we would struggle to put together one. It is not just the size of the armed forces that has diminished; the last defence review introduced ruthless cuts to equipment. The main battle tank is now reduced to just 156 and is three decades old, and upgrades will not be completed until the next decade. The armoured fighting vehicle, the Warrior, is also decades old, and it was replaced by a wheeled vehicle without a turret. The 8-tonne recce vehicle that was brought into service in 1971 was replaced by the massive 43-tonne Ajax, which should have entered service in 2017, but a dire procurement process means it is still struggling to get sign-off.
It is a grim state of affairs when our armed forces are not shaped to meet the threats, but trimmed to meet the budget. I appreciate that I am not speaking to the right Ministers here, because they understand this. It is the Treasury that needs to appreciate this, and I think we should pay tribute to the work that I know Defence Ministers are doing behind the scenes to make the case that we need to upgrade our defence posture, because the consequence of not doing so is the cuts we have seen.
The Type 32 frigate programme has been dropped completely, the E-7 ISTAR—intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance—plane has been reduced from five to three platforms, the Hawk training aircraft has been cut completely, the Typhoon fleet has been reduced, and even the plans to introduce the promised 138 F-35s have stalled at just 78. The Hercules transport aircraft, which is absolutely imperative for special forces operations, has been cut in its entirety. However, the real kick in the teeth is the armed forces’ manpower, which has been reduced from 82,000 to 72,000, while our land warfare capabilities have been severely reduced by the reductions in tanks, armoured fighting vehicles and artillery systems.
Sadly, we are neither ready for war, nor any longer able to project a viable conventional deterrent to maintain the peace. The Navy and the RAF have to some extent regrouped with investment and upgrades in response to the changing character of conflict, but the British Army has been left behind, without a clear narrative as to what it should be training for, how it should fight and, indeed, the force structure it should adopt.
Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
I am very grateful to the right hon. and gallant Member for giving way. Today is the 41st anniversary of the liberation of the Falkland Islands, and it is an appropriate moment to celebrate the sacrifice of everybody who gave their lives in that campaign. It is a good moment, however, to reflect on how our country would go about embarking on such a military operation today. What is his assessment of our capability to launch a campaign like the campaign that liberated the Falklands?
Mr Ellwood
I certainly pay tribute, as I think we all would, to our armed forces for their courage and what they did to liberate the islands, but I am actually articulating that very point in saying that we are behind the curve. This goes against the spirit of what Ministers are trying to do to step forward, as I have outlined, and the recognition in the defence review refresh that the world is getting more dangerous.
The NATO summit in Vilnius is approaching, and there will be four main themes. The first is maintaining NATO deterrence, which will mean moving from out-of-area operations such as Afghanistan towards a NATO territorial force. Secondly, there will be plans to transform the alliance into a more modernising rapid response force, rising from 40,000 to 300,000. Thirdly, there will be support for Ukraine. Finally, there will be a look at global challenges, including China. In every one of those cases, there will be a call for greater investment in our defence posture, and that will add to our overseas commitments.
We need to recognise what we have done in Ukraine, and I again pay tribute to Ministers for that. We have stepped forward, and more so than any other nation in Europe. We can be very proud of that—not just militarily, but with the political commitment. We have been an exemplar, with the training we have done with the Ukrainians, the next-generation light anti-tank weapons, the battle tanks and the Storm Shadows, and even in encouraging the F-16s to get there as well. We have become ever less risk averse, and ever more willing to look Putin in the eye and not be spooked. I also pay tribute to the Government for planning and putting together the Ukraine recovery conference, because it is critical to look at the next steps we will actually take.
I took a look at my last speech from when we debated Ukraine, and some of the recommendations I made then remain valid today. We still need to agree what the mission is. For me, it is actually the removal of Russian forces from mainland Ukraine. That should be clarified, but I believe it is what the Ukrainians want. Crimea is a separate and more complicated challenge. We must secure UN safe haven status for the port of Odesa to go back to getting grain out so that we can reduce food inflation, which is running at about 19% in this country. We must assist Ukraine to construct its own major armaments programme—for example, in Poland—so that it can manufacture, assemble and replenish its own weapon systems, rather than relying on western stocks. We must ensure that the Wagner militia is listed as a terrorist organisation, along with sanctioning Putin directly. I also emphasise the need to welcome Ukraine into the joint expeditionary force—I still have not had an answer as to why that is not a possibility and a stepping stone into NATO. We wish the Ukrainians the very best as they move forward. There is an emphasis on saying that they can do this, but they need that continued commitment, which I hope we will see from NATO, despite what happens in the United States over the next couple of years.
As I said at the beginning of my remarks, our world is changing fast. Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine will not be limited to that part of eastern Europe. Iran could soon join North Korea in posing a nuclear and ballistic missile threat, and there is increasing instability in the western Balkans. China is also challenging the norms of international behaviour. Great power rivalry is back, global tensions are increasing, and when we add the challenges of climate change, increasing competition over resources, population growth and the proliferation of the weaponisation of artificial intelligence, there is a strong argument to increase defence spending. There are many questions for the defence Command Paper, which I hope will be produced soon.
Finally, Armed Forces Day is rapidly approaching, which is a chance for a grateful nation to show its support to the men and women who make up our armed forces community. They are on duty around the world, at sea, on land and in the air, promoting peace, delivering aid, providing security, fighting terrorism, working with our allies and supporting our comrades in arms, such as in Ukraine. Armed Forces Day is the day when barrack spaces and garrisons are opened up across the country for local communities to visit on a family day out, and to learn more about what our military does, the equipment it uses and the vital role in plays in watching our backs. Those events are held up and down the country and are both informative and entertaining, involving celebrities and local businesses. They are a simple but much appreciated way to say thank you to our valiant armed forces community for all its hard work, dedication and efforts to keep us safe in the UK and across the globe. As the armed forces covenant reminds us, we have a duty of care to all our service personnel, not just in the training they receive and the equipment that is procured, but in ensuring good provision of accommodation as well as mental health support.
Our armed forces who step in harm’s way for us deserve the best support we can provide. When we speak of the armed forces community, that is not just the regulars in uniform; it is the reservists, the cadets, the surrounding families, husbands and wives—it is all those directly supporting anyone who wears the uniform. I give a special mention to our veterans who may no longer be serving, but who remain very much part of the armed forces family. If hon. Members see anyone in uniform on Armed Forces Day, or a veteran proudly wearing their medals, please thank them for their service—it will make their day. Let us all support our brave military on Armed Forces Day.
Dave Doogan (Angus) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to speak on behalf of the Scottish National party in this important debate on defence, and the role that the people and professionals in defence play in keeping us safe. I listened intently to the Minister as he set out the interventions, support and donations that the United Kingdom has played a key role in delivering to the Ukrainian defence forces. Today, as they always have had, the UK Government have the full support of the SNP. I pay tribute to some of the key decisions that have been made by the United Kingdom Government, not least of which was the decision on main battle tanks. That support continues and endures.
Yesterday I was pleased to have the opportunity, together with my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), to meet the Ukrainian ambassador to underline that support, at both a political level and on behalf of the Scottish Government and the people of Scotland. The unanimity that exists in this place over Ukraine is a welcome respite. Similarly, the United Kingdom does a lot of outstanding defence work in support of the overseas territories, which is a benign activity and welcome for those territories that benefit from it. There is not much to argue with in any of that.
However, when we go a little bit further afield, the Indo-Pacific tilt has played a key role in the Government’s defence ambitions in my four years in this place, and it is one with which I take some issue. It is easy to caricature it as slipping back into an imperial mindset of power mirroring trade, and how without power there can be no trade, but trade has been inexorably globalising for the last 50 years—even back as far as the second world war—and nothing will stop that. If we look at the evidence from other European manufacturing and large economies such as Germany, we see that there are many more Mercedes than Jaguars in China, south-east Asia and Australia, but I do not see the Kriegsmarine getting deployed in an Indo-Pacific tilt as the Royal Navy is.
It seems to me—I would be happy to be corrected—that this is a rebound from Brexit. It is about getting as far away from the European continent as possible. Obviously, I do not judge senior officers for that—they are reacting to their political masters’ ambitions. Indeed, to echo the Chair of the Defence Committee, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), as Armed Forces Day approaches, it is important that we all acknowledge the sacrifice and service that people in uniform make to protect us.
In terms of protection and the Indo-Pacific tilt, I am not certain what or whom will be protected in that theatre, and I do not understand what incumbency there is on the United Kingdom to play that role, other than an ambition towards arresting a decrease in relevance. I do not see India or Australia patrolling off the coast of Scotland—that said, neither do I see the Royal Navy patrolling off the coast of Scotland very often. Of course, Canada and the United States have a Pacific coast, so they have a relevance and a role
How is this going to be done? Let us take a look at the assets. As we would expect, the United Kingdom is a very senior member of the F-35 club—it would be a scandal if it was not playing a role within that—and a significant part of every one of those aircraft is manufactured in the United Kingdom. The people working in that facility should be tremendously proud of that. The problem is, it is not the 138 F-35s that were originally vaunted but an order of 48 as yet not fully fulfilled, with a further 26 to come. Mr Deputy Speaker, if you wanted to see a strained defence procurement budget, that would be it. The F-35s are the B-variant, so they will happily operate off a carrier—unlike Typhoon, which cannot. France figured out that conundrum much more successfully. So those F-35s will not have the mass they require as an APEX theatre weapons instrument to direct fire elsewhere.
We have nuclear-powered attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines—SSN and SSBN—which are of course part of what the UK is very keen on; I will get to that later. The Queen Elizabeth carriers are both excellent Scottish-built ships, and I look forward to HMS Prince of Wales being back on active service just as soon as possible. On support ships to support carrier strike, the Type 23s are way past their sell-by date, for want of investment. If the Type 45s have not been through the power improvement project, they will not be going to the Indo-Pacific any time soon, because they cannot make it past the Mediterranean. On fleet solid support, my goodness: we have Royal Navy warships designed by the Spanish and largely built in Spain. What on earth would Sir Francis Drake make of that?
On SSN-AUKUS, I wonder whether the Royal Navy has explained to the Australians about the 14 rotting submarines in Devonport and the seven in Rosyth, and the inability to either fund or prosecute their recycling. There is the cost of that and the scandalous cost of the refit of HMS Vanguard. Government Members are very excited about the nuclear enterprise and the SSN and SSBN, but I think they are less enthusiastic about the steel for those submarines coming from France. It is literally beyond comprehension. In terms of further defence of carrier strike, they will not have Crowsnest any time soon. Mr Deputy Speaker, you will be surprised to hear that fully 10 years after it was supposed to be available, it is still not available, costs are out of control and there is no idea when it will be in a position to protect the carrier strike. So, in essence, it is a pretty patchy picture.
On the cost of nuclear, there are eye-watering costs for: the long overhaul period and refuel, as we have touched on; keeping Vanguard boats in service for want of replacing them in time; and the delays and cost overruns to Astute. Given the through-life costs of hundreds of billions of pounds, nuclear waste disposal, rising sea levels potentially affecting all seven nuclear sites in the United Kingdom, and Scotland forced to host nuclear submarines, it is quite clear that of all the peoples of the world, Scotland’s have the most to fear from the UK’s nuclear deterrent.
The cost of nuclear is an opportunity cost, as well as in cash terms. What many will not know is how stretched the United Kingdom defence enterprise is. If you want evidence of that, it is manifest in the fabric of the defence estate. I encourage anybody to go to a local defence establishment in their constituency, if they have one, and see that some of them look like they were abandoned at the end of the cold war. That is because, in terms of maintenance and repair, they were abandoned at the end of the cold war. Our accommodation offer for our service personnel is risible. We have talked about ageing platforms of Type 23 and Vanguard. Vanguard’s unplanned maintenance means it has gone beyond its 2024 retirement date, beyond 2028 and is now into the early 2030s at extraordinary extra cost. There are four Dreadnought boats at a cost of £31 billion, plus £100 billion for through-life support. That £131 billion is 6% of the defence budget for 30 years of service. It is simply eye-watering. And of course, of the paltry £5 billion extra for defence this year squeezed out of the Chancellor, £3 billion has to go on nuclear.
UK defence policy is in crisis. We can see that from the dropping of orders for F-35s and E-7 Wedgetails. We can see it in the recruitment crisis, with poor pay, poor retention and unacceptable conditions. We can see it in the damning results of the armed forces personnel attitudes surveys; the unaffordable obsession with nuclear; conventional capabilities pared to the bone; no armoured fighting vehicles; geriatric main battle tanks, combat air pilots who only do air policing; cutting corners; fitting for but not with; 10 years to train fast jet pilots; binning perfectly good C-130Js; losing fast jet pilots after two tours, at extraordinary cost to the taxpayer; and in the budget of 2.5% of GDP
“as fiscal and economic circumstances allow”,—[Official Report, 15 March 2023; Vol. 729, c. 837.]
That is fooling nobody.
Then there is the big one: Germany. Germany’s 2% commitment, notwithstanding its extra €100 billion, means that its defence budget will outstrip the United Kingdom’s defence budget. The UK will be reduced to playing second fiddle on the defence stage within the European arena. If it is not careful, without serious investment in defence, France will overtake the United Kingdom too.
The title of the debate is “Global Military Operations.” My contention is that it is difficult to be taken seriously as a global military power when you can no longer command primacy in your own region of the world.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)
In addition to the Front Benchers, there are 10 Members seeking to take part in the debate. I am putting on an immediate time limit of six minutes on speeches. If Members take too many interventions and attract injury time, that may have to come down still further.
Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I very much welcome this debate on defence, in Government time. That is an exceptional thing these days. Ever since the implementation of the Backbench Business Committee, that has not been the case, so the Government are taking their responsibilities very seriously. I appreciate that it is about global military operations. The debate I asked for was one devoted solely to Ukraine. I hope we will still have a debate about Ukraine.
Much of the discussion has actually been about defence policy, which ironically was the original title of the debate. Defence policy tends to be a term that either covers everything in defence, or is treated as theory which the rest of the Government confine to policy wonks and the Ministry of Defence. In today’s world, however, defence policy needs to be about delivery and delivery across the whole of Government, and that is lacking at this time. The war in Ukraine has been a wake-up call to the democratic countries of the world. We can no longer take for granted the peace and freedoms we have enjoyed since the end of the cold war. All is threatened by belligerent states, of which Russia is just one.
The UK Government’s leadership—admirably supported by the Opposition parties—in providing state-of-the-art military assistance to Ukraine has been exemplary. But this has also exposed the inability of the Government and the MOD to rebuild relevant military and industrial capability. I very much welcome a great deal that was said by the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), but I think it has a price tag on it, and if he ever becomes Defence Secretary, I suspect he would have as much difficulty as have my right hon. Friends on the Government Front Bench in getting money out of the Treasury. Perhaps there should be an honest bipartisan discussion about that problem.
There is a very real possibility that war could spread to our NATO allies. The UK cannot wait for that to happen before implementing a different and far more dynamic defence policy. The ability to ensure our own national security and that of our allies demands a transformation of effective cross-Government collaboration. There should be a new national body for co-ordinating the use of all forms of power, underpinned by a strategic mindset, as well as a process of implementation and of constant reviewing and learning. Government and Opposition should agree to lead a national conversation about the nature and danger of war in today’s rapidly changing world. This must be supported by a robust intellectual effort to assess how to restructure our forces so that they remain the very best and most effective.
This is not about being able to put an overwhelming number of boots on the ground. War is no longer confined to military conflict. Instead, we need to strengthen our intelligence system to give us better warning of impending threats, whether armed, cyber or informational, and there must be a much greater political appetite for challenge and for hearing unwelcome truths from our intelligence services. We also need a civil service that has established defence expertise from the bottom to the very top. The idea that generalists in the civil service can run anything was tackled in the 1960s by the Fulton report, but that culture has become even more prevalent in today’s Whitehall.
We need a military that has the ability to adapt to rapid and drastic changes in warfare, and the flexibility to expand and contract rapidly, dependent on our need. Importantly, we need an acquisition system—everybody talks about defence acquisition these days—that can effectively support the military system in all its aspects, under direct state control to ensure fluid supply chains and protecting itself from espionage.
The MOD must develop armed forces that are capable of dealing with threats both immediate and in future. The MOD’s intention is to focus on the need to prepare for wartime effectiveness, but it has become imbued by a peacetime mentality and a lack of urgency, and it is preoccupied with a misplaced notion of cost control, which tends to add to project risk and to cost. The MOD ties up too much of its resource in trying to build and maintain a fixed arsenal of weaponry. It should spend perhaps substantially more on the ability to expand any capability rapidly, so that we can neutralise new threats quickly, when they arise. The MOD is too reliant on a few defence prime contractors. More of that capability should be brought back in-house, where acquisition risk can be better understood and managed. Nor should we be so dependent on offshore supply chains for crucial capability, which can be choked off at times of crisis.
This new defence policy, which I look forward to the Government bringing forward, should be co-ordinated with an effort to bring to our population a greater understanding of defence, security and international affairs. Working with our higher education institutions, we must support defence and security-related courses and educate more graduates in the disciplines essential to our collective defence.
I will reiterate the point I made in an intervention. We should be prepared to co-operate bilaterally with EU forces in order to carry on the work that we need to do in the Balkans at this particular time.
If I could add one further point, we must look after our veterans. I am joining the campaign to get certain documents released from the Ministry of Defence and the National Archives at Kew, concerning the Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram disaster during the Falklands war. It is now 40 years since that conflict. The veterans, the survivors and their families desperately need closure. Why is the issue still being hidden? What is the purpose of hiding the truth? Maybe there are truths that people will not want to hear, but—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. I am sorry but I have given the hon. Gentleman as much time as I can.
Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
I believe the United Kingdom needs to have a military presence across the globe. I am particularly thinking about the South China sea and the threat presented by China, which has been alluded to already. I am conscious of the situation in that area, which is called the East sea by the Vietnamese, and I am acutely aware of the threat to Taiwan, which is apparently escalating. I welcome the fact that the Navy has two ships permanently in the region and that the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth has recently visited the area. I recognise that things have moved on since the integrated review, which heralded the Indo-Pacific tilt, but still there needs to be concern about that important part of the world, well into the future, given the increasing influence of China and the importance of the area for Britain’s trade.
Equally, it is important to say that today Europe has to be our main focus. NATO is, and will remain, the cornerstone of our defence, and we must be resolute in our support of Ukraine. It may well be a long struggle, but it will be necessary. However long it takes, we must stand four-square behind the people of Ukraine and its Government, and take note of the increasing threat. For example, we note that Russian nuclear weapons have now been moved into Belarus. It is incumbent upon us all to watch the situation very carefully.
We must also be mindful of two things. When we look across the globe, we look to the United States of America. There is the possible re-election of former President Trump. We all know what happened when he was President last time: concern was caused by his comments about NATO, and about Montenegro in particular. Who knows—dare I say, God forbid—President Trump might be in the White House again.
We also have to bear in mind the long-term desire of the United States to have a greater focus on the Pacific, and its wish for Europe to be collectively more proactive in its own defence. Therefore, the debate about how much money we and our European allies spend on defence is extremely important, and something we cannot and should not avoid.
A few weeks ago, I visited Estonia, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) and two other senior figures from the Labour movement. We had a series of wide-ranging meetings with fellow social democrats, trade unionists, the national defence committee of the Estonian Parliament and many others. The visit was extremely worth while. I was struck by the absolute unanimity among everyone we met and spoke to about the concerns they had about Russia’s activities, the war in Ukraine, and the potential and actual threat it could pose to Estonia.
In 2016, the United Kingdom’s enhanced forward presence was agreed for Estonia and since 2017 the UK has deployed an armoured infantry battalion to Estonia, with 800 to 900 personnel, which was doubled in size in 2022. Our presence in Estonia, in conjunction with that of our NATO allies, is extremely valued. That was another clear message that was given to us by a whole range of people whom we met in Estonia during our visit.
Looking to the future, we are in no doubt of the UK’s resolute support for NATO, but we should recognise that we need to be much stronger in developing foreign policy and military co-operation with our close allies in the European Union. Intergovernmental co-operation must be increased, and also at the very least there needs to be a dialogue with the European Commission so that there is coherence between our approach and that of our allies.
Again looking to the future, we ought to focus our minds on the nature of our future military equipment and how it is manufactured. Of course the US is our closest ally and will remain so, but we need to be prepared to develop our own specific sovereign capability and from time to time, if necessary, also co-operate more closely with our European allies. In this country we are developing the sixth-generation aircraft that will eventually succeed the F35, and we have, for instance, the Tempest programme, but the European Union has the Future Combat Air System initiative. There needs to be the possibility of consideration. Nothing is certain about the future—
James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)
Clausewitz famously wrote that war was a continuation of policy by other means, so it is entirely appropriate that we are debating global military operations in this place.
Over the past 30 years, the UK has had a pretty proud record of military performance overseas on a large, medium and small scale. From 1991 we had Gulf war I, Rwanda, Angola, Bosnia, Kosovo and Northern Ireland. Blair’s Chicago speech in 1999 set the case for international intervention beyond that: we had Gulf war II, East Timor, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and other expeditionary operations. There is, of course, no truth in the supposition that the UK forces deploy only in wars that they can win, but past performance is not necessarily indicative of future success, and in this era of global instability and competition, it is essential that we maintain sufficient forces to do the job in all five domains.
The integrated review gives the framework doctrinally while the defence tasks provide the direction, and I think that three of those are relevant to this debate: the first,
“defence, security and resilience of the UK”,
the fifth, “overseas defence activity”, and the seventh, “direct defence”. Back in my day, at Northwood Permanent Joint Headquarters, defence held the joint operational estimate of capability and readiness, otherwise known as JOECR. I think that today it is called the capability readiness assessment framework, or CRAF. It is classified secret, but I suspect that I know broadly what it says.
Intuitively, RAF and Navy capabilities are probably equipped to do the job with which they are tasked. Yes, we need more of everything—quantity has a quality of its own—but our ships, submarines and aircraft are good, supportable and modern. The elephant in the room is the land domain. My instinct, therefore, is that the CRAF is probably flashing red for land capability. Indeed, when we discuss defence in the House, operational capability is ultimately what truly matters. Yes, the Army has been bent out of shape for the support and gifting of capability to Ukraine—is this “a” war or “the” war?—but we must still hold at readiness the full suite of land capability for contingent purposes, and we must be ready for what comes next. If the MOD is required, under the defence tasks, to hold an armoured division at readiness, that is what this country must still be required to do. If it has not already been done, the MOD must first carry out a detailed estimate of exactly what is required now to get the 3rd (United Kingdom) Division out of the door. If it is necessary to increase the defence budget to 2.5% or 3% of GDP, then so be it.
The strategic defence and security review and the Army 2020 programme structurally altered the Army, moving it away from large-scale divisional deployments, so if we cannot deploy a division under the current construct, we need to put it back in place. We also need to get back the strategic enablers lost during the Army 2020 programme, not to mention the need for the full suite of strategic air and sea lift to be fully deployable worldwide.
Beyond increasing available manpower, equipment and capability within the field Army, we also need to enhance the logistic tail. We therefore need contingent stocks to be at readiness, including weapons, ammunition, spares and all supply natures, and not just training stocks. Supply lines need to be kept open with our suppliers and commercial partners, even when legacy equipment stops being made. As for equipment procurement—yes, let us purchase the best available, preferably made or integrated in the UK, but it needs to be affordable and scalable to meet the requirements. Exquisite exclusivity is fine but as an operator I would much rather have enough to satisfy all structures. Modular platforms that we can build for export must also be factored in.
Lastly, a fully equipped, manned, supported and sustainable Army costs money. If Defence tasks are serious about having a deployable division at readiness, the path to get there is non-discretionary. It is also clear that both NATO and the US allies expect that of us in this place. The world remains a dangerous, unpredictable place and the primary role of any Government, as we know, is to defend their people and their allies. It would be unwise to forget that.
Samantha Dixon (City of Chester) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to speak in today’s debate. Keeping the nation safe and protecting our citizens are the main priorities of any Government. From deployments abroad to deployments at home, our armed forces are essential to our national defence. Next week will mark Armed Forces Week, a time when we reflect on the commitment and sacrifices of the brave service personnel in our armed forces, and I would like to express my sincere appreciation to them for their unwavering commitment and dedication to protecting our nation. It is their effort that ensures our safety and upholds the values we hold dear. They deserve our utmost respect and gratitude.
Chester, the constituency I represent, has long historic links with our armed forces. The Dale barracks are currently home to the 2nd Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment, and the reserve unit C Squadron, the Queen’s Own Yeomanry, is based in the Fox barracks, next to the Dale. Long may the barracks remain as homes to our forces. HMS Albion, which has a long affiliation with the city of Chester, is currently busy in the Baltic on a three-month deployment as part of a series of joint exercises with NATO allies and international partners across northern Europe. I am honoured to represent a city with such strong military connections.
The Labour party has always understood, and always will understand, the importance of our armed forces and defence. However, despite increasing threats, the Government are still cutting day-to-day MOD spending in real terms, which means less money for troops, housing and forces families. Our armed forces deserve support and proper funding, especially in the current climate, but I worry that the threat of hollowing out our armed forces remains present. As global uncertainty continues to rise, the fundamentals of supplying our Army, Navy and Royal Air Force with the correct equipment are paramount to our defence. We have witnessed Type 45 frigates being unable to cope with warm water and Ajax light tanks harming our service personnel more than enemy action. That is despite a lack of active deployment, six years behind schedule.
Sadly, Putin’s war in Ukraine continues and there is no question but that UK military support for Ukraine has had and will continue to have Labour’s fullest backing. As this awful war continues, we must continue to stand with Ukraine and its people and support them in defending their freedom and their home. The threat posed by Russia and other hostile powers is not limited to the battlefields in Ukraine. On this I agree with the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin). Future military operations in Europe and across the world will also be fought on the digital battlefield. A vital part of the UK defence infrastructure is that of cyber-security. When we speak of cyber-security, we think of the events of 2017, with the NotPetya cyber-attack on Ukrainian infrastructure and the Wannacry ransomware attack that highlighted the vulnerabilities of crucial organisations such as our NHS.
In 2012, former CIA director and US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta warned of a “cyber Pearl Harbor”. While the threat of that can never be underestimated, it seems that the more effective methods being deployed by hostile powers involve microscale disinformation campaigns. With the emergence of deep fakes and the threat of quantum computing seemingly round the corner, it is vital that our armed forces receive the support they need for the 21st-century battleground. The fog of war now extends to the digital realm, with conflicting reports and misinformation weakening western support for this conflict. If we are to have a truly resilient Ministry of Defence, we need to ensure that victories on the battlefield are not portrayed as losses by those who wish to undermine our solidarity with our allies.
Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)
It is a great pleasure and honour to speak in this timely debate. We probably all agree that we face perhaps the most dangerous and concerning time for global security since the end of the cold war. There is a period of extreme danger coming up, with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the possibility of Chinese action in Taiwan, and the west’s attention is split between those two theatres.
This means that we in Europe have to take a very close look at our capabilities. The fundamental point, looking at what has changed over the last year or so, is that the big assumption under which we operated for 20 or 30 years has now gone. Peer-on-peer conflict and great power rivalry are back, and the assumption that our forces will be able to operate under an umbrella of air supremacy, without fear of substantial attack from the air, is now over.
This means we have to take a close look at how our Air Force and the air forces of our NATO allies are set up. For years we have engaged in operations in low-intensity conflicts, doing air policing or close air support operations without an air-to-air or significant surface-to-air threat. That will now change, of course, which means the Air Force will have to do a number of things, such as building up the number of spares.
Secondly, training will have to change. The training necessary for high intensity peer-on-peer conflict is much different from that required for air policing operations, and personnel can get only a limited amount from sims. Sims are useful because they can engage in scenarios they cannot do for real, but nothing can recreate the psychological and physical stresses of operating multiple aircraft in complex air scenarios.
Much as the Air Force will be thinking about these things and adjusting its training accordingly, it is relevant for us in terms of policy because, if we are looking at the need to build up spares and to fulfil a much more intense training requirement, space is needed to do that. We need to have enough aircraft and enough pilots to make sure the Air Force is not constantly stretched. If the Air Force is stretched all the time, we will not be able to build up either of those things.
That is before I even start talking about the simple factor of mass. As can be seen with the conflict in Ukraine, we can expect that any peer-on-peer conflict will need mass because of the inevitable attrition. For years we have operated in a world in which we could do more with less. Each fast jet we have now is incomparably more capable than what existed during the cold war, and they are light years ahead of anything that existed during the second world war, but we still need the number of platforms to be able to cope with attrition and the training requirement.
Fundamentally, this means either we will have to start doing less discretionary conflict and more high-end training to face the threat, or we will have to scale up the number of people and aircraft to be able to do both. I suspect that the House, the Government and the country will want to do the latter, because we will probably want to take part in the discretionary operations that are so important to the rules-based order and how we see ourselves as a country, but that has a cost.
I have mainly spoken about fast jets, and much of it also applies to air mobility, which is based at RAF Brize Norton in my constituency, so I have a particular interest, but some of the points are common. For example, the concept of main operating bases, in which all our assets are concentrated in two or three large bases, has cost savings. In peacetime, that is of course helpful, but it is a danger when we face a peer adversary. Perhaps the Minister will elaborate in due course as to what consideration is being given to the dispersal of forces, to ensure there is resilience in the event of a peer-on-peer conflict.
We have touched on the C-130 today, so I will not go into that in great detail. I know the Minister will say that the A400M Atlas can fly twice as much, twice as far and twice as fast, which is true, as it is generationally significant; it is a step change as an aircraft. However, concerns remain, first, about its reliability and whether it is where we need to be. Secondly, not all of the capabilities from the Hercules have yet been transferred and they need to be. Thirdly, and above all else, however capable an aircraft, it cannot be in two places at once. We cannot expect the limited number of crews and platforms to be able to do everything if the number of airframes available is decreasing. The important thing that the House must consider is the availability of task lines. Perhaps the Minister will address that in due course, but there is a capability gap there and we are going to have to address it. On air mobility, the other lesson from Ukraine is that no matter how important our capability, we have to get it there. So the logistics are essential and important as never before.
In the last few seconds I have, I shall talk about housing. Our armed forces do crucial work, but it is no good telling them that their work is crucial and that we will rely on them if their showers are cold and there is mould on their walls. We have to make sure that we have the homes we need if we want to be able to undertake global military operations. The sun is outside but the skies are darkening, and we need to remember that.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
First and foremost, in the name of keeping our nation safe and protecting our citizens, which is a duty we all share, I want to pay tribute to those who serve in our armed forces, whether here in the UK or around the globe, and to the vital work they do to that end. I also want to say clearly how important it is that we stand with our allies in support of Ukraine. Unfortunately, we have in the past been too slow to see the dangers to our security and that of our allies. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has brought a destabilisation of peace in Europe, it has deepened the famine in east Africa and it has fuelled energy and food price rises that we are now all feeling. It is a wake-up call to us all.
I recently joined an Anglo-German fact-finding delegation to Estonia, with my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David), who also mentioned it. It was a telling visit, because, as many Members will know, Estonia is a country painfully aware of the threat Russia poses. Estonia is a proudly independent nation, but because it has not always been independent it has suffered much in the last century. It had a narrow escape from the Russian Bolsheviks, when it was supported by the Royal Navy, but it then faced occupation under the Soviet Union and the Nazis, and decades of suppression under the Soviets after the war. The occupation stretched for 50 years, from 1940 to 1991, and the daily atrocities that the Estonians faced are well documented in Tallinn’s museum of occupations and freedom—my visit there will stay with me always. That is why Estonia’s support for Ukraine is so steadfast, but it is also why it must think about its own defence; the costs of losing freedom are understood all too well. Indeed, the Estonian Prime Minister’s grandmother was sent to Siberia as a baby during that brutal occupation.
Estonia lies between Scandinavia and Russia. It is a vital strategic position on the gulf of Finland, at NATO’s eastern edge. As my hon. Friend said, during that visit we spoke to politicians from all parties, as well as meeting the country’s defence select committee. Their analysis of today’s Russia was bleak but unanimous: they see a ruler lumbered with a lethal mindset of brutality and conquest, and an outlook that is deeply embedded in the wider leadership of the country and unlikely to change soon. We also visited the NATO centre of excellence on cyber-defence, an interdisciplinary hub set up shortly after Russia launched its damaging digital attacks against Estonia in 2007. But Estonians do not fear Russia. They stand supported by NATO allies and they have a powerful will to resist. Ukrainian flags fly everywhere in Tallinn. The two countries are intimately linked, and both need our unequivocal support.
As the NATO Secretary-General has repeated, Labour wants to see Ukraine on a path to join the alliance, but, to achieve that end, we need to support Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty now. I am proud that Labour has been unshakeable in supporting NATO members in their contributions to Ukraine.
Estonia may be small, but its determination to defend its hard-won independence is compelling, and it highlights the best of what we can achieve when we work with our partners and our allies. Today, Members have pointed out many of the shortcomings in our defence capabilities, which means, I think, that some of that partnership working is the way forward to ensure that we can meet the growing challenges that we know the world poses.
The Government must answer the growing clamour of questions surrounding the UK’s ability to meet our NATO obligations. The delays to the new defence Command Paper are frustrating, because many want to see how things will look going forward. The stakes are simply too high for any wavering in our commitment and any weakening of our capabilities.
Estonia is on NATO’s frontline, working alongside allies on training operations as part of NATO’s UK-led multinational battle group work—operations that are part of our crucial bilateral commitments with Estonia. While I was in Estonia, Exercise Spring Storm was under way, with more than 1,500 UK troops joining military personnel from 11 NATO countries in an important demonstration of our joint defensive strength. This readiness is vital both in Estonia, on NATO’s frontline, and here in the UK. I am proud of Labour’s ongoing commitment to NATO and to our obligations to our partners. The Government have my full support in standing up with our allies for the values that we all hold dear. We know that this is a long-haul struggle for freedom, peace and security in Europe and around the globe, and we must stay the course.
Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell). I wish to thank our armed forces for what they do both here at home and in many countries across the world. They are a credit to our nation. Bearing in mind that the defence of our island must be any Government’s top priority, these debates are important, not least when we face a world that is as unstable as it has ever been in my lifetime.
I note that the heading of this debate is “Global Military Operations”. Those operations are set: first, by the Government’s priorities; secondly, by what we can afford; and, thirdly, by our obligations, not least to NATO. Having served in the armed forces for nine years, and been in this place for 13 years, four of which have been with the Defence Committee, I have seen Prime Ministers and some Ministers struggle to clarify the scope and structure of our armed forces and to fund them properly. I exclude the current set of Ministers who are doing an outstanding job. My criticism goes straight to the Treasury in the main. To be fair to the Government, world events have a nasty habit of changing, as yet another defence review—a “refresh” of the previous one—highlights, and this while the world stands on the edge of an abyss with another murderous war taking place in Europe and, worryingly, on NATO’s borders.
Since the end of world war two, we have not faced a top-tier opponent, but that threat is very real today with both China and Russia raising the threshold. I quite accept that conflict on this scale would be fought with allies, not least the US. But as the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) mentioned the Falklands war—let us hope we never have to go back there again. Many of my friends served when I was in in 1982—let me say that, as the Falklands is one of our main dependants, the question for this or any Government is: can we retake the islands in the event that they are invaded? If we cannot, clearly, we are failing in our duty.
While the US gears up for major conflict, I do not detect the same sense of urgency here. To deter war, one needs to prepare and train for it, with sufficient mass to sustain a lengthy conflict. On that point alone, we must reverse the decision to cut the Army by 10,000. Everywhere the Defence Committee has gone—although I can speak on my own behalf—I have heard that our armed forces are stretched to breaking point.
I said at the start of my speech that a Government’s top priority must be the defence of our island nation. That is essential, of course, but this debate is about our global reach, which requires more funding for more planes, more ships and more soldiers. It is clear from the Committee’s evidence sessions that the pitiful 2%— or just over—of GDP that is spent on defence is not enough. It clearly is not. It was more than 5% in my day, and since then the kit has become more expensive and our requirements and obligations even greater.
If we are to play our part globally, along with our allies in most cases, we must fund our armed forces to allow them to do the job that we in this place send them to do. It is our responsibility. We cannot ask them to do things without the kit, the manpower or whatever they need to do the job. If we do, we are failing in our duties.
Global reach and influence are of huge significance, as China is showing. Too few politicians, regrettably, have understood the significance of a military presence around the world and the diplomatic and economic benefits that flow from it. An effective presence costs money—money that politicians all too often divert to other priorities. I mentioned China, whose economic and military reach around the world are expanding at an alarming rate. China appreciates that the world’s resources are not limitless and that, to ensure its security, those resources need to be identified, secured and protected.
The war in Ukraine is a wake-up call, if ever there was one. I pay tribute to the Prime Minister, to his predecessor and to Members on both sides of the House who have stood together on this issue; long may that be the case. Many European countries, not least Poland, Germany and France, are increasing their defence budgets. Political leadership is what we badly need if we are to fund our armed forces sufficiently to meet the inevitable rise in our global responsibilities. To be fair, our brave men and women are already operating in many countries, as we have heard, and very effectively. That is to their great credit, but greater mass is needed for the reasons I have stated.
Looking back in history, we have a rather poor record on being prepared for major conflict. The peace dividend that followed the end of the cold war saw a major disarmament, to the extent that we now struggle to find one fighting division where it is needed, as my right hon. Friend the Chairman of the Defence Committee stated.
Richard Drax
May I not? I have little time left and I know others on the right hon. Gentleman’s side of the House particularly want to speak.
At the start of world war two—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. Perversely, the debate is under-running slightly at the moment. Having admonished hon. Members earlier, if the hon. Gentleman does wish to give way, I think the House would understand.
Richard Drax
In that case, may I reverse my decision? I would be delighted to hear from the right hon. Gentleman.
Liam Byrne
I am very grateful. I wanted to underline the point the hon. Gentleman is making so eloquently to the House. The risk is even greater than he has set out, because global defence spending is now rising by between $200 billion and $700 billion a year. If we want to keep pace with that, defence spending is going to have to rise.
Richard Drax
I hear the right hon. Gentleman, and of course it is true. To be fair to our Government, it is down to the economy, how much money we have and everything else, but at the end of the day, where we spend our money is about political priorities.
History shows, as I have said already, that for many years we have underfunded the armed forces, to our detriment. At the start of the second world war, thank heavens, we had a Royal Navy with more than 1,000 warships, which played a huge part, with the RAF, in preventing the Germans from invading our country. To under-invest in our armed forces at times when we think we do not need them is short-termism of the worst kind. As history again shows, on many occasions when a war breaks out, it comes from nowhere and many countries are taken by surprise. Alternatively, MPs and others warn of conflict and nothing is done. In either case, surely we have to learn from history.
At the start of world war two, we had over 1,000 warships; I think the figure now is 17 or 18, and the RAF has been similarly emasculated. Talk of the global reach of military operations is one thing, but funding them is quite another. Will I be refreshed after the refresh? I am sure the narrative and ambition will be along the right lines, but those are easy. It is the political will, the funding and the sense of urgency that are the challenge, if we are to take our global responsibilities seriously.
Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
I will make three very quick points about focus versus spread, the need to prepare for economic warfare and the importance of expanding our soft power.
The beginning of the debate was pretty illuminating. The Minister eloquently set out the stark reduction in our capabilities since 2010. The reason why we need the defence Command Paper was well illustrated. On the one hand, the spread is getting bigger, but on the other, the capability that we have on hand is much reduced. We desperately need to bring a sense of focus to our priorities.
For me, that must start with the re-containment of Russia, which has a nasty habit of invading and invading and invading its neighbours. Down the course of history, Russia invades its neighbours over and over again. That is why we have to complete the rebuilding of NATO. Nobody has said anything today about President Erdoğan’s commentary on keeping Sweden out. That is something that this House should deprecate.
We have to strengthen our capabilities in the Arctic. China and Russia’s “no limits” partnership creates the risk of a new polar silk road through the Arctic that will halve China’s journey time for transiting goods around the world. Russia is re-equipping bases in the Kola peninsula, where, of course, it stables its second strike capability. We will need to strengthen our deployment and our weaponry in the Arctic if we are to keep the Arctic safe.
We have to bring greater attention to central Asia. We have to ensure that we do everything we can to support the multi-vector foreign policy ambitions of countries such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and others along Russia’s southern boundary.
We have to do more in Africa, not least because the Wagner Group is now raping Africa, exploiting 14 countries there. We already know that something like $250 million has been extracted from Africa to help fund Prigozhin and his dogs of war. We must bring a sense of focus and priority, and that is why we need a Command Paper.
There are also new opportunities to consider, of course. Defence spending is rising: NATO partners are committed to raise defence spending by something like $55 billion, and our allies in Japan are committed to raising theirs by something like $60 billion—that is $100 billion extra in defence spending among our allies. We should have an intelligent conversation about who should be spending what and where. I suspect that one of the conclusions would be that we should focus much more aggressively closer to home.
Secondly, we have to ensure that we are prepared for economic warfare. The alliance structure has been transformed over the last two to three years. We now have not just a rules-based order but the hardcore of a rights-based order—AUKUS, NATO, the North American free trade agreement, the EU, the Quad, us, Korea, Switzerland and Israel. Together, those countries make up two thirds of global GDP—$61 trillion—but we do not co-ordinate critical supply chains across that great arc of the globe, and we do not co-ordinate strategies for critical minerals. In fact, we co-ordinate very little.
Part of the problem is that we have still to define precisely what a critical supply chain is. I put that question to the Foreign Secretary on Monday. Frankly, he struggled to answer it. He could not tell the Committee whether our dependence on China was going up or down, despite the fact that imports from China have doubled to £73.4 billion in the last decade. We have to get a grip on that; we have to think through, strategically and forensically, where we are economically vulnerable and how we can deepen our alliances, particularly with the United States and the EU, to ensure that our critical supply chains are safe from foreign interference. Our allies in Europe and America are spending $1.5 trillion on supply chains, the transition to domestic energy and their respective Chips Acts. We are currently shut out of those dialogues. We simply cannot afford to have that vulnerability in the future.
Finally, I underline the importance of a whole-of-Government approach—as was mentioned by the Chair of the Liaison Committee, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin)—and that includes transforming our soft power around the world. On the Foreign Affairs Committee, when we talk to ambassadors we tend to hear four or five common themes. First, we should see English as a strategic enabler, stop the cuts to the British Council and expand the provision of English teaching around the world. Secondly, we should think radically about how we expand the BBC World Service. The truth is the best stratcom we have available, so we should stop underfunding it. Thirdly, we should think about how we expand education links, whether that is through Chevening scholarships, university-to-university links or technical assistance programmes. Fourthly, we should expand the incredible work of our military attachés. Fifthly, we should get a well-functioning visa service and a Foreign Secretary who is travelling an awful lot more.
This has been a welcome debate, but it underlines the point that there is an awful lot more to do if we are to step up to the responsibilities that, across the House, we believe that we share.
Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)
The Liberal Democrats fully support the apparent consensus in the House in relation to Ukraine and the restoration of Ukraine’s sovereignty, but that is not what I would like to focus my remarks on today. I will focus on deterrence in two domains: the maritime domain and the land domain. In relation to the land domain, I want to talk about munitions stockpiles and the size of the Army, and to suggest that the Government are mistaken in boosting the number of warheads that we have in our nuclear stockpile while simultaneously permitting our conventional munitions stockpiles to run low.
The Liberal Democrats recognise that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has changed the security environment, so we support continuous at-sea deterrence. That is a dividing line between the Scottish National party and my party. While the strategic environment is as it is today, we need to see the maintenance of continuous at-sea deterrence, as we have for more than 50 years. However, we cannot support the increase in the stockpile of nuclear weapons that was first announced in the integrated review of 2021.
When the Liberal Democrats were in government, we achieved a commitment to reduce the nuclear stockpile by 65%, yet the 2021 integrated review announced that the cap on that stockpile would be raised and that information on the operational availability of warheads, deployed warheads and deployed missiles would no longer be made available. That is contributing to the atmosphere of secrecy, rather than transparency, in a very sensitive area. I have nothing but disdain for what Russia and Putin have done in relation to START—the strategic arms reduction treaty—but we need to set an example in this space through our transparency around nuclear.
On conventional munitions, £3 billion of the additional £5 billion of funding that was announced in March was for the nuclear enterprise, whereas less than £2 billion of the funding will go towards replenishing conventional stockpiles. That is the wrong priority, and it sends the wrong signal to industry. Industry wants a signal that there will be sustained production into the future, and it will ramp up production on that basis. The EU has already called for a million artillery rounds a year to be made available to Ukraine, and the UK could contribute to that effort.
I also want to talk about the size of the Army. This reiterates what other Members have said, but it is common in such debates for us all to pay tribute to the bravery of our armed forces personnel. Of course, that is entirely appropriate, but while the Government are cutting the size of the Army, we can be sure that British soldiers are not reciprocating those warm words. They will not be talking about the wisdom of their political representatives; they will be talking in terms that are far less complimentary.
We need only look at the online Army Rumour Service —essentially, the soldier’s answer to Hansard—to see that service personnel are not impressed by this Government’s plans to reduce the size of the Army. The Army was 103,000 strong in 2004, when I was training recruits as a platoon commander at Bassingbourn, which is now the Mission Ready training centre near Bedford. It currently stands at 76,000 full-time trained strength regulars, and we can anticipate a further cut of 3,000, making 73,000 by the end of 2024. The former Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, argued that the size of the Army should be in the order of 80,000, to ensure that the UK can deploy a full division of troops as part of a combined NATO force. We have to think about not only the physical component of fighting power, but the moral component—that is, the ability to get people to fight.
To summarise, I would like to know whether the Minister or, indeed, the Government plan to take the UK’s deployable nuclear weapons stockpile back to levels that we have seen previously, or that we saw announced before the integrated review in 2021, when the strategic environment allows. I would like to see how the UK’s conventional ammunition stocks can be knitted into wider European responses to the invasion of Ukraine in the way that NATO and EU members have responded, by upping production and giving a clear signal to industry that we plan to do that over the long term, and I would like to know when the Government will stop hiding behind the false choice between a sufficiently large Army and a properly equipped one.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
May I say how pleased I am to be involved in this debate, and thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have made such pertinent and worthwhile comments and speeches?
First, I commend the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Defence on taking a lead among allies in supporting Ukraine. I believe we must do all we can to assist Ukraine, now and in the future, and that commitment is clearly there. In the inevitable peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts that must surely follow Ukraine succeeding in its efforts to oust Russia from the illegally held occupied territories, Northern Ireland has invaluable experience in conflict resolution and peacebuilding that should be shared with Ukraine, to help it with the challenging task of rebuilding communities deeply fractured by the conflict.
While I recognise that the use of advanced defence technology is prevalent in the conflict in Ukraine, such as new missile systems, drones and social media warfare, that conflict is still fought in a manner that we should recognise from the first and second world wars. Tanks and troops are fighting the war: taking and holding ground, digging in, digging trenches and defending. I gently remind the Minister that those are precisely the capabilities that our British Army has had over the years, and—as other Members have referred to—those capabilities have been shredded in many ways. We have an Army crippled by cuts to battle-winning manpower and battlefield warfighting kit. The old Russian military maxim that quantity has a quality of its own still holds true, so I call on the Minister and the whole of the Ministry of Defence to reverse the decline in combat arms, regrow the infantry and the armoured corps, and give Britain back the capability to deploy two warfighting divisions, a capacity that more accurately reflects the current threats we face.
Northern Ireland remains the best place in the UK to recruit men and women to join the military and fight for King and country—the data emphasises that. Northern Ireland’s contribution to the defence industry is immense. I pay tribute to the work done by the likes of Thales, whose NLAW missile system is making such a positive difference to Ukraine’s ability to defeat the Russians on the battlefield. I visited that factory last year and was very impressed, and I understand that many of the people who work there are from my constituency of Strangford. I am very pleased to see good, constructive and positive work coming from Northern Ireland. Defence shipbuilding contracts have recently been awarded to Harland and Wolff—how good it will be to see ships once again going out from Belfast to defend the nation’s interests, at home and abroad.
I cannot speak highly enough of the work being done by many other Northern Ireland-based companies and of their contribution to defence, so ably supported by Northern Ireland’s Aerospace, Defence and Security Group. We had a meeting last night where we met some of those businesses and some of the small SMEs that feed into that. It is impressive to see such capability, such skill and the workforce there to fill the gap.
The recent report from the Royal United Services Institute, “The Defence Industry in Northern Ireland: Leveraging Untapped Potential”, highlights how much more of a contribution Northern Ireland companies can make to defence. When the Secretary of State was a Minister in the Northern Ireland Office, he would have been exposed to this issue, so he should know what an asset we are. He must take note of the RUSI report’s conclusion, which stated:
“In all, NI exhibits considerable defence potential, with three prominent businesses at the top of the supply chain that can, together with the extensive range of SMEs in the region, create an opportunity to promote NI, not as part of the problem set of UK defence and security, but as a valued contributor to its management and solution. The MoD should be monitoring the situation and looking for further opportunities to support local stakeholders, as the current UK government ambition that the whole of the UK”—
that is Northern Ireland as well—
“should benefit from defence activity is clearly not being met.”
We want to do more, we can do more, and we need the opportunity. This issue should be of particular concern to those in the MOD focused on prosperity and in the consciousness of all involved with defence spending in the private sector.
I will say a quick word about nuclear power, to which the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) referred. I agree with those who say that we must never use nuclear armaments, but the fact is that we must have it and it must be a working deterrent. That may not be the feeling of everyone in this House, but it is certainly that of us in the DUP and I think of the majority of the House. Can the Minister send me details on capability and the future role of the nuclear programme and how that will impact on our current budgetary plans? I also invite the Minister to visit Northern Ireland and see at first hand the good work being done. Will he give Northern Ireland companies the chance to be at the Defence and Security Equipment International expo in London in September? That would be to everyone’s benefit.
I wish to conclude by thanking members of the armed forces for their service to our constituents across this great nation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Every night away from home and every missed graduation ceremony or birthday is not forgotten by us in this House. Although we cannot give the armed forces all that they deserve, we in this House give them our loyalty and sincere thanks from a grateful nation.
Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
This has been a serious debate, reflecting darkening times, uncertain times and the growing confidence of our adversaries. The warnings from the most senior Conservative Back Benchers were carefully worded, but behind that precision is deep worry. The right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) rightly said that the cuts to our defence have been “ruthless” and the Ajax procurement process “dire”, and he was right to say that we are in “a grim state of affairs”.
The hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) set out a mandate for transformation. It was a lot of home truths and hard thinking from him, and it is worth reflecting on his words. My friend the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) spoke about the era of peer-to-peer conflict being back, and he is right. The hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) yet again made the case for halting the 10,000 cuts to the Army, which we on this side of the House agree with and share his view on.
I also thank my hon. Friends who contributed to this debate. My hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Samantha Dixon) set out clearly Chester’s keen defence links, including with HMS Albion, a proud Devonport-based ship in my constituency. It serves Chester and Plymouth well. My hon. Friends the Members for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) and for Caerphilly (Wayne David) spoke about their trips to Estonia. Having visited last year, I know just how seriously the people of Estonia take their commitment to NATO and how much they value the United Kingdom’s support. The Minister sketched over the departure of the second battle group from Estonia, and I hope that any discomfort that may have been created with our Estonian friends has now been patched up, because we need to make sure that we have a clear presence there with no chance of Putin putting an inch between us and our allies.
The delay to the defence Command Paper, as set out by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North, is frustrating, and I hope that will be rectified shortly. I am grateful for the contribution from my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), who spoke passionately about the importance of soft power, which is something I hope we can all reflect on further.
The continuous at-sea deterrent was mentioned a number of times by Members on both sides of the House. It is really important that we thank the people who serve on the submarines, but also the people who support the submarines, including those who refit and service the Vanguard class submarines, again in Devonport in my constituency. As a proud Plymouth MP, I am proud to represent a military city and proud to represent those people who serve supporting our armed forces. I would like to agree with the hon. Member for Angus (Dave Doogan) about the need to recycle the old nuclear submarines. There are very few Members on their phones at this point—it warms my heart that they are listening to what I am saying—but for those who want to have a look, please do zoom in on the western side of Plymouth and see the submarines lined up against each other. It is a sure sign that as a nation we are not dealing with our legacy in the way we ought to, and we must do so.
A bonus point goes to the hon. Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) for mentioning the five domains. In a debate about global military operations, the inclusion of space and cyber is absolutely vital. All-domain warfare is there, and having been to and spoken at the Space-Comm expo in Farnborough last week, it is very clear to me that the UK needs to take further steps to ensure that we are fully integrating space and cyber into all our work.
This debate takes place on the eve of Armed Forces Week, and as the son of a Royal Navy submariner and as an MP who represents a proud military community, I want to say thank you to and recognise the sacrifices of our armed forces and their families in the defence of our nation. They are the best of British, and I echo the thanks that have been mentioned on both sides of the Chamber for their work and sacrifices. As many other Members have stated, I look forward to celebrating Armed Forces Day and Armed Forces Week in my own community, and I look forward to seeing the Secretary of State—or whichever Defence Minister it may be—in Falmouth for the national celebrations.
This debate is taking place under the long shadow of Ukraine, and the support that has been offered by the United Kingdom should make all of us proud. We need to ensure that we continue that support, because this is a long-term fight. On UK military support, the Government have had, and will continue to have, Labour’s continued backing. The UK should be stepping up to support Ukraine now, as the long-awaited counter-offensive has begun. That means setting out a clear plan, as was promised by the Secretary of State in August last year, as to what a 2023 action plan for Ukraine will mean, what the implications and consequences for the industry are, and how we can best prepare. The continued absence of that plan is telling.
The war in Ukraine has had a profound effect on how future global military operations will be conducted. Our allies in NATO and Europe—the likes of Germany, France, Poland, Estonia and Lithuania—have all rebooted their defence plans and their budgets. We also need to have a strategic rethink of the UK’s defence plans, but so far this seems to be lacking from the Government. Labour has argued for defence plans to be rebooted since March 2022. Why are we still waiting? Ministers must reboot defence plans, looking again at and halting their cuts to the Army, ensuring that our NATO obligations are met in full and renewing Britain’s contract with our forces.
As the shadow Defence Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), rightly highlighted at the beginning of this debate, we are meant to be debating the new defence Command Paper about now. The delay in that paper coming forward is disappointing. I would be grateful if the Minister, when he gets to his feet, could set out when that paper will be published, and whether it will contain more Tory cuts to our armed forces. In the words of the Defence Secretary earlier this year, the Government had “hollowed out and underfunded” our armed forces. That degree of honesty was welcome at the time, but honesty should come with consequences in the adjustment of the strategy, and we all look forward to seeing whether that has taken hold in the defence Command Paper.
When we talk about global military operations, we must also talk about the morale of our forces. It is the duty of any Government to make sure that those on the frontline do not have to worry about the home front, but the reality right now for many of our service personnel is very different. Many members of our armed forces are living in, frankly, appalling service accommodation, putting up with damp and mould, broken boilers and endless waits for repair. The hon. Member for Witney was right to raise that in his remarks. Poor military accommodation has a direct impact on forces morale, and on recruitment and retention. Satisfaction with service life in the UK armed forces has fallen from 60% in 2010 to 42% this year. Four in 10 UK military personnel have stated that poor morale is increasing the likelihood of their leaving the armed forces. That is why in March this year Labour launched Homes Fit for Heroes, a campaign to highlight the poor state of our armed forces accommodation, and make it clear that when in government it will be a priority to sort that out. The truth is that Ministers could have made that a priority; this could have been sorted out over the past 13 years if they had wanted to do that, and it is important that it is fixed.
Under successive Governments since 2010 the Conservatives have wasted at least £15 billion of taxpayers’ money through MOD mismanagement and defence procurement mistakes, with £5 billion wasted since 2019 alone, while the current Defence Secretary has been in place. How much money is in the budget is as important as what we spend it on, and the certainty of what we spend that money on is important. As someone who grew into defence policy from a passion for the Royal Navy, I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed the future for Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships Wave Ruler and Wave Knight. At the weekend it looked as if they would be decommissioned by the Government because of a lack of service personnel. Will the Minister set out whether an accurate assessment has been in the media, and say what will happen to the RFA’s tanker capability without those ships being held at readiness?
In conclusion, this debate has set out clearly that the world is more uncertain than it has been for some time. It has also set out why a reboot of the UK’s military plans is necessary and required. Let us not look back on these debates in future years and see a Parliament squandering precious time. Let us back our armed forces, rearm by filling our stockpiles, and ensure that the Government look again at their plans to cut 10,000 soldiers from the Army, and look again at the year in, year out defence cuts. I hope we have more debates such as this, in which there are more difficult challenges, and hard thinking and constructive criticism. Our defence and security depends on getting this right, and on a cross-party basis it is essential that we do that.
The Minister for Defence People, Veterans and Service Families (Dr Andrew Murrison)
I thank the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) for his remarks and for the support he has given to our current operations and the men and women of our armed forces. I am pleased he cited Albion. I have visited Albion twice in the recent past, once in Plymouth and once overseas. He was also right to support the men and women of our Submarine Service; I would expect nothing else from a Devonport MP. They are unsung heroes and do an extraordinary thing. He hinted at the NATO defence model, which is important at the moment as we consider Vilnius and what follows from that.
It is reasonable to say that the UK will remain a trenchant supporter of NATO and what it does, and its ask. It is the cornerstone of our defence, notwithstanding the remarks that were made, quite reasonably, by right hon. and hon. Members about forming alliances wherever it is expedient to do so. Indeed, I was particularly heartened in that respect by the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) about the European Union. We have to be pragmatic about our alliances and where we form them, in order to promote our shared and common interests. The men and women of our armed forces are extraordinary. They do things that the vast majority of our fellow citizens are not called on to do. Particularly as we approach 24 June, Armed Forces Day, it is right that so many Members took the opportunity to pay tribute to them.
This has been a good debate—discursive on occasion, off the point from time to time, but in general a thoughtful contribution to Britain’s place in the world, and specifically to what part defence plays in that. A year after I was born, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was no fan of the United Kingdom, quipped that Great Britain had
“lost an empire but has not yet found a role.”
If that was true then, I do not think it true now, and recent events have confirmed that.
Put simply, our role today is to safeguard and improve the lives of those whom we represent. Most hon. Members in the Chamber would agree that defence is central to that—we are among friends—but it is right that we are challenged on whether the £50 billion we now spend on it might be better deployed elsewhere. After all, the Almighty provided us with a quite adequate natural defensive position in the form of the channel, which is a bit like the Alps in respect of Switzerland. Why not shelter and cower behind that? Why not announce that the UK will henceforth simply be patrolling its Euro-Atlantic backyard and take a dividend that could be used to give public services a welcome shot in the arm? We are all facing re-election next year, and that would surely be quite appealing, would it not?
Well, first there is Ukraine. Some nations in the global south may try to convince themselves that Russia’s neo-imperialistic war of conquest is no more than a little local difficulty. Less enlightened jurisdictions may even revel in a challenge to a stable democratic and liberal world order. They are wrong. Putin’s behaviour has had global consequentials with the pain falling on ordinary people everywhere through food shortages, the energy crisis, the cost of living and opportunities forgone: their hopes, their dreams and their future. In a thoughtful contribution, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) made that point well.
What has happened has real-life consequences, not just for those individuals caught up in the immediacy of that terrible conflict but for people right across the world, and those who are affected the most are the poorest. Meanwhile, China watches and waits, inscrutably. How we respond to Putin today will determine what happens in the Indo-Pacific tomorrow. Get it right in our Euro-Atlantic backyard today and we may yet avoid conflict in the South China sea.
Britain’s global contribution buys us influence that benefits all our constituents. I have seen it myself, serving in the Navy and at the MOD and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Whether it is a carrier visiting the Indo-Pacific, our Air Force evacuating citizens from earthquake-hit Turkey or our Army working with Kenya to strengthen regional security, the signal that we send to a transactional world is that Britain is a serious player; one to be reckoned with and one that can be relied on. Tangible examples of that reliance are AUKUS and the Global Combat Air Programme. The US, Australia, Japan and Italy chose to work with us because they knew that we could deliver. Look at what those partnerships mean for our country: thousands of jobs and the creation of a long-term skills base that will give a generation of young people cutting-edge skills to succeed in the decades ahead.
There is a further reason why the UK should retain its global presence. It is about values and the sense that the UK is a force for good in the world. We have seen in recent times that whenever adversaries detect liberal democracies weakening, they move to fill the gap. The UK, as the world’s oldest democracy, a member of the UN Security Council and a nation with global reach, has a responsibility to show leadership, stand up for values that make chaos and conflict less likely and promote peace and prosperity.
In the time available, I will attempt to do some justice to the points raised. First, I turn to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), because the first shall be last, and the last shall be first—that is Luke 13:30. I agree with him that continuous at sea-deterrence is a necessary evil. I wish that we did not need it, but we do, and we will. In the spring statement, £3 billion was announced for the nuclear enterprise. That is a big commitment and a vote of confidence in those who undertake this vital task. I thank him for his invite to Northern Ireland and will very much take him up on that in the near future.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex is always thoughtful and, as always, I agreed with much of what he had to say. He is right to point out that, in this country, our military workforce has always expanded and contracted. That has been in the nature of how we have done defence for all time. That is perhaps by virtue of the fact that we are blessed with quite a lot of water between ourselves and those who have historically been our adversaries, but the crucial thing is that we need to be able to scale up quickly when the time demands it. He was also right to point out that we need agility—particularly in relation to equipment—and sovereign capability. That is one of the lessons of the recent past.
Of course, none of this defence is cost-free. If I may be ever so generically critical of the debate, very few of us have really bent our minds to what it costs, although I have hinted at it in suggesting somewhat rhetorically that there is an opportunity cost to it all: we could spend more on defence, but we would have to find that from somewhere else. I can assure the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) that there is an active dialogue with all those supporting Ukraine right now. I am very pleased to say that at all levels—politicians, officials and members of the military—the United Kingdom is taking a lead. I think the facts bear that out. He should be proud of the leadership role we are taking, and I say that to him in all sincerity.
I cannot do justice to the detailed points made by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland). As a logistician, I expect him to make a number of forensic points, but he is quite right to say that we should not be matching the good against the exquisite. Never let the excellent be the enemy of the good. I think he mentioned a medal for CASD. Of course, all medallic recognition is kept under continual review. I cannot give him a commitment. I would just point out, although I know it is second best, that the deterrent patrol pin was produced in 2009, the 50th anniversary of CASD, which I know a lot of submariners wear with pride.
I thank the hon. Member for City of Chester (Samantha Dixon) for her support in backing the UK’s efforts to support Ukraine. That is much appreciated. She spoke about digital and cyber. However, she did seem to be committing her party to more defence spending. I will come on to that in a minute.
My hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts) understandably focused on the Royal Air Force. I look forward to being in his constituency very soon indeed. He made a point about dispersal, which took me back to world war two. From my memory of a number of films from that time, dispersal is very much an RAF thing. I agree with him, but there is, again, a cost in terms of money and, probably, efficiency and delivering effect, but the point is extremely well made. He also made a point about the importance of logistics, which is not glamorous.
The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North spoke about Estonia, which was music to my ears. I have been there on a number of occasions, including very recently. I agree with her that our enhanced forward presence there is impressive. I visited Tapa Camp and the headquarters in Tallinn, and saw our RAF in action at Amari. I am particularly pleased that it is an amalgam of all three of our armed forces working together. She was also right to cite Exercise Spring Storm, which I witnessed while I was there.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax), a trenchant advocate of all things to do with the armed forces, argued for an uplift. There’s a funny old thing; I have never heard him do that before. He called the 2% pitiful. Well, okay, but—I am sure he would agree with me—as we aspire to do better than that, we must take others with us, too. That is vital. Our efforts on their own will not be sufficient in facing down some of the threats we face. I was interested in the 5% figure he cited. I think we joined up more or less at the same time. I have to say, though, that the effect we are able to project these days is way greater than what he and I would have been used to at that time. Our kit today is in a completely different league. To compare the two is like comparing chalk and cheese.
The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) mentioned, in a thoughtful speech, the central Asian republics—the Stans—where, interestingly, Russia’s influence is on the wane. It is axiomatic to say that Russia is extending its influence pretty much everywhere, but we have to understand that in some parts of the world, particularly in Russia’s backyard, that is not necessarily the case. The current war and Putin’s behaviour has turned off almost as many as it has enlisted to his particularly unpleasant cause. The right hon. Gentleman also mentioned defence engagement. I am very pleased he mentioned that, because when I was in Defence previously I had some hand in increasing the defence engagement activities we undertake. We have recently recruited six new Defence attachés.
The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) made spending commitments on behalf of his party. I have noted those.
I really must come back at the hon. Member for Angus (Dave Doogan). I mean, to say that the Royal Australian Navy does not patrol off Scotland is clearly not right. I am afraid he was not listening to the previous exchange on the Navy’s most lethal platforms and I know the Submarine Service will be upset with his comments.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) worried about headcount and equipment. He is right, but I gently point out to all contributors today that we spend at 2% consistently. We have done for many years and we will continue to do so, hopefully with an uplift to 2.5%.
I am sorry that I have not left sufficient time to deal with the remarks made by the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). May I, however, address his point about a plan? Plans are great, but President Zelensky is not too troubled, apparently, because he said:
“If everyone in the world—or at least the vast majority—were steadfast and courageous leaders…as Britain, I am sure we would have already ended this war and restored peace throughout our liberated territory for all our people.”
That, I have to say, is the best endorsement for our armed forces that I can possibly find.
Coventry City of Culture Trust
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Taiwo Owatemi (Coventry North West) (Lab)
The collapse earlier this year of Coventry City of Culture Trust, the arm’s length body tasked with continuing the legacy of our city’s time in the national spotlight, shocked and infuriated many. Millions of pounds of public money may never be recovered and the plans for an ongoing legacy are having to be rewritten from scratch.
That is not to say that the city of culture celebrations themselves were a mistake. The year-long pageant of art, music, drama and poetry enthused our community and drew visitors from all over Britain. I am proud to represent a city whose heritage and present are both alive with vibrancy and humanity. Coventry was a perfect choice for city of culture, and the celebrations went a long way to restore our spirits as life finally reopened after the pandemic.
That said, lessons must be learned. Future cities of culture, including Bradford in 2025, should not have to face the financial and reputational losses. Throughout the process, local communities were left without a voice. It is deeply worrying that a vast amount of local talent, advice and involvement was simply ignored, leaving many of my constituents with an uneasy feeling of alienation from an initiative that should have been rooted in the community. Communication was poor. My constituents were not even informed what events were taking place on which dates until after the fact. It is very clear that something went deeply wrong with the management of an organisation that time and again rebuffed and ignored local knowledge and offers for help, thinking instead that it knew better and bringing in so-called experts who knew nothing about our city.
I believe in the city of culture programme and want it to succeed in the future, but unless the lessons from Coventry’s experience are heeded, I fear that those issues will keep recurring, starting with Bradford in 2025. Better central Government oversight is essential in order to avoid the shameful failures of governance that allowed the trust to implode so quickly. People in my community were beyond appalled to see big players walk away from the trust with honours galore, despite leaving in their wake a dismal record of failure and broken promises. How on earth can it be justified that Martin Sutherland, the former trust chief executive officer, was granted an OBE for his work leading the organisation?
The sums involved are staggering. West Midlands police alone are owed half a million pounds. The arts organisation Assembly Festival is £1.5 million out of pocket. Coventry City Council, after receiving guarantees from the trust’s then CEO that it could meet its obligations, may now have to write off £1.6 million of public money. The Albany Theatre Trust, a local charity of which I am a trustee, is named in the administrators’ report as being owed £34,000. Like so many other Coventry-based creative bodies, it was initially prevented from participating, only for the trust management to do a complete 180° turn when the lack of any real links to the community became glaringly obvious. In total, administrators have revealed that the city of culture trust will leave a black hole of more than £4 million in its wake. Coventry was promised a programme to enlighten, educate and entertain our city. What we received was a leadership without any interest in local people, and incompetent money management, with dire consequences. I have been calling for an investigation since the bankruptcy was announced, so I welcome the ongoing review by the National Audit Office, which I hope will be a step on the way to understanding what went so badly wrong behind the scenes.
Oversight is key. Although local authorities bid for city of culture status, the award is made by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport here in Westminster. The programme is then drawn up and implemented by arm’s length bodies, controlled by neither local government nor national Government directly. That approach proved fatal for Coventry City of Culture Trust. Those responsible for creating the disaster have been free to hide the truth from the press and public throughout. Only the administrators appear to have ever been given the full picture of the organisation’s financial situation, but by the time they were compiling their report, it was too late to salvage much from the wreckage.
As sorry as this tale of mismanagement and financial loss has been, I do not wish to discourage future applicants from bidding for city of culture status. The benefits of a cultural festival extend far beyond the celebrations and performances themselves, but it is clear that deep-rooted reform is a must. Whole areas of arts and heritage are made accessible for the first time to untapped audiences, from every possible background and walk of life. The research and creative projects inspired by a city of culture should keep giving back for decades. Our duty is to ensure that the serious flaws revealed in the last festival’s governance do not hang over the city of culture programmes to come and to ensure that the legacy of Coventry’s year is secured.
Coventry What’s Next, a grassroots organisation made up of various stakeholder organisations, including Coventry cathedral, Coventry City Council, Talking Birds and the Albany Theatre, hopes to secure the funding that was previously promised to the trust, by rebidding for the money that was already set aside for the legacy programme. Will the Government share the contents of the original bid with those stakeholders and ensure that money is automatically transferred to those organisations, so that the legacy project can continue?
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport must keep a much closer eye on the finances of any arm’s length body tasked with implementing city of culture programmes. What steps is the Minister taking to ensure this level of financial mismanagement will not occur again? Will the Minister commit to including an independent representative of the Secretary of State as a voting member of the governing body heading any such bodies in the future? Or will he look at ensuring that the Culture, Media and Sport Committee is able to audit the leadership and delivery of organising bodies on an annual basis?
Finally, will the Government commit to holding a full investigation into how this maladministration and bankruptcy has been allowed to occur, so that lessons can be learned for the future management of the city of culture programme?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Stuart Andrew)
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi) for securing this important debate on Government support for Coventry City of Culture Trust, on behalf of her constituents.
I start by offering my sincere regret that Coventry City of Culture Trust had to enter administration, with local job losses and wider negative implications for those businesses that work closely with the trust. It is never easy for those who are affected by such events. My thoughts are with those who are struggling as a consequence of those events, and I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that issue.
Before I turn to discuss the particular circumstances surrounding the Coventry City of Culture Trust, I would like to take a moment to set out how the Government view the UK city of culture competition and its positive impacts, because it is important that we remember those, as the hon. Lady did in her speech.
DCMS established the UK city of culture competition in 2009, following Liverpool’s immensely successful term as European capital of culture in 2008. The competition is a proven model for place-specific, culture-led regeneration. Derry/Londonderry, the first winner of the UK city of culture competition, received £160 million in capital investment associated with the title. That funding secured major improvements to the public realm along the River Foyle, forming part of Derry/Londonderry’s regeneration legacy. Hull, which was the city of culture in 2017, received £15 million of direct Government funding, which in turn attracted more than £600 million of public and private investment, with nine out of 10 Hull residents saying that they thought the programme had had a positive impact on the city.
As UK city of culture in 2021, Coventry enjoyed huge successes. It secured more than £170 million of investment, facilitating regeneration across the city valued at over £500 million. The Government invested more than £18 million to support Coventry directly in that year. Over £8 million of that funding supported the redevelopment of key cultural assets such as the Daimler Powerhouse, which saw the major transformation of one of the first car factories built in Britain into a £2.5 million creative hub. The Belgrade Theatre has seen a refurbishment of the main stage, auditorium and foyer, while Drapers’ Hall, a music hall that was closed for 30 years, has now opened its doors to the public thanks to city of culture funding.
We should not lose sight of Coventry’s excellent cultural programme. For instance, it has hosted the Turner prize, grassroots festivals, concerts such as Radio 1’s Big Weekend, and a spectacular drone light show watched by thousands. Cultural activity took place in every ward, and just under two thirds of the programme was co-created with local residents. The model of co-creation promoted the bottom-up, hyper-local production of events within communities, but I do note the points that the hon. Lady raised in her speech.
Taiwo Owatemi
When it comes to events organised by the city of culture trust, does the Minister recognise the importance of giving local organisations the support that will enable them to create programmes that are tailored to local people, and does he recognise that when that does not happen, many of those people are left feeling disengaged and undervalued?
Stuart Andrew
Absolutely. That is an important point. I was pleased to be able to go to Bradford not long ago, and it was great to see how much it was engaging young people in particular in the creation of projects.
We should also remember that Coventry’s programme had to be reimagined to comply with covid restrictions at short notice. Sadly, the pandemic, the energy crisis and cost of living issues have all played a part in the challenges faced by the trust and contributed to its eventual administration. The circumstances in which Coventry had to stage its year as city of culture were therefore unprecedented. Indeed, the administrator’s report states that covid had an adverse impact on the business’s finances.
Nevertheless, following the trust’s administration, I do not dispute that there are lessons to be learned by all parties, and, as the hon. Lady knows, wider work is being undertaken to understand the circumstances in which it entered administration. As she said, the National Audit Office has elected to conduct a review of the trust, which is focused in scope and is examining the issues of central Government funding and oversight of the trust. The report is due to be published in the summer, and I can give the hon. Lady a commitment that we will consider it and apply the lessons learned from it to the future of the programme. We continue to engage with the NAO as it proceeds with the review. The Charity Commission has opened a regulatory concern case examining the governance of the trust, and we will continue to look at that as well.
I can give a personal commitment that the Department and I are keen to learn our own lessons from the past. The Department has already co-hosted a discussion with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Warwick Business School to consider how best to ensure effective legacy delivery for the UK city of culture programme. I was pleased to attend that event, and it was good to have representatives from cities that had hosted it in the past and those hosting it in the future, so that we could all share our experiences. We are actively working with Bradford Culture Company, Bradford Council and Arts Council England to ensure that robust governance and accountability for Bradford 2025, as well as—crucially—a sustainable legacy programme, are all there in the planning.
Taiwo Owatemi
Accountability is key, and in the situation of Coventry City of Culture Trust, there has been no accountability. What steps will the Minister be taking to reassure my constituents that those who mismanaged the trust will be held accountable?
Stuart Andrew
As I said a moment ago, we are awaiting the report from the National Audit Office. I think that it will be doing the sort of detailed work that the hon. Lady talks about. I assure her that as soon as we get that report, if there are any lessons to be learned in terms of oversight, we will look at them carefully. It is important that we learn those lessons, because I do not want us to damage this excellent programme. People need to have great confidence in it, and we will also need to apply those lessons to the launch of the 2029 competition.
We know that the UK city of culture designation is transformative. It drives economic growth and regeneration, and it promotes lots of social benefits and gives a real pride in place. Winners such as Coventry have seen significant regeneration to much of the public realm and cultural assets, and we are keen that Bradfordians can enjoy change of a similar scale in their city too. We know that Bradford’s enthusiasm for and commitment to the programme is clear from its excellent bid and planning, and I have confidence that it will be able to deliver a successful year and, most importantly, to secure a continuing legacy. That really is critical. We will continue to work closely with Bradford to ensure that it meets its stated goals, and we will certainly learn all the lessons that we have experienced from Coventry. We will also work closely with the city, as I know it is currently considering what that legacy programme will look like.
Taiwo Owatemi
I know from speaking to many of the local arts organisations in Coventry that they are concerned about what is going to happen to the money allocated to the legacy trust. For many, their key concern is that they will have to rebid for that money. Many of the smaller organisations do not have expert bidders to draw up those bids, so what commitment can the Minister give that that money will still be accessible to local organisations that do not have the funding for a bid person?
Stuart Andrew
I know that officials in the Department are in regular discussions with Coventry City Council, and I understand that they are working with many of those local organisations on building up the legacy programme. We are looking forward to receiving the proposal from Coventry City Council and as soon as we get it, we will of course consider what help and support the Government can give.
My door remains open and I would be keen to continue this engagement with the hon. Member so that she can highlight some of these specific points. She is clearly representing her constituents extremely well here today, and I would be happy to do that. We need to learn lessons from this. It is a great programme that brings about many benefits, lots investment and lots of regeneration. When it is done well, it really engages the local community, but it is important that as we go through this, we learn the lessons. We look forward to seeing what the NAO report says and we will learn from that. In the meantime, I am happy to meet the hon. Member and representatives of Coventry City Council to explore what more could be done, and I thank her very much for raising this important issue.
Question put and agreed to.
Deferred Divisions
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Draft Judicial Pensions (Remediable Service etc.) Regulations 2023
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mike Freer)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Judicial Pensions (Remediable Service etc.) Regulations 2023.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I declare a direct interest: I am a member of the parliamentary pension scheme who may benefit from the implementation of the McCloud judgment. The regulations provide for technical aspects of what is known as the McCloud remedy, which I shall go into later. Hon. Members will remember the passage of the Public Service Pensions and Judicial Offices Act 2022, which was brought forward in response to the legal ruling that the 2015 public sector pension reforms were discriminatory on grounds of age. The Act sets out how we will remedy that discrimination across the public sector, including in the judiciary. It is necessary, however, to make provisions for groups of the judiciary with specific circumstances that are not captured in the Act. The Act provides the power for these regulations, which will ensure delivery in special cases and for different groups of judges.
For example, the regulations ensure a fair remedy for pension credit members who are the ex-spouses of members of the pension scheme who have a pension sharing order. Pension sharing orders set out how pension benefits should be divided between the pension credit member and the judge. The regulations ensure that pension credit members continue to receive the proportion of the pension benefits that they have been allocated in the pension sharing order, and that they cannot be adversely affected by any choices made by the judge. I apologise to hon. Members: these are quite technical regulations and can be a bit dry, so I ask them to please bear with me.
To give another example, the regulations provide options for when a judge owes money to the scheme as a result of their remedy. The regulations give judges a number of ways to pay any moneys owed; they include, but are not limited to, paying a lump sum, paying in instalments and opting for deductions from their salary. The regulations also allow for any liabilities to be waived, depending on the circumstances.
In addition, certain powers in the Act have been exercised in accordance with directions from HM Treasury. The directions provide guidance on applying interest and paying compensation to ensure a degree of consistency in administering the remedy across the public sector. The regulations also include associated amendments that may impact judges in scope of the McCloud remedy, but that are not made as a direct result of the discrimination. I will address these further later.
I come to the purpose and rationale for the regulations. Prior to the 2015 pension reforms, salaried judges were eligible for pensions under either the Judicial Pension Act 1981 or the Judicial Pensions and Retirement Act 1993. Fee-paid judges secured equivalent pensions through other litigation and became eligible for the fee-paid judicial pension scheme. These collectively are called the legacy pension schemes and were all tax-unregistered final salary schemes.
In 2015, the Government introduced extensive reforms to public service pension schemes. The reforms followed the Independent Public Service Pensions Commission’s final report in 2011, which set out a number of recommendations that were adequate and fair, but also made public service pension schemes more affordable and sustainable for the taxpayer. To that end, the commission recommended a number of changes, including increasing the normal pension age to a member’s state pension age for most schemes; replacing final salary schemes with new schemes based on a career average design; and introducing a fixed cost ceiling to ensure cost control for the taxpayer.
The Government adopted those recommendations, and introduced pension schemes based on the proposals from 1 April 2015. For the judiciary, the Judicial Pensions Regulations 2015 created a tax-registered, career average pension scheme. The 2015 regulations also included transitional protections whereby older members—those aged 55 or over on 31 March 2012—were exempt from the reforms and remained in their legacy schemes. For those aged between 51½ and 55 on 31 March 2012, tapered protection was available; those judges were given the choice of joining the 2015 scheme on 1 April 2015, or tapering across on a later date determined by their date of birth. All other judges—those aged under 51½ on 31 March 2012—received no protection and moved to the 2015 scheme on 1 April 2015, unless they opted out of pension scheme membership altogether.
Those transitional provisions were challenged by younger judges in the case of McCloud v. Ministry of Justice in 2016. In 2018, the Court of Appeal held that the 2015 reforms were unlawfully discriminatory on the grounds of age. On 15 July 2019, the Government issued a written ministerial statement that accepted the Court of Appeal’s judgment, and confirmed that they would take steps to address the difference in treatment across all schemes and for all affected members, regardless of whether they had brought a claim. That is called the McCloud remedy.
Since then, the Government have taken steps to resolve the discrimination for affected members. In July 2020, the Ministry of Justice consulted on proposals to remedy the discrimination. In February 2021, it confirmed which members the remedy would apply to, and that the remedy would consist of all non-claimant members participating in a formal options exercise, in which they would be offered a retrospective choice of pension scheme membership between their legacy scheme and JPS 2015 for the remedy period. The remedy period will cover from 1 April 2015, which is when the discrimination began, to 31 March 2022, at which point all members were moved to the judicial pension scheme 2022. On 1 April 2022, the judicial pension scheme 2022 became the only scheme open to members of the judiciary for future accrual. That remedy approach is different from that of the majority of public sector schemes affected by the McCloud judgment. As the Government recognised the judgment’s wider implications, the Act provided for a remedy for all public sector pension schemes, to ensure that all eligible public service workers received an appropriate remedy.
The one-off options exercise will happen later this year. The difference in approach for judicial members and other public sector workers is due to a preference for certainty for judicial members, given a number of unique factors in the judicial schemes, such as the 20-year accrual cap in the legacy schemes and the different tax treatments between the legacy and the 2015 schemes.
That remedy approach was legislated for in the Public Service Pensions and Judicial Offices Act 2022. Chapter 2 of the Act specifically provides for the judicial remedy. Following the passage of the Act, we are now bringing forward the draft regulations to provide for specific technical aspects of the remedy, primarily for special cases, as I mentioned earlier. The draft regulations are necessary to fully operationalise the choices members make in the options exercise. We have brought forward the draft regulations following a consultation that was open from 16 December 2022 to 10 February 2023. We received 10 responses, and carefully considered all of them; they were broadly supportive of the proposals. On 15 May 2023, the Government published the consultation response.
As I said, the regulations also make a number of amendments that may impact judges who are in scope of McCloud, but that are not made as a direct result of the discrimination. The amendments cover three main areas. The first area is indexation in the judicial pension scheme 2022. The JPS 2022 included indexation calculations that did not align with the calculations for other public sector schemes and the initial policy intention. An amendment rectifies that position. The second area is dependant contributions for salaried and fee-paid judges. Amendments ensure that all judges pay the same level of dependant contributions, which is 0%, on sums earned over £150,000, from the 2016-17 tax year onwards. That ensures that members choosing a legacy pension option are treated the same as those who are protected by the 2015 reforms, and that fee-paid judges are treated the same as salaried judges. An extension of the deadline in the Judicial Pensions (Fee-Paid Judges) (Amendment) Regulations 2021 is one of the other amendments.
Mike Freer
For context, when the 2021 regulations came into force on 1 April 2021, they extended eligibility for a fee-paid judicial pension to 13 further judicial offices with retrospective effect. They also enabled affected judges to pay contributions into the FPJPS retrospectively for pensionable service prior to 1 April 2021 by way of deductions or a lump sum. However, as the window in which members can pay back-dated contributions via a lump sum payment has now closed, the amendment extends the period in which that lump-sum payment can be made, so that it runs to 31 March 2025, with the possibility of further extension by the administrators in individual cases.
Once the regulations come into force, we intend to run the options exercise for all members in scope as soon as possible. The options exercise will run for three months for most members; after that, members’ choices will be implemented, and pension records will be amended where necessary.
Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)
The Minister is actually being quite interesting—not at all dry. Does he have an estimate of the numbers and costs? Will the costs come out of the Ministry of Justice budget?
Mike Freer
Off the top of my head, I cannot remember the numbers. I can say that the overall cost is about £170 million to the MOJ over the period. There are 2,500 members impacted. I hope that is helpful to the hon. Member.
In conclusion, I assure the Committee that the regulations are necessary. I apologise for the rather dry and technical nature of this issue, but the regulations are necessary to ensure that the judiciary will receive a pension remedy that is complete and equitable.
The Chair
I am sure that is all very clear, and that everybody has understood it completely.
Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I start by declaring my interest, as I may be one of the people who benefits from the change to pensions scheme.
The Chair
Order. Presumably everyone here will; we will take it as read that everyone is declaring an interest. I do not believe there will be any problem with that.
Afzal Khan
I thank the Minister for outlining the provisions in the regulations. As he explained, they have a number of features that ensure that the technical aspects of the McCloud remedy will be implemented. Those include a remedy in respect of technical member options, provision for judges where there has been immediate detriment, and repayment mechanisms where judges owe sums to the scheme or the Ministry of Justice. The Opposition is pleased to support the statutory instrument.
I recognise that the Government have provided meaningful opportunities for engagement through consultation throughout their correction of the Court of Appeal’s 2018 finding of unlawful age discrimination. I am content that the changes being made to the judicial pensions system address that discrimination. I am glad to see that the Ministry of Justice’s equality impact statement considers that the regulations will have a positive equality impact, though of course that is to be expected from legislation that directly addreses discriminatory practices. I am also pleased that the equality statement commits the Government to monitoring equality impacts after the regulations have been introduced.
The matter has been ongoing for a number of years, and we are glad to see it draw to a conclusion at last. As I said before, we are pleased to support the Government on this SI.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
I have a couple of questions—they are a bit of a protest. Obviously, the regulations are of much bigger size and much more complicated than a normal statutory instrument. Given that parts of it are effectively amendments to Acts that were introduced only 12 months ago, it seems to me that these provisions could have been an Act of Parliament, and I am not quite sure why they are regulations.
There are endless complaints about the shoddy scrutiny of legislation in this place, not least from the other place. Given the technical nature of the SI, the fact that we were given only a few days’ notice of our being on the Committee, and the fact that we do not have the opportunity to take any expert advice about what is in this very complicated document, this strikes me as a pretty poor show. Given the complexity of the regulations, and the fact that part of them amends previous legislation, I am fairly confident that we will be back at some stage to amend this SI because of technical problems with it.
Obviously, the regulations seek to remedy McCloud/Sargeant, which affected all the public sector. When I was a Minister at the Home Office, I spent a fair amount of my time dealing with the police’s issue with that judgment. There was a consultation on a remedy for the police on the same matter earlier this year. Can the Minister tell us when he expects the whole of McCloud/Sargeant to be resolved? The longer it drags on, the more uncertainty there might be. I congratulate him on getting something over the line for the judiciary, but there are a relatively small number of them and a much larger number of police officers, so it would be great to see movement on that as well.
On the settlement, I am quite surprised to hear that only 10 responses to the consultation were received. Was one of those responses from whatever collective body the judges have to represent their views? Knowing them as I do after many years of involvement with them, I feel that it is unlikely that only 10 of them would respond. If that is the case, there may have been a communication problem. They are normally pretty voluble on these issues.
My second question is whether the settlement for the judiciary is particularly different from, or more generous than, any of the other settlements that have been agreed with parts of the public sector. Are we likely to get any kick-back from people who feel that the judiciary have been privileged?
Finally, I have a question about partners or spouses of judges who sadly died between the judgment and the settlement. Will they be given the same options as living judges? I am not on top of the detail of the judicial pensions scheme, but I imagine that there is a death-in-service payment, and that a residual pension will fall to those spouses and partners. Will they be given the opportunity, retrospectively, to make the same choices that they would have been afforded if their spouse or partner was still alive? Given that the settlement is retrospective to 2012, and that the change took place in 2015, it is likely, given the demographic and the actuarial calculations, that a small number of judges will have died between the judgment and settlement. It is very important that their partners are given the same opportunities that they would have been given had their partners been alive.
Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)
I am grateful to the Minister for the way he set out the SI, which is quite technical. I did not think that what was said was dry. It is true that there is quite a lot of information, as we have just heard, but I was grateful for his efforts to talk us through the regulations. It is understood that consultation has taken place, and I would like to hear a bit more about that.
I know that the SI has absolutely nothing to do with the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign, but it is interesting that this pensions issue is moving forward with a consultation, with haste and with good communications. All those things are really important. I suspect that any WASPI women watching the debate might contrast that with their experience. None the less, it is really important to rectify issues of discrimination, and as there clearly has been age discrimination, the measures to remedy it must be welcomed.
The points made about spouses and partners, particularly given the passage of time, are important. The Minister said that he intends for the options exercise to run as soon as possible. Given the passage of time and the subject matter, that seems very sensible. I would be keen to hear the Minister’s answers to my questions, but I do not see anything to oppose in what has been said.
Mike Freer
May I first touch on the nature of the discrimination, because the word “discrimination” can be quite loaded? As the pension schemes have changed, those people who are coming up to retirement age and may have had fewer pensionable years to make changes to their provision have got some additional protection. The court case was because younger members felt that they were being discriminated against. It is important to put that into perspective. I understand why younger members felt that they were not being given opportunities that older members of pension schemes were getting, but equally, those of us who are older and are contributing do not necessarily have the working years ahead of us to make additional contributions or arrangements. I can understand why the situation arose, but we are where we are. I thought it was important to clarify that.
I turn to points raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire. It is quite difficult to say what the impact on other schemes will be, because each scheme is quite complex in its own right, as he knows and as we have seen with the digital scheme. Each Department will have to make its own statutory instruments to address the issues and the complexities of its own schemes.
I understand the question about why such a technical and complex matter is being addressed through an SI. In my time in this House, I have served on a number of statutory instrument Committees dealing with quite complex pension changes. It is not unusual for technical changes to pension schemes to be made in this way, but I take on board the very fair issue that my right hon. Friend raises about having time to understand the complexities.
On dependants, my understanding—I will double-check this point and write to my right hon. Friend if I have it wrong—is that the whole point of the McCloud remedy is to ensure that people are given the opportunity to put back in. My understanding is that that would include dependants. [Interruption.] I will quickly read my note to make sure that I have not misunderstood.
Kit Malthouse
Let me give the Minister a little time to read his note. I guess the question I am asking is: if I am the husband of a judge who died between the judgment and the remedy, will I be given the opportunity to make the same choices that my spouse would have made if they were alive? I would obviously have a dependant’s pension, and I would have had a death-in-service payment as well.
Mike Freer
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving me a little time. The scheme election may be made in respect of a person who is entitled to the remedy.
Mike Freer
Yes—that might have been quicker. In a former life I used to sell pensions, although certainly not of this complexity, I have to say.
These are important regulations about a matter that we need to address. I am grateful for the support of colleagues and the Opposition. I commend the draft regulations to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Westminster Hall
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Hospice Services: Support
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Paul Holmes (Eastleigh) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered support for hospice services.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. You are intrinsically linked to the Mountbatten hospice, which I will speak about this morning, in your role as the Member of Parliament for Romsey and Southampton North.
I thank the all-party parliamentary group on hospice and end of life care and its chair and co-chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson), who is here today, and Baroness Finlay, for their work in promoting and championing the hospice sector. They have a lot of experience in the sector and I am grateful to them for lending me their support in this important debate.
The hospice sector in this country does incredible work for thousands of families and individuals every day. It is a fact of life that we all experience a bereavement at some point, and some of my colleagues know that we recently had the very sad task of saying goodbye to my office manager, Sue Hall. Sue was not just an employee of mine; she was my friend, confidante, an incredible wife and mum, and a friend to all. She was a magnificent woman—a local hero who helped people every day. She never baulked at a challenge or missed an opportunity to show people how much she cared. I am sure many, if not all, of those here have had that special support in their lives from someone they rely on. For me, that person was Sue. I never thought I would have to make do without her by my side.
Sue left us peacefully, surrounded by her family and friends on 30 March. She was comfortable and well looked after, and for that I will ever be grateful to Mountbatten hospice in my constituency, which cared for her at the end of her life. It made her final days and moments a special time for her family and friends. We can all hope at the end of our time on this earth to have an opportunity to say, “Thank you, I love you, and goodbye.” That is a truly special and incredible moment for everyone—one that the hospice Sue stayed in provides for people every day.
Sue’s journey had a profound impact on me as I spent time with her in the hospice learning about the work that it does and the struggles it faces. In a moment of weakness, her son-in-law, Miles Rogers—a good friend of mine—and I agreed to do a charity skydive for Mountbatten hospice on 24 June. The fundraising page is available on my Facebook page if anyone wants to contribute.
Mountbatten Hampshire is a hospice in my constituency that provides 24/7 in-patient and community domiciliary and palliative end of life care services to people across Southampton city and large parts of Hampshire. It also provides rehabilitation and enablement services, as well as psychological and bereavement support to parents and their families. Sue’s family and I will forever be grateful to it for its kindness during Sue’s last days. Having had the pleasure of meeting the hospice’s chief executive officer, Nigel Hartley, and the fantastic staff who work there, I know that their passion and commitment to providing the best possible care for all their patients is their top priority, and they give that care with skill, tact and grace every day.
Alan Mak (Havant) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. Rowans Hospice does great work in the Havant constituency, and as a result it engenders a lot of loyalty, including from fundraising and support groups. Will he join me in thanking such groups for their contribution alongside the full-time staff at hospices?
Paul Holmes
I pay tribute to Rowans Hospice and to all the hospices that we will no doubt hear about this morning, given the number of people attending this debate.
As I say, I had the pleasure of meeting the CEO of Mountbatten hospice. Its work does not come without cost, but, as a charity, its services are provided free of charge to all who need them, thanks to the generosity of its amazing community and incredible volunteers, who give their time to support the best possible care for local people during the last years and months of their lives. Mountbatten currently supports around 1,000 families every day, and demand for its services is predicted to rise by 40% in the next 18 months. It costs £11.5 million a year to keep the services running, and the hospice relies on charitable support to fund its 24/7, 365 days a year services to people who need them.
Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)
St Christopher’s Hospice in my constituency is widely regarded as the first modern hospice, and it is still pioneering today, but it has to fundraise £15 million a year. The cost of living crisis means that its costs are going up and its donations are at risk of going down. Does the hon. Member agree that the Government must review the current funding model?
Paul Holmes
The hon. Lady tempts me to come to content that I will cover later in my speech, but for now she can take it that I wholeheartedly agree, as do many Members here, I suspect.
No one will contest that our health and care staff deserve to be well paid for the incredible work they do, and in an ideal world we would see our life savers and carers never have to worry about their finances and pay, but it would be deeply irresponsible to facilitate pay rises without giving due consideration to the dramatic impact that rising wage costs have on these essential services. To give some specific context, Mountbatten Hampshire took over management of the hospice from the NHS in 2019. It has a contract with the NHS for roughly 35% of its costs, of which about £3.8 million comes from the local NHS commissioners in the form of an outcome-based contract. The hospice follows the NHS pay award each year to remain competitive and to retain and hire staff for its services, which means that the hospice has seen a 4.8% rise in costs this year and will see a further 5% next year, with no corresponding change in its NHS contract, leaving an increasing and worrying financial gap that the charity will find very hard to reconcile without public funding.
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the hon. Member give way?
Several hon. Members rose—
Paul Holmes
I am spoilt for choice! I give way to the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier).
Dame Meg Hillier
It is interesting to hear about the Mountbatten, which I spent many years at when it opened, when I was a child. The hospice in my constituency, St. Joseph’s Hospice, is really cutting-edge, but the retrospective payment for nurses will cost it £470,000, and it cannot apply that yet because it has no certainty from commissioners about its funding. To keep it up will be another half a million a year, and it cannot afford that without certainty of funding. I am sure the hon. Member agrees that we need to press the Minister for some clarity on this.
Paul Holmes
I agree with the right hon. Lady; we do. In my experience, the uplift that has been given to local NHS commissioning groups is simply not making it through to those end of life services. I hope we will see some recognition of that from the Minister, and I am sure she will enforce this, to ensure that the funding to local commissioning groups gets through to these services.
Several hon. Members rose—
Paul Holmes
I do not want to be harsh, but I have been warned by the Chair that I should get through my speech. I will make some progress and then give way shortly.
Written evidence submitted to Parliament by Hospice UK records that hospices across the UK employ 12,000 nurses, with 8% of the nursing workforce drawn from bank or agency, which make up a 9,400 full-time equivalent nursing establishment, but they are struggling to recruit registered nurses. A clinical survey in 2021 found that there was an 11% vacancy rate in community-based hospices and a 7% vacancy rate in hospice-based nursing roles in adult hospices, with 16% vacancy rates for hospice-based nursing associate and community-based healthcare assistant roles. The written evidence states:
“Since this data was collected, between March and May 2021, the sense on the ground is that these figures have increased and workforce shortages in UK hospices and across other providers that deliver palliative and end of life care have worsened.”
This is clearly the tip of the iceberg, and further pressures are to follow. Hospices are desperate for more support from the Government. The Mountbatten will end the year with a £1.4 million deficit, with no foreseeable change in the financial forecast with the current funding arrangement. The impact will be felt not only in the care sector but throughout the whole NHS.
Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)
My hon. Friend paid a fantastic tribute to his office manager, Sue. Rowans Hospice in my constituency is thinking about increasing its number of beds from 19 to 22, but that will cost an extra £130,000 a year, and the trust is nervous about making that commitment. What he is saying is very important. Does he agree that the Government need to give more money to this valuable service?
Paul Holmes
I suspect that I will be in constant agreement with interventions this morning. My hon. Friend and constituency neighbour makes an astute point, as usual, and she is right to pay tribute to the hospice in her constituency.
Communities such as mine in Eastleigh will suffer as hospices such as Mountbatten have no choice but to reduce their services and the extraordinary high-quality care they offer, and this comes at a time when demand is only growing. As if that were not enough, staffing costs are but one consideration that care providers are having to take into account. As we all know, the soaring price of energy has hit businesses, families and individuals all over the country, and none more so than those in the charity care sector.
Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)
Acorns Children’s Hospice in the Walsall borough supports families and children in my constituency. Does my hon. Friend agree that, in these challenging times when energy prices are on the rise, we want any additional help to include the hospice sector?
Paul Holmes
I thank my right hon. Friend for her intervention. She tempts me to talk about issues that I will come to later in my speech—it is only a couple of pages away, I assure you, Ms Nokes. She is right that hospices have not been included in the energy support given to other charities, even though their services are energy intensive due to the equipment they use. Her point is well made and will be recognised in her constituency.
The energy bill for Mountbatten has risen by an eye-watering £250,000—a fivefold increase—and there has been no additional financial support. One might think that that is surely as high as prices can go, but a London-based hospice has forecast that its energy costs will increase by almost £300,000 a year due to inflation pressures. A north London hospice told Civil Society Media that it faces an energy bill of £433,000 in 2023-24, based on predicted energy costs.
Adult hospices are not the only ones affected by this issue. As my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) said in his letters to the Department of Health and Social Care, there is also uncertainty about the children’s hospice grant—a vital source of funding that represented an average of 15% of children’s hospices’ income in 2021-22.
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the pressures on the sector, which also affect St Raphael’s in my constituency. The Government have been generous with the children’s hospice grant, but it runs out next year, and the lack of certainty is the problem. We would really like the Minister to stand up and say that she will renew the grant after 2023-24, which would provide a huge amount of certainty for the sector.
Paul Holmes
My hon. Friend, who is my past employer, makes a good point—although not as good as when I wrote his speeches. He is absolutely correct that there is uncertainty about that grant, and about how it is handed out by local commissioning groups. It is not getting through to children’s hospices, and I hope the Minister will have something to say about tweaking the way that grant is allocated to local areas.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Sixty-six per cent. of adult hospice income and 80% of children’s hospice income is raised through fundraising—bake sales, charity shops and marathons—and Marie Curie depends on that more than others. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we should put on the record our thanks to the volunteers who make the effort and get the money in?
Paul Holmes
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct. I only have to see Mountbatten local networks of fundraising and charity supporters, whether in charity shops or in fundraising roles. I am honoured that I may become part of that community—if I land on the ground safety, alongside Miles—but it will not end there. I will carry on fundraising for a fantastic cause.
When Mountbatten hospice wrote to me in January to outline those extraordinary energy costs, I was happy to write on its behalf to the Secretary of State. Unfortunately, the energy bill relief scheme and the later energy bills discount scheme did not ease the pressures, as the hospice was not eligible. Mountbatten still faces unsustainable pressure, as do hospices across the United Kingdom.
Of course, there are some people who ask whether a charity should not take the majority of its funding from its local community—from donations and contributions, rather than from Government funding. That is a fair question, but unfortunately it does not provide a solution, especially considering that community donations already support 70% of Mountbatten’s funding, which it has calculated to be the limit of what it can ask from people.
Andy McDonald
The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech. He is right about donations, but my local hospice, Teesside Hospice, is really struggling. I congratulate the hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) on his work in that respect. Is the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) not describing a perfect storm? There is a statutory obligation on the NHS to fund hospices for medical care, but the NHS is entirely strapped. Can I divert him away from the solution of asking members of staff to tighten their belts even further? That is not an option. When we cannot recruit and retain, that is not the solution. We need a fundamental reset of the economic settlement.
Paul Holmes
I hope the hon. Gentleman has not taken from my speech that I am suggesting that staff tighten their belts. In fact, I am advocating that hospices be allowed to follow the NHS pay settlement model, and be funded properly to so do. I would say to the hon. Gentleman that the Government have put their hand in their pocket through the £1.5 billion uplift, although that is simply not getting through from the Department of Health and Social Care and local commissioning boards to the hospices. That is where the Government need to step in to a greater extent. Therefore, I ask the Government to take the issue seriously and to continue to treat the charity care sector with the priority it deserves.
Hospices do incredible work, and they represent spectacular value owing to the services they provide. We cannot allow that vital link in the care chain to be broken, or even weakened, particularly at this time. Evidence submitted to the all-party parliamentary group on hospice and end of life care’s report detailed how the covid-19 pandemic made fundraising even more challenging for hospices. Hospices experienced a massive decrease in income while facing unprecedented demand for their services. One hospice’s overnight sitting service had to end due to lack of funding to sustain it, which highlights how dependent those services are on charitable donations.
It is important to highlight the fact that the sustainability of the hospice sector continues to be tested due to the cost of living crisis. Some sort of long-term funding settlement for hospices would be in the interests of all concerned because 160,000 more people each year are expected to require palliative care by the end of 2040. Having sufficient staff and volunteer resourcing in the specialist palliative care field is essential. An ideal outcome would be the Government and the NHS working with the hospice sector to provide an ongoing financial settlement, with regular contractual reviews to ensure that the support that hospices receive is at least the minimum they require to keep services running. That should be directed to cover both staffing and energy cost rises.
Doing that would be in the best interests not only of hospices, because hospices play a vital role in reducing pressure on NHS services by providing bed space and crucial care capacity. The NHS can scarce afford to lose such space and capacity, particularly in the light of the current waiting lists, but lose them it may if action is not taken.
Several hon. Members rose—
Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
Order. Members will see that a lot of colleagues want to get in. I will do my best to call as many Members to speak as possible, and that will require a three-minute time limit from the start. I call Kate Hollern.
Kate Hollern (Blackburn) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) on securing this important and timely debate.
I begin by paying tribute to East Lancashire Hospice, and the staff and volunteers who deliver exceptional services to people in difficult family circumstances. You will excuse me if I get a bit emotional, Ms Nokes, because my family benefited greatly from East Lancs Hospice, and I could not have come through a very difficult time without its support.
Sadly, many hospices are facing an existential crisis. Unlike big business, as energy and food prices rise, hospices cannot pass the cost on to their customers. In fact, the opposite is true, because as the cost of living increases, donations invariably decrease as individuals on whose generosity hospices rely feel the pinch. As a result, hospices have less money available for paying staff, who themselves are struggling to make ends meet.
It is vital that the Government address that unsustainable situation because the care provided by hospice services cannot be replicated elsewhere within the NHS. Indeed, hospices take a burden off the NHS. Let us be honest: a reduction in hospice services would result in increased hospital admissions, higher costs and bed shortages, all of which would further stretch our already overwhelmed health system.
According to Hospice UK, hospices are collectively budgeting for a deficit of £186 million. Therefore, Hospice UK is calling for the Government to take action to help hospices with rising costs, and asking for £30 million of Government funding for hospices to offset the cost of increased energy bills in the year ahead, as well as £102 million for hospices in England to help them to keep pace with NHS pay rises.
In April, I visited East Lancs Hospice. I met the chief executive and staff, and I had the pleasure of observing the remarkable care provided by this wonderful team every day. I was in awe of the diligence with which staff supported patients and their families, but I was also reminded me of the support and care given to John, my partner, in the last days of his life.
Back to business. The hospice does not receive full funding from the NHS; apart from its core grant, it must fundraise in order to make ends meet. Like most hospices, it is very creative in that fundraising. The turnover of the East Lancashire Hospice is £4 million, but the core grant is only £1.6 million. That means that they must find £2.4 million. I beg the Minister to address the funding for hospices urgently.
Peter Gibson (Darlington) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) on securing this important debate, and I extend my condolences to him on the loss of his office manager. I draw the attention of the Chamber to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, particularly as a trustee of North Yorkshire Hospice Care, and to my co-chairmanship of the APPG on hospice and end of life care. I put on record my thanks to everybody in our hospices—the nurses, the doctors, the trustees, the volunteers and the fundraisers—for all that they do.
As my hon. Friend mentioned, the APPG recently published a report entitled “The Lasting Impact of COVID-19 on Death, Dying and Bereavement”. I know that the Minister has received a copy of that report, because I personally handed it to her. One of the key points in it was about sustainability of funding for end of life care and bereavement services, and about the need for funding to them to provide their care confidently, commissioning for the years ahead, not just the year ahead.
I recently convened a meeting of all the MPs and hospices in the Tees valley, and there is a very sad picture. In Darlington, St Teresa’s Hospice is posting a £541,000 deficit this year. Teesside Hospice is posting a deficit of £400,000 this year, and Alice House Hospice in Hartlepool has had to close a unit. It does not have to be this way. Ask anyone where they want to die; they will tell you that they want to die at home, surrounded by their loved ones. Our hospices provide support to enable that to happen. Given a choice between a hospital and a hospice, people will choose a hospice.
We know that deaths in hospital are costly, blocking beds and often giving people a less than good death. I want to see everyone have access to a good death, and I want the NHS to save money and unblock beds. That can be achieved with proper commissioning and support for palliative care, as required by the Health and Care Act 2022, not just in Darlington, Teesside or North Yorkshire, but right across the country. We would not, in this day and age, fund maternity care by running bake sales, skydiving or wing-walking, but it seems perfectly acceptable to many that that is how we should fund palliative care. It is not right and it is not fair, and the time for dealing with it is now.
UK hospices are budgeting for a deficit of £186 million this year. Our integrated care boards must step up to the plate, commissioning and paying for the hospice care that their community needs and, at the same time, safeguarding these institutions that are so integral to our communities, saving the NHS money and reducing bed blocking. It really has the potential to be a win-win situation. I implore the Minister to do everything in her power to get this sorted, once and for all.
Samantha Dixon (City of Chester) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I congratulate the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) on securing this important debate.
As we have heard, hospices provide compassionate care and support for more than 300,000 individuals a year who are facing life-limiting illnesses. They offer a place of comfort, dignity and peace not just for their patients, but for families and loved ones. May I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the incredible staff at hospices around the country, in particular the Hospice of the Good Shepherd in Backford in my constituency, where members of my own family have received care in the past? We should also thank the wider palliative care workforce, who work extremely hard to provide good care for so many.
Unfortunately, as we have heard, the reality for so many hospices is becoming increasingly bleak. Collectively, they are budgeting for a deficit of millions due to rising costs, with high energy bills and rising staff costs hitting hospices at a time when donations have dropped as a result of the cost of living crisis. I applaud the trustees at the Hospice of the Good Shepherd, who have taken the decision to match NHS workforce payments—an important step to establish the workforce and continue as a going concern. However, they are facing energy consumption that is going through the roof. They cannot reduce it, because they need to keep machines running and keep the in-patient unit warm or cool for those who need care.
As we know, the majority of hospices rely on charitable funding for a significant part of their finances. When I visited the Hospice of the Good Shepherd, the staff told me about the brilliant ways people raise funds. They include the corporate challenge, where local businesses grow £50 into £20,000, the Chester Sparkle Walk on 16 June, and local people holding individual events—my friends Steve and Zena held a garden party on Saturday and raised £800.
Those imaginative initiatives are essential for hospices to keep a good connection with their communities, but with costs increasing, Government must do more to lend support to hospices and their staff so that they can continue to provide their essential work.
Robin Millar (Aberconwy) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. Ms Nokes. I thank and congratulate the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes): judging by the attendance at this debate, he has struck a chord.
I would like to pay tribute briefly to two hospices in my constituency, St David’s and Tŷ Gobaith, which is Welsh for “Hope House”, and particularly to the clinical teams there. The UK has a reputation for having some of the best palliative care in the world, but it is not appreciated as much as it might be. I thank healthcare workers, the volunteers, who have such a critical role to play, and those who donate: donations provide up to 70% of Tŷ Gobaith’s income.
It is true indeed that hospices play a key role: 90 children a year are looked after by Tŷ Gobaith, which has the effect of reducing pressure on the NHS and delivering end of life care within homes across north Wales, as my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) mentioned. The hospice faces record numbers of referrals, as increasing numbers of babies and children in Wales are living with complex life-limiting conditions. It forecasts a deficit of £1.3 million this year and will not be cost-neutral in 2026.
As the chief executive of St David’s has said, part of the problem is that awareness of the role and value of the hospice does not come until the point at which it is needed. My point is not to talk about how we have a perhaps fading Christian message in our society of a God who walks with us through troubles—through that valley of the shadow of death. It is not about a fading tradition in which the body of the deceased was once laid out at home, or about the trend in science where we are now able to extend the life of the body beyond sentience. It is more that it is the hospice that is in that space, very often helping us and walking through it with us. That role and the excellence of palliative care are crucial and must not be neglected. Beyond the care itself, it is about research into and understanding of that support.
On the point about finance, it is clear that across Wales £4.4 million is needed from the Welsh Government. The pressures on finance from that most pernicious of taxes, inflation, are incredible, but staffing is the biggest cost: 71% of hospice costs are related to staffing. In Wales in particular, there is pressure through the NHS pay deal. Hospices must compete for the staff that they have in their care homes. If I had time, I would talk about the challenges of energy supply costs: St David’s has had an extra 50% on its heating and energy bill as a result of price rises.
Hospices have earned our respect. There is no doubt that their staff and teams have also won our deep gratitude. Now they must have our support.
Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I congratulate the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) on securing today’s important debate. It is personal to me, as I know it is to many parliamentary colleagues here. My mother died recently, and then my brother died about 11 months ago: the very least we can do for those who have been given a terminal diagnosis is to ensure that they die with dignity, surrounded by loved ones. Hospices are there to help and to alleviate physical, emotional and psychological suffering. Their work ensures that a dying person’s final days are made as peaceful as possible.
Bolton Hospice, which serves my constituency, has a reputation for providing outstanding care to its patients, but it is expensive to run and gets minimal Government support. A constituent recently wrote to me to praise its work, telling me that her husband had been given just months to live:
“The ‘hospice at home’ team supported me and the girls to make unforgettable memories from the comfort of our living room…later he was admitted to the inpatient unit at Bolton Hospice where he passed away with his loved ones at his bedside.”
Even beyond his death, the hospice continued to support her and her young daughters through those very difficult times.
Bolton Hospice needs to raise over £4 million each year to be able to provide its specialist services. It is an independent charity; it relies solely on the generosity of donations and fundraising from the people of Bolton. The cost of living crisis has tipped its financial difficulties from a challenging position to crisis point. In the current climate, it is £457,000 worse off than in 2008. Hospice care, as we have heard, is an intensive user of energy, because of the need to maintain temperatures as well as extensive electrical equipment, from oxygen pumps to ventilators. Rising food prices have also meant that the cost of feeding patients has increased by 10%, while the cost of transporting patients has gone up by 44%.
Like other hospices, Bolton Hospice has worked hard to improve its fundraising, but it is running at an operational deficit of £1.2 million. Unless the Government intervene with an uplift of funding for 2024, it will have to reduce beds by 40% and reduce its care or end other vital services. The Minister must acknowledge that if hospices have to reduce or close down, that will place pressure on the NHS and our hospitals. At this time, because of the rising cost of living, the local community is not able to give as much money. I ask the Minister to make an exception in the case of hospices, and grant them the money.
Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes, and to follow my constituency neighbour the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), who champions the cause of Bolton Hospice so effectively. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) on securing this timely debate; the fact that it is so well attended demonstrates how important the hospice movement is, right across the land.
The service that Bolton Hospice, Wigan and Leigh Hospice and Derian House Children’s Hospice provide to my constituents is an immensely important part of the community. The charitable and fundraising aspect represents their importance to so many people in the community. When we are going through very difficult economic times, whether they are caused by war in Europe, by covid or by lockdown restrictions, that makes it very difficult to fund hospices, so they have relied for many years on simple things such as sponsored walks and other events and activities. They value that relationship with the community. I have never had a sense from the hospice movement that it wants to be dependent on the national health service. They need that healthy relationship, but they also need certainty of funding from the national health service.
My principal question to the Minister, because so many of the key arguments have been made so compellingly, is what she can do with the integrated care systems and integrated care boards, as well as with the national health service, to maintain and shore up their relationship with their local hospices. That point is not necessarily recognised, because the hospice movement is independent of and separate from the national health service. When the NHS is going through a difficult squeeze, it is perhaps those other services, which are so important to the local community and which have such fantastic staff and so many superb volunteers doing amazing work, that are not necessarily recognised by the local system in the way they should be. The Minister must encourage and support integrated care systems and integrated care boards to deliver.
Several hon. Members rose—
Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
Order. I will reduce the time limit to two minutes after the next speaker.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) on securing this debate and on volunteering to join the community of those of us who do daft things to fundraise for our local hospices.
Lancashire and South Cumbria hospices have been informed that our ICB has offered them a 0% uplift on their 2022-23 funding. Following on from last year’s 1.7% uplift, that results in significant pressure, with the cost of living crisis and the need to retain doctors and nurses and be competitive with the NHS.
People often do not realise that our hospices rely on the good will of local communities and on fundraising. On average, two thirds of adult hospice income and four fifths of children’s hospice income is raised through fundraising. St John’s Hospice in Lancaster costs more than £5.1 million a year to run, and only about a third of that is provided by Government funding. That is why I decided two months ago that I would run the 26.2-mile London marathon to try to plug that gap, but I only managed to raise £1,500.
Hospice funding has never been a sustainable model. The crisis, rising energy costs and inflation are creating a perfect storm. The cost of living crisis is putting pressure on charitable donations. Hospices cannot simply reduce their energy use, and they need to remain competitive with NHS pay to recruit and retain staff.
Trinity Hospice in Blackpool’s hospice-at-home service directly supported 70% of all those who died at home on the Fylde coast last year. The Minister will also be aware of Brian House Children’s Hospice, which is part of the Trinity service. For many years, it has served families on the Fylde coast who have the joy, but also the challenges, of raising and loving a child with a life-limiting diagnosis.
I want to press the Minister on the issue of children’s hospices. I have visited the hospice on many occasions and have seen the amazing work to support so many of my constituents living in the most unimaginable circumstances, yet Brian House has seen a huge challenge to its funding, with its grant cut by £50,000. It is already one of the children’s hospices with the least Government and health authority funding in the country: only 14% of its expected £1.6 million annual operating costs. A further loss of £185,000 next year is unimaginable.
I thank the Minister for meeting my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), and me. Unfortunately, the hon. Gentleman cannot be here today, but he shares my concerns about the funding for Brian’s House Children’s Hospice. Can the Minister reassure him and me that this issue is on her radar and that she is doing all she can to ensure that no children’s hospice loses out on funding because of changes to formulas?
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) on securing this debate.
Like many Members in this debate, I have seen at first hand what it means to be supported by hospice services. Back in January 2014, my mother Linda was entering the final stages of her battle with bowel cancer when she was cared for by St Luke’s Hospice Plymouth. The staff there helped create some very special memories, which made her passing easier for all of us, especially my mum. Similarly, the support for my family from the local hospice and palliative care teams in Tameside two years ago as my stepdaughter Anne approached the end was significant to us all.
Colleagues have expressed and described the challenges facing the sector, but I also want to add a note of optimism to the debate. Rowcroft Hospice in Torquay marked its 40th anniversary last year not just by looking back over those 40 years, but by firmly looking to the future, unveiling a multimillion-pound investment and development programme that includes a new 60-bed specialist nursing home centred around a village green. A village hall, restaurant and allotments would also be part of the development, as well as a children’s nursery and estate workshop. The plans are very welcome, as they will be a boost not only for Rowcroft but for Torbay’s entire health and social care sector, with the hospice facility at its centre.
I am conscious that time is limited, but I have a couple of specific points on which I want to hear the Minister’s thoughts. First, even though it is clear that the hospice movement does not wish to become a fully publicly funded healthcare service, what further options may be provided for support with some of the costs they face? Secondly, what support will be provided to hospices that are looking to expand their services and develop new integrated care offerings, as Rowcroft Hospice seeks to do?
Hospices are a unique place where life is added to days when days can no longer be added to life. They provide a service not just to in-patients, but to a whole community. I hope we can support them to continue doing so.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) for securing this important debate. I extend my condolences to him for the loss of his manager Sue.
I start by giving my heartfelt thanks to all those who work in hospices. Ensuring that people can pass away in comfort and dignity is an extremely honourable profession, and it means a great deal to people, as we have heard. The cost of living crisis is affecting hospices up and down the country, and we need to take it seriously. Even before the cost of living crisis began, working in a hospice was challenging. The Government should not be making it harder.
The Minister should be concerned by what hospices such as the brilliant St Cuthbert’s Hospice in my constituency are saying. Inflation, for one, is a real concern. What St Cuthbert’s is receiving from the integrated care board does not even come close to either wage inflation or general inflation. It is seeing a massive rise in its energy costs, by tens of thousands of pounds. As we have heard, a care home cannot reduce its energy consumption.
The marketplace for specialist staff is currently extremely competitive. The absence of a proper workforce plan from the Government is not helping. It should be noted that despite the challenges it is facing, St Cuthbert’s Hospice continues to run at 100% satisfaction. I know the Minister will mention the £100 million announced in the spring Budget, but that falls short of what is really needed. Hospices are collectively budgeting for a deficit of more than £180 million this year.
Where is the support for energy bills? Hospices need to be able to offset their costs. After all, it does not reflect well on a society when the Government do not prioritise end of life care. Patients require the utmost dignity, and the Government should be ensuring that their dignity is prioritised.
James Wild (North West Norfolk) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) on securing this important debate. It is timely for me, as on Friday I visited the Norfolk Hospice Tapping House in my constituency to talk to the staff and volunteers who provide the care, comfort and compassion for people living with life-limiting illnesses.
Tapping House is rightly a valued part of the west Norfolk community, supporting more than 1,000 families each year. At the heart of that hospice, and all hospices, are the incredible staff who provide high-quality care and go above and beyond to make people’s final days as comfortable and memorable as possible—even, I heard, providing virtual reality headsets so that patients can imagine being on a tropical island and enjoying a cocktail from their bed. The brilliant team at Tapping House is supported by hundreds of volunteers, and it is testament to the great care provided there that many of the volunteers and fundraisers are family members of people who spent their last days in the hospice. We have heard about the escalating costs in Tapping House, as energy costs have risen by 36% in the past year alone.
That brings me to funding. Only 30% of Tapping House’s services are funded from the NHS, with the rest coming from donations. Despite the challenging economic backdrop, Tapping House just held one of its most successful events, Tulips for Tapping, at which people could go into tulip fields near Sandringham and experience their great beauty. That event raised more than £140,000. However, the NHS funding received for in-patient units has not increased for the past two years, and community-based services have not seen an increase for several years.
I would be grateful if the Minister could say how much of the £1.5 billion for additional costs has actually flowed through to hospices. Along with other MPs, I have previously called for additional support for hospices, and the Government responded positively. The sector needs urgent support now; I hope the Government will carefully consider the requests that have been made and provide that additional support.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) for securing this important debate.
St Mary’s Hospice at Ulverston, St John’s Hospice at Lancaster and the Eden Valley Hospice at Carlisle provide tender, professional and specialist care for people with life-limiting conditions and their loved ones—something we are so grateful for. They prove that life has dignity from beginning to end. Hospitals, however marvellous they are, do not have the resources to replicate the care that is provided by hospices.
The costs of running a hospice have gone through the roof in recent times. Val Stangoe, the chief executive of St Mary’s, one of our three local hospices, said to me:
“The recent settlement by the NHS Lancashire South Cumbria ICB of 0.0%”—
as pointed out by the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith)—
“has left our hospices in a state of financial deficit, with potential loss of hospice beds and services.”
She went on:
“Your local hospices”—
our hospices—
“are now operating on a deficit budget, have received the lowest settlements in England. The proposed 0.0% uplift equates to almost 10% in cuts, significantly impacting delivery of services. This stands in contrast to other regions, where hospices have received an average uplift of 2.7%”—
which is not enough. She continued:
“The disproportionate treatment faced by hospices in Lancashire South Cumbria is unfair and must be addressed.”
My fundamental ask of the Minister is this: will she directly involve herself in that situation to stop our hospices in Cumbria suffering? I have been asking the Government for months to come up with a scheme to help hospices that are struggling with their energy costs, which have gone up three times in recent months. There are lots of promises and no action.
There is a cost to meeting the NHS pay settlement. There is a cost to ensuring that hospices are paid properly so that they can pay their staff, keep them, and recruit them in the first place, and so that they can pay their energy bills. But the cost of not doing that is far greater, not only in terms of the health damage and people’s pain and suffering, but for the hospitals that have to pick up the pieces when hospices are not able to meet people’s needs.
Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
Because one speaker has dropped out, I am going to increase the time limit back to three minutes.
Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) on securing this debate, and everyone who has spoken. We have heard some fantastic speeches.
Hospices provide a vital public service, but it is important to recognise that they are not, and do not want to be, part of the publicly funded NHS. Their flexibility as independent organisations helps them to meet the many and varied needs of people at the end of their life and with life-limiting conditions. They do a fantastic job of fundraising to support their activities so that they can deliver impact way beyond the value of the small public contributions they receive.
I am fortunate to have two brilliant hospices in my patch—St Richard’s Hospice and Acorns Children’s Hospice. I remember the first time I visited St Richard’s, and there was a sense of trepidation. It is a place where people go to die; would it not be a sad and depressing visit? Not a bit. I was amazed at how uplifting and positive it was. A few months later, I sadly got to know the hospice much better. Just a month after I was elected, my father was admitted to St Richard’s Hospice, and it provided amazing care and incredible support to my family. I echo the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), who talked about people dying with dignity with their loved ones around them. That is what the work of adult hospices should be, and is, all about.
St Richard’s tells me that only about £700,000 of its £12 million income comes from the NHS and the public purse. It has been offered an uplift of 1.8% by our local ICB, which would be worth about £40,000. A 1% pay rise for its staff would cost about double that, and matching the NHS 5% increase would cost about 10 times as much. I will not ask Ministers to take over funding for hospices, or the NHS to take a much larger share of hospice funding, but it is fair to ask them to provide help when inflation and the Government’s own pay increases are driving up costs for hospices. The ask from Hospice UK is for £30 million of Government funding to offset the increase in energy bills and £102 million for hospices in England to help them to keep pace with NHS pay rises in the next year. That is not unreasonable.
Children’s hospices also do an amazing job. They are also uplifting and inspiring places, as we have heard from many Members. I am fortunate to have Acorns in my patch, which has already been mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton). It has a new CEO and it is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. I want that to be a successful moment, and certainty about the children’s hospice grant would be incredibly helpful in that respect. The grant has sustained children’s hospices—it has kept them going year after year—but its short-term nature has become a problem for them.
We recently saw some welcome news from the Government about sports funding in schools—they have finally provided a multi-year settlement after many years of not being able to do so—and I hope they consider doing the same for children’s hospices. A multi-year settlement would make a massive difference, and giving some certainty that the grant will be renewed is essential.
Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) for securing this important debate and for his incredibly powerful speech; I pass on my condolences. I also pay tribute to Barnsley Hospice and Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice in South Yorkshire, which I want to focus on.
Six-year-old Daniel from Darfield in Barnsley has been receiving care at Bluebell Wood for mitochondrial disease and cerebral palsy. He struggles to sit, eat and stand, and his family simply do not know how long they have left, but they treasure every day despite facing many challenges. Daniel has received excellent care, and his family are grateful to Bluebell Wood for all that it does, but they want greater security for hospices and they want to speak directly to the Government to ask for it, because they do not know whether Daniel will be able to receive the end of life care that he might need at Bluebell Wood. I have raised this issue at Prime Minister’s questions and I was grateful for my discussion with the Minister when I met her a few weeks ago.
Last year, Bluebell Wood hospice was forced to close because of staffing pressures. It is now open again, but only to 90% of its capacity. When I visited a few weeks ago, the staff spoke about not only how they are of course there to provide end of life care, but how they do so much more. They provide respite care and support for parents, siblings and families. They try to provide fun and happiness, to make memories at what is an incredibly difficult and traumatic time. I saw that work at first hand. It was incredibly moving also to see at first hand the hospice’s end of life suite. The staff took me into what they call the cold room, which is where families will spend their final time together at the very end of the life and after passing. Often, it is where the larger family can say their goodbyes.
The staff told me that there is nothing they can do to prolong a child’s life at the worst moment in a family’s life, but what they can do is do everything they can to support families, which is often so important to the grieving process. That is the most powerful case for the provision of greater support and security for hospices—for all the different things we have spoken about today, including the continuation of the energy support grant, particularly for children’s hospices, and of course the provision of a longer-term and more secure model.
I conclude by thanking the amazing staff, medics and volunteers who continue to do all the work that they do at Bluebell Wood, at Barnsley Hospice and at hospices across the country, so that Daniel and all the children and young people in a similar situation receive the care they deserve when they need it.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Nokes, and I thank the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) for securing this timely and important debate.
For children in York, hospice care is provided by Martin House, and for adults by St Leonard’s. I pay tribute to all the staff at both hospices for their services and their love, care, professionalism, sacrifice and dedication for their patients and the families they serve. Where would we be without them? I will never forget the doctor, who had experience right across the NHS, who told me that before she came to St Leonard’s she had never seen care like it. That is what people across this country experience as they pass from this world.
Hospices are special places, as we have heard at lot in this debate, but they are also important places whose funding we cannot just leave to the rattling of tins. That is why it is so important that we focus on their funding, which is the call from today’s debate that the Minister must hear loud and clear. It is not good enough just to say that ICBs have the money and it is their decision, because ultimately hospices need funding from the Government. Now that the Government have put it on the statute book, thanks to the Lords, they need to make sure that they put the money behind this service.
Let me talk about St Leonard’s, which this year faces a £1 million deficit. It has not received the increase in funding to cope with the pressures of inflation. It received just £340,000 from the better care fund, which is the same amount as in 2016. There has been no increase, despite the fact that there has been an increase in the number of patients, moving from 200 back then, with the hospice-at-home service, to 700 patients a year now. St Leonard’s provides excellent care in the home, allowing people to choose where they die and the support they receive when they die.
The hospice faces fuel costs that are up by 180% for that hospice-at-home service. Of course, the in-patient service has seen energy costs rising, alongside the rising cost of food and so many other things. Indeed, staffing costs have also increased and are up by 31% over the last three years. We cannot just keep rattling tins when the cost of living crisis is impacting on everyone; we need to find a secure, assured and long-term funding solution for the services we are talking about.
Less than 30% of St Leonard’s funding comes from statutory sources. That situation cries out to this Government: “Surely, ensuring that people have a good death is worth finding the money for.” That is why I call on the Minister to think about what this means not just for NHS budgets but for families, carers and all the people who depend on hospice services. We need to move urgently to find that security, just as people find that security at the end of life.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
This is one of those occasions when being called last means I gain a minute, so I am pleased to have the opportunity to do just that—thank you, Ms Nokes. I thank the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) for setting the scene so well, and for giving us the chance to participate in a debate that moves us all. Some Members have told very personal stories.
I put on the record my thanks to all the charities, groups and staff who give hospice care, and give families, and us in this House, so much across this great United Kingdom. Our NHS is under immense strain, and we completely understand that there is a finite budget, but questions have to be asked about the use of funds when we look at those at the end of their lives living in conditions that are not acceptable. Rising costs from energy, food prices and staff costs, which are required to meet expected NHS pay rises, mean that hospices across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are collectively budgeting for a massive deficit of £186 million this year. Unless we are going to understaff, under-feed, under-medicate or under-heat our dying patients, more money is needed—that is the bottom line.
It is always a pleasure to see the Minister in her place. She grasps the situation very well. She is a lady well known for her compassion and understanding, and I look forward to her response. I agree with Hospice UK, which says that hospices need financial support to continue to offer their essential services. Government funding of £30 million for UK hospices to offset the increased cost of energy bills in the year ahead needs to go beyond the energy bills discount scheme. Additional funding for hospices from the Department of Health in Northern Ireland is also needed; I do not know whether the Minister has had a chance to consider that. The fact is that funding for hospice care is unsustainable. By the end of the year, 86% of hospices will be impacted by increasing energy prices. They need to keep medical machines running and their in-patient units warm for those in their care. Some 71% of hospice expenditure is on staff, which is a massive issue. As I referred to in an intervention, charities and volunteers run 66% of adult hospices and 80% of children’s hospices.
Over the next few years, I and others, as we often do, will help those hospices. Marie Curie, based in Knock Road in Belfast, is a hospice that I have visited to see people who have now passed away. I understand what such hospices do. The facts are clear: savings can always be made with improvements, but on nowhere near the scale that is needed. I therefore believe, with respect, that the Government and the Minister must man the breach. We regularly prioritise human rights in other nations, and the most basic right to a good death must be prioritised in the United Kingdom. That is what we want. It is a very simple request, and I hope the Minister can answer in a positive fashion.
Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
That brings us to our Front Benchers. I call Patrick Grady.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) on securing the debate, and echo the tributes and condolences that have been paid to his chief of staff, and all those who knew her.
Many, if not most, people will know, or know of, someone who has passed away in the care of a hospice. The hon. Members for Blackburn (Kate Hollern), for City of Chester (Samantha Dixon), for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), for Torbay (Kevin Foster) and for Worcester (Mr Walker) all spoke of their personal experiences. I have spoken previously of Liz Quinn, a long-standing activist in Glasgow Kelvin SNP, who spent her final days in the Marie Curie Hospice in Glasgow shortly before the 2017 election. In a debate in March I spoke about my good friend Melanie, who at that point was receiving care from the wonderful and dedicated staff at the Highland Hospice in Inverness. That care continued right up until the end, about a month or so later.
In many ways, that care provision has not stopped, because the hospice is still there to support Melanie’s husband, their son, and other family and friends. The compassion and support shown by the hospice movement, both before and after bereavement, is another of the aspects that make it such a special and valuable service. For that, we thank all those who work and volunteer for our hospices. The wraparound care—from the respite, which is beneficial to both the patient and their family, to ongoing support for their emotional wellbeing, practical advice for families dealing with finances, and signposting to other more specialised services, especially helping younger people and children to come to terms with trauma and loss—is all part of the service.
As we have heard, that incredible work is mostly done without reliance on public funding. Hospice UK estimates that up to two thirds of adult hospice income, and four fifths of children’s hospice income, derives from fundraising. Much like the hon. Member for Eastleigh, I hope to contribute in a small way by running the Loch Lomond 10K on Saturday for the Highland Hospice in memory of Melanie—perhaps we can swap JustGiving pages. We can aim to the heights of the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) by running a marathon eventually.
As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, we ought to express our thanks to all the people who have raised funds in so many ways; whether that is through runs, bungee jumps, skydives or marathons, it is admirable and inspiring. But increasingly it is not enough. The cumulative impact of energy, food, staffing and other price rises have left the hospice sector across the UK budgeting for a deficit of around £186 million this year. It is becoming a literally existential crisis for many individual hospices. In particular, we should recognise the work of the all-party parliamentary group on hospice and end of life care. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) for the report that was produced early this year.
Perhaps in some areas of the public sector, maybe even in health or wider services, there are possibilities to cut costs, but that is much more difficult for hospices. Medical machinery must be able to run 24/7 and 365 days a year. Temperature control—usually that means heating, although in the current season it may mean a little bit of cooling—is vital because maintaining comfortable temperatures for patients is a key aspect of palliative care, as is the provision of wholesome nutritious and tasty food.
The Government may have a target of reducing energy and food inflation, but that does not mean prices reducing; lower inflation just means prices rising a little slower. All that is driving wage inflation. Of course hospices want to be able to keep up with NHS pay rises. The better pay and conditions are for staff, the better level of service they in turn will be able to provide for those in their care.
We must acknowledge that there are staff shortages across the health and care sector as a result of the Government’s decision to force through a hard Brexit. We will never know how many trained and talented health and medical workers arrive here on small boats because the Government refuse to ask them—they would prefer to put them up in hotels or deport them to Rwanda than let them put their skills to use in hospices or hospitals.
The risk of all those challenges is a reduction in a service that everyone who has spoken in this debate agrees is of immense value on so many levels, but reduced provision is not going to mean that there is reduced demand. In fact, Sue Ryder has calculated that demand for palliative care in England is likely to rise by 55% in the next 10 years. If the hospice sector cannot provide the care, the costs will still have to be met from somewhere, either by the NHS directly, by other social care providers, by local authorities or ultimately by the families of the people who need the care themselves. They will have to take time out of the workforce to become full-time carers or pay emotional, psychological or even physical costs to their own wellbeing as they try to cope without professional support. That in turn simply increases costs for social security or the NHS. Therefore, in a way, providing adequate support for palliative care now also has longer-term preventive effects in the future.
The sector has made its funding requirements clear to the UK and Scottish Governments. Those include at least £30 million to offset energy costs above and beyond what is provided through the energy bills discount scheme. Sue Ryder sees the need for a step change in the funding approach, saying a commitment to fund 70% of total palliative care costs is the minimum required to ensure the sustainability of the sector in the medium term. In his intervention, the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) made an important point about budgeting certainty.
The Government must take this seriously. Access to care and compassion at the end of life should not have to be fought for or seen as some kind of luxury. If Westminster Hall debates are to have any kind of impact, it should be to give notice to the Government of the challenges that lie ahead and an indication that our constituents are paying attention. Sixteen Back Benchers in a Westminster Hall debate—it is a pretty good show these days. That is to say nothing of the eight different interventions. That suggests the seriousness with which the Government must take this issue.
Many people in Glasgow North are thankful for the support that the hospice sector has provided to their loved ones. I hope the Minister, when she responds, will agree that a cost of living crisis should not be allowed to turn into a cost of dying crisis.
Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. This has been a really important and good debate; we do not always say that about debates in this place. I thank the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) for securing it. He spoke with great passion and personal insight, and I am sure Sue’s family and friends will thank him for what he said. I also thank all hon. Members who spoke about their personal experiences. It is not always easy to do that here, but they have shown great courage.
Many Members thanked the amazing hospices in their constituencies. I hope they will forgive me for also paying tribute to LOROS Hospice in Leicester West, which I have visited many times. I am blown away by the care and compassion there, and the complete humanity shown to others. I am very grateful for that.
The argument I want to make today is that we need a much bigger, more serious debate about what makes for a good death, in the words of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). Policy really needs to change across the board. When the welfare state and the NHS were created, average life expectancy was 63. Now it is over 80, and one in four babies born today is going to live to 100. Back then, most people died of infectious diseases or accidents. Now, it is long-term chronic conditions. That means we are now experiencing death in a very different way. Often, death is not sudden; it may be long and difficult, both physically and emotionally.
Hospices—including hospice at home, because that is where many people want to die—need to be seen as an essential part of our health and care system, not an optional extra, a luxury or an add-on, as part of that much bigger debate about what makes for a good death. “A good death” is not perhaps a great campaigning slogan for any political party to focus on, but it is the truth of what we face, and politics needs to keep up with the changes in society. We need to start looking at that. The vital role of hospices and the need to properly plan a funding system, our workforce, training and how we link services and support is the context within which I see today’s debate. Quite frankly, people do not want to die in hospital. They want to die in the community and at home, with integral support for family and friends. That is our vision; that is what we need to deliver.
Abena Oppong-Asare (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)
I thank the shadow Minister for giving way. I completely agree with the points she has raised. I thank the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) for bringing the debate forward and for sharing his personal story, as have others in this room. It is not easy to share those stories, but it is important that we do.
I have seen first hand how hospices play a vital role in communities. They go over and beyond, and are truly heroic. I am patron of Greenwich and Bexley Community Hospice in my constituency; I have seen how they provide compassionate end of life care. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is vital that the Government recognise the issues hospices face, particularly during the pandemic and with the cost of living crisis?
Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
Order. I remind the Member that interventions should be short.
Liz Kendall
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and will come on to many of the points she raises.
I want to touch on about five issues, as part of shifting us to a different position on how we ensure people have a good death in the 21st century. The first issue, which I hope the Minister will comment on, and which all right hon. and hon. Members have spoken about, is the real need to review how hospices in England are funded, so that this absolutely critical sector has certainty and security in the months and years ahead. That was a key recommendation of the all-party parliamentary group for hospice and end of life care.
Many Members have spoken about the huge financial pressures on hospices: food prices, energy costs, the costs of NHS pay settlements. As Sue Ryder says, most hospices have seen a 10% increase in their costs, but only a 1% increase and in some cases no increase at all in NHS funding from integrated care boards, creating a perfect storm. ICBs have a statutory requirement to meet palliative care and end of life needs of their populations, but where is the funding? I hope the Minister will say whether the Government will institute the review because, without that, we will not have security for the future.
My second point, which has not been discussed in this debate but which I care passionately about—I would like to hear the Minister say something about this—is inequalities in access to hospice, end of life and palliative care. We know from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology that the pandemic exacerbated inequalities in accessing good palliative and end of life care for minority ethnic groups, and there are also socio-economic inequalities in access to hospice care. We know from Sue Ryder that there are also inequalities in access to bereavement support. We want to see everybody have fair access. Will the Minister say something about that?
The third issue relates to help to die at home, something I have campaigned on for many years as a Member of Parliament. There are still at least 10,000 people a year dying in hospital when they want the choice of dying at home. They are not getting the fast track NHS continuing healthcare support that they are supposed to get within 48 hours so that they can die at home. Our brilliant hospices have all sorts of support that they want to give, so I ask the Minister: why is that still a problem and what are we doing about it?
My next issue, which has been raised by many Members, concerns children’s hospices. Rainbows, the sole children’s hospice in the east midlands, wrote to me to express its concern about the children’s hospice grant potentially being wound up. As recently as 22 May, the Government replied to a written question:
“Funding arrangements for children’s hospices beyond 2023/24 have not yet been agreed.”
We cannot have children’s hospices not knowing what is happening to their grants. We have to be able plan ahead better.
Fourthly is something that my hospice, LOROS, has raised with me, but also lots of care homes. Bear with me on this. Many care homes are now essentially providing a lot of end of life care because the level of need that people have when they go into a care home is so great that that is what they need. But the staff might not be properly trained, and LOROS has said that it could work with care homes to make sure the staff are trained. That is one specific ask, so perhaps the Minister could meet me and LOROS to look at what hospices could do to better support our care homes.
Last but by no means least is workforce shortages. Sue Ryder stated:
“The Government must plan for the workforce as a whole system across health and social care”
and charitable providers. That is really important. We have to stop seeing all those different bits of the system as separate. We Labour Members have set out our plans for the biggest expansion in the NHS workforce’s history and for fair pay agreements and for social care staff. We urgently need to see the Government’s workforce plan, and I would like to see that covering all the issues.
In conclusion, we have heard today about the manifold pressures on hospices. I do not think I have ever been in a debate where so many Members have spoken so powerfully and positively about a part of the health and care system and what it does. It shows the strength of feeling and support, but I ask everyone here to think about how we as a Parliament can put achieving a good death as a big thing that we can make progress on and continue this campaign in future. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments.
The Minister for Social Care (Helen Whately)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) for securing this debate on hospices, and I thank all hon. Members who have contributed. Both the number of colleagues in the room and the passion of so many contributions show the strength of feeling and level of support for hospices in all our communities.
We have heard from so many colleagues this morning: my hon. Friends the Members for Darlington (Peter Gibson), for Aberconwy (Robin Millar), for Bolton West (Chris Green), for Torbay (Kevin Foster), for North West Norfolk (James Wild) and for Worcester (Mr Walker), and the hon. Members for Blackburn (Kate Hollern), for City of Chester (Samantha Dixon), for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), for York Central (Rachael Maskell), for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock), for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon). In addition, many other hon. Members have contributed by intervening. In the course of today’s debate, many fantastic local hospices have rightly been praised for what they do for our communities.
My hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh spoke about the Mountbatten hospice in his constituency and how it cared so wonderfully for his friend and colleague Sue Hall. Many hon. Members spoke about their personal experiences, which often involved family members, and the amazing ways that hospices have helped family members and themselves through difficult times. I, too, remember the amazing care that my granny received in her local hospice in Dorset when I was in my twenties. I still hold in my head the experience of visiting her there—the tranquillity of the hospice and the amazing care that she was clearly receiving, which made the last weeks of her life as bearable as possible. I remember the kindness and peace that I felt there in that hospice. I, too, have that personal experience and appreciation of what hospices do.
A theme of this debate has, rightly, been the importance of dying well—dying with dignity and dying with the right care in the place where a person wants to die, which is very often at home. Dying well depends on good end of life care, for which we in this country rightly have a good reputation. Most end of life care is provided through NHS services, but hospices are an important part of end of life and palliative care in our communities. As we know, hospices provide care in their facilities, but increasingly and very importantly they provide care to people in their own homes towards the end of their lives, and also support families through those difficult times and through bereavement.
Stephanie Peacock
The end of life care that I spoke about in my contribution, which is so important, remains closed at Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice; it is the one part of the hospice that has been unable to reopen. Will the Minister commit to doing everything that she can to support the hospice to reopen, so that it can continue to provide end of life care, and not just all the other services it provides to families that need them so much?
Helen Whately
As the hon. Member mentioned earlier, we have indeed met and spoken about the hospice to which she refers. I have also met with several other hon. Members. I am grateful to them for coming to me to talk about the specific difficult situations faced by some of the hospices serving their communities.
That brings me to exactly what I was coming to talk about: the financial pressures on hospices, which have been a strong theme of the debate. I know very well, not just from this debate but from conversations with hospices, about the financial challenges that hospices are facing. In fact, financial challenges are being faced by many organisations that provide care in our communities, whether NHS organisations or care homes, as the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) mentioned. In particular, there are the extra pressures of energy costs—such organisations often use substantial amounts of energy—and the higher costs of staff pay. We know that many hospices pay their staff in alignment with the NHS agenda for change pay scales.
An additional difficult context for hospices at the moment is fundraising. That was clearly hard during the pandemic, but since then many households have been affected by the higher cost of living and therefore have found it harder to contribute to fundraising efforts in their communities, including those organised by hospices. I know how hard that context is for our hospices.
On energy costs, many hospices have been able to benefit from the Government’s energy bill relief scheme, which ran to 31 March. Eligible organisations, including hospices, will continue to get baseline discount support for gas and electricity bills under the energy bills discount scheme, which is running from 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024. In addition, last year NHS England released £1.5 billion of extra funding to integrated care boards in recognition of the extra costs arising from inflation in the services they commission. ICBs have been responsible for distributing that funding according to local need, including to palliative and end of life care providers in our communities, whether they are NHS organisations or hospices.
Tim Farron
Of course, ICBs are not elected, but the Minister is. She heard what the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) and I had to say about the 0% increase that the Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB has granted—or not granted—our hospices. Will she directly get involved in that to fix it so we do not have to have the 10% cuts that St Mary’s Hospice thinks we will have to deliver?
Helen Whately
I will not commit to getting involved in a specific conversation between a hospice and an ICB. That would not be the right thing for me to do as a Minister. The hon. Gentleman and I have had several conversations over the years that I have been a Minister, so he will not be surprised to hear that I have been seeking transparency about the extent to which the funding has or has not gone to hospices. I have been seeking data on whether the rates being paid to hospices have or have not gone up so that we have transparency about the extent to which the funding that has gone to integrated care boards to support with inflation is getting through to the services that need support.
Peter Gibson
Although I acknowledge and appreciate everything the Government did to support hospices during covid, it is simply not the case that every ICB across the country is passing the right amount of money to the hospices from which it commissions services. Will the Minister commit to publishing information about which ICBs are stepping up to the plate and fulfilling their statutory obligations, and which are not?
Helen Whately
I commit to continuing to dig into getting visibility on the extent to which extra funding is going through to hospices. Of course, there is a balance to be struck when giving integrated care boards the freedom to do what we want them to do, which is to understand fully the needs for care in their populations, and make good decisions about how they fund care for their populations. None of us believes that a Minister in Westminster has the answers about what should happen and exactly how funding should be distributed in every single one of our communities. I will continue to get that visibility, because it is important that we know the extent to which our hospices are getting support for the extra financial pressures that we have been discussing.
Helen Whately
I will make a bit of progress, because I am conscious that the clock is ticking.
Integrated care boards are responsible for ensuring the provision of the end of life and palliative care that is needed in our communities across England. In addition to the funding, I am working with NHS England to ensure greater visibility relating to what that means in practice and what is being commissioned.
The shadow Minister’s point about inequality of access was very important. We know that there is inequality of access to palliative and end of life care. Some communities are much better served than others, in part due to the fantastic legacy of our hospices: where there is a really good hospice, there is often much better access to end of life and palliative care around it. We want to improve equality and reduce some of the disparities in access to end of life care. As part of that, people should be able to do what most people want—to die at home with the right support in place.
I want to talk about the funding for children’s hospices, which several hon. Members brought up. Recognising the importance of palliative and end of life care for children and young people, NHS England provided £25 million specifically for that, via the children’s hospice grant during this financial year. I have, of course, heard the calls for that grant to be continued, and for greater continuity and visibility of funding further out. I cannot say more on that today, but I can assure hon. Members that I have been speaking to NHS England about that funding beyond this year. I do expect further new to be communicated about that shortly, appreciating the level of concern among hon. Members and children’s hospices in their communities.
Rachael Maskell
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. The Health and Care Act 2022 put a responsibility to fund palliative care on the statute books. Will the Minister set out what has changed, to enable that funding to come forward? We know there are people in our communities who are not receiving that care, although they need to now under the law. The funding needs to be in place for them to receive the care that they need at the end of life.
Helen Whately
That alludes to exactly the point I made a moment ago. As flagged in that 2022 Act, ICBs have responsibility for commissioning that care, using the budgets they receive through NHS England. I am working to ensure the visibility of the commissioning, to be assured that that is taking place, so that we can be assured about the availability of end of life and palliative care for our communities.
I want to make a final point as I close; I am looking at the clock ticking. Against the backdrop of financial concerns, which I of course recognise and which we are discussing, is the strength of hospices in their communities, and the importance, as mentioned by hon. Friends, that they are not solely financially dependent on the state and the NHS for funding. They receive some NHS funding, but it is important that hospices are successful in fundraising and gaining support from our communities. That is one of the strengths of their model, and I want to continue to support that.
I pay tribute to all the volunteers and those involved in fundraising, including many hon. Members this morning who mentioned the fundraising efforts that they are personally making for hospices in their communities. I wish very good luck to my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh for his forthcoming skydive. All credit to him for having the courage to jump out of an aeroplane. I sincerely hope that he is successful.
Helen Whately
I wish him very good luck; it is fabulous that he is doing that for his own hospice. I also commend the efforts of many other hon. Members. I conclude by thanking all hon. Members for coming today and for their contributions to this important debate.
Paul Holmes
Thank you, Ms Nokes. I will briefly wind up by saying thanks to all hon. Members for the heartfelt contributions that they have made. It has been incredibly humbling sitting here. If my career does end on 24 June with my skydive, and this is the one thing I have managed to do, it will be entirely worth it. I thank the Minister for responding. I also thank Sue’s family—her husband Jerry and her girls Rosie and Phoebe—who have been immensely strong over the past year or so.
I hope the Minister has recognised that there are serious concerns about the funding of hospices. In the environment she set out of the ICBs being given the money, she should take credit for the uplift they have been given. I hope that after this morning’s debate she will take a stronger line in holding those ICBs to account because, frankly, that money is not getting through when it should.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered support for hospice services.
Bank Closures: Stoke-on-Trent North
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)
I will call Jonathan Gullis to move the motion and then the Minister to respond. As this is a 30-minute debate, there will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to make a winding-up speech.
Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered bank closures in Stoke-on-Trent North constituency.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I am grateful to Mr Speaker for permitting the debate, and I thank right hon. and hon. Friends, including the Minister, for attending. There is one Member who would like to be here—my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell), whose constituency is also suffering a closure—and he is hoping to join us later, and I place on the record my thanks for my hon. Friend’s support.
Banks are at the very heart of local communities, and they provide the most vulnerable people in society with vital services and support with their money. Banks have been at the centre of high streets up and down this great country for generations, drawing people to the local area, which has the added benefit of increasing footfall for local businesses. In Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke, we have a Lloyds in Tunstall and a Barclays in Kidsgrove, but constituents tell me that they feel there is already a significant lack of access to in-person banking services, which impacts the most vulnerable in our communities—the elderly and the disabled—disproportionately.
According to Which?, 86% of banks have closed in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke since 2015, which in my opinion justifies my constituents’ concerns. At the national level too, there has been a significant number of closures: between June 2015 and January 2023, 5,391 bank branches closed in the United Kingdom, which is a shocking 54 per month. This year, regrettably, the pace of closure has not relented, with 114 HSBC, 95 Barclays, 52 NatWest and 23 Lloyds branches closing their doors, leaving gaping holes in local high streets and local communities.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this matter forward. My constituency has had 11 banks close, which is similar to the experience in Stoke. When it comes to closing banks and the effect that has, does he agree that there never seems to be any consideration given to elderly people who depend on the old system of using cash and cheque books, face-to-face interviews and talking with bank staff?
Jonathan Gullis
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right not only about the elderly, but about people who do not have online access, or have no desire to have it, or who do not understand the modern technology about which we have the benefit of learning in this day and age. Such people have a natural mistrust of online banking because they are fearful of scammers and the online hoaxes that have sadly become all too apparent in our criminal justice system. If the Barclays closure goes ahead, Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke will be left with just one high street bank, which is simply not good enough.
I am pleased to have secured the debate given the terrible news that Barclays has announced its intention to close the Kidsgrove branch on 11 August. That decision will leave that great town without a single bank and leave the community isolated from vital in-person banking services, which provide local people with reassurance and confidence with respect to their money, particularly during a cost of living crisis.
It is right to point out that digitalisation has transformed the way that families and businesses deposit, withdraw and save their money, and in Stoke-on-Trent we have been rolling out brand-new 5G broadband, which is increasing our connectivity, and which will undoubtedly make online banking more effective. The digital revolution means that banks are innovating, and Barclays points out in its argument for closing the branch that
“the way people bank today is unrecognisable from 50 years ago”.
However, it is of paramount importance that we do not let digitalisation exclude people in our community from banking services.
The services that bank branches provide are most important for vulnerable members of society, and closures impact them the most. One of my constituents, Dawn from Kidsgrove, told me that her father, who is an elderly customer, would find it “impossible” to travel to Crewe or to Hanley to visit a Barclays branch, that his deafness means he cannot use telephone banking, and that he is not confident enough to use internet banking.
As the Chief Secretary to the Treasury pointed out in the 2020 access to cash call for evidence:
“exclusion from banking services can have a detrimental impact on people’s lives. Whilst card payments and other payments services are becoming increasingly popular, the evidence shows that a significant proportion of the UK population continues to rely on cash in their day to day lives.”
The Financial Conduct Authority states that banks are expected to carefully consider the impact of planned branch closures on the everyday banking and cash access needs of their customers, and to take particular care for their most vulnerable customers.
I have launched a petition to save Barclays branch from closure, and it has nearly 450 signatures already. That shows the strength of local feeling that Barclays is not upholding its responsibility to look after its most vulnerable customers.
Sir Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. We are also facing the closure of a Barclays branch in Wombourne, which is going to have a devastating impact on the village, and on the access to banking facilities for many elderly people, as well as for businesses. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is time for Barclays to rethink? It is often the last bank in town, and we need that in order for our communities to thrive.
Jonathan Gullis
My right hon. Friend and Staffordshire colleague has been a fantastic champion for that great country for many years. He is entirely correct that there needs to be a rethink. It is starting to feel, albeit unintentionally, like Barclays has something personal against Staffordshire, with Kidsgrove, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Wombourne all facing branch closures. This has not been well thought through, particularly as residents may have to travel to Crewe or Hanley. That is not an easy journey for the constituents of my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Gavin Williamson), as I am sure public transport connectivity is not what he would desire.
A journey to Crewe is a significant one even from the place I am proud to serve, particularly if households do not own a vehicle and rely on public transport that is not well connected to the surrounding north Staffordshire area and the Cheshire boundary. I hope that common sense will prevail here, and that Barclays will engage with my right hon. Friend, my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme and myself to talk about what can be done to help protect its customers in these difficult times.
One of my constituents, Ms Green, told me that
“many disabled people and pensioners will suffer”.
That makes me question whether Barclays is even complying with the FCA’s guidance. Crucially, 40% of over-65s—over 4 million people—do not manage their money online. That is because online banking is difficult to navigate and automatic telephone responses are monotonous and impersonal. A constituent wrote to me to say that they found telephone banking
“confusing and difficult to hear.”
A recent survey by Accenture illustrates that point, finding that 44% of over-55s would rather visit their branch. It also showed that in-person banking was also popular among over 20% of younger people.
Alongside the impact the branch closure will have on vulnerable people, it is impossible to underestimate the financial security implications of a lack of in-person banking. Since Barclays announced its closures, I have been inundated with correspondence from local people outraged that Kidsgrove is losing its last remaining bank. One constituent told me that they are “appalled” at the announcement, and that it will put the elderly
“at greater risk of getting scammed.”
Dr Daniel Tischer of the University of Bristol noted that,
“the danger of mass cyber-attacks... looms ominously”.
He also noted that there is a genuine risk of cyber-crime, scams and fraud. I am certain that the precedent set by bank closures will put people at greater risk, especially the most vulnerable in our society, who lack the digital awareness younger people have to spot clear signs of illicit financial activity. For those people, in-person banking with specialist advisers is crucial. By closing the branch, Barclays is putting people whom it has an obligation to support and protect at a much greater risk.
Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)
I apologise for being a little late. I congratulate my hon. Friend and neighbour on his campaign for the Kidsgrove Barclays branch. As he knows, Barclays has closed the branch in Newcastle-under-Lyme as well, and I too have been inundated with correspondence. My constituents have the option to switch, and I am encouraging them to do so. That option is there because of Government measures that were put in place to make switching easier. My hon. Friend is a superb champion for the people of Kidsgrove in the north of the borough, but they do not have the option to switch. Barclays should think again about both closures—but especially about his.
Jonathan Gullis
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his campaign and petition, and on guiding those customers of Barclays to other local banking providers that are proudly remaining in the centre of Newcastle-under-Lyme. It is a shame that the decision was made to close both the Kidsgrove and the Newcastle-under-Lyme branches within a two-week period. Ultimately, had a decision been made just on Kidsgrove, at least there would have been some justification for residents of Kidsgrove, Talke and Newchapel to go to Newcastle-under-Lyme, Hanley or Crewe—but Barclays took both branches out.
Local transport is not necessarily the best and not everyone has access to a motor vehicle. The longer journeys make in-person banking services simply not accessible for many. It is therefore wholly appropriate that customers vote with their feet and that people are made aware. There is a Lloyds bank branch available in Tunstall and there are other banking providers in my hon. Friend’s local town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and I will join him in directing customers to places where they can still access that face-to-face service within a five-mile radius of where they live. My constituent Ms Birchall told me that she feels that older generations are being marginalised. Barclays’ decision undermines its commitments to the Financial Conduct Authority’s guidelines, and it does not do enough to care for the most vulnerable, as the closure clearly increases their exposure to fraud.
Small and medium-sized businesses rely on local banking services to deposit their cash and rely on in-person infrastructure to deposit their earnings and savings. One local business owner told me that they were devastated by the proposed closure of Barclays in Kidsgrove. They said that the queues are so long because some customers had difficulties in using online facilities, and that it will now be far more difficult for those businesses to deposit their cash and earnings, especially after NatWest, TSB and Britannia’s closures.
Not only will Barclays’ decision to close its branch have an impact on local businesses that use the local bank’s services, but the closure may drive people away from the local high street. Over the past 10 years, 10,000 shops, 6,000 pubs, 7,500 banks and more than 1,100 libraries have closed. The impact of closures has been felt especially in areas such as Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke. Without doubt, the covid pandemic exacerbated some of the problems local high streets face, with more people than ever before turning to online shopping. Local bank branches incentivise people to visit high streets, with constituents telling me they shop, eat and drink after going to the bank. If the local branch goes, people will be less likely to visit small businesses and help the local economy to grow.
I am passionate about fighting for the health and vitality of the local high streets I am proud to serve. They are the focal point of local communities and a source of immense civic pride. That is especially true in Kidsgrove. With the £17.6 million Kidsgrove town deal—a once-in-a-generation investment in our local community— the new BMX pump track at Newchapel Rec, the 3G astroturf pitches at The King’s Church of England Academy, the newly reopened Kidsgrove Sports Centre and the plans for the shared services hub in the town centre, as well as investment in Kidsgrove railway station, we are attracting more outsiders to visit our local area.
I accept that digitalisation is transforming the way we access banking, but we should do more to explore how we can incorporate banking hubs into our system and into local communities, such as in Kidsgrove. Banking hubs are shared services where customers from almost any bank can visit their local post office and withdraw cash from the counter. Both the Access to Cash action group—CAG—and LINK argue that banking hubs are extremely popular, and their use has doubled since they opened. However, we need to roll out far more of those hubs more widely if they are to negate the demonstrable impact of bank branch closures.
Shared service banking hubs have the potential to be highly valued facilities at the centre of a thriving town centre. I am certain that having banking hubs with specialist advisers from all major banks present in a new and permanent feature on our high street, such as the shared services hub in Kidsgrove we propose to build in the not-too-distant future, would go a long way to not only delivering on the levelling-up agenda that is so important to my constituents, but giving them the reassurance they rightly deserve about having that access.
The Barclays bank closure in Kidsgrove threatens to limit the local community’s access to cash. More than 10 million adults in the UK need access to cash, and this is especially pressing since our most vulnerable constituents rely on cash more and more for things such as budgeting. The independent 2018 access to cash review found that as many as 8 million adults would find a cashless society difficult, and Barclays’ decision to close its branch in Kidsgrove will exclude many people in the local community even more from getting the cash they need to get by on every day.
The impact of irresponsible closures of local bank branches is exacerbated by the decline in the total number of ATMs. A report by Which? found that between January 2018 and September 2019, the number of free-to-use ATMs went down from 54,500 to 47,500, representing a 13% reduction in the size of the free network. As of 2023, there are 3,431 ATMs in the west midlands. The great town of Burslam was the first in the UK with a population of more than 20,000 without either a bank branch or an ATM. We tested an access to cash scheme run by Sonnet in Burslam in 2021. While the pilot found that local people were largely supportive of the cashback services in convenience stores, the free educational services offered over a significant period, aimed at people with poor digital skills, were deeply unpopular and failed to give people the confidence to transition to online banking.
It is undeniable that Barclays’ decision to close its branch in Kidsgrove will leave a gaping hole in our local community, but I want to take the time to point out the measures that Barclays is taking to help the community transition. Barclays has assured me that face-to-face banking continues to play an important role for some of its customers in Kidsgrove through a continued presence in the community via new alternative physical touchpoints in retail outlets and community spaces. I believe that one is planned for the local library. Barclays is introducing specific, targeted support for vulnerable and elderly customers who have been identified as needing additional help. The offering includes one-to-one “tea and teach” sessions to support digital skills capabilities, alongside sharing the services available at the nearby post office and, in due course, at the alternative community banking presence we are seeking to put in place.
Yesterday, Barclays informed me that it will have a team at Kidsgrove Sports Centre for three days a week, offering face-to-face financial support on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. However, that fails to match the services offered from its traditional branch and, crucially, the access to cash pilot in Burslem demonstrated that the educational services were deeply unpopular, with low attendance figures. As such, I am sceptical of the precautions that Barclays has put in place to support local people in the community in Kidsgrove to transition from a physical branch.
Bank closures have a demonstrable impact on local communities like Kidsgrove. My constituent, Ms Leake, wrote to me saying that her mother visits the branch religiously, and I know that Ms Leake’s mother is not alone. As we have discussed today, the closures have a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable in our society, with the elderly and disabled facing financial exclusion, as it is far harder for them to use online banking services or travel further afield. Leaving Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke with just one bank on the high street will also put my constituents at greater risk of fraud. Lack of access to in-person banking will put more people at risk of cyber-crime and, once again, the impact will be felt more by our most vulnerable constituents.
Bank closures also disincentivise people from visiting high streets in places like Kidsgrove, which will lead to decreased footfall and have a knock-on impact on small businesses. Banks are at the very heart of communities, and we need to explore how we can expand banking hubs more widely to ensure that people still visit the high street.
With more than 10 million people in the UK needing regular access to cash, further bank closures such as those we are seeing in Kidsgrove exclude my constituents from their money. Given that those from disadvantaged backgrounds rely more heavily on cash, Barclays’ decision impacts our most vulnerable constituents. Ultimately, we need banks in our local communities, and the people who make communities like Kidsgrove great need banks. I urge the Minister to do whatever he can to support areas like Kidsgrove to keep banks on their high streets, as they are so important for economic vitality and as a focal point of support for our most vulnerable constituents.
The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Andrew Griffith)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Nokes. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) on securing this debate on a very grave matter that faces his constituents and many others across the country. I thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Gavin Williamson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) for their contributions, which shows the depth of concern about this significant change.
There is strong feeling here. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North talked about his incredible 450-strong petition from local residents, which demonstrates the real concern of people in Kidsgrove, as well as his formidable capability in representing them and bringing the issue to the national stage. As a fellow local Member of Parliament, I have also focused on helping small high streets in my constituency. I understand the real concern that when an amenity such as a local bank branch closes, there is more jeopardy for the high street. My hon. Friend is quite right to highlight that. It is a credit to him and to Members who have supported him that he has secured that commitment from Barclays for a Barclays Local, which will be just a three-minute walk away from the current branch, offering the face-to-face service that people value so much, three days a week at Kidsgrove Sports Centre. That comes on top of the three free-to-use ATMs at which his constituents will continue to have free access to their cash, and the Post Office, which is doing a valiant job. As consumer patterns change, we often see the Post Office stepping in, and that is one of the things underpinning the continued fortunes of our post office network.
Although it is uncomfortable and difficult, we are seeing a very rapid change in consumer patterns. Local bank branches across the nation are getting fewer and fewer visitors. That does not mean that face-to-face banking is not vital, which is why there are so many regulations in place, administered by the FCA. It is also why it is so important that we all remain vigilant to ensure that the FCA does its job of challenging and pushing back when communities such as Kidsgrove are threatened by the loss of a bank branch, and why it is imperative that adequate alternatives are in place. I fall short of the Government stepping in and making commercial decisions for firms, and I think Members broadly understand why that might be the case.
Sir Gavin Williamson
My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) set out the interesting idea of hubs working together, which is already being trialled. The Minister rightly says that there is commercial pressure on banks, and they are looking at a different model, but Government have a great ability to act as a convening power, bringing the major high street banks together to look at how they can co-operate and work together to ensure that communities such as those in Kidsgrove, Wombourne and Newcastle-under-Lyme are not excluded.
Andrew Griffith
My right hon. Friend, who exercised his great convening power and delivered great service to the nation, makes a very good point. This agenda is never far from my mind. Only last week, I visited the new banking hub in Acton to see how the Government and the sector are working together to bring forward viable alternatives, and it was impressive to see the range of services offered in a new community hub. I wish my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North all the best with the regeneration project, and perhaps there could one day be a banking hub. For the time being, Barclays is seeking to mitigate the change that is happening.
Members may know that the Financial Services and Markets Bill, which has had its final day of debate in the House of Lords, will shortly be coming back to the Commons for a final time before being put on the statute book. I hope, that will happen within a matter of weeks, if not days. The Bill enshrines for the very first time a statutory right of access to cash—free cash, no less—working with the LINK network and with UK Finance, convened by the Government. That is one of the ways that we seek to underwrite this, and I understand that it is underwriting; it is not the full provision that every colleague seeks.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North said, we have to be very mindful of the vulnerable. The Government are committed to cash. It is not the Government’s policy to seek to extricate cash entirely from the system. It is very important to underwrite it for those who are vulnerable, those who have some sort of impairment or simply those who manage their finances through cash.
We have made significant interventions through that Bill—the great clunking force of law—to ensure that our constituents can continue to have access to free cash and, potentially more importantly, although it does not show up as much in our inboxes, that businesses can continue to have access to deposit cash. If they do not have that really important part of the supply chain, businesses will find it more onerous to accept cash, and we will not have the ability to pay with cash.
There is a range of alternatives in place. My hon. Friend is right to have secured this debate on behalf of his constituents and others.
Jonathan Gullis
I am pleased with the Minister’s kind words about the importance of this debate. Before the bank is closed, there is due to be a Kidsgrove town deal board meeting, where we will discuss the planning for the shared services hub we hope to create. Could the Minister find time—perhaps just five minutes—to pop in to hear about how this could be a building that fits in with the banking hub being created, and whether, as my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire said earlier, he is convening power to encourage those banks to consider moving into the new facility being created?
Andrew Griffith
I will give that due consideration. I do not want to make a commitment from the Dispatch Box today, in part because we operate a federated tapestry in financial services regulation. The FCA has the primary duty of regulating the banks, and that includes regulating the conduct of bank closures, but it is also the case that there are organisations such as LINK and Cash Access UK, which recently opened the excellent banking hub in Acton—the model to which my hon. Friend perhaps aspires. Rather than the Minister trampling incautiously into that tapestry, I will give consideration and write to my hon. Friend with my suggestions for the best course of action he can take on behalf of his constituents. If a banking hub is the course he seeks, I will of course try to do all I can to support him and his constituents on that journey.
These are not easy matters. We are seeing a significant transition, but I reassure my right hon. and hon. Friends—and you, Ms Nokes—that this remains a point of intense focus for us. It is something we have taken action on, even in legislation going through Parliament right now. I wish my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North and all his constituents, whom he represents so ably in this House, the very best as they seek to do everything they can for their community.
Question put and agreed to.
Insolvency Law and Director Disqualifications
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered insolvency law and director disqualifications.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. Thank you for making time for this important debate.
Five years ago, Carillion collapsed in one of the biggest corporate scandals seen in recent years. Millions were racked up in debt, tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs and pensions, and thousands of supply chain businesses were put at risk, all because the auditors failed to hold Carillion’s board to account and a blind eye was turned to poor corporate behaviour. Five years on, have changes to the UK corporate governance regime been made to ensure that such a scandal cannot happen again? The answer, sadly, is not encouraging.
As the Unite the union has stated,
“In the end, four Carillion executives were fined £870,000 in total – a mere slap on the wrist given the hundreds of millions of pounds the company lost and the thousands of lives they ruined.”
Former BBC investigative journalist Bob Wylie, who wrote the Financial Times book of the year “Bandit Capitalism: Carillion and the Corruption of the British State”, summed up the present position perfectly when he said:
“The sad truth is they get away with it because they know they can.”
The most recent figures by the Insolvency Service for 2022-23 show that almost half of disqualifications were because of misuse or abuse of the bounce back loan scheme, rather than more robust action being taken against directors for unfit conduct prior to insolvency. I suggest that that is because the bar for disqualification for unfit conduct is very high and often difficult to prove, particularly where a director can claim to have relied on the advice of external advisers when making decisions. Further, the law surrounding whether directors have acted inappropriately in an insolvency situation, and specifically the point at which directors should begin to consult on redundancies and prioritise payments to creditors prior to insolvency, is ambiguous to say the least.
The Supreme Court recently affirmed that ambiguity in the case of BTI v. Sequana, noting that company directors are only required to begin prioritising creditors if it is probable that their company will plunge into insolvency. The problem is that no one knows what “probable” actually means. As the London Solicitors Litigation Association noted,
“the precise point in time at which the duty will be triggered and how to balance creditors’ interests with other competing interests of the business remains relatively elusive.”
It is that elusiveness that continues to allow some directors to act in a way that is detrimental to workers and other creditors.
The Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union highlights the cases of Dawnfresh Seafoods and Orchard House Foods, which it says
“raise significant concerns about the ability of business owners to abuse the process around administration and insolvency, leaving workers in the lurch and denying them the full value of their outstanding pay and redundancy monies owed—whilst Directors walk away with impunity, often with enormous levels of wealth intact.”
In the case of Dawnfresh, the union reports that the director allowed workers to carry on overtime shifts in full knowledge that he was about to bring in the receivers. He also took the opportunity before insolvency to rescue his own private art collection from company premises. The workers were left waiting for weeks without any source of income, obliged to depend on family and friends or use food banks in the resulting emergency, and they included one who was fighting leukaemia. A not dissimilar instance occurred at Orchard House Foods in Gateshead, with redundancy negotiations over the site’s closure seeing the company fail to pay workers ahead of the Christmas period.
Sadly, that practice does not just plague the food sector; it is increasingly evident across the wider economy. Thomas Cook, for example, also failed abjectly to consult over redundancies prior to insolvency, when it was known for some time that the company was in trouble. In a more recent case, journalists at Vice UK faced statutory redundancy terms, with many having to leave with almost nothing because the company filed for bankruptcy, while its recent global CEO was on an annual salary of $1.5 million. It is not just workers who lose out in these situations. Figures disclosed in response to written parliamentary questions tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) indicate that over the last two years alone statutory redundancy payments cost the taxpayer around £300 million.
If the law is not clear enough on the point at which creditors’ interests in an insolvency should be prioritised, what other mechanisms are there to sound the alarm?
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the hon. Lady for securing this debate. I would like to be here for the whole debate, Ms Fovargue, but I have another event to attend at 3.30 pm. I apologise for not being here for the whole debate. Nevertheless, I would like to make a contribution.
There is another factor as well, which I would just like to outline for the record. Does the hon. Lady agree that in many situations the big businesses that she is referring to have the ability to use accountancy in their favour, by going insolvent and trading under different names, which too often has left those on the bottom of the ladder, such as suppliers and sole workers, with no option other than to swallow the pill and even go bankrupt themselves? Some of my constituents have experienced this. It is difficult to watch directors move on with impunity, while other people have to sell their homes to cover their costs. In other words, the small person at the bottom or the back of the queue always suffers and the big boy gets away.
Rebecca Long Bailey
I thank the hon. Member for his comments and I agree completely. There are huge issues surrounding the area of pre-pack administrations and the issue of phoenix companies, whereby directors are allowed to reappear in another form with the same kind of company structure with complete impunity. This certainly needs to be addressed by the Government.
Other mechanisms exist to sound the alarm on poor corporate governance. That is usually when the role of auditors should be key, but in recent years the unhealthy structure of the industry has been widely criticised, as well as the market dominance and conflicts of interest of the big accountancy firms. In this dysfunctional culture, firms must win and retain engagements from companies in order to generate revenue, but simultaneously they must objectively scrutinise the company reports of the very people they are trying to win business from. Indeed, the symptoms of this flawed culture are clear. The Financial Reporting Council has stated that 29% of the audits delivered by the seven biggest accounting firms fail to meet UK standards. It is abundantly clear that the UK corporate governance regime is in urgent need of reform
What actions have the Government taken so far? In his response to the debate, the Minster will no doubt refer to the Government’s White Paper on reforms to the UK corporate governance code, which the FRC is consulting upon as we speak. However, it is important to note that although the code is underpinned by listing rules that require premium-listed companies to “comply or explain” if they have not complied with a code provision, there is no strict legal requirement to comply with the code at all. It is merely a guidebook, and the lack of legal enforceability is clear. The Financial Times reported only last month that the FRC has reported falling levels of compliance since 2020, suggesting that boards are willing to risk avoiding the “comply or explain” requirements, particularly as the ultimate threat is simply to register dissatisfaction in a non-binding shareholder vote, or one that historically the company has a vanishingly small chance of losing.
Secondly, what is glaringly absent from the Government’s White Paper proposals so far is a statutory and enforceable Sarbanes-Oxley equivalent, which would make directors legally responsible for financial reporting governance. Instead, the White Paper opts for the fluffier “encouragement” of boards to include in their annual reports declarations about whether internal risk management and internal controls are effective or not. Similarly, the provisions that recommend that certain minimum clawback conditions or “trigger points” are included in directors’ remuneration arrangements are welcome in principle, but the reality is that these employment contracts are not publicly available so as to enable enforcement, and annual financial reports rarely provide comprehensive information.
Sadly, even the chief executive of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales believes that the Government’s White Paper proposals on reform of the audit industry do not go far enough, stating:
“Taking these measures as a package with the draft audit reform Bill outlined, the government's approach has a half-hearted and lopsided feel to it… Lessons from Carillion and other recent company failures have been ignored, with little emphasis now on tightening internal controls and modernising corporate governance.”
A further five years on from Carillion, we are no closer to the creation of the Government’s long-promised audit, reporting and governance authority, or the passing of the Government’s promised audit reform Bill. When we can expect legislation on audit reform and the creation of ARGA?
Given these glaring deficiencies in the law, I will be grateful if the Minister considers some simple legislative changes that would provide much-needed clarity and protect workers, creditors, and the long-term health of companies. First, will he widen the scope of directors’ duties in section 172 of the Companies Act 2006, so that a duty is not owed solely to shareholders, as at present, but is owed to workers and other stakeholders as well? That must sit alongside a clear duty to prioritise the long-term welfare of a company, rather than simply the short-term maximisation of shareholder dividends.
Secondly, with regard to the duties of directors prior to insolvency, will the Government legislate to set clear definitions and parameters for when insolvency is deemed to be a “probable” event? That would provide much-needed clarity on when a duty to consult on redundancies is triggered, and when payments to workers and creditors need to be prioritised over shareholder dividend extraction.
Thirdly, will the Minister comment on why the Government proposals made in recent years to introduce workers on boards have been shelved? Will he commit to examine and develop policy in the light of the experience of other European jurisdictions, where direct representations of employees on both unitary and two-tier boards has actually helped to improve corporate performance and success, for the benefit of all stakeholders? Last, will he introduce clear Sarbanes-Oxley-equivalent legislation that would finally make directors legally responsible for financial reporting governance? If not, can he explain clearly the Government’s reasons for avoiding that in favour of more diluted and legally unenforceable guidance?
It is clear that the current UK corporate governance regime has become dysfunctional, ambiguous and unenforceable. Despite numerous scandals, it still has no room for the protection of employees and other stakeholders. I hope the Minister can reassure me today that things will change. Thank you for the opportunity to hold this debate, Ms Fovargue.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
Thank you, Ms Fovargue—I always find the pronunciation difficult. That is my fault, not that of the spelling. I do not have a lot to say, other than to compliment my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) on her speech. To be frank, I am here to listen to the Minister’s report on progress to date.
I believe that in 2018-19, my hon. Friend was involved in work with Lord Prem Sikka on the development of a report on regulatory structures and standards overall. Having identified that my hon. Friend had obtained this debate, I looked back to her work with Prem Sikka on that regulatory regime. To be frank, I am looking forward to the Minister’s response, because it seems not an awful lot has moved on.
That report came out of Carillion and a number of other cases. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made the point that a number of companies went into insolvency and left behind large-scale debts, large numbers of workers laid off and contracts not fulfilled. In Liverpool, the collapse of Carillion meant that a hospital would not be built in the required timescale, causing considerable distress at the time.
Prem Sikka produced a comprehensive report. So that people are aware of Prem Sikka’s background, he is a professor of accountancy. He became an adviser to Select Committees and Government about 30 years ago and went on to advise on the appalling Bank of Credit and Commerce International banking scandal. He demonstrated his expertise and as a result was regularly called to advise Select Committees when different issues arose. He then set up a group of lawyers and accountants to examine and explore corporate abuse. They published a book about 10 years ago, if I remember rightly, and I brought together his group to take advice on where we went from here. That is how the connection was made. When Carillion happened and we desperately needed someone to advise us—he was already advising Select Committees—he came on to advise us.
What was startling about Prem Sikka’s report was his description of a maze of regulatory bodies—the chaos of the regulatory bodies. They all had a particular role to play, but none of them played the role effectively, and those who had committed what I think were economic and financial crimes during that period walked away without any loss to themselves. The report identified extraordinary and bizarre issues. Among the financial sector regulators, he identified 41—I think he gave up after No. 41—different agencies involved in financial regulation, which bizarrely included the Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which had a notarial professional role.
All of those bodies failed to address the real issue, which was inadequate supervision and accountability in the operation of the individual companies, particularly with regard to insolvency, where the audit companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel, particularly with regard to Carillion. The audit companies consistently produced audits that could be described as not just inaccurate, but almost deceptive in the way that they portrayed the state of the company, which allowed it to keep operating and employing contractors and so on while knowing that there was an issue. Prem Sikka went on to look at the role of the audit companies in advising companies and selling them products on tax avoidance as well. That is why he argued that there needed to be a reform of audit, possibly introducing a form of public audit into the sector.
On the insolvency role, Prem Sikka has consistently argued that there are no supervisory committees for the companies, as there are in the German economic system, where representatives supervise the decision making of companies. There are representatives in the workforce, as well as the recipients of particular services, or the consumers. Because we had no supervisory committees, companies became reckless in their endeavours. We had almost a moral hazard developing because a large number of the companies were often able to walk away from the liabilities that they had incurred.
One issue that Prem Sikka raised in his report was the offloading of pensions. We saw that with Carillion and elsewhere, when pensions were offloaded on to the public and the taxpayer had to step in to protect the rights of the workers who held pensions with those companies. Yet again, no one seemed to be held liable for the way in which they had either deliberately or recklessly put the companies into a situation where they were offloading their responsibilities.
I am particularly critical of the Financial Conduct Authority. I have said this publicly in debates before. I was critical of the FCA during the period in which Andrew Bailey was its chief executive. Before he was appointed Governor of the Bank of England, I urged the Chancellor of the Exchequer to delay his appointment because we were awaiting a number of reports of scandals with regard to investment bodies that should have been properly investigated by the FCA. What was generally identified, by not just me but other commentators, was that the FCA under his directorship was consistently asleep at the wheel on a number of individual instances.
Going back to Prem’s report, what he was identifying was a huge panoply of regulators, all of which seemed to be failing. Secondly, a large number of them were subject to corporate capture by the very sectors that they were meant to be regulating. As the hon. Member for Strangford said, the small people lost out badly as a result of that. They always lost out, and the people responsible often gained. As yet, I have not seen radical proposals from the Government to address that.
Prem Sikka did two reports. One was on the regulatory architecture of the financial sector overall, and the other was on audit. He put forward the establishment of an overall business commission, which brought together the various regulatory bodies under one structure. That included supervisory committees that would enable all stakeholders to be involved in the development of regulatory rules and the implementation of regulation much more effectively. That would at least be more open and transparent than the existing system.
I hope that the Minister will tell us, but I cannot see what has changed between now and back in 2018-19 when Carillion and other scandals were happening. I fear that those vulnerabilities still exist because we have not seen the radical reform that is needed. We need to integrate the whole process of regulation and to make it more independent, open and transparent. I hope the Minister will tell us that is the direction of Government.
We have had reports on this particular issue for a long time; I think the Cooke report was in the 1960s. It brought forward proposals but never really established independent regulation and handed it back to the industry itself. There has been a long history of corporate capture when it comes to financial regulation over successive Governments; I am not particularly blaming this one. The basic questions asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles could provide us with more clarity on the Government’s sense of direction on some of these issues.
I feel there needs to be a sense of urgency about action. I understand why the Government want to consult thoroughly, but consultation is beginning to result in delay as far as I can see. Vulnerabilities still exist; we will be back here again, maybe in six or 12 months’ time, with yet another scandal, asking why action was not taken and why redress was not available to people who suffered as a result.
Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) on securing the debate. Given its title, it could have gone in many directions, but I think we are coalescing around a theme.
Directors clearly have important duties to their companies and their shareholders, whether in good times or bad. They have legal duties, including the duty to promote the success of the company for the benefit of the shareholders. However, when a company is in financial difficulty and there is a risk of insolvency, another set of responsibilities kick in. There is a duty to creditors to minimise losses.
As each speaker has highlighted, the regime appears to be letting far too many people down, and it is often those who can afford to lose out the least who end up losing out the most. Our view is quite simple. The UK Government must ensure robust supervision. Proper deterrents should be in place to ensure that those responsible in cases of negligence, or where economic crime has been committed, can be held to account.
The organisation openDemocracy estimates that fraud costs the UK about £290 billion a year in total and, in recent years, high-profile corporate scandals such as those at British Home Stores and Carillion raised serious questions about the level and quality of corporate governance in the UK and about the ability of those charged with supervising that governance to spot the obvious danger signs. In particular—I think it bears repetition—the collapse of Carillion in 2018 led to the loss of thousands of jobs and delay to many hundreds of infrastructure projects, while the directors walked away with their pay and bonuses intact. Those who had worked for them were left to suffer without.
Jim Shannon
Not only that, but a number of small companies suffered. People with their own businesses had to sell their properties and businesses, because they honoured the debt while others did not.
Richard Thomson
The hon. Member makes an extremely powerful point, which gets to the heart of the issue: those responsible for the waves of financial chaos that result from a corporate failure are not the ones who pay the price. Often, those who can afford to lose the least end up losing the most, whether that is their homes or their livelihoods. In 2020, two years on from the collapse, the assistant general secretary of the trade union Unite said that the UK’s accounting and audit system was clearly “not fit for purpose” and accused the Government of failing, even then, to demand reforms, because of their “many friends” among the major accountancy firms.
While the recent launch of the Financial Reporting Council consultation on its proposed changes to the UK corporate governance code was welcome, serious questions need to be asked about why that has taken so long so far. Frankly, the Government must get a move on with the reforms to ensure that they lead to a prompt, substantive and enforceable change of the landscape, so that the culture of corporate backscratching —if I may put it that way—that led to the Carillion collapse is left as a dim, distant and not-too-pleasant memory.
Robust deterrents are also required to ensure that where criminality is involved, those responsible—whether they are company owners or directors—and enablers are caught and receive proportionate sanctions for their actions. Culpable directors, senior managers and other enablers of economic crime need to face proportionate sanction, and the rules on anti-money laundering supervision need to be applied consistently.
John McDonnell
The hon. Member mentions criminality. I am flicking through Prem Sikka’s report, and I forgot to mention the section on Companies House. Previously, in the exposure of Magnolia Fundaction UK, an Italian fraudster who was one of the directors had registered himself—hardly fraudulently—as the “chicken thief”, with his occupation as “fraudster”, while another officer gave his address as the “Street of the 40 Thieves” in the town of “Ali Babba”. The issues at Companies House need to be addressed. I am interested to hear how much that will be addressed by the Minister.
Richard Thomson
I thank the right hon. Member for highlighting a particularly egregious example of hiding in plain sight. I will come on to mention some of the reforms that need to take place at Companies House.
To go back to the anti-money laundering supervision, there are clearly some significant holes in the AML framework, as well as a pretty patchwork approach to supervision, which varies significantly across companies and sectors. The non-governmental organisation Spotlight on Corruption noted that some 22 industry bodies oversee anti-money laundering compliance across the legal and accountancy sectors, which seems far too many to be doing the job effectively. With 22 supervisory organisations, a few gaps are bound to creep in somewhere.
In 2021, the Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision, or OPBAS, found that only 15% of supervisors were effective in using predictable and proportionate supervisory action. OPBAS also found that only 19% had implemented an effective, risk-based approach to supervision, so the system is clearly not working. In the UK, an estimated £88 billion of dirty money is cleaned by criminals every year, compared with £54.5 billion in France and £51.3 billion in Germany. I know money launderers are consistently evolving their practice and that pace needs to be kept, but trying to supervise it across 22 bodies with those low levels of effective frameworks in place does not seem to be making the best impact possible on that trade and the other criminal activities that it promotes. Putting adequate resources into tackling economic crime not only pays for itself, it provides additional resources for public spending and reduces criminality across a broad spectrum of activities.
On Companies House specifically, Transparency International recently found that 14% of all LLPs incorporated show money laundering red flags. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill had the opportunity to be a strong first line of defence in tackling that at the earliest opportunity, but unfortunately it did not provide the scale of reforms needed to ensure that the registrar could effectively tackle economic crime. Low registration fees in the UK and the quick turnaround clearly do not lend themselves to robust scrutiny by the registrar, as we heard in the example given by the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). It is exemplified by the inclusion of a warning at the top of the Companies House website that states that it does not
“verify the accuracy of the information”
filed. Well, it seems to me that that is something it very much should be doing.
The SNP tabled amendments to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill that would have introduced more stringent requirements for company directors, including one to limit the number of directorships that an individual could hold. We put forward amendments for directors in breach of duties, which would prevent directors who failed to comply with their tax obligations from being able to receive public funds, except for the purpose of paying staff. We were vocal on the issue of phoenixing, where directors of companies that go insolvent then open up a new company that is effectively the same as the one that went under.
We are used to amendments to Bills falling flat on their face. That seems to be the fate of Opposition parties who table amendments, whether they are the third party or the official Opposition, but it was particularly disappointing that nothing to pick those ideas up was reflected in what came through in the Bill, because ensuring that information is correct at that early point would ultimately help to prevent companies from engaging in money laundering, other forms of economic crime and other dubious activities or from evading their corporate governance responsibilities, which causes the damage we have heard about. With adequate resourcing, that is a task that Companies House is more than capable of fulfilling.
To draw my remarks to a close, we need robust supervision of directors and proper deterrents in place against negligence and malfeasance. We need further reform and increased resourcing for Companies House. Above all, we need to create a culture of honesty, transparency and compliance, which in good times and especially in bad is as fair and beneficial to all as it is possible to be. I very much look forward to what the Minister has to say about those points when he takes to his feet.
Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Fovargue. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) on securing the debate and on her excellent opening speech. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and the hon. Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson) for their important contributions on the chaos of regulatory bodies, and what really came through was the ongoing lack of a culture of challenge, and the links to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, which—I will speak to this later—we were keen for the Government to move much further on to tackle some of the weak areas, particularly phoenixing.
It is worth referencing that rising insolvencies, if we are talking about insolvency law and director disqualifications, also show an environment in which businesses are being hit hard. Many businesses are under strain due to the way in which they have been hit by the cost of doing business crisis, the supply chain crisis, the cost of living crisis, late payments and rising inflation and interest rates, with a Government that many businesses tell me is not on their side.
Monthly insolvencies hit record levels earlier this year in February and March. In March, there were almost 2,500 insolvencies, setting new records. However, alongside companies and directors who find themselves subject to insolvency despite their best efforts to survive, we know that there are business owners who abuse the process around administration and insolvency, with poor governance and stripping of assets. They incur high levels of debt and then dissolve the company, leaving workers and creditors in the lurch, and even denying workers the value of their outstanding pay and redundancy.
I thank the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union for its briefing and the caterers of Dawnfresh Foods and Orchard House Foods, which my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles also spoke about.
John McDonnell
We have had several representations from the bakers union over a period of time. It looks as though it is a sector where the strategy of insolvency has been used consistently. I wonder whether there could be a specific examination by the Government of this particular sector, because over the past eight or nine years we have had a pattern of behaviour, and it is one that is becoming almost endemic in the baking industry.
Seema Malhotra
I thank my right hon. Friend for his contribution. I agree with putting that question to the Minister and asking for a specific response.
The other issue is that rogue directors are able to walk away with seeming impunity. Some Government steps have been brought forward, and they have been important, but clearly they have not been enough—certainly not for the scale of the challenge. Recent public cases have highlighted the need for urgent action, but where steps have been taken by the Government there seems to be a lack of will to really grasp the challenges. I make reference to insolvency powers and audit and corporate governance reform here.
As one example, in 2021, clauses 2 and 3 of the Rating (Coronavirus) and Directors Disqualification (Dissolved Companies) Act 2021 introduced powers to enable the Insolvency Service to investigate directors of dissolved companies—measures that were first proposed in 2018. The Government’s main policy objectives were, first, to ensure that public concerns that rogue directors who abuse a company and insolvency law can be investigated and held accountable and, secondly, to provide a deterrent for company directors who may use the dissolution of the company to evade their responsibility to repay bounce back loans. Since the Bill became an Act, data showed to the Insolvency Service has focused mainly on the second policy objective, a point made effectively by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington. In December ’21, the Insolvency Service gained powers to disqualify directors of dissolved companies, and, since 2022-23, just 25 directors of dissolved companies have been disqualified.
Many of the issues being talked about today were laid bare for all to see during the Carillion collapse in early 2018. Carillion had ostensibly been financially healthy. Its collapse saw more than 3,000 jobs lost, 450 public sector projects, including hospitals, schools and prisons, plunged into crisis and a company in billions of pounds of debt. In Hounslow, our leisure services were affected, and saved only by the council stepping in. Approximately 11,000 employees lost their jobs at British Home Stores, with a pension deficit of £571 million. These issues not only affect those close to the cases but cost the taxpayer, too. The National Audit Office reported that the Carillion affair cost the taxpayer at least £148 million, including £65 million in redundancy payments. Since the Government promised action on reforming corporate governance in the wake of the Carillion collapse, it took until May 2022 for a White Paper to emerge, and only in the past few weeks has the Financial Reporting Council issued its own consultation in response to the White Paper.
Let me say a few words on audit and corporate governance reform. This is an important policy space, in which reforms need to be robust for red flags to be seen early. An annual audit is a statutory requirement for listed and large companies. The purpose is to provide assurance to shareholders that financial statements give a true and fair view of a company. Good audit protects not just shareholders, but employees, pension holders, suppliers, customers and the wider community. At the broadest level, it serves the public interest by underpinning transparency and integrity in business.
Reform of the audit sector is clearly necessary and long overdue. The scandals we have heard about have damaged the reputation of the audit sector and the professionals who work in it. The Financial Reporting Council’s finding in December 2020 that over 80% of audits reviewed in the previous two years required improvement indicates the scale of the challenge. It also raised the issue of the importance of a challenge culture. Despite some improvements, there is still huge urgency, and it seems that the Government are dragging their feet. We are still waiting for legislation. The accounting and audit professions, the business community and the trade unions are all clear that change must come, and that the new audit, reporting and governance authority, which will step in when directors breach their duties, must be put on a clear statutory footing and given new powers that can only be conferred through legislation. I would be grateful for the Minister’s response to questions about plans for reform of section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 and directors’ duties.
I have some final remarks on the effectiveness of insolvency law and the director disqualification framework. R3 members note that for many years, regardless of the number of insolvency appointments and the number of reports submitted highlighting director behaviours that could warrant disqualification, broadly the same number of directors seem to have been disqualified each year, though there was a notable drop post pandemic. Are those numbers driven by resourcing constraints in the Insolvency Service, rather than assessment of director conduct?
Secondly, the annual enforcement statistics published this year indicate that there have been no disqualifications for phoenixing or insolvent trading. I would be grateful for the Minister’s view on enabling greater use of section 216 of the Insolvency Act 1986, so that it can be applied not only to companies in liquidation, but also to those that enter insolvent administration or are dissolved while the balance sheet is insolvent. That would accord with the Government’s recent extension of the director disqualification regime to dissolved companies.
During the recent passage through the Commons of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, we tabled amendments that would have improved the insolvency regime, including by tackling the practice of phoenixing, but the Government voted against them all. I hope that we can come back to some of those measures.
There is not just a failure to take this issue seriously, but a broader pattern of failing working people, who are so often left in the lurch. For too long, our economy has been ravaged by dire productivity, insecurity and stagnant pay. Government and business need to work together on a proper, pro-business, pro-worker, long-term plan for industry and the economy. Labour is committed to creating jobs that provide security, treat workers fairly and pay a decent wage through our new deal for working people—the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation. I would welcome assurances from the Minister that there will be progress on audit and corporate governance reform, and a further strengthening of the insolvency and director disqualification regime—two vital tools for keeping enterprise, employment and the economy protected from rogue directors, and for preventing the huge scandals that we have seen from ever happening again.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Kevin Hollinrake)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I add my grateful thanks to the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) for bringing forward this important debate. Members may know that I spoke out on this subject a lot from the Back Benches, and my appetite for change in this area—when parliamentary time allows—remains the same.
There is no doubt that the Government absolutely believe in strong corporate governance and an effective insolvency regime. The hon. Lady rightly referred to the demise of Carillion. Years have passed since that happened, but it is very important that we do not forget the lesson learned from the impact that had on all stakeholders, including employees and small and medium-sized enterprises in the supply chain.
I have great sympathy for those affected when companies declare themselves insolvent or go through insolvency in any circumstances, including the SMEs in those companies’ supply chain. The hon. Lady referred to the case in her constituency of Orchard House Foods; the redundancy protection service stepped in rapidly after the insolvency to make sure that people were properly compensated. Nevertheless, it was a worrying time for many people. Clearly, it would not be appropriate to talk about any ongoing investigations, but it is important that the Insolvency Service follows through on these matters and ensures that proper procedure is followed.
Given the comments made in the debate, it is important to say that most directors and businesses are bona fide and do the right thing. Of course we are concerned when companies go into insolvency, for all the reasons that have been outlined in the debate. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is no longer in his place, commented on cases in his constituency. Such cases have immense knock-on effects for stakeholders in our constituencies. Indeed, this is one of the issues on which I get the most letters from colleagues.
We must consider any changes we make to the regime in the light of the fact that most directors and businesses do the right thing. It is important to recognise that our economic system is not a zero-failure system. Failure is part of the process, and unfortunately many bona fide businesses that seek to do the right thing and invest their hard-earned money enter insolvency—in many cases through no fault of their own. We need a regime that reflects that context.
I think that most people accept that the FRC has significantly improved its oversight of the sector in recent years, particularly under the stewardship of Jon Thompson. There have been significant improvements. The right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) referred to the regulator as being asleep at the wheel. That may have been a fair accusation years ago, but it is probably inappropriate now. However, when parliamentary time allows, it is right to replace the regulator with a new one—the audit, reporting and governance authority.
The hon. Member for Salford and Eccles referred to the US’s Sarbanes-Oxley system. Should we adopt that kind of system? We believe that there is a balance to be struck. We do not want anything that would be counter-productive to our economic system, in which competition is ultimately the best outcome for consumers. High competition drives down prices for consumers and drives up service. It is therefore important that we do not move to a system of a new generation of professional directors. It is important that our system is entrepreneurial, encourages investment, and encourages people to start up and expand businesses. We are, however, planning new corporate governance rules, which I will talk about in a second.
A number of hon. Members asked whether we will reform the Companies Act 2006 duties. The Act already requires all company directors to have regard to employee, consumer, environmental and other interests while pursuing the success of the company. Since 2019, large companies have been required to report annually on how those wider interests have been taken into account in boardroom decision making. I think the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) made a point about reform of those duties. It is important that we parliamentarians are cognisant of the burden on businesses; I applaud her for referring to that. Many businesses are under significant pressure right now from a number of angles, and it is important that we do not add to the burdens on them.
The right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington raised the issue highlighted by Baron Sikka. I have worked very closely with Baron Sikka on economic crime and money laundering, and on the fact that there are 41 regulators in the financial system. It is important that we have straightforward corporate governance reform, so that we can hold people to account on their duties under the Companies Act 2006 and other requirements.
The Government response in May 2022 to our consultation on the “Restoring trust in audit and governance” White Paper confirmed plans to require very large companies to provide targeted new annual reporting on their management of risk and certain other matters. The new reporting will apply to UK-listed and private companies with more than 750 employees and an annual turnover of more than £750 million. Crucially, it will consist of four new statements in those companies’ annual reports: a resilience statement setting out how the company is managing significant risks over the short, medium and long term; confirmation that the company has sufficient realised profits to pay out any proposed dividends, and a statement about the company’s approach to profit distribution; a statement on the directors’ actions to prevent or detect material fraud; and an audit and assurance policy setting out how the company is assuring the quality of non-financial information that largely lies outside the statutory audit.
The new reporting requirement responds to concerns identified followed the sudden collapse of Carillion and other very large companies. Shareholders and other stakeholders need more information to understand the steps being taken by directors to ensure the future prospects of the company. We are developing secondary legislation, which we hope to lay before Parliament soon, to implement those new measures.
I often spoke about insolvency reform from the Back Benches; indeed, I co-authored a report called “Resolving Insolvency” on behalf of the all-party group on fair business banking. That relates to a point raised by the hon. Members for Feltham, and for Strangford, about insolvency reform. The Insolvency Service primarily investigates company directors and corporate misbehaviour. That includes investigating trading companies, and taking court action to wind them up when they have been acting against the public interest—for example, when there is evidence of fraud or corporate abuse. About 150 companies are investigated each year for that reason. The Insolvency Service also works collaboratively with other enforcement agencies to ensure the public are protected.
The bulk of the Insolvency Service’s enforcement work relates to investigating the conduct of directors of companies that are subject to formal insolvency, such as liquidation or administration. If an investigation finds evidence of misconduct by a company’s directors, the Insolvency Service may bring disqualification proceedings where that is in the public interest. Disqualification can be for a period of up to 15 years, and breach of a disqualification order is a criminal offence. Disqualification is therefore a significant interference with a person’s rights, and the courts take it very seriously. High standards of evidence are required. If a disqualification order is made, in certain circumstances there is the option to seek a compensation order against the disqualified director, who is personally required to pay back the losses they caused.
Having said that, we can go further on insolvency reform. It is the Government’s intention, when parliamentary time allows, to move towards a system of regulation with a single independent regulator, and away from the recognised professional bodies that we see today. I am very keen to take that forward when parliamentary time allows.
The hon. Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson) spoke about money laundering, the number of supervisors who act in that space, and the need to streamline that regime. His Majesty’s Treasury is looking at that, and is due to report on how we do that more effectively. I do not recognise his comments about the changes we are making as a consequence of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill. That is the most significant change to Companies House in 170 years, and I look forward to the Scottish Government introducing a legislative consent motion so that Bill is fully effected in Scotland. Some of the hon. Gentleman’s comments, such as those on verification , were about the situation today, rather than the situation as it will be. We are all on the same page on the need to replace the dumb register with a database with integrity. That is one of the registrar’s four main objectives.
On fees, we are keen to make sure that it is quick, easy and affordable to start up a company in this country, but we recognise that fees need to increase to make sure that Companies House, and potentially the Insolvency Service, have the resources to do their work. We will therefore bring forward plans to make sure that those resources are there, through increases to the incorporation fee and the annual fees for registration.
On the hon. Member for Gordon’s points about directors’ limits, we do not feel that is a key issue. Setting an arbitrary limit on the number of directorships would not be the right way forward. I was the Minister responsible for taking the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill through the House, and if I remember rightly, the SNP suggested a limit of 20 directorships. I had more than 20 directorships at any one time in my past business life, so that limit would have restricted me from making some investments in the economy that created jobs and raised taxes. I do not think those kinds of arbitrary limits are right; instead, we see the regime working on the basis of red flags. If a high number of directorships is connected with other potential issues, we expect the registrar to investigate.
The hon. Member for Gordon raised an important point about phoenixing. That has certainly been of concern to many hon. Members, and we are keen to act on it. We have made significant changes around phoenixing. Individuals who have acted as a director of an insolvent company at any time in the preceding 12 months are prevented from forming, managing or promoting any business, including a company with the same name as, or a similar name to, the liquidated company for a period of five years from the date of insolvency. There are both criminal and civil penalties for a breach of that restriction, including director disqualification proceedings.
The Government strengthened the law in that area in 2021 by introducing changes to the disqualification regime to make sure that directors cannot avoid investigations by simply dissolving their companies. That point was also made by the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston. Twenty-five directors have been disqualified under that legislation. None of those disqualifications would have happened without the Government’s legislation in that area. We want to make sure that legislation goes further, and more investigations are ongoing. I will not specify the numbers, but it is fair to say that when the IS looks for cases of phoenixing, that is not the only misconduct identified. Often, those cases are dealt with as more serious offences that it is more important to prosecute. The hon. Lady gave a figure of 25, but that does not reflect some of the detriment and misconduct that we have identified.
We absolutely think there is a case for reform, and we are determined to take reforms forward quickly, as soon as parliamentary time allows. We also want to make sure that the UK is the best place in the world to do business, and that we do not interfere with people’s ability to start up and scale their business; however, we also want to maintain proper fiduciary responsibilities and have a system that properly oversees the conduct of directors. We will bring forward the legislation that strikes that balance as soon as parliamentary time allows.
Rebecca Long Bailey
I thank everybody for taking part in the debate, which has been wide-ranging; a lot of interesting points were raised. I thank the Minister for his lengthy response. I welcome a lot of the comments he made, and I followed his work as a Back Bencher on this issue, so I know we are on the same page on many issues, but I am saddened that he did not go into the level of detail that many of the questions asked by myself and colleagues required.
The vast majority of directors do the right thing—we wholeheartedly agree on that point—but the problem is that when the minority do not and it goes seriously wrong, the Insolvency Service and the UK corporate governance code only work to a certain point, because the enforceability just is not there. I applaud the work of the Insolvency Service, but it can only examine conduct as determined under the current law. Take a situation where directors could have consulted on redundancies prior to an insolvency event but did not. The law is very weak and ambiguous on that, which is the point I was trying to make in my opening remarks.
As the Sequana case clearly shows, the point at which an insolvency becomes probable is not defined in law. There is a point in time when directors should be, on a sliding scale, prioritising the interests of creditors prior to a probable insolvency. Defining that is crucial to providing the protection that workers and creditors deserve in situations where some of the money they are owed could be paid back to them.
On the issue of Sarbanes-Oxley, the Minister said that there is a balance to be struck, and he implied that by introducing legal requirements on directors in the style of Sarbanes-Oxley, we would in some way restrict entrepreneurship. That has certainly not been the case in the United States. I was reading a Harvard law report this morning that suggested the opposite—that providing certainty to shareholders and investors would actually encourage future investment. Directors should be able to say, “Yes, all the financial statements we are making are 100% correct. We are categorically supportive of the work that our auditors have done, and we’re happy to provide those reports to our shareholders.” If they cannot do that, we have a serious problem with our UK corporate governance regime. I do not think it is unreasonable to expect directors to have that legal liability.
Finally, on the audit system, the Minister has not provided any clarity about when ARGA will be set up, when audit reforms will be forthcoming or how extensive they will be. We got a taster in the Queen’s Speech, but as I am sure he agrees, reforms need to go a lot further than what the Government have put forward, because issues arise time and again. If we look at the dysfunctionality of the audit industry, KPMG was fined £14 million for not auditing Carillion’s company accounts correctly, and that was not a one-off. Prem Sikka referred to the case of Silentnight, in which KPMG—again, in the pursuit of a coveted client—did a pre-pack administration and sold a company to that potential client at an undervalue. It was fined £13 million for its role in that. That shows the dysfunctionality and the unhealthy nature of the audit industry as a whole.
John McDonnell
I worked for Silentnight as a youngster, but one of the other issues is the distressing of assets by the accountancy firms, so that they can get sold on. We have seen case after case of that.
Rebecca Long Bailey
My right hon. Friend is 100% right. I hope the Minister will come back with plans for more detailed reforms of the audit industry in due course.
I will finish on the point about the three reports that my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) mentioned. Lord Sikka provided three incredibly detailed reports a few years ago: one on the reform of regulatory architecture, one on reform of the audit industry and one on reform of the UK corporate governance regime. He did that along with a whole team of accountants and industry experts. The points made in those reports are as valid today as they were then, and they are non-partisan. I hope the Minister will take time to read those reports when he is bored over the weekend, and will take some pointers from them that he can take forward in Government policy.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered insolvency law and director disqualifications.
Publication of Claimant Data in County Court Judgments
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Yvonne Fovargue (in the Chair)
I will call Janet Daby to move the motion and then call the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention in 30-minute debates.
Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the publication of claimant data in county court judgments.
I begin by informing the House that one of my first jobs as a young person, before attending university, was at the Mayor’s and City of London county court, as an administrative officer. During that time I handled many thousands of claims, so I bring some knowledge and experience to today’s debate.
Turning to the debate, I want to make it clear how easy the solution to this problem can be. My ask is simple and straightforward: will the Minister agree to rectifying an omission in the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines Regulations 2005, so that claimant data is published? I am not asking the Government for funding, and there is no need for primary legislation. Instead, the issue I am raising today requires only a small adjustment, which will have a big impact, thereby underpinning the principles of justice, which are rightly celebrated in our country, tackling inequalities that are too often shouldered by those who have the least, and saving resources in our already stretched justice system.
Peter Gibson (Darlington) (Con)
The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech. I rise simply to express my full support for the proposed change for which she calls. This is a sensible tidying up of the legislation, and I urge the Minister to crack on.
Janet Daby
I thank the hon. Member, and I absolutely agree with him.
The regulations were created in 2005. They allow for the sharing of specific civil court information with the registrar. However, that information does not include the name of the claimant in a judgment. That means that a defendant can obtain every other piece of information they might need, but not the name of the claimant who took the judgment out against them. That is a problem for several reasons.
Our justice system is world renowned. One of its key principles is that individuals should know who is taking them to court. That is a fundamental principle of natural justice—one that I am proud to champion, and one that I hope the Minister is, too—so it is ludicrous to discover that defendants in these cases do not know who is taking them to court. Indeed, it seems unreasonable and unjust that the claimant’s name is not published in county court judgments, and it creates something of an unbalanced system. It goes against the fundamental principles of natural justice that underpin our justice system. Again, I hope the Minister shares that concern.
To look at this on a more practical level, the omission of claimant data can have negative consequences for some of the most financially vulnerable in our society—for example, those wishing to settle and repay debts, or to come to an agreement with their creditor, who are unable to obtain the information they need about who is pursuing a claim. Instead, they must embark on the lengthy and convoluted process of seeking the judgment case number, via TrustOnline, and then making phone calls or writing letters to the courts to access claimant information.
The average waiting time for income inquiries to the courts often peaks at approximately one hour. That makes it likely that individuals will have to make repeated attempts to reach the courts, which further swells an already bursting administrative system. These delays in getting their calls or correspondence answered put individuals at risk of passing the 30-day window that they are given to settle their debt. If they miss the 30-day deadline, the judgment can be left to sit on their credit file for up to six years, at which point people will no longer be eligible for mortgages and may have further rent applications rejected, and insurance policies may lapse. That creates many problems.
Publishing claimant data would eliminate that. It supports both the claimant and defendant by making it easier to settle their debt, and it gets rid of an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, which stacks the system against those who fall into debt. It seems archaic, ineffective and inefficient that individuals have to make endless calls or continually write to the courts to find out such a small but important piece of information. Neither side of this House would disagree with the assessment that our court system is currently beset with severe backlogs, and the Minister, alongside his departmental colleagues, has said repeatedly in the House and elsewhere that the Department is committed to cutting those backlogs. Therefore, it is in everyone’s interests that they succeed.
Today I offer the Government an easy win. Every week, it is estimated that the courts field 2,000 inquiries related to claimant information, which adds up to 100,000 inquiries a year—a colossal and unnecessary figure. Imagine what court capacity might be freed up if our courts were handling 100,000 fewer inquiries every year. Publishing claimant data will do just that: free up capacity and help to cut the court backlogs. I remind the Minister that that is without additional Government spending and without the need for primary legislation.
If I have not yet been persuasive enough, let me share with the Minister some of the other potential benefits of making this change—I think I probably have, as I can see some nodding in the Chamber.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mike Freer)
indicated assent.
Janet Daby
I will share a bit more anyway. Policymakers would be better able to understand what is driving problem debt and so would be able to develop better policy solutions. Regulators such as the Financial Conduct Authority or Ofwat would be better able to identify which firms are treating customers fairly by proactively supporting those who fall into difficulty. The Government would also be able to better target funding for debt advice services exactly where it is most needed.
Analysis by the Registry Trust, an organisation that I will talk about in more detail as I bring my speech to a close, found that 25% of all claimants in county court judgments are utility companies or parking companies. Unfortunately, in recent months Members of this House have become all too familiar with some of the poor practices deployed by energy companies in relation to the forced installation of prepayment meters. I know that is something that the Minister has engaged on with various Select Committees. Rightly, the actions of those energy companies have been condemned on both sides of the House.
Nevertheless, the fact that claimant data is not ordinarily published means that those energy companies can remain anonymous. Meanwhile, the people who the companies have registered a claim against are left blindfolded in terms of knowing who has taken out a judgment against them. That is wrong and a clear imbalance of justice, whereby our society’s most financially vulnerable people come second to energy giants who rush warrants through the courts, break into people’s homes and force-fit prepayment meters without proper regard for their customers’ welfare. Surely the Minister is not satisfied with this situation and wishes to rectify this inequality.
Let me reassure the Minister that I am not here to point the finger; I am here to help him put a solution in place that will actually work out in practice. The register of judgments, orders and fines has been run by the Registry Trust on behalf of the Ministry of Justice since 1985. The data managed by the trust supports millions of lending and credit decisions across the UK and Ireland every year. The Registry Trust provides services to Government bodies, regulators, credit reference agencies and many other organisations. On average, it processes over 130,000 records each month—vital work that helps our economy to keep moving. Before this debate, I shared with the Minister the news that I have been liaising with the Registry Trust for some time on this matter. The Registry Trust could not be clearer: it has the capacity to manage the addition of claimant data to the register.
If the Minister takes on board the arguments that I have laid out, goes back to his Department after this debate and drafts a statutory instrument so that it can be laid before Parliament at the first opportunity, I can assure him that he would not face opposition from the Registry Trust. Quite the opposite—the Registry Trust is leading the campaign for the publication of claimant data. If the Minister wants reassurance from the trust, I know that it would be only too happy to meet him and put their case forward.
Let me conclude by saying to the Minister: please do not look a gift horse in the mouth. This proposal requires no primary legislation, as I have already said. It does not add to Government spending. It promotes fairness and efficiency in our justice system. It is even being asked for by the organisation responsible for administering it. I therefore hope that the Minister will confirm the Government’s intention to update the 2005 regulations and publish claimant data.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mike Freer)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Ms Fovargue.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) for securing this debate. I am tempted to say, “I agree”, and sit down again. Sadly, there are a few things that I have to put on the record first.
I genuinely welcome the hon. Lady’s focus on this issue. I have heard her set out how enhancing the data that the Registry Trust holds could help protect households facing financial difficulties. I can confirm that the Government are considering whether we can support the proposal by the Registry Trust to allow claimant data to be included on the register of fines, orders and judgments in England and Wales, as articulated so clearly by the hon Member.
I want to commend the Registry Trust for the valuable service it provides to consumers, businesses and the wider economy. Access to data it holds supports millions of lending and other business decisions each year. The register holds more than 6 million records of fines, orders and judgments. Ordinarily, if a debt is not paid within one month of the court order, an entry will remain on the register for six years, as the hon. Lady set out.
Currently, entries on the register in England and Wales include the name and address of the judgment debtor, the amount owed and whether the debt has been satisfied. Every day, His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service provides the Registry Trust with a secure data feed of new or amended entries to the register. Once the Registry Trust has reviewed and processed the data, it is uploaded to TrustOnline, which provides members of the public and businesses with access to search the public registers. TrustOnline has enabled more than 100,000 customers to check county court judgments registered in the courts. It also provides organisations or individuals with bulk data, which is typically used to support lending and other types of business decisions.
The hon. Lady clearly set out the benefits of including the name of the claimant on the register in England and Wales, as happens in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Reflecting on the proposal, I note that that could benefit households in two ways. First, it would provide greater transparency about the use of the county courts by creditors. It would shine a light on the businesses and institutions that most frequently bring county court claims against consumers.
When we first started to discuss the topic of the debate, I tasked officials to see how we could start publishing the top 10 or 20 users of the data, so that we could shine that light as fast as possible. Because the data could help regulators to monitor how firms treat their customers in vulnerable financial positions, and it would help to identify which firms are the most aggressive in using enforcement action. The data could also be used by the regulators of utility and telecom providers to monitor the effectiveness of policies intended to support consumers in financial difficulty. Data could also provide an indication of the credit controls that lenders have in place to prevent irresponsible lending.
Secondly, the Registry Trust states that the addition of claimant data on the register could help academics and debt advice providers obtain better insights into the source of problem debt in the economy. As the hon. Lady said, the Government do provide a lot of support to debt advice. If this would make debt advice more effective, she is quite right that we should proceed.
There is a benefit to HMCTS, as well, as the people and businesses who find out that a court order has been made against them. Often they find they are in default without having received the claim, and transparency would help in that case. That can happen sometimes because, although the court rules require claimants to take reasonable steps to ensure that they have served the claim to the right address, they are not required to prove that the claim forms have been received. These rules seek to balance the rights of claimants to recover debts and the rights of debtors to be informed of the claim against them. As the hon. Lady said, that lack of transparency as to who is making the claim, sometimes means that people do not find out in time or are unable to satisfy within that 30 days. That is an incredibly powerful point. As she said, it could save the courts time, and lead to a quicker resolution of the debt, which would help restore the person’s business credit rating.
As the hon. Lady set out, the change would require the Government to amend the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines Regulations 2005. It would also require HMCTS to update its existing digital systems to implement it. I would like to reassure the hon. Lady that we are carefully considering Registry Trust proposals. We agree it could bring several benefits to consumers.
We also want to ensure it does not expose consumers to any risks. For example, we are aware that criminals seek to exploit publicly available data to extort money from vulnerable people, for example by impersonating enforcement agents. We also need to consider where to focus the Department’s efforts to modernise many of the back-office systems that we are currently grappling with. I can reassure the hon. lady that this is, as she says, a gift horse, and something that I am keen to deliver as fast as I can.
In conclusion, I am grateful for the opportunity to support and respond to this debate, to the hon. Member for Lewisham East for securing it, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) for his support. I have the found the debate and reading around the subject in preparation incredibly helpful in finding out how we can address what sounds like a simple solution, for the benefit both of businesses and of those who find themselves in difficulty. I give my commitment that I will do my best to move this forward at pace.
Question put and agreed to.
Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered progress on delivering the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail.
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Fovargue. Reform of our railways has long been a contentious issue. There are countless opinions on the best way to run the rail system—from 100% nationalisation to 100% privatisation, with a plethora of views in between—but one thing the House can agree on is that rail is a good thing. Passenger rail can unlock economic growth across Britain’s regions; it connects communities, and is the greenest form of public transport. There is an ambitious growth target to treble rail freight by 2050, which will deliver huge economic and environmental benefits to Britain. The rail sector is a force for good. It ought to be obvious to anyone that we need more of it, not less.
We can also agree that the status quo is not working. We have an unhappy halfway house between privatisation and nationalisation, which clearly is not working as intended. Across much of our rail network, fares are high, services are poor and passengers are unhappy.
Some elements do work well. One example is open access: on the east coast main line, a public sector operator is competing with private sector open access operators on full revenue risk, which are able to make the best offering to the customer. That has boosted competition, lowered fares, increased the quality of services and created greater innovation. Operators on the east coast main line have recovered beyond pre-pandemic levels, proving that competition, not over-centralisation, is in the customer’s best interests. If we had open access across the network, I am confident that we would be in a much stronger position.
However, open access alone is not a silver bullet that will solve all the problems. Unfortunately, as the Secretary of State for Transport illustrated in his Bradshaw address in February, Britain’s railways operate on
“a broken model…unable to adapt to customer needs and financially unsustainable.”
That is sadly true. The modelling produced during the pandemic was appropriate in a crisis, but is now stalling recovery and pleasing no one. The key to creating a successful railway is correctly diagnosing the problems that the industry currently faces, and prescribing the right solution.
Opposition Members would attribute the woes that the railway faces to the fact that it is not entirely in public ownership. However, that is simply not the case. A perfect storm of factors has converged to create the levels of turbulence that we have become used to. The pandemic disrupted long-established travel patterns, causing passenger numbers to drop as low as 4% at one time. In 2023, they have recovered to around 90% of pre-pandemic levels. However, revenue levels are at around 85% of pre-pandemic levels, with costs fixed at 100%. That is financially unsustainable and needs to be changed.
The temporary contracts introduced during the pandemic are blunting operators’ abilities to attract passengers back, with such contracts making the railway effectively quasi-nationalised, with operators’ hands tied. The Department for Transport has never been so involved in the running of the railways, not even in the British Rail days. The operator of last resort now commands four former franchises, as well as a rolling stock company. Those services are afforded significant freedoms in comparison with normal franchises, and they compete with open-access operators on full revenue risk.
Then there are the Department for Transport-contracted operators, which are on a quasi-nationalised contract with their hands tied and must look to DFT officials to get the most basic things approved. There is also an unacceptable lack of transparency around OLR funding, which ensures that organisations are not operating on a level playing field. The OLR has stated that it
“maintains constant readiness to take responsibility for other train companies…as required”,
but we must implement the reforms required to ensure that that is not necessary. The last thing we need is nationalisation by stealth.
I reiterate that we have a broken rail model with unsustainable finances and restrictive contracts. Further to that, we have industrial action on certain routes, with the public left feeling frustrated and rightly demanding improvement. What is to be done? The nationalised models are supposedly a panacea, where high-quality trains run at cost price for the greater good, never cancelled or delayed, and tying together communities that would otherwise rely on gas-guzzling cars to keep connected.
So we are told, but the reality is the opposite. Bean counters at the Treasury keep a hawkish eye on operations. Their chief concern is the revenue produced by the network. At the first sign of difficulty, revenue has flatlined at around 85% of pre-pandemic levels. Remember: they order the Department for Transport to make savings. They, in turn, have little option but to cut services, staff and customer benefits. This further reduces revenue, compounding the problem, which then spirals out of control. If hon. Members do not believe me, they need only look at a real-world example, not from some far-flung socialist country but from here in the UK. What was the result of British Rail’s reign over our railways? Huge operating deficits, lines starved of investment, and dire need of modernisation, culminating in the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. I fully accept that privatisation is not entirely perfect, but I will not take lectures from the Opposition about the fairy tale of nationalisation.
John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)
The other thing everybody hated about British Rail was that it was monumentally disliked by its staff. Staff morale was at rock bottom and industrial relations were not great. It was not a worker’s paradise either, even while it was awful for customers.
Martin Vickers
I entirely agree.
I concede that even under the current system, the separation of cost and revenue across two departments creates perverse incentives. No business that wanted to grow would structure itself in that way. Only with major reform can we break a cycle of decline.
I hope we can agree that the solution will utilise a public-private partnership to bring train and track back together and provide strategic leadership of the railways. The Conservatives, the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats have all identified the need for a body to oversee track and train, and the rail industry has long called for a guiding mind to co-ordinate the network. That is why the Government are creating Great British Railways, which will be responsible for both track and train, as well as revenue and cost.
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)
My hon. Friend’s analysis of what the Government are creating is correct, in that it would be very good if Great British Railways were to be the guiding mind. The trouble is that it looks as though there will be centralised control of the system, driving out private sector initiative, driving out investment and underpinning the underperformance of Network Rail, to which at least 78% of the current delays on our railways are directly attributable.
Martin Vickers
My hon. Friend the former Minister identifies some of the downsides, although, as I mentioned earlier, there is no perfect solution. My next sentence was going to be that creating a big, monolithic public body will not solve all the problems unless there is a mix of public and private working together. The private sector has more than doubled passenger numbers in the past two decades, has increased services by more than a third since 1997, and has increased jobs by 27% since 2011. The private sector must have a role.
I recognise that the private sector has not got it all right. There are significant concerns today around particular services linked to industrial action and rest-day working agreements. I was a keen advocate for TransPennine Express to lose its franchise and for the service to be taken under the wing of the OLR until a new private operator could be found. But colleagues across the House must look to pragmatic solutions to fix the railways, with the private and public sector working together. We need to create a market in which the private sector can deliver for customers. We need to let customer-facing operators act in the interests of the customer, not constantly seek permission from the centre. That is not an ideological argument, but one based on reality: command and control from the centre is not helping the sector to bounce back after the pandemic. If we get the balance right, a public-private partnership will enable operators to deliver for customers.
As chair of the all-party parliamentary group for rail, I hear from all manner of stakeholders in the rail sector, including operators, trade associations, those involved in the supply chains, community action groups, industry journalists and, of course, passengers. It is clear that the vast majority agree that legislation is required to make the public body a legal entity and give it the powers necessary to be truly effective. In November 2019, the all-party group published a report, “Rail Reform: A Guiding Mind”, which called for a similar body. The report was presented to the then Rail Minister. I recognise that the next parliamentary Session will be tight, but a Bill to establish GBR would be relatively thin and ought not to be controversial. I urge the Minister to lobby within his Department to ensure that a Bill appears in the King’s Speech.
Having said that, and without wanting to give the Minister the impression that anything other than a Bill is the preferable way of underpinning the long-term success of the railways, some important reforms can be done in the meantime without legislation. The national rail contracts are one of the last vestiges of the pandemic. They were right in a crisis, but now they need to evolve to provide operators with more flexibility to use their commercial nous and attract customers back. That would restore some financial sustainability and allow the Government to spend more on other priorities.
The independent economic expert body Oxera estimates that the Treasury is missing out on as much as £1.6 billion over two years because of restrictive contracts for operators. That reduces operators’ ability to drive the recovery of passenger numbers. Money is also being lost through the lack of ticket checks on board. Many commuters will be aware of journeys on which their tickets are checked once in a blue moon. That means they could travel for free, knowing that if they did happen to be caught, the savings they would have built up would vastly outweigh any fines they might have to pay. However, at present there is no incentive for rail operators to ensure the collection of fares.
Beyond reforms to the current National Rail contracts, we must look ahead to the end state, as envisioned by Keith Williams, and the passenger service contract, which must be flexible enough to reflect the varying rail market. The public instinctively understand that when they book a flight earlier, the ticket should be cheaper than if they were buying it closer to when they travel. That approach needs to apply to longer-distance rail journeys.
For shorter commuter journeys, we need to introduce more turn-up-and-go services with tap-in, tap-out technology and some degree of flexibility for operators to entice customers on quieter days. I was delighted that in the George Bradshaw address, the Secretary of State signalled that this anti-one-size-fits-all approach is being adopted for future contracts. As a key principle, the future passenger service contracts should be developed to reflect the geography and markets that they serve. They should incentivise operators to use all their creativity and capability to deliver the best possible outcomes for taxpayers by growing revenues and reducing costs.
The Government also need to drive forward fares reform, which the public rightly and understandably care greatly about. Why has it been 18 months since the Government announced the tender for the consolidated online retail solution to deliver radical and long-awaited fares reform? Can we get on and start the tender process? As the Minister knows, it does not need legislation. The prior information notice for CORS was published in December 2021.
The Government have announced one measure relating to fares: a single-leg pricing trial extension on LNER. That is something that should be rolled out more widely to private sector operators. The use of single-leg pricing removes the anomaly of some single tickets being almost as expensive as a return ticket. It means passengers can more easily choose when to travel in the knowledge that the fare offers value for money. For example, if someone commutes in at peak-time in the morning, but then attends an event after work and comes back off-peak, why should they pay for a peak-time return? This is a good step forward that ought to be utilised more widely.
Moving on to freight, I had the pleasure of hosting a cross-party parliamentary reception on this issue in March. Freight makes sense for the environment and the economy. The longest freight trains can ease road congestion by removing up to 129 heavy goods vehicles from the road. If the Government set an ambitious target to treble rail freight by 2050, the sector would deliver nearly £5.2 billion in economic benefits as a minimum. The freight sector would flourish by setting a supportive policy environment and also by opening the east-west freight corridor, which, as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, would be beneficial to industry and the development of the Humber freeport, and would take a significant number of HGVs off the M62.
I want to highlight the Luxembourg rail protocol, which is making progress internationally and is expected to come into force towards the end of the year. However, the UK is yet to ratify it. There has been extensive engagement with the DFT and the Great British Railways transition team, with the DFT including it as part of a consultation last year. Will the Minister confirm today the Government’s position on the protocol? Is he still supportive in principle, and when will the Department issue a response to the consultation? Is there a particular legislative vehicle envisaged to see it implemented? Those involved in the protocol from the UK perspective would appreciate clarification.
The rail model is broken, and both legislative and non-legislative reform is crucial. Misdiagnosing the problem will not make it any better; it will make it worse. Over-centralisation is not in the interests of passengers, the economy or the environment. All parties have identified the need for a public body, but it is important to get the design right and ensure that the private sector is allowed to do what it does best with the package of reform I have outlined today. Along with much-needed changes to ticketing and fares, the Government can deliver rapid and much-needed improvements for passengers, trade customers and the taxpayer.
I know the Minister would be disappointed if I did not raise a couple of local issues, which I have spoken to him about on many occasions. One such issue is the return of the direct train service from Cleethorpes to London King’s Cross. Perhaps he could update us on that. Another issue, which I have not raised with him previously, but perhaps he could look into for me, is that for the past 30 years there has been a Saturday-only train from Sheffield via Gainsborough and Brigg to Cleethorpes, with three trains each way. A few weeks ago, Northern announced that it would make that a daily service, which on the face of it is welcome, but it appears to be more for the convenience of the operator than the passengers, because the one train to Cleethorpes arrives at 11.14 am and the return train is at 1.20 pm. An hour and a half in Cleethorpes is simply not good enough; people need at least a week there to enjoy all the facilities. More seriously, one train arriving mid-morning with a return train at, say, 6 pm would be sensible, but allowing people 90 minutes in Cleethorpes or Grimsby is not ideal if they want to do some shopping.
Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on securing this timely debate. I concur with much of what he said. The desirability of the amount of time to spend in Cleethorpes I will leave to him to determine, but otherwise it was a powerful speech. He referenced the Bradshaw lecture that the Secretary of State for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), delivered a few months ago. That was very well received and warmly applauded by the industry as a direction of travel from, not the paralysis, but the uncertainty that the covid period delivered. That appreciation has waned and has been replaced by a deep concern that what is happening with GBR is starting to drift.
There is a strong call for the legislation to be included in Parliament’s next Session. I understand that the Bill is drafted and has been consulted on. It is a small Bill, so it could be introduced fairly quickly, however as a former Government Whip and Minister I know that it is not necessarily in the gift of the DFT to set the legislative slots, and that all sorts of considerations must be taken into account. I urge the Minister to argue as strongly as he can for that Bill to be included, because it would provide the certainty that we need.
In the absence of that legislation, there is a lot that could be done to give reassurance and certainty to the industry. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes has pointed out, there are simply too many decisions that have to be made by the DFT and the Secretary of State himself on the day-to-day operations of the railways and that they should not be making. That level of command and control is not conducive to developing the railway. The single biggest problem, as has been identified, is this split of responsibility between cost and revenue, with the Department for Transport responsible for cost and the Treasury getting the revenue. No business would operate that way, and it has to be ended as quickly as possible.
Industry needs certainty to invest for the long term. That applies not just to the operators, but also the supply chain for engineering and procurement—all the different parts of industry need certainty. They also need the flexibility to respond to post-pandemic patterns of travel, which have not settled down. I do not think that the business world has yet settled on a final mix of home and office working. Just in the last couple of weeks, we heard Google urging more and more of its employees back into work. We will probably not get back to the traditional levels of commuting into the office in the morning and the going home peak in the evening, but the industry needs to have agility to respond to the changing demands.
What can be done in the interim, in the absence of legislation? I strongly urge the Minister to look at the suggestion made recently by Nigel Harris, editor of Rail Magazine, that GBR could be set up in shadow form, in the same way the Strategic Rail Authority was set up back in 2000. It could do work such as developing new passenger service contracts itself, with the Secretary of State only coming in to do the legal bit—the signing—and then it can proceed. I think that is worthy of consideration. Similarly, it could progress with the ticketing reform that is much overdue. It is a thorny issue, because as soon as we reform something we create winners and losers in that model, but it is long overdue. I am not just looking at ticketing reform within rail itself, but rail as part of the wider transport ticketing strategy, so that multimodal tickets can be more easily introduced.
GBR must also not become a heavy command and control body. It has to be the guiding mind, but in a light-touch way. It needs to work with the sub-national transport bodies, the mayoral combined authorities and others so that there is flexibility geographically as well as in the types of service. There is not a plan B. For this work to happen in the absence of legislation, there needs to be a will in DFT and more widely in Government, at both ministerial and official levels. There is an appetite there. I met recently with Lord Hendy and others from the GBR transition team. They want to get on with the work, and they can do it, so I hope the Minister can give me some assurance that that work will progress and the industry can get the certainty it needs.
Chris Loder (West Dorset) (Con)
It is a pleasure to take part in this debate; I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on it. I am delighted to follow the chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart), and I am even more delighted to have the Minister here, so that we can have this discussion.
The Great British Railways initiative emanated from what was nothing short of a timetable disaster in May 2018. It affected large parts of the country significantly, and it led my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) to take that first step and say, “Actually, this does not work. This system does not click together, and it needs proper reform.” Of course, that led to the Williams review. If I recall, that piece of work commenced at the beginning of 2019, and we are now four years on. Admittedly, we have had covid in the middle, which has made things more difficult, but the progress has been unclear.
In the Bradshaw lecture mentioned by the Chair of the Transport Committee, the Secretary of State described the railway system as broken, and I agree with him. There are many reasons why it has become so fractious. We have allowed the trade unions to have much more influence than they should have. During covid, trade unions told train companies they would not allow the training of train drivers. That generated a deficit in the manpower requirement, and it meant that many train companies—including TransPennine Express, I suspect, and many others—have to cope with fewer train drivers than they require, and therefore have a requirement on overtime. That has meant that the influence and power was with the trade unions, particularly the train drivers’ union. We know that that is the case even today.
Having been a member of the Transport Committee since 2020—indeed, under the then chairmanship of the Minister—we have had much debate and discussion about this with successive Ministers, commencing in May 2021, March 2022 and October 2022, and with senior officials, including the permanent secretary. We have got to a place where the industry, as well as the passenger and taxpayer, now needs to see real progress on what can and will happen to improve our railways rapidly. We have talked a little this afternoon about the need for legislation. That is one way, but—not to be too sceptical—I do not think we will see the legislation immediately. Even if we did, with the timescales we have to contend with before the end of this Parliament, its impact would be limited.
I will focus my remaining remarks on what is actually feasible to do, rather than being concerned too much with what is unfeasible or unlikely to take place in what remains of this Parliament. We know very well that the DFT is able to specify the core timetable that operators run today. That is part of the contractual arrangements. I am a huge advocate of releasing some of that specification to allow the private sector to bring back to our railways the innovation and commercial capabilities that we have seen previously. We see it currently; I recall reviewing the statement by FirstGroup that its open-access operations, such as Hull Trains and Lumo, have performed very well. I am a huge advocate of enabling that to happen because my great concern, as someone who worked in the railways for 20 years before I was elected to this place, is the enormous uncertainty in this huge industry, which affects both the economy and the passenger experience.
In my own constituency, I have two operators, South Western Railway and Great Western Railway, both of which have had extended management contracts from the Department to deliver train services. It is of great regret to me and my colleagues locally that there was no consultation about the needs of the community when those contracts were leased. When the current contracts come to an end—if it is in this Parliament—I hope we might have that discussion.
However, in the absence of that consultation, I have an ask for the Minister to consider. Once upon a time, we ran summer Saturday trains, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes mentioned, from the Salisbury-Sherborne-Yeovil line down to Weymouth. That service was removed without consultation, and I would be very appreciative if the Minister would ask his Department to consider putting it in the service specification for South Western Railway.
The county town of Dorset—Dorchester—has suffered terribly over the last two or three years. The whole county has been cut off from London on numerous occasions for a number of reasons, whether it was covid or otherwise. The journey time to London from Dorchester is almost three hours; if I recall correctly, it used to be two hours and 15 minutes in years past. I would very much appreciate it if my hon. Friend the Minister would consider such improvements to the railway and ask Network Rail to consider them.
Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak with you in the Chair, Ms Fovargue, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on securing this much-needed debate. It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder).
I very much supported the enthusiasm of the former Secretary of State for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), when he launched the Williams-Shapps plan. I particularly supported the commitment to ensure that we saw a reversal of some of the damage done by the Beeching mindset. That was why I was somewhat concerned that a Beeching-esque mindset could see some revival under William-Shapps, although it is not inevitable that that will happen.
The Beeching mindset is that where there is a bus, there is no need for a train, and that where there is a train, there is no need for another train in competition. Beeching called competition duplication, as though a competing service and consumer choice were redundant or inefficient. He was wrong, and the nationalised railway continued to decline. However, thanks to privatisation, we have seen competition return, and record numbers of passengers with it. For example, Birmingham New Street to London Euston faces excellent competition from Moor Street to Marylebone, which has helped to keep fares low on those routes, while other places—such as Stoke, unfortunately—face disproportionately higher fares. On the road, there is also the National Express service from Digbeth to Victoria and of course the soon-to-open service from Curzon Street to Euston or at least Old Oak Common.
That is competition, convenience and choice, not duplication; it puts passengers first, and we need more of it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes said, it is noticeable that, where we have seen more effective competition, with open access on the east coast, performance has been better and fares have remained more competitive. Unfortunately, following the pandemic all risk and reward now rests with the Government. With our railways put on life support, they are more nationalised than ever before, with zero incentive for operators to grow revenues or deliver for passengers.
Our railways are facing an acute revenue crisis, but not really a passenger numbers crisis. The Office of Rail and Road’s estimate of 1.4 billion journeys for the financial year 2022-23 is historically high—it is not back to the 2018-19 peak but, mainly due to increased leisure travel, it is well above 2010 levels, and it has increased to where it has been for all but half a dozen years in the post-war era.
Season ticket sales unfortunately plummeted with lockdown and have not recovered. People who previously would have travelled at peak times, paying the highest fares for business meetings, now find it far more convenient to move to Zoom or Teams. It is good, then, to see operators such as East Midlands Railway introducing a new form of season ticket that allows eight days of travel within a four-week period. I just wish that EMR would restore all the services it cut during the pandemic, particularly on its route through Stoke-on-Trent, and add more to serve revived passenger numbers, which, on EMR, are now at 101% of pre-pandemic levels. There is certainly a demand that is not being effectively met by the barely hourly service throughout the week between Crewe and Derby, with only an afternoon service on a Sunday.
Across the national network, the latest quarterly figures, published last week, show that passenger numbers are 88% of what they were in the same pre-pandemic quarter four years ago, but revenue is only 70%. The rail plan needs to inspire innovation and incentivise operators to win back fares. It also means our railways need to up their game in winning an increased number of lucrative freight contracts.
When it comes to the make-up of GBR, there must be the flexibility for operators to provide services over and above the contracted minimum in response to consumer demand. It would be a mistake for the whole timetable to be decided centrally and inflexibly by the Department in London. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) said, we cannot just see a transfer of all the bad practice and cultural problems we have seen in Network Rail. The headquartering of GBR in Derby is therefore welcome, as is the commitment in the plan for more regionalised management. We must see a much lighter-touch and decentralised GBR that allows the needs of local economies and communities to be properly reflected.
However, those regions must be got right. Currently, Stoke-on-Trent endures being split over two Network Rail areas, in a farce that has forced us to seek intervention from the ORR and No. 10 to compel Network Rail to engage with the transforming cities fund projects as a single organisation and to stop dragging its heels over the TCF infrastructure works that had already been agreed. Even now, I await the unacceptably overdue progress on improving access to Longton station in my constituency. At the very least, having GBR in Derby would put it on the same line as Longton—the Crewe to Derby line—which would hopefully focus minds on improving services in stations through north Staffordshire, including reopening a station in Meir, in my constituency. Indeed, it would be a great commuter base for GBR staff working in Derby, adding urgency to getting the TCF programme delivered.
GBR will need to make serious studies of the Crewe to Derby route and the impact of High Speed 2. Unfortunately, current designs for Crewe threaten to take away capacity for local trains rather than opening up the promised capacity for more local trains. More capacity was supposed to be the rationale for the whole upheaval that HS2 is causing. What is the point of having HS2 services that no one can get to or use if local and regional services are completely hollowed out as a result? We should use the pause of phase 2 to look again at whether money could be far better invested in upgrading existing rail infrastructure to better provide the enhanced connectivity that is needed.
In conclusion, delivering the rail plan urgently requires more detail of what the plan actually is. It needs opportunities for open access to be prioritised. It needs to enable tangible benefits for passengers and to bring back the intangible glamour of rail travel that helped make it the preferred mode of transport, adding to revenue by adding consumer value. The focus has to be more competitive services to drive up standards for passengers, support economic growth and put our railways on a much more stable footing for the long term.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on securing this debate. We have heard from colleagues, and indeed a former colleague, on the Transport Committee. I agreed with much of what they said, but not necessarily the conclusions they drew.
We are two years on from the publication of the Williams review, and in that two years we have seen any prospect of high-speed rail serving north of Manchester removed completely. Even the remaining parts of HS2, when opened, will now terminate near Wormwood Scrubs rather than travel into central London to Euston. That is a boon for prison visiting, but hardly useful for connecting to the centre of the city, which was one of the original points of HS2.
Cities such as Leeds and Bradford have been kicked off the HS2 map and offered trams in return. Like Scotland, they will be stuck at the end of what, in high-speed rail terms, will be branch lines. Even the crown jewel in the review—the formation of GBR—has been kicked into the long grass, as if the Government here have an exhaustive and time-consuming legislative programme to get through in this place, and days were not collapsing early, which we frequently have.
Answers to my written questions published this week show that £64 million has been spent over the last two years on the GBR transition. If GBR is being mothballed until after the election—if there is a change of Government, we will be looking at long after that for any action—those costs will continue to accrue and we will be left with a bill into the hundreds of millions for an organisation that, essentially, or officially, does not exist.
The former Secretary of State intervened at the last minute to slap his name on the front of the report. Given that he is now firmly in the sidings and stuck with no route in sight, I wonder whether he regrets his burst of self-publicity, although I think we all know the answer to that. It has been left to his successors to pick up the pieces and make the case for the review and its recommendations, but No. 10 and the Chancellor are clearly not listening, because by their actions—and inaction—they are showing just how low down rail and transport more generally is on their list of priorities. I feel for the Minister because his Department is being targeted by the Treasury for swingeing cuts. The Williams review called for a 30-year strategy for the rail network, but that simply cannot happen when the Treasury sees transport as an easy target for cuts.
Williams ruled out public ownership and public control, yet as we have seen with ScotRail and the Caledonian Sleeper, the Scottish Government disagree. The UK Government insist that the private sector railway works efficiently, but it clearly does not. The review said:
“Simplification is more important than nationalisation”,
but while the rest of the UK continues to have passenger services under private operation, that simplification cannot happen. Those who receive the new passenger service contracts envisaged by Williams will still extract profit from the system, and the profit will still come from the public one way or another, whether it is from unregulated fares or direct via the DFT contracts. It is not simplification; it is just a tweaked continuation of the present system.
Scotland was the last part of the UK to see its railways privatised and the first to bring them back under full public control. We have heard many times in recent years that Scotland’s railway and the partnership between ScotRail and Network Rail in Scotland has provided much of the template for the GBR operation—if indeed it comes to pass. However, the semi-integration of track and train is despite Westminster, not because of it. Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government are, as per, trying to operate with one arm tied behind their back, with the operator being fully devolved but the track and infrastructure network still reserved.
What is needed now to complete the integration in Scotland is for Network Rail to be brought under the control of the Scottish Parliament, with a Government that are committed to rail in the long term, regardless of the mindset of the Treasury. That is in part being driven by the target to decarbonise Scotland’s railway by 2035—a target that we are well on the way to meeting, showing how a Scottish Government with control over services are marrying their policy objectives with that of the railway.
Thirty years after the Railways Act 1993, which began the privatisation of the system, we are still seeing the same mistakes repeated and the same political ideology standing in the way of a real plan for our rail network over the next 30 years. The truth is that, while Williams-Shapps may have offered the possibility of a sea change on the network down south, we are now likely to see its demise by a thousand cuts, with its core ideal delayed for who knows how many years.
To conclude, we have GBR on the back burner, possibly indefinitely; HS2 curtailed; the north of England bearing the brunt of cuts yet again; a Treasury on the warpath ahead of any election promises; and no end to the fragmentation and profit-driven structure that has demonstrably failed over the decades. It is time the Government went back to the drawing board, looked again at Williams’s integrated rail plan and their 13-year track record of cuts and more cuts to improvement programmes—cuts that never seem to affect Greater London to the same extent as they affect everywhere else—and started building a railway fit for the future, rather than patching up the work of the great engineers of the Victorian era who built our railways.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve once again under your chairship, Ms Fovargue. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) for securing this important debate on the future of our railways. He eloquently explained that the status quo is not working: fares are high, services are not running, and passengers are not happy. The rail model is broken.
Whenever someone puts their name to something and is then no longer there to lead it, the project is usually destined for failure, as was the case when the then Transport Secretary, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), decided to append his name to the long-awaited Williams review, calling it the Williams-Shapps review, and was then unceremoniously moved out of office to be replaced by another Transport Secretary. I knew straightaway that the review was doomed to be discarded and dumped, which is the situation we now find ourselves in.
It has been two years since the Williams-Shapps plan for rail was published, promising the biggest shake-up of our railways in three decades. We certainly have seen a shake-up, including three Prime Ministers and as many Transport Secretaries, two failing train operating companies put under the operator of last resort, endless strikes, and nearly one in 20 services cancelled in the third quarter of 2022-23. As the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) remarked, the Government are ideologically opposed to taking rail back into public ownership, as the Labour party has proposed. Great British Railways was hailed by the Government as the solution—a guiding mind with clear, central accountability. That means nothing if the status quo remains and progress continues to stall.
As the hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) explained, the path ahead of us is unclear. There is enormous uncertainty in an enormous industry. If Great British Railways is the Government’s flagship rail policy, it has certainly run aground. As explained by the Chair of the Transport Committee, the hon. Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart), there is Government drift on GBR, especially on the legislation. Just a few weeks ago, it was reported that officials were told that it would not be a priority and would not appear in the King’s Speech. GBR has been taken out of the transport Bill, and it may have only a fraction of the powers first proposed. A new headquarters has been announced amid much fanfare and videos produced at taxpayers’ expense, but concrete proposals for it are nowhere to be seen.
I look forward to the Minister providing some clarity. Perhaps he can tell us whether the Government even remain committed to delivering Great British Railways in full. If they are, will he use this opportunity to outline exactly what non-legislative steps will be taken by his Department to move forward with Great British Railways, and when? It cannot become an expensive vanity project, with taxpayers footing the bill. They have spent £50 million and counting on the transition team, and £20 million on consultants alone.
Worse still, the Government forced local authorities into a protracted competition for the opportunity to host Great British Railways’ headquarters, on a promise that it would bring jobs and opportunities. Now, after spending its precious time and resources, Derby is stuck in limbo—a fitting metaphor for the Government, who cannot help but over-promise and under-deliver. I urge the Government to get on with it. As the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) highlighted, the Government must stop dragging their heels, but they have been too busy lurching from crisis to crisis, while rail operators’ poor performance has gone unpunished or, even worse, been rewarded. In April, the Transport Secretary authorised a £65 million reward payout for First Group, the company that ran two of the worst-performing operators last year. It is absolutely absurd. Passengers deserve better.
We have years of missing annual updates on the rail network enhancements pipeline, which is vital to industry stakeholders. We have had consistent industrial action, which Ministers admit is costing much more than if they had agreed the pay rises for rail workers. We were promised simpler fares; instead, we get a 5.9% increase. We were promised net zero; instead, we got only 2.2 km of rail electrification in 2022. We were promised centralised timetabling; instead, we got service reductions and cancellations. We were promised devolution; instead, we got disparity, with the north left in the lurch.
Our railways are on a downward turn, despite journeys returning to pre-pandemic levels. Passengers and the industry feel as though they have been abandoned. Unity, vision, leadership—that is what our railways need, and what stakeholders and passengers want, not this broken system under this broken Government.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Huw Merriman)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Fovargue, and to reply to this debate secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers). I thank him for his work as chair of the all-party group for rail.
Given my former role as Chair of the Transport Committee, it is also a pleasure to be surrounded by former Committee colleagues, including the shadow Rail Minister, the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), who cannot stand to be Chair. We also have two former Transport Ministers. I welcome all continued liaison with the Transport Committee—a great Committee with great members.
In his Bradshaw address in February, the Transport Secretary set out his vision for rail: a customer-focused, commercially-led industry with Great British Railways as the guiding mind for the sector. I welcome the supportive comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes about the Bradshaw address and the need for a guiding mind. I agree and, to answer my shadow, we still support it and will still deliver it.
The case for rail transformation is now stronger than ever. As many have said in the debate, the railways are not delivering the services that customers deserve. The industry remains fragmented, which limits effective decision making. The existing commercial model is not sustainable, with the cost to the taxpayer remaining too high, and the structure does not provide adequate opportunity for private sector investment or initiative. Like my hon. Friends, I fully support the private sector in what it does and what it has done in the past; we need it now more than ever, following the pandemic and the reduction in passenger numbers. We need to put customers at the heart of what we do.
By establishing Great British Railways, we will enable a single guiding mind to co-ordinate the network, bringing infrastructure and operational decisions together, and planning coherently for the future with robust levers of accountability. It will develop local partnerships to bring decision making closer to the communities that the railways serve. Importantly, Great British Railways will enhance the role of the private sector, developing a new commercial model that focuses on operators competing to deliver high-quality, punctual services and excellent customer service.
New passenger service contracts will balance the right performance incentives with simple, commercially-driven contracts. Those will not be one size fits all. I want the private sector to play its part in reinvigorating the rail sector, driving innovation and attracting customers to rail. We are now working with industry on how we can introduce more private sector risk and reward into existing contracts.
On the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes about open access, I too want to see more open access where it benefits passengers and taxpayers, with a more level playing field in track charging. As part of rail reform, we want more competition to drive up quality and choice. We look forward to working with existing open access operators, as well as new entrants to the market such as Grand Union Trains, which will shortly introduce new services between London and Carmarthen, to maximise benefits for passengers. Legislation is needed to take forward some of the structural elements of reform, but we will ensure that customers feel the benefits as soon as possible, ahead of the introduction of such legislation.
My hon. Friend mentioned the Luxembourg rail protocol. The Government signed it in 2016 and remain committed to unlocking the benefits of greater private sector financing of rolling stock, which the protocol aims to support. The Government intend to implement the protocol, and we will continue to explore all suitable legislative opportunities to do so.
Let me turn to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes about lowering barriers to entry to create a more competitive retail market. As set out in the plan for rail, we recognise that there is a multitude of train company websites with different standards of service, which is confusing to passengers. We are looking and working closely with industry partners to review the best way to address that. Reform is not something that can be completed overnight, but delivery is well under way. We have launched national flexi-season tickets, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton), and over 700,000 have been sold since launch. We have delivered on our commitment to extend single-leg pricing to the rest of the LNER network from 11 June. That delivers simpler, more flexible tickets that are better value. In March, we announced Derby as the winner of the GBR HQ competition.
The accessibility audit of all 2,572 railway stations in Great Britain is complete and work is under way to ensure that data is kept up to date and made available to the public. In response to the points on rail freight, the rail freight growth target call for evidence will be published shortly, and we remain committed to introducing a long-term rail freight growth target towards the end of this year.
The transition team at Great British Railways has analysed hundreds of responses to the first-ever long-term strategy for rail call for evidence. The plan will be published later this year. In response to the complex rules and industry processes, the Great British Railways transition team, with the support of the Office of Rail and Road, will identify and recommend such rules and what can be done.
We continue to press ahead to deliver reforms and tangible benefits, including publishing the Department’s response to the rail reform legislation consultation this summer, taking forward workforce reform, developing the new commercial model, and continuing to simplify fares and roll out pay-as-you-go ticketing, ahead of legislation. I was asked many questions about legislation in the debate; I can only say that we will deliver legislation when parliamentary time allows. Such decisions are made collectively across Government and can be confirmed only during the King’s Speech in autumn.
I heard the call from my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart), Chair of the Transport Committee; Nigel Harris is indeed an influential figure who has a lot of good ideas. With regard to the suggestion of a shadow body, I am working with my Department—I had meetings in the last week—to try to escalate and set up more of the teams, so that rather than waiting for matters to be transitioned over, they can take those matters and come up with ideas. I am not saying that our idea is exactly the same as the one put forward, but we are looking to create the very same culture. My hon. Friend is absolutely right: so much can be done without legislation, and so much is being done. Since the end of last year, I have met weekly with the team that is transitioning everything to Great British Railways to ensure that whatever can move without legislation does move. The reality is that this change project is more about getting the change delivered than, ultimately, about legislation; legislation delivers paper and powers—it does not actually deliver the change, which is what I am working on.
To the point made by my shadow, the hon. Member for Slough, it is deeply regrettable that today ASLEF has balloted its members to continue strike action. It has balloted to ask for a continuation of strikes, but it has not asked its members whether they would like to take up the fair and reasonable pay offer put forward by industry, which would take average pay from £60,000 to £65,000 for a 35-hour week. That is on the table, but it is not being put to members. We remain committed to that offer, but we ask the unions to do their part and ask their members to give their view on it. I hope that the hon. Member would join me in welcoming that stance, which could bring an end to strikes rather than seeing the unions continue to put this country and rail passengers through absolute misery.
To conclude, nationalisation is not the answer. We need simplification and modernisation. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes: privatisation has been a success story. The new model will take the very best of the private sector—innovation, an unrelenting focus on quality and outstanding customer service—and fuse it with a single guiding mind to drive benefits and efficiencies across the system as a whole. I look forward to working with all my colleagues across the House to make this reform work.
Martin Vickers
I think it is fair to say that it has been a lively debate, with contributions from many colleagues. That shows how rail issues always arouse the passions of hon. Members. In contributing, they highlight the interests of their constituents. It has been a helpful debate. I thank the Minister for his response, which I think continues the debate. I hope that as we move forward, the guiding mind, which of course is the Minister, will produce some results.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered progress on delivering the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail.
Written Statements
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
UK-Switzerland Agreement on Recognition of Professional Qualifications
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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The Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Kemi Badenoch)
On 14 June 2023 the UK and Switzerland signed the UK-Switzerland agreement on the recognition of professional qualifications (RPQ).
The UK and Switzerland are two global leaders in services trade with deep links between our economies. In 2022, Switzerland was the UK’s third largest partner for services trade, with £23.7 billion in total services trade (imports and exports).
Interim arrangements on RPQ were concluded with Switzerland ahead of EU exit. The “UK- Switzerland citizens’ rights agreement” among other things rolled over the existing (EU-based) processes for recognising, qualifications until 2024.
Given the strength of both our services economies, and the importance of the RPQ in facilitating trade, it is vital that we establish longer-term arrangements for such recognition to replace these interim arrangements when they expire. Professional services businesses and stakeholders have also made clear the value that they place on smooth and transparent processes for RPQ with Switzerland.
This agreement provides such arrangements, establishing long-term:
Easier access for UK qualified professionals who want to practise in Switzerland, requiring regulators to provide a route to recognition.
Smoother processes for assessing applications—requiring reasonable decision times, reasonable application fees, and clear and transparent guidance on requirements.
Bespoke access for the world-leading UK legal profession, an important export market adding £29 billion gross value to the economy annually.
This agreement will provide certainty for UK and Swiss professionals regarding the arrangements for recognition of their professional qualifications. It will bring tangible, long-term benefits to the UK, simplifying processes for UK professional services businesses that trade in Switzerland.
The agreement also safeguards regulators’ autonomy to set and maintain professional standards, to assess against these, and to decide who is fit to practise the profession.
Securing this agreement is an important step in establishing a new long-term trading relationship with Switzerland, alongside the UK-Swiss FTA negotiations which I launched with my Swiss counterpart last month.
The ambition is for this agreement to enter into force on 1 January 2025, following the completion of domestic processes by both parties.
[HCWS850]
Creative Industries Sector Vision
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Lucy Frazer)
Our creative industries are a true British success story. They drive economic growth at home—contributing £108 billion in 2021 to the UK economy—and are a brilliant global advert for our creativity and values.
This Government are determined to build on their world-class excellence and I am today publishing a creative industries sector vision that will make sure we do that. This vision is about maximising growth, nurturing young people’s talent and delivering on the creative potential that exists right across the country. By 2030—working with industry—we plan to grow these industries by £50 billion of gross value added and support a million extra jobs with a pipeline of talent and opportunity for young people.
This vision is a blueprint for how we support creatives from their first day at school to their last day at work. It comprises a range of measures for young people to help them discover and nurture their skills at school. The plan has targeted investments to help people when they are ready to start their own creative endeavours—with investment for early-stage games studios, grassroots music venues and other creative pursuits. For those businesses, entrepreneurs and artists who are ready to mature, they will find support to help them break into new markets, develop their products from prototypes and access mentoring expertise.
We also plan to build on the status of culture as one of the main drivers for levelling up and spreading growth across local economies. Among the centrepieces of this vision are more funding for creative clusters to stimulate local growth, and providing opportunities for creative education and training people to support creative careers. We have already seen how clusters of excellence—from video games in Dundee to TV in Leeds—have helped draw in investment and nurture talent, and we want to replicate this success in more towns and cities across the UK.
I would like to thank industry for its invaluable help in shaping and delivering the vision, particularly the Creative Industries Council, whose support and advice has been indispensable.
I will place a copy of the creative industries sector vision in the Libraries of both Houses.
Goals and actions in the sector vision
Goal 1: Grow creative clusters across the UK, adding £50 billion more in gross value added (GVA).
We will:
deliver the next £50 million wave of the creative industries clusters programme to support research and development (R&D) in at least six new clusters.
provide £75.6 million to set up four new R&D labs and an insight foresight unit across the UK as part of the convergent screen technologies and performance in real time (CoSTAR) programme.
increase the create growth programme’s (CGP) budget by £10.9 million to a total of £28.4 million to support businesses in another six English regions.
provide an additional £5 million for the UK Games Fund to invest in early-stage games studios, bringing its total value to £13.4 million.
Extend and increase funding for Arts Council England’s (ACE) supporting grassroots live music fund with an additional £5 million over the next two years.
triple the funding for the music export growth scheme (MEGS) to £3.2 million over 2023 to 2025 to enable emerging artists to break into new international markets.
in partnership with the Royal Anniversary Trust, launch a challenge designed to encourage innovation and growth in the creative industries.
welcome the recommendations of the pro-innovation regulation of technologies review and make rapid progress to develop a code of practice on text and data mining to ensure creator rights are appropriately protected.
Goal 2: Build a highly skilled, productive and inclusive workforce for the future, supporting one million more jobs across the UK.
We will:
publish a new cultural education plan (CEP) in 2023, deliver the national plan for music education (NPME) including £25 million for musical instruments, and explore opportunities for enrichment activities as part of the Government’s wraparound childcare provision.
improve creative apprenticeships, with regards to small and medium enterprise (SME) engagement, training provision, relevance of standards and the effectiveness and sustainability of the flexi-job model.
support the roll-out of T-levels, and complementary high-quality, employer-led level 3 qualifications that focus on good progression outcomes.
work with industry so that they can take advantage of skills bootcamps at national and regional levels, and benefit from new local skills improvement plans (LSIPs) and the forthcoming lifelong loan entitlement.
set out, with industry, an action plan in response to the independent review of job quality and working practice in the creative industries. The CIC will launch a charting progress tool to track the effectiveness of diversity and inclusion interventions.
Goal 3: Maximise the positive impact of the creative industries on individuals and communities, the environment and the UK’s global standing.
We will:
deliver on the Government’s commitment to creative excellence—supporting and promoting the very top end of our cultural and creative output to enhance soft power and boost exports. The Government will provide new funding of £2 million to London fashion week to support five fashion weeks from 2023 to 2025 and £1.7 million to the London film festival 2024.
deliver the £80 million “Research infrastructure for conservation and heritage science” (RICHeS) programme to secure the UK’s reputation for excellence in conservation and heritage science.
support the Music Venue Trust to deliver its £3.5 million “Own Our Venues” pilot.
implement the broadcasting White Paper, “Up Next”.
introduce an industry-led creative climate charter.
support Bradford to deliver the next UK city of culture in 2025.
[HCWS849]
House of Lords
Illegal Migration Bill
Wednesday 14th June 2023
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Illegal Migration Act 2023 View all Illegal Migration Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 133-V Fifth marshalled list for Committee - (12 Jun 2023)
The Lord Bishop of Durham
“(6A) The Secretary of State may not make regulations under subsection (1) specifying any limit on the number of persons who arrive under the following schemes—(a) the Ukraine Sponsorship Scheme,(b) the Ukraine Family Scheme,(c) the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, and(d) the Hong Kong British National (Overseas) routes.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would exclude the schemes for those displaced from Ukraine, the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) and the Hong Kong BN(O) routes from the safe and legal routes cap. None of these schemes are currently capped.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
My Lords, I remind the Committee of my interests with the RAMP project and as a trustee of Reset, as laid out in the register. In moving Amendment 128B, I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Stroud and Lady Lister, and the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, for their support, which, in itself, I hope demonstrates that this whole business of safe and legal routes is a matter about which there is common mind across the House and that we all agree that we need safe and legal routes. I am therefore looking forward to the next couple of hours—as I anticipate it might be—as we explore these issues, because this is really a debate about what is the best, how and when.
This amendment is a straightforward and well-intentioned addition to ensure that any cap placed on safe and legal routes excludes current named schemes already in operation. I hope, therefore, that it is a simple amendment that the Government will be able to accept to help provide clarity. Before I explain the rationale behind the amendment, I should like to comment on the importance of safe and legal routes. Since the pandemic, and following the end of the vulnerable persons resettlement scheme, I have despaired as I have witnessed the breakdown of our contribution to global efforts to support refugees to find sanctuary. I believe that the strength of shared opinion across different sides of this Chamber on the need for safe and legal routes is, in part, due to the global reputation we once held on resettlement. Central government led with great conviction and leadership in supporting communities up and down the breadth of this country to welcome over 20,000 Syrians who could then start to rebuild their lives. However, we now find ourselves in the absurd position that in order to deter asylum seekers from travelling to the UK irregularly, we are being asked to sanction the possibility that the Government will deliberately break international law to ban the right of men, women and children to claim asylum on arrival—and this is while providing no alternatives for vulnerable people to travel here safely.
In the absence of safe and legal routes, families are left with the impossible choice to travel informally to claim sanctuary in the UK and are thus at the mercy of smugglers taking criminal advantage. We often forget that, to claim asylum in the UK, a person has to be physically present here but, for those most likely to be in need of protection, there is no visa available for this and there are no UK consulates on European soil to claim asylum before making a dangerous journey. The UNHCR has also needed to reiterate—following government comments to the contrary—that there is no mechanism through which refugees can simply approach the UNHCR itself to apply for asylum in the UK.
The Government cannot deny that it is a choice to require refugees who wish to seek asylum here to rely on dangerous journeys if we do not provide safe alternatives. It is a difficult choice, but a choice it is. The Bill provides an opportunity to demonstrate real leadership and make a different choice.
Afghans, Iranians, Syrians, Eritreans and Sudanese are among those currently crossing the channel in higher numbers, making up over half the boat crossings in the first quarter of this year: 2,086, to be precise. Although all these countries have an asylum grant rate at initial decision of over 80%, only 146 people from those same countries were resettled. Taking one country as an example from 2022, we can see that 5,642 Iranians crossed the channel but only 10 were resettled here:10 out of 5,642. Let us not forget the most vulnerable group—children—who attempt to reach safety. Between 2010 and 2020, over 12,000 unaccompanied children were granted protection in the UK, but only 700 of those were able to arrive through official schemes. How many children could have been spared the trauma of a dangerous journey with better safe and legal routes?
I find the situation perverse, and I think we can, and must, do better. Yet currently the Bill does not propose any new protection pathways to help change this; in fact, it proposes a cap on such schemes and does not place any obligation on the Government to facilitate any such safe routes, preferring simply to consult local authorities. It is also important to note that every safe route will disrupt the smugglers’ ability to continue to capitalise on human misery. I therefore fully support the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, which would place a duty on the Home Secretary to specify additional safe and legal routes. The Prime Minister has promised that the Government will create more safe and legal routes. Although these would not dispense with the need for a functioning system of territorial asylum, I will take him at face value, otherwise the intention behind the Bill would appear needlessly pernicious and unjustly punitive.
Last year, resettlement figures decreased by 39% and family reunion decreased by 23%. Amendment 128C appears simply to provide the opportunity for the Government to turn this decline around by placing the Prime Minister’s welcome commitment in the Bill. I appreciate the unprecedented magnitude of forced displacement across the globe. The latest figure, from yesterday, says that there are 10 million more, so it is now 110 million. Therefore, any long-term strategy for safe and legal routes must be formulated collaboratively with our international partners and wider refugee organisations, rather than simply in a Home Office vacuum. Protection routes must be informed by the refugee experience and explore innovative and sustainable solutions with human dignity at their hearts. I know that the most revered Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury will share further on this in later groupings.
I will leave others to expand more fully on the safe and sanctioned routes that could be explored, although I note that, on previous occasions, I have spoken in favour of all three outlined in the amendments in this group. I expect the Government to bring forth details on the potential expansion of family reunion, including the ability of refugee children to be joined by their closest family members, and refugee visas, which would grant people permission to travel to the UK to claim asylum. There is also the potential capacity to welcome more people through community sponsorship, which would not necessarily be captured by a consultative cap with local councils.
Baroness Stroud (Con)
My Lords, in speaking to Amendment 128C in my name, I shall also lend support to many of the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 128B in the name of the right reverend Prelate, which he has just outlined and to which I have added my name.
Amendment 128C is very simple. It places a duty on the Government to do what they say they want to do and are going to do anyway. This amendment imposes a duty on the Home Secretary to create additional—I emphasise “additional”—safe and legal routes by 31 January 2024, six months after the anticipated passage of the Bill, under which refugees and others in need of international protection may come to the UK lawfully from abroad.
The whole purpose of the Illegal Migration Bill is to shut down unsafe and illegal routes and its whole narrative is to ensure that genuine asylum seekers and refugees can then come via safe and legal routes. If that is the motive for the Bill, as the Government have repeatedly communicated, this amendment will not be difficult for the Minister to accept.
I have been asked why I believe it necessary to establish a duty on the Government to create these routes: why is it not enough for the Government just to be required to lay before Parliament a report detailing the safe and legal routes that they intend to introduce? There are pages of the Bill weighted towards eliminating illegal and unsafe routes, but only a few sentences indicating an intention to create legal and safe routes—and then only to lay a report before Parliament detailing the Government’s intention to create safe and legal routes.
This is simply not certain enough. If the Government are genuinely seeking to establish safe and legal routes, they would do so with the same weight of legislation as is committed to the abolishing of unsafe and illegal routes. I have the greatest respect for the character and integrity of my noble friend the Minister but, with the all the best will in the world, many assurances have been given and many reports written that have never delivered on the well-meaning and well-intentioned promises of Ministers. For this House to be certain that the abolishing of unsafe and illegal routes will genuinely lead to the creation of safe and legal routes, a legal duty set out in the Bill is what is required to balance the Bill and make good on the Government’s intent.
When announcing the Bill, the Home Secretary told the other place:
“Having safe and legal routes, capped and legitimised through a decision by Parliament, is the right way to support people seeking refuge in this country”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/3/23; col. 170.]
This amendment would simply create a duty to have these safe and legal routes, capped and legitimised through a decision by Parliament, as the Home Secretary so eloquently laid out. Indeed, in December the Prime Minister announced that through the Illegal Migration Bill:
“The only way to come to the UK for asylum will be through safe and legal routes”,
and he indicated that that would be through the Illegal Migration Bill. He promised that
“as we get a grip on illegal migration, we will create more of those routes”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/12/22; col. 888.]
The Government assure us that the Bill will swiftly get a grip on illegal migration so this amendment provides assurance that the Government will deliver on the Prime Minister’s stated intent of creating, through the Bill, safe and legal routes. Vague promises for establishing safe and legal routes towards the end of 2024 or commitments to establish safe routes after we have stopped the boats are not sufficient. A duty is required in the Bill that the Home Secretary must, by 31 January 2024, make regulations specifying additional safe and legal routes.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Baroness and the right reverend Prelate. Amendment 130 is in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Carlile, Lord Kerr and Lord Dubs, to whom I am very grateful for their support.
First, I must apologise for inadvertently misleading your Lordships’ Committee in the early hours of Tuesday morning, when referring to age-assessment data from Full Fact, at col. 1805. Although, in the absence of transparent published data there remains a big question mark over the Immigration Minister’s claims about the percentage of adult males pretending to be children, and similar ministerial claims, the Full Fact data were not in fact comparable and had been misinterpreted by a journalist. Clearly, I should have checked my facts rather than relying on a newspaper report. I apologise for that.
The amendment provides for a visa scheme that would allow those with viable asylum claims who meet specified conditions to travel safely and legally to the UK to make such claims. Before providing a more detailed explanation, I emphasise that the proposal is based on the premise that unites us, so clearly articulated by the right reverend Prelate: a desire to stop unsafe travel to the UK, be it by boat or other routes, such as hidden unsafely in a lorry. As such, it would damage significantly the people smugglers’ business model—again, a goal that unites us. Where we differ from the Government is in our belief that the way to do this is not by, in effect, ending the right to claim asylum in the UK. There is a clear distinction between deterring people from making dangerous journeys and stopping them claiming asylum.
Of course, safe and legal routes are part of the answer, and here I support in particular Amendment 128B, to which I have added my name, and Amendment 128C. Personally, I am unhappy with the idea of a fixed cap on the numbers entitled to enter on safe and legal routes if it is what the JCHR describes as a “hard” cap. The right reverend Prelate makes an important point in excluding the listed schemes from the cap, on the grounds that these schemes are not currently capped. I also support the Children’s Commissioner’s recommendation that children should be excluded from the cap. I would be grateful to know the Government’s response to that. It should also be noted that she emphasises that
“safe and legal routes must be agreed in parallel to the passage of the Bill”,
which is relevant to Amendment 128C.
But however generous the safe and legal routes option is, the UNHCR makes it clear that it is not a substitute for the right to claim asylum under the refugee convention. As my honourable friend Olivia Blake said when she spoke to a similar amendment in the Commons,
“as it stands … there is no way for the many thousands of people who have already started their journey to get on to a safe and legal route … You cannot reduce the number of boats if the people who are going to try to make that journey are already on their journey and have no alternatives to come to the UK”.—[Official Report, Commons, 27/3/23; col. 754.]
This proposal offers a means of reducing significantly the numbers arriving by boat or other irregular and unsafe means. It does so by retaining the right to claim asylum, but in a way that, in effect, opens up another safe and legal route. I thank Care4Calais and the PCSU —two organisations working on the front line—for all the work they have put into it. When a similar amendment was proposed in the Commons, the Minister did not grace it with a response, so we are giving the Government an opportunity to do so today.
The proposal builds on the Ukraine model of safe passage, for which, for all its difficulties, the Government can take credit. I hope that they will learn and apply lessons to other groups with a strong case. It is no coincidence that no Ukrainian has, to my knowledge, crossed on a small boat or used people smugglers. Where the proposal differs from the Ukrainian scheme is that, on arrival in the UK, applicants holding a safe passage visa would enter the normal UK asylum process —speeded up considerably, I hope—and if, at that stage, they were found not to be eligible for asylum, they would not be allowed to stay in the UK.
A safe passage visa would typically be claimed online, as in the Ukrainian scheme, although provision would be made for applications also to be made at existing visa centres. I am assured that NGOs would undoubtedly help those with literacy problems. To qualify for a safe passage visa, a person would have to be in the EU—although, if successful, it could be expanded at a later date—not be a national of the EU, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland, and have a viable asylum claim. The viability of the claim would be determined in a similar way to the initial screening interview that currently takes place at the first step in the asylum process in the UK. This would ensure that clearly unfounded claims would be turned down at this point. Successful applicants would be sent an electronic letter that they could use to enter the UK lawfully. On arrival, they would be required to visit a UK centre to provide biometric data.
An initial fear that I had was that well-founded claims might be turned down as a way of reducing the numbers entering the UK, and that, although legal aid would be available on appeal, an applicant not in the country would clearly be at a disadvantage. The point was made to me, however, that the scheme relies on it being applied in good faith. It will work only if it is seen to work fairly—if claims are processed in a timely manner and a realistic number receive visas. If the Government are genuine in their claim that their primary motivation with the Bill is to stop unsafe journeys on flimsy boats, they have a real incentive to make it work.
I know, too, that some fear that this represents an open-borders policy, so I emphasise that it does not. The reverse is the case: it offers a way of replacing the current chaos in the channel—the Government’s attempts to regulate that have failed—with managed and controlled borders, where we know who is making the crossing. As I said, safe passage visas would be available only to those with viable asylum claims. Those refused a visa would receive a clear personal communication explaining that they do not have a viable claim, nor, therefore, the chance of a safe future in the UK were they to try to reach it by irregular means. Surely that would be a more effective deterrent, consistent with our international obligations, than the Bill—the deterrent effect of which is at best uncertain.
Nor does the evidence support the fear that this would attract more asylum seekers to the UK. Research suggests that immigration policies do not drive asylum seekers’ destinations. The introduction of the Ukrainian scheme, on which the safe visa scheme is modelled, did not lead to the great majority of those fleeing Ukraine seeking refuge in the UK. We know that the great majority of those seeking asylum in Europe do so in other European countries and there is no evidence to suggest that they will not continue to do so.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)
My Lords, I am a signatory to Amendment 128C, and I again declare my former role as an Immigration Minister in this country. I cannot really see, and I hope I am right, that my noble friend the Minister, or indeed the Government, could refuse to accept this amendment, which seems to be completely in line, as my noble friend Lady Stroud said a few minutes ago, with the declared policies and positions of the Government.
However, I want to clarify with my noble friend the whole question of definitions because I think there is a muddle here, as there has been in a number of interpretations by the Government, about what precisely is meant by a safe and legal route. They seem sometimes to be declaring that these include programmes that are organised by others, such as the United Nations. I was responsible for the 1996 United Nations Bosnian resettlement programme. A very important part of the work of this country is working with international agencies and, indeed, in specific cases, funding special programmes so that we can accommodate those who need to flee areas of repression or aggression. I think that is really a good thing for this country, and I hope that we will always take that approach, but that is not the same as providing facilities in wider parts of the world, where perhaps there is not a well-known conflict going on, but where nevertheless there are individuals who meet the criteria of the 1951 refugee convention but have no way to claim asylum in this country.
I just want to go back, if I may, for a moment or two to the history of how we used to deal with this. I am sure noble Lords will know that before 2011 or thereabouts—my noble friend the Minister will clarify—applications could be made through United Kingdom embassies and consulates in other parts of the world.
Indeed, we have been talking about specifying safe and legal routes. I would argue against that to some extent because if we are going to specify on a discriminatory basis certain places where these routes might be opened, we are falling into the same trap that I have just explained. Programmes may well be available through the United Nations or others and therefore if we are going to introduce these routes, they ought to be introduced widely.
The International Journal of Refugee Law from 2004 gives some of the history here. It says that in early 2002 six European states formally accepted asylum applications or visa applications on asylum-related grounds at their embassies. They were Austria, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. It seems to me that things have changed. When we got to 2011 there was a statement—I do not know whether it was made or printed or referred to. It said:
“As a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UK fully considers all asylum applications lodged in the UK. However, the UK’s international obligations under the Convention do not extend to the consideration of asylum applications lodged abroad and there is no provision in our Immigration Rules for someone abroad to be given permission to travel to the UK to seek asylum. The policy guidance on the discretionary referral to the UK Border Agency of applications for asylum by individuals in a third country who have not been recognised as refugees by another country or by the UNHCR under its mandate, has been withdrawn”.
That evidence is quite interesting because at some point—and again my noble friend will have it all available to tell us—we made a clear decision to reverse what had been practice for many years. Certainly, when I was the Minister, it was the practice that we had the ability in our embassies and consulates—people who had the discretion to be able to consider at first instance an asylum application. I recommend strongly to my noble friend that we reintroduce this, if for no other reason than to comply with the clear statements the Government have made that we can avoid the arguments and stop those boats by having a process that has a safe and legal route.
Finally, I think I am not alone in this because a number of my honourable friends in the other place have referred to it. I refer particularly to David Simmonds MP, who said:
“We must also not be afraid to look at and explore innovative solutions. For example, we could give asylum seekers the chance to have their applications processed in British Embassies around the world”—
he goes on and I do not quite agree with his last bit—
“or perhaps online”.
As far as I am concerned, to meet the terms of the convention it is important that these things are done on a face-to-face and personal basis. Online does not appeal here, although I am sure the technology is being pressed on us. I certainly would not suggest for one moment that we introduce AI in such decisions. My honourable friend Pauline Latham has also spoken of her support for the processing of asylum claims in British embassies.
I know this is a complex Bill and I have not spoken in Committee before. I believe very strongly, however, that there are solutions here which would satisfy the determination of the Government—and of us all—to stop the suffering of people who cross the channel in those boats. Let us be pragmatic and sensible about it and let us use the resources we have available and are wasting in so many other ways on these matters. Let us use them and focus our attention on providing those safe and legal routes at the very places around the world where the United Kingdom has presence and representation.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord and his very interesting contribution. In many respects, it was a very persuasive argument and, I believe, a very persuasive preparatory argument for Amendment 131 in my name, supported by my noble friend Lord Paddick and the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. It seeks to at least present a mechanism by which we would be able to realise the case that the noble Lord has made. On Amendment 128C, I have a slight concern with the way in which the Government may get around it, which I will address in a moment. At the outset I reiterate an interest that I have, in that I am currently deeply involved in working with civilian groups within Sudan and have supported an anti-trafficking project in the Horn of Africa through to the Gulf.
I am very happy to support Amendment 128B and the way in which the right reverend Prelate opened this debate so clearly today, making the case, which I believe is unanswerable, that the current schemes should not be included within any hard cap mechanism. In debates, many of my noble friends and colleagues around the House have raised the difficulties in getting some of these schemes up and running and, as the right reverend Prelate indicated, the limited scope of some of them. It would have been a tragic loss for many people if we had wrapped up these schemes in a hard cap, because Clause 58, which I argue should not be in the Bill, leaves enormous discretion for the Government. As the Refugee Council indicated, the Government could establish a cap of, say, 10,000 people and would comply with it if just 10 entered. Even a cap, an upper limit, is not a commitment to provide support and refuge for the individuals within that overall cap number.
Amendment 131 is very much designed to be a brake against smuggling and trafficking. It is meant to remove incentives for crime and is, in addition, an effective means of allowing access to apply for the very kind of support that has been called for so far in the debate. On that basis, I also commend my noble friend Lady Hamwee, who made arguments for this in debates on the Nationality and Borders Bill last year. The Government accept the case for a non country-specific emergency scheme for people who qualify for asylum in the UK. However, not only have they accepted the case but they have also, I believe, sought to misrepresent the situation and suggest that it is available already in many instances.
My first question for the Minister is that if it is the Government’s position that they will consider new routes once the boats have stopped, at what level of crossings over the channel will the Government consider that the boats have stopped? Is it in their entirety or do the Government have an indicative level under which they would then trigger the mechanism they have indicated, which is to consider new safe and legal routes? Given that, as my noble friend Lord Scriven has pointed out on many occasions, this is an issue not simply about cross-channel crossings but about road access, rail access and misuse of papers, what is the level of this being stopped before which the Government will indicate new safe and legal routes?
I indicated earlier that the Government seek to misrepresent the situation. On the morning of 26 April, the Home Secretary said to Sky News:
“If you are someone who is fleeing Sudan for humanitarian reasons, there are various mechanisms you can use. The UNHCR is present in the region and they are the right mechanism by which people should apply if they do want to seek asylum in the United Kingdom”.
On the same day, in the House of Commons, the Minister, Robert Jenrick, said:
“The best advice clearly would be for individuals to present to the UNHCR. The UK, like many countries, works closely with the UNHCR and we already operate safe and legal routes in partnership with it. That safe and legal route is available today”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/4/23; col. 774.]
Clearly, that was awful advice because, on the same day, the UNHCR issued a statement:
“UNHCR is aware of recent public statements suggesting that refugees wishing to apply for asylum in the United Kingdom should do so via the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ respective offices in their home region. UNHCR wishes to clarify that there is no mechanism through which refugees can approach UNHCR with the intention of seeking asylum in the UK”.
The Government seemed to accept that because, in the evening, Foreign Office Minister Andrew Mitchell was on Sky News, and he was asked for clarification on what safe and legal routes a Sudanese person could use to claim asylum in the UK. He said:
“Well, at the moment those safe and legal routes don’t exist”.
So after what was said in the Commons and on Sky News in the morning, after clarification in the afternoon it was clear by the evening that safe and legal routes do not exist. This is the political environment in which we are having to seek clarity from the Minister today with regard to the Government’s position.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, I support Amendments 128B, 128C and 131, which all deal with an issue which is crucial to any overall approach by this country to remake its broken asylum policy. Without that, you do not have an overall approach; you just have a piece-by-piece approach. All that was spelled out during the debate tabled by the most reverend Primate in December last year, and many Members of the House spoke in support of these safe and legal routes as one part of an overall solution. That is what I am doing today by supporting these amendments. At the time, the Minister who replied to that debate did not respond on the point of safe and legal routes, nor did the Government respond in the legislation we are discussing today, which they tabled quite soon after that debate. That was a pity: it was an opportunity missed.
Now, in the course of the proceedings in another place, the Government have put in the Bill some language about safe and legal routes. I welcome that—it is a shift of policy, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, said, back to policy which we practised before 2011—but I am sorry to say that the drafting currently in the Bill is really quite inadequate, not only because of the cap, which is arbitrary and is liable to frustrate the objective being pursued, but because actually there is no obligation on the Government, if the Bill passes in its current form, with some reference to safe and legal routes, to arrive at the implementation of such safe and legal routes. Amendments 128B, 128C and 131 are all aimed to arrive at that point: where there is an obligation on the Government. The Bill imposes a lot of obligations on the Government, many of which I and others in this House have said are contrary to our international obligations. This would be in total conformity to our international obligations, and I therefore argue that it needs to be mandatory now, not awaiting some mythical moment when the last boat has been stopped. That is not going to work; it is simply not going to happen. The wording in the Bill at the moment leaves enormous opportunities for a Government who do not wish to proceed to give effect to safe and legal routes to escape. That is why I support the amendments.
I hope that the Minister will finally lay to rest the argument that the UNHCR can do all this on our behalf. As the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, has said—and others have said—reading out the text that the UNHCR has issued, that is simply not the case. I hope also that the Minister will feel able on this occasion to answer the question that has been put so many times and which I now put again: what safe and legal route exists for an Iranian woman fleeing for her life from the persecution of an extremely unpleasant regime that has hanged quite a lot of people and persecuted many others? What safe and legal route does this Iranian woman have to apply for asylum in this country? I believe myself that the answer is a very short, one-word answer: none. I would like to hear from the Minister whether he disagrees with that. If he does disagree, I would be delighted. Perhaps he would then, on the public record, show us what such a woman could do to achieve a safe and legal application, which is what she deserves.
My final point is that this all fits with our relationship with the other countries of Europe, which are also struggling to shape their migration policy to make it more apt for the circumstances of today. They are at the point of agreeing a new set of migration policies. Everyone who has looked at this—and I think the Home Office believes this too, because that is why the Interior Minister of France is in this country today, talking to the Home Secretary—acknowledges that the only way that we are going to get to grips with this is if we are able to work together right across the board. Whether it is on prevention, police work, intelligence or handling the scale of the problem, we need to work together with other European countries. That is, after all, where all these asylum seekers come from when they come illegally and where some of them would come from if we made it possible for them to come legally. At the heart of getting an effective policy is the need to have one where we can work 100% hand-in-hand with the other European countries. I hope that the Minister, when he replies to this really rather crucial set of amendments, can give us a full-scale response to these wider issues. I am sorry if it is thought at some stage that some parts of this debate have been repetitious. This is not repetitious; it is necessary.
Baroness Helic (Con)
My Lords, I am pleased to support Amendment 128C in the names of my noble friends Lady Stroud, Lord Kirkhope and Lady Mobarik. The very first clause of the Bill states that its purpose is to,
“prevent and deter unlawful migration, and in particular migration by unsafe and illegal routes”.
This amendment seeks to support that aim by requiring the Secretary of State to set out additional safe and legal routes in keeping with the Prime Minister’s ambition, as stated in the House of Commons last December, to “create more” safe and legal routes. The amendment leaves significant discretion for the Secretary of State to determine the size and scope of these routes, and I hope that the Government will recognise that. It complements the existing clauses of the Bill that require the Secretary of State to report on what routes exist. I believe it is entirely in line with the Government’s own aims and ambitions for this Bill.
In particular, the amendment addresses one of the key pressures that drives unsafe and illegal migration: the fact that, for the vast majority of refugees and asylum seekers, there are no routes deemed safe and legal by the Government. As it stands, there are routes, as others have said, for Ukrainians, for the British nationals (overseas) from Hong Kong, for select Afghans, and for a few—a very few—under UNHCR resettlement, though there is no guarantee of being sent to the United Kingdom under resettlement. For many people in desperate circumstances, there is simply no safe and legal route available for claiming asylum in the United Kingdom; yet there will always be people forced from their homes who want to seek safety—and, in particular, safety in the United Kingdom, perhaps because of family or historical ties, or perhaps because of their admiration for this country, something that we ought to be proud of. We should also recognise our obligation under the refugee convention to allow people to claim asylum in the United Kingdom. The question is whether we provide a safe method where we can carefully monitor—and indeed, as per the Bill, control—the numbers coming, or whether we criminalise everything and everyone, force everything underground and push people into unsafe routes.
There are more refugees and displaced persons around the world than ever before. The number has doubled in the past decade. Only a very small proportion of them seek to come to the United Kingdom. However, this is a global crisis that is likely to get worse rather than better. Climate change risks driving millions of new displacements. This is not something that one country can hope to solve on its own. As it stands, three-quarters of refugees are hosted by low- and middle-income countries. If they start to follow the approach set out in our Bill, the Government really will have a migration crisis on their hands.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I wish to speak to my Amendment 129 on refugee family reunion. I am grateful for the support of my noble friend Lord Paddick, the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.
Refugee family reunion does exist as a safe and legal route but it needs to be expanded. I was proud to steer a Private Member’s Bill on that subject; it passed through this House and is currently in the other place. I picked up the baton from my noble friend Lady Hamwee, who has worked on this issue for many years.
The problem at the moment is not only that the safe routes available to refugees are extremely limited; last year, refugee settlement provided in collaboration with the UNHCR decreased by 39% and the issuing of refugee family reunion visas decreased by nearly a quarter—the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham referred to this. In the year ending March 2022, 6,000 family reunion visas were issued. In the year ending March 2023, there were only 4,600—a reduction of 23%. The Bill misses an opportunity for the UK to curb the number of irregular arrivals by creating more routes to safety and—I would like it to fulfil this opportunity—to allow more family members to join those who have reached safety in this country, including by letting separated refugee children be joined by their closest family members.
Last year, the Nationality and Borders Act restricted access to family reunion for refugees arriving in the UK irregularly. Of course, it has failed to replace the Dublin regulations since we left the EU. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, referred to the hole that exists for international co-operation; we might refer to that later today. Although those restrictions from last year’s Act are beginning to take effect only now, preliminary research from Refugee Legal Support has already found evidence of children who would previously have been eligible for reunification being stranded in Europe and crossing the channel dangerously.
Australia provides an example of the longer-term impact of this sort of restriction. In 2014, Australia reintroduced temporary protection visas—which do not confer family reunion rights—and has seen an increase in the number of women and children arriving via dangerous journeys. We should remember that 90% of those arriving on family reunion visas in this country are women and children. I am sure I do not need to convince noble Lords of the importance of family reunion for refugees’ integration into their new communities. Surely that should be our aim. If we have allowed people the legal right to settle here, and in some cases be on a path to citizenship, surely we should want to do anything that fosters integration and the physical, emotional and psychological adjustment of people.
Refugees separated from their families can, understandably, experience serious mental health difficulties, compounding the trauma that they have already experienced. This means that they are less able to focus on activities which are essential to integration, such as learning English, building new relationships in the community, and working, which is another topic that we will talk about today. In the other place, the Conservative MP Tim Loughton tabled a new clause seeking to expand eligibility for refugee family reunion, and I applaud him for that. It did not get pushed to a vote.
The problem is that current family reunion entitlements are too restrictive. I have mentioned that refugee children are not allowed to sponsor family members within the Immigration Rules, and we have also had the creation of those bespoke pathways, such as the Afghan route, which do not confer protection status, meaning that some resettled people in the UK have no eligibility for refugee family reunion because they do not have the necessary status to sponsor family. All those with protection needs must have access to refugee family reunion. This pathway should be expanded to allow children to sponsor their parents and siblings and adult refugees to sponsor parents who are dependent on them.
We referred on Monday to the Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick, announcing on 8 June that the differentiation policy, which under last year’s Act decides whether someone is a group 1 or group 2 refugee, would be paused, and that those previously given group 2 status would have their entitlements increased. However, the announcement says only that the policy will be paused. The power to differentiate will still be on the statute book. Can the Minister explain exactly where that leaves us, and the Government’s intention on how to go forward on this? Will they bring forward an amendment to the Nationality and Borders Act to delete group 2 refugees?
This Bill does not deal directly with refugee family reunion, and my amendment is designed to fill that hole. However, the Bill would dramatically reduce the number of people eligible for this route, as we have discussed, because it makes asylum applications from people who travel irregularly permanently inadmissible. They would never be granted protection status and would therefore never be able to sponsor family members. I propose expanding the Immigration Rules to allow refugee children to sponsor parents and siblings, refugees to sponsor their dependent parents, and Afghans settled via pathways 1 and 3 of the ACRS to be able to act as sponsors for the purposes of refugee family reunion.
I am afraid to say that research from the Refugee Council and Oxfam has found evidence of refugees turning to smugglers after realising that there were no legal routes available to bring their loved ones to join them. A lack of access to family reunification does appear to be a key driver of dangerous journeys. As many as half of those seeking to cross the channel from northern France have family links to the UK.
Finally, our Justice and Home Affairs Committee, chaired by my noble friend Lady Hamwee, published a report in February called All Families Matter: An Inquiry into Family Migration. One of its recommendations was:
“The Government should harmonise which relatives are, or are not, eligible for entry and stay across”
various
“immigration pathways and the Government should be transparent about the reasons for any differences”,
because there is variation in the definition of a family.
I am afraid that the Government’s response had me rather puzzled; it appears to be a bit circular. They say:
“We do not think it is … right … to fully harmonise the conditions … There are clear differences between immigration routes relating to family members. Given the broad and diverse offer for family members across the immigration system, it is right that requirements vary according to the nature and purpose of their stay in the UK”.
I felt that that was a bit circular or tautological—I am not sure which is the right description. They say that, because it varies at the moment, it is right that we carry on with the variations. I do not think that any reasons or explanation were given; it was just stating why we go all round the houses.
I urge support for Amendment 129 and suggest that it is an extremely valuable part of the provisions on safe and legal routes; it is a subset, if you like, of everything we are debating this morning. The problem is that the current provisions are far from being sensibly expanded to the benefit of the families—the settled refugees and their families—and our society as a whole. One thing that we often hear from the Conservative Party is that it is party of the family. Many of us would dispute that; but if it is, it should support not only the maintenance but the expansion of refugee family reunion, which is currently going in the wrong direction.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 130 and 131, but I speak in support of all the amendments in this group.
There have been some very good and persuasive speeches, but I refer particularly—and I am sure that others will understand why—to the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope. Why? For more than one reason. First, the noble Lord was the Immigration Minister at a time of particular attrition in Bosnia, as he referred to, and he has a great deal of knowledge on that matter. Secondly, he has had the courage to make his speech from the Conservative Back Benches in your Lordships’ House, and I particularly look forward to the Minister dealing, line by line as it were, with every point made by the noble Lord.
Thirdly, my belief is that, somehow or other, the Bill is a visceral part of the attempt to win votes beyond the red wall. However, the Government only have to look at the noble Lord’s history to find somebody who has within his blood and bones the red wall: he cut his teeth in the north-east of England; he represented part of another great city in the north-east of England; and he represented his party in Europe, on behalf of areas beyond the red wall. So, if the Government are listening to those whom they are aspiring to gain votes from, perhaps he, above all, is the person they should be listening to at the moment. I hope he will forgive me, because praise from me may not be altogether familiar or welcome.
I hope that everybody in this House wants to stop the boats. My question is: do we want to stop the boats by means within international law and treaties, or by means that are in breach of those international laws and treaties that we have signed? As I pointed out in a debate I think the day before yesterday—although it might just have been early yesterday—the Home Office website, at least when I was speaking very early yesterday morning, still had on its immigration pages inferences that we have to obey international law on immigration and asylum.
Lord Dubs (Lab)
My Lords, I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, mentioned the Bosnian scheme, because at the time I was at the Refugee Council, which was instrumental, along with the Red Cross and others, in facilitating reception centres for the Bosnians. I remember being at Stansted Airport when they arrived, and most of the world’s media were there to see the spectacle of these people who had come from most appalling concentration camp-like conditions. It was a really good scheme and it did not seem to arouse a lot of public opposition. We need to think of that scheme in relation to the amendments we are discussing: the way it was handled suggests that there are ways we can get public opinion on our side, provided we explain carefully what it is we are about and what we seek to do.
To digress slightly, one of the reception centres was in Newcastle. One of the things we did to get public support was arrange an open day near the reception centre for local people—councillors, MPs, teachers, the police, voluntary organisations, you name it. That meant that they had a chance to meet the Bosnians very soon after arrival and that a willingness and friendship was created right from the beginning. I hold that up as a model for the Government. Maybe the noble Lord could start advising the Home Office again—I would not want that fate for him, but anyway, maybe he could do that.
I also very much welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said; we can develop that a bit further when we come to a later amendment from the most reverend Primate on international agreements. If we are to have effective safe and legal routes—I keep saying that, despite the wish of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, that we would not—for people to come, it is clear that they need some international underpinning.
We do not advocate an open-door policy. Some Conservatives who should know better keep saying that the Labour Party wants an open-door policy. Although I do not speak for the party but for myself as a Back-Bencher, we do not advocate that. We advocate a policy that it should be selective, based on need and on co-operation with other countries, so that we can take our share of the responsibility. My noble friend Lady Lister talked very clearly about Amendment 130, which is one model for developing a safe and legal way of doing this.
Some of us have been to Calais and the Greek islands, and to other refugee camps or what remains of them. I used to ask people there, “What are you going to do?” They used to reply that they were going to jump on the back of a lorry on the motorway near Calais. It has now become boats, but the motive is the same. I used to say to them, and would like to be able to say to them in the future, “Don’t do it—there is a way that you can come to the UK safely and legally, without paying money to the people traffickers. You’ll be received well when you get to the UK. That is the way forward”. I would like to say to people in Calais or the Greek islands that there is a better way of doing it. I very much hope that this pack of amendments, all of which are interesting and which I support, will at least result in the Home Office moving sensibly in this direction.
It is not much to ask for. We used to have safe and legal routes; we had one for the Bosnians and we had one for children who were in Europe under an amendment I moved. It is possible to do this, and with public support. Surely that is the challenge. I look forward to the Minister’s positive response.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, I will speak in support of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham’s Amendment 128B, in particular the reference to removing BNO nationals from the safe and legal routes. I do so because the Government’s own document on safe and legal routes, in its description of Hong Kong British national (overseas) visas, says that the scheme
“was developed following concerns about erosion of human rights protections in Hong Kong, but it is not an explicitly protection-based scheme. Eligibility is not based on the person’s risk of persecution in Hong Kong. Rather, it is a way of making it easier for Hong Kong BN(O) status holders to migrate to the UK compared to the general work, study, and family visa rules”.
As we discussed on Monday night—I will not rehearse those points again—BNO holders of course have rights under the British Nationality Act 1981, in that they can arrive and move to settlement without having to seek the discretion of the Home Secretary to make them a British citizen; it comes with the package of holding a BNO status. That then means that they and their dependants, after they have been here for the right amount of time, can move straight to that status.
I ask the Minister this question because it relates not just to BNO holders. If the Government seriously want to propose caps to safe and legal routes, why is there one group in there which, under our British Nationality Act 1981, does not have to be capped? Any such capping would inevitably mean that people fleeing from other countries would have their numbers reduced in order to protect BNO status-holders, who also have rights and should be able to come here, given that most of the 144,000 who have arrived did so because they or their families are dissidents under the rule of the CCP in Hong Kong.
Lord Green of Deddington (CB)
My Lords, I will be extremely brief. I suggest that we look at these issues, which have now been dealt with in great detail, in a wider context. The fact is that the asylum system is a shambles; I will not go into that any further—we all know that. However, we need to be very careful before we make further commitments on safe and legal routes.
The wider reason is that, last year, we had overall net migration of 606,000. Of those, roughly 200,000 were refugees of different kinds—I am putting it in the most general terms. If that is allowed to continue, and if we fail to reduce the other elements of immigration which are also rising very quickly under this Government, we will have to build something like 16 cities the size of Birmingham in the next 25 years. Nobody has challenged that, because it is a matter of arithmetic.
We face a huge problem. Therefore, I suggest that whatever the arguments for this particular category may be, we need to keep well in mind the wider impact on the scale and nature of our society. That should not be overlooked.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, I have my doubts about the term “safe and legal routes” as well. I would prefer to focus on safety; to talk about legal routes now impliedly accepts the argument that people who come here in the way that we have been discussing are in some way illegal. I do not think the routes are illegal any more than the people.
I did not know that my noble friend was going to refer to the recent report of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee on family migration, published in February. It raised a number of matters pertinent to the debate. Noble Lords will be familiar with the problem that one of our recommendations addresses. We recommended that the Home Office should allow biometrics to be completed on arrival in the UK for a wider range of nationalities in crisis situations. As noble Lords will know, there are many countries in which it is not possible to reach a visa application centre before travelling in order to enrol your biometrics. There are countries which do not have them. My noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed said of the Government’s attitude to Iran and Sudan that they do not recognise the reality of the situation. In this connection, I do not think they recognise the realities either.
The reply from the Government arrived less than a week ago. I hope that this “in due course” is quite quick, and we will have the opportunity to debate it, but who knows? The Government said:
“Where an applicant considers they cannot travel to a Visa Application Centre … to enrol their biometrics, they can contact us to explain their circumstances”.
Well, that sounds practical, does it not? They continued:
“New guidance will be published in the near future setting out the unsafe journey policy. Where an applicant believes that travelling to a VAC would be unsafe, their request will be placed on hold pending the new guidance being published, however, should there be an urgent requirement to resolve their request this should be made clear in the request and consideration will be given as to the applicant’s circumstances and whether there is an urgent need to travel to the UK. If the request is deemed to be urgent we will contact the applicants to explain available options prior to the guidance being published”.
What a neat and tidy world the Home Office thinks exists.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, I know this is not something I say very often, certainly not in the context of this debate, but the Government are to be commended for their welcome to Ukrainians and Hong Kongers, and a little less so for their slightly less warm welcome to Afghans.
Even more than commending the Government, I commend the British people who opened their homes and hearts to these desperate people. When we are making these generalisations about what our countrymen will or will not tolerate and what the will of the people is or is not, it is important to remember that. There is real value in allowing people to open their homes and hearts, rather than putting people on barges or in de facto prisons and so on. It is that separation that leads, in part, to the dehumanisation of these people who are coming to our shores in the most difficult times.
Baroness Sugg (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the Government’s commitment to deliver safe and legal routes and I support Amendments 128B and 128C, which help deliver that commitment.
There are numerous details and duties in the Bill on how illegal and unsafe routes will be stopped, but little on how safe and legal routes will be opened—so how and when? The number will be decided by the elected Parliament, but I would welcome clarity from my noble friend on whether country-specific, at House of Commons or listed schemes will be included, as I do not really understand how the system will work if that is the case. So I support Amendment 128B.
We have had various ideas about the mechanism, and a point has been made about the UNHCR resettlement scheme. Can my noble friend explain how the Government envisage that the scheme’s safe, legal and deliverable routes will work?
On timing, which I do not think has been mentioned before, the Minister has previously given verbal reassurance that these safe and legal routes will be opened by 2024. I think we all agree that they should be opened, but that does not really deliver the balance and the overall approach that is needed in the Bill. The plan is that, by the end of this year, the Bill will be law and the plans the Government have designed to stop the boats will be actioned. We are assured that the backlog is being dealt with, so safe and legal routes should be open by then, too.
The Minister has rightly highlighted the frustration that many people in this country feel about the unfairness of illegal immigration but, to make it fair, not only must we stop illegal and unsafe routes but we must open safe and legal ones. Amendment 128C does that.
The Bill is full of obligations and duties to stop the boats and to close illegal and unsafe routes. I hope the Government will agree to include the same obligations and duties to open safe and legal ones.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I rise with great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, who raised some of the points on which I am going to focus about balance and the importance of all of this group. I offer Green support for all this group. In saying that, particularly looking at the exclusion of the Ukrainian, Afghan and Hong Kong BNO schemes, I should declare my position as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong.
That word “balance”, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, is terribly important. There is a real reflection to be made. We often hear in your Lordships’ House great praise for the Act passed through this Chamber centuries ago on the abolition of slavery. Yet there is a great deal of concern about the fact that there was just one very short paragraph that addressed what would happen to the former slaves, and paragraphs and paragraphs addressing compensation for the slave owners. That has had a very long historical tail that still rebounds today. I suggest that the Bill as currently constructed, with its extreme focus on attempts at deterrence and at treating refugees—desperate people—really badly, has real echoes of that, and that the Committee might like to reflect upon those parallels.
We have had a lot of discussion about terminology. The term that I prefer and will try to always use for what we are talking about in this group is “safe and orderly routes” for people to reach refuge in the UK. There is no such thing as illegally seeking asylum, and no person is illegal. That really needs to be stressed.
I pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, about our overseas development assistance and the way in which we are utterly twisting the classification as well as cutting the total sum in a way that will only produce more refugees, as well as more death and suffering around the world. In that context, I have to mention a briefing that I attended this morning from a brilliant organisation, the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership—GARDP—which is working on sepsis in infants around the world and on drug-resistant sexually transmitted diseases. A comment was made that we put less money into that scheme than Germany does, despite our claims of world leadership in the pharmaceutical area. That is something to which some of our ODA money could, and should, be going.
I will focus in particular on Amendment 129 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, who has already outlined it very powerfully. I was pleased to be able to attach my name to it—it was one of the few that had space. It is about refugee family reunion, and I have two reflections on this. I am sad that the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, is not currently in her place, because I will first reflect on the work of the Refugee Rights Hub at Sheffield Hallam University, which is part of the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice. It has a scheme—a very innovative one, particularly following the cuts in legal aid to refugees, which were discussed earlier in Committee on a group when I am afraid I was not able to be present—in which 50 third- year undergraduate law students and two postgraduate interns work to help refugees already here to arrange family reunions. It is worth reading the accounts of those students and their experiences. They realise, “Wow, she is just like my sister”, or “Wow, he acts like my brother”. People who have heard lots of nasty things about refugees on social media, and in so much of the media bombardment we are subjected to, realise that they are doing something wonderful and amazing and how much they are enriching our whole society.
We really have not thought enough about the joy that a family reunion brings and the way in which it enriches our whole society. If a child comes and joins a school and brings all their experience and knowledge, or if an elderly parent comes—as proposed under this amendment—and a family is reunited, just think about how we are adding to the richness of our society and of the world. I do not think that we have talked about that very much.
I would love to stay hopeful but I cannot, so I will turn to the other side of this, which is the most recent report from the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration regarding the Home Office’s management of the current family reunion schemes. A report in 2019 said that there were serious problems and made recommendations for addressing them. Sadly, what we had from the report of what happened from June to September last year is that the performance of the family reunion scheme has in fact deteriorated. The chief inspector reported that the system is “beset with delays”, the team is “ill-equipped to manage”, there is a “backlog of … almost 8,000” cases and it routinely takes double the standard 60 days to manage an application for family reunion. There is no evidence of prioritisation based on vulnerability—it is very often the intervention of an MP that makes a difference—despite the commitment and hard work of the staff.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, we support all the amendments in this group. The issue of the millions displaced by war and persecution requires international co-operation, including the UK taking its fair share of genuine refugees. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham said, there are no safe, or deliverable, and legal routes for many, or most, genuine refugees. The Bill seeks to imprison and remove any genuine refugee who arrives in the UK other than by safe and legal routes that do not exist. We need humanitarian visas, as my noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed has said.
Placing a cap on the numbers arriving by safe and legal routes at the whim of the Secretary of State is not acceptable, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has said. Any cap needs to be debated and set by Parliament. Rather than the Secretary of State being exempt from the need to consult if the number needs to be changed as a matter of urgency, it is exactly in times of emergency that we need debate and consultation.
In support of the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick, I say that if the UK secured a reputation for taking its fair share of genuine refugees, and had a widely publicised humanitarian visa scheme and a strong strategy for tackling people smugglers, an international agreement to address the global problem of those seeking sanctuary would be more likely to be negotiated. I ask the Minister to answer clearly in his response the questions raised by my noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick, about the situation facing young women fleeing Iran.
There was only one dissenting voice in the debate on this group, and that was from the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, on the Cross Benches. The noble Lord knows that I have some sympathy for the views he expresses about the pressure on housing and other services caused by immigration but, as I have said previously, we are talking about desperate people fleeing war and persecution. The noble Lord talked about 606,000 being the net migration figure last year. The Government actually issued 1,370,000 visas to people to come and stay in the UK, and that is an issue that needs to be addressed. The people coming across the channel in boats, which is what the Bill is supposedly all about, are a tiny fraction of the numbers that this Government are allowing into this country.
Most of the time, it causes me real distress to hear about these sorts of policies and the direction the Conservative Government are taking this country in. Yet it is heartening to know that compassionate conservativism is not completely dead. To hear the support for these amendments from Back-Benchers on the Government side is truly heartening, and I am very grateful for their support.
On family reunion, surely children looked after by their parents will be less of a burden on the state than looked-after children, let alone the other benefits to the children involved and society generally. Hard-working refugees are more than capable of looking after dependent parents, similar to UK citizens in that situation. I support Amendment 129 particularly, as well as the other amendments in this group.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
My Lords, this has been another very important debate on the Bill, on safe and legal routes. We support much of what has been said and the majority of the amendments in this group, particularly the one moved by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. I also mention Amendment 128C, which I thought was important, from the noble Baronesses, Lady Stroud, Lady Helic and Lady Mobarik, and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope.
I want to pick up what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, was saying. I thought that it was really important. I think his point was that there is a lot of intent but that it is important to see the obligations laid out, hence the importance of knowing when the Government will do certain things. The noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, also made that point. Can the Minister confirm when he expects this to be operating? If it is 2024—again, I am not being sarcastic—is the expectation that it will be towards the end of that year? Can the Minister give any indication of when we can expect the safe and legal routes to operate, however they and the cap are arrived at?
The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, also made the point that this is part of the Government’s solution to the chaos in the system at the moment. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, made the point well: it is broader than just small boats. It is about the asylum and refugee system that we think should operate.
During the debate, I was particularly struck when I reread the first part of Amendment 128C, on the duty to establish safe and legal routes. This is why I was referring to what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay said. It says:
“The Secretary of State must, on or before 31 January 2024, make regulations specifying additional safe and legal routes”,
to try to put some sort of timescale on what is taking place. The Government say in Clause 58 that they will make regulations after consulting and so on, but, unless my reading is wrong, there is no timescale. The addition of a timescale would help significantly, for the operation of the system and for all of us to understand what is going on.
Can I also, in the spirit of early afternoon on a Wednesday, make a suggestion? The Government can reflect on it or ignore it. Obviously, they are making regulations on something really significant and important. If I have read the Bill correctly, it will be done by the affirmative process, so the regulations will be put and debated. I wonder whether the Minister could confirm that it is affirmative—my reading is that it is.
One thing that sometimes happens and which Governments have done in the past—and given the importance of this legislation, and all the various reflections that will change the primary legislation, or not, as we finish this process—when something is of significant importance or contentious, as this may well prove to be, is to publish the regulations. Because the regulations cannot be amended, to at least ameliorate the impact of that, Governments sometimes publish them for comment well before they put them for approval. They put them in a draft form and make sure that everyone is aware of it, then ask people for comments well before they put them for approval. The Government would take a view as to whether or not they would like to change them, but that is one helpful way for them to take this forward. Will the Government consider that?
Will the Minister also confirm what the regulations under Clause 58(1) actually involve? Will it just be a figure, or will they say how that figure has been arrived at, mention all the countries that may be involved, and so on? It would be interesting for us to know exactly what those regulations would involve and include. On the regulations, which are everything with respect to much primary legislation, will the Minister comment on my suggestion about having draft regulations well in advance, before they are put for approval? Will he say whether they are affirmative, and a little bit more about what they would actually involve? There is also the point about timescale and the very good point made in proposed new subsection (1) in Amendment 128C.
To move on to general points, in the Government’s safe and legal routes scheme as proposed, do they intend to have any sort of prioritisation, or will it be just on an individual case basis? I am interested whether the Government are going to talk about family reunion and high-grant countries and what their view is of any of that. How will the Government deal with the emergencies that may arise? I have read the clause, but could the Minister spell that out a little bit more? It has got slightly lost, so I also emphasise one of the points that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham made—the issue of children in all this, whether they are unaccompanied or not. We would be interested to hear what the Government have to say on that issue.
I have nothing much more to add to the many excellent points made by many noble Lords during this very important debate. I am really interested in the process with respect to the regulations, because in that will be everything. I am concerned that we do not just have a repeat of what has happened before, whereby the regulations are just put and there is no ability to debate or amend them. Any regulations being published well in advance so that we can at least debate and discuss them and try to change the Government’s mind would be extremely helpful.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Migration and Borders (Lord Murray of Blidworth) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for her clarification of the statistic used in the earlier debate on age assessments.
Turning to the remarks of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, I am heartened to hear, and indeed I entirely agree with him, that this group particularly highlights a point on which all across the Chamber are agreed—that there should be safe and legal routes—and the question is about the mechanics of that safe and legal route and how it fits with the scheme in the Bill to deter people embarking on dangerous journeys across the channel. It is in the spirit of that consensus that I conclude this debate.
Before I turn to the amendments, it may assist the Committee if I say a little about Clauses 58 and 59, not least as this will provide important context for the examination of the amendments. This Bill will introduce for the first time a cap on the number of people entering the UK through safe and legal routes based on local authority capacity. Clause 58 sets out how that cap will be developed and agreed. In answer to the question posed by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, the cap is being introduced in recognition of the limited capacity that local authorities have to house and support through integration and local services, such as health and education, those in need of resettlement in the UK, a point well made by the noble Lord, Lord Green.
In recent years, following the fall of Kabul and the war in Ukraine, we have welcomed and provided sanctuary to larger numbers of people than we could comfortably manage because it was the right thing to do, and I appreciate the remarks that the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, made in relation to that. Going forward, it is right that both Houses have the opportunity to debate and approve through the affirmative procedure—which I can confirm to the noble Lord—the numbers to be admitted to the UK each year through safe and legal routes. That is the purpose of Clause 58. Local authorities have been required to provide accommodation for these large cohorts and subsequently there is no longer sufficient capacity in our system for our UNHCR-referred global settlement schemes to function in the way in which they were intended.
At this point, I wish to clarify this route for the benefit of the noble Lord, Lord Purvis. The UK’s global resettlement schemes do not involve an application process. Instead, those who have sought sanctuary in the first safe country should on arrival register with the relevant authorities as a person in need of international protection. The UNHCR is expertly placed to help the UK authorities identify and process vulnerable refugees who would benefit from resettlement in the UK and has responsibility for all out-of-country casework activity relating to our resettlement schemes.
I remind the Committee, especially my noble friend Lady Helic, that even under our current constraints between 2015 and March 2023 the UK resettled more than 28,400 individuals under UNHCR resettlement schemes, around half of whom were children. I should be clear that the cap does not remove any routes or change our willingness to help. However, consulting on capacity and developing the cap figure based on the response is the right way to continue offering resettlement pathways to the UK for those in need of our protection as part of a well-managed and sustainable migration system.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
I apologise for missing the start of this debate as I was in a committee. Will the Minister explain why Clause 58 imposes a cap on the maximum number of people who may enter the United Kingdom, not the maximum number of asylum seekers, using safe and legal routes—in other words, tourists, businessmen, or whatever? They tend to come by safe and legal routes. I do not understand the drafting. Secondly, will the Minister consider the cart and horse problem? He has said more than once—I hope I have got it correctly—that once illegal immigration is under control the Government will create new safe and legal routes. However, the way of getting the illegal immigration problem under control is by creating safe and legal routes. Will he address that point?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I appreciate that the noble Lord was unable to be here at the beginning of the debate. I hope that Clause 58(1) makes it clear that the regulations must specify
“the maximum number of persons who may enter the United Kingdom annually using safe and legal routes”.
There is a cross-reference to subsection (7), where noble Lords will see that “safe and legal route” is a defined term. It means
“a route specified in regulations made by the Secretary of State”.
Those regulations will clarify what that term means.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
I understand the Minister’s point, but it does not answer the question that I asked: why does the clause talk about “persons” rather than asylum seekers?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
It is because that is the structure of the legislation, and it simply makes for good parliamentary drafting. There it is. Forgive me: I shall make some progress because we have a lot of groups to deal with.
Clause 58 provides for the Home Secretary to consult local authorities, and any other organisation or person deemed suitable, to understand their capacity. The cap figure, and by extension the routes to be covered by the cap, will be considered and voted on in Parliament through a draft affirmative statutory instrument. The cap will not automatically apply to all current and new safe and legal routes that we offer or will introduce in the future. The policy intention is to manage the accommodation burden on local authorities, and my officials are currently considering which routes are most suitable to be included within the cap.
Alongside the cap on safe and legal routes, Clause 59 further requires the Home Secretary to publish a report on existing and any proposed new safe and legal routes. In response to the right reverend Prelate, we will continue to work with the UNHCR and other organisations as the Secretary of State considers appropriate in devising proposed additional safe and legal routes.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
This is a technical point, but it is important to reflect on it before Report. It is not a substantive policy point, but the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, may have hit on something, in relation not just to the question of why it does not say “asylum seekers” but to a potential unlawful sub-delegation. If the regulation-making power is about safe and legal routes, and “safe and legal routes” will not be defined in vires in the primary legislation but will be determined in the regulations, there is a circularity that is in danger of looking either too vague or specifically like a potential unlawful sub-delegation. No doubt the Minister and his colleagues can discuss that with parliamentary counsel. I may be totally wrong, but the noble Lord may have hit on a point which the Government have been given an opportunity—there is time—to consider before Report. That is what Committee is for.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
As I said, we have considered these issues and are satisfied with the drafting as it is, but of course I will look again at what the noble Baroness suggests.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
The Minister talked about “devising” new schemes; I asked for co-creation. Is he willing to go so far as to say “co-creating”?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
The right reverend Prelate is right to point to the fact that these things are always a joint effort. The Home Secretary of the day will consult, and consider input, so yes, all those words would be applicable in my view. Clearly, ultimately the scheme has to come from the Home Office, but it will be done following appropriate consultation with and the involvement of interested parties.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
If the noble Lord will forgive me, I should probably, in order to have a more coherent speech, take his more general points at the end. I am conscious that we need to make progress, not least because we do not wish to be here into the small hours.
As I say, the report described in Clause 59, which will be laid before Parliament within six months of the Bill achieving Royal Assent, will clearly set out the existing safe and legal routes that are offered, detail any proposed additional safe and legal routes, and explain how adults and children in need of sanctuary in the UK can access those routes. This clause is being introduced to provide clarity around the means by which those in need of protection can find sanctuary here.
Through the report, we will also set out any proposed additional safe and legal routes which are not yet in force. While a range of routes is offered at present, we believe it important to consider whether alternative routes are necessary and, if so, who would be eligible. In recognition of the different needs of children and adults in need of protection, the clause will require the report to set out which routes are accessible by adults or children.
It is against this backdrop of the Government’s approach to expanding the existing safe and legal routes that I now turn to the amendments in this group.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. My intervention is pertinent to that clause. Can he confirm, first, what I had indicated from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact: that it was the Home Office that asked for the UNHCR to direct the resettlement scheme to be focused on Afghans only, therefore closing it down for other countries; and, secondly, that when it comes to what the Government could consider to be new and safe and legal routes, they could simply be expanding some of the funding available for the UK resettlement scheme, because that is what the Government currently define as a safe and legal route, rather than it being new country routes?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
On the first point, I do not have that detail to hand so I will go away and find that out and write to the noble Lord. But on the second point, obviously, the UK resettlement scheme is a general scheme to take refugees who have been identified by the UNHCR and in that sense it is not geographically specified. Obviously, these are all issues which would be considered in the report provided for under Clause 59, so the noble Lord is right to identify that.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
Before the Minister moves on, I asked a question about children, which was echoed by my noble friend Lord Coaker. The Minister mentioned children in relation to appropriate routes but the Children’s Commissioner has argued that children should be excluded from any cap. I asked what the Government’s response was to that recommendation.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I ask the noble Baroness to forgive me; I was going to come to that. I have met with the Children’s Commissioner and we have an ongoing dialogue on the provisions in the Bill. There is no intention to exclude children, for the simple reason that children utilise resources in the same way as adult asylum seekers do. Therefore, in assuming the global level of resources needed to provide adequate support and integration for asylum seekers, whether adults or children, it is appropriate that a global view be taken. Therefore, it is necessary to take a global view of the cap.
Baroness Stroud (Con)
My noble friend the Minister just spoke of “alternative” rather than “additional” routes. Can he confirm that these would in fact be additional routes, rather than just taking one route out and putting another route in?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
Yes, I was simply using the word “alternative” to discuss that particular route, but there is no intention to withdraw any routes. Obviously, it may be that routes are consolidated or changed so that they are incorporated—I do not want to tie any future Government’s hands on that—but I can reassure my noble friend in that regard.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
In just a second. My noble friend Lady Sugg also spoke to this amendment.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
Can we come back to that at the end?
On Report in the House of Commons, my right honourable friend the Minister of State for Immigration confirmed that the Government’s aim is to implement any proposed new safe and legal routes as soon as practicable, and in any event by the end of 2024. I hope that directly answers the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker. I believe that the timeframe proposed by the Immigration Minister is suitable as it will allow for proper consultation on potential new safe and legal routes, and meaningful consultation with our international partners and key stakeholders, to ensure that any proposed routes work well. It will enable us to work collaboratively across government to welcome and integrate new arrivals. While we are committed to considering new safe and legal routes, we must also acknowledge the current local authority capacity to house and support refugees. It makes no sense to launch new routes where we do not have the capacity to bring people to sanctuary in the UK and ensure their successful integration into our society; otherwise, it would simply be an exercise in paperwork.
In addition, as I have indicated, Clause 59 commits the Home Secretary to publishing a report on current and any proposed new safe and legal routes within six months of the Bill achieving Royal Assent. The proposed amendment would risk rendering this report meaningless. I believe the proper thing to do is to lay the report before Parliament, as we have committed to do, after which we can make a measured decision on any new safe and legal route that may be needed. My noble friend’s amendment, while well-intentioned, would not enable us to do the work needed to ensure that our safe and legal routes form part of a well-managed and sustainable migration system.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
I am grateful to the Minister for allowing me to intervene. I return to Amendment 128B and his comments on those with BNO status. I raised whether they should be included within the safe and legal routes for the clear reason that they are not seeking protection and do not fall under UNHCR; they are British citizens who have rights under the British Nationality Act. If there are limits to their numbers, are the Government proposing to change the arrangement for BNO status applicants, and can we please add this to the agenda of the meeting that he promised me on Monday night? It is a very specific issue but a major political one if these people with British national rights are suddenly to be treated as if they are refugees.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
As I say, the definition of those to be caught will be specified in the regulations. Those are all highly pertinent points and, for the reasons I set out on Monday, we can certainly add them to our meeting agenda. I do not anticipate that we are at odds on this, but the topic is not really for the discussion of the Committee at this stage, because these matters would be covered when any regulations were considered.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
With the greatest of respect to the Minister, it is covered by Amendment 128B. It is quite explicitly covered by that amendment.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I hear what the noble Baroness says and hope to be able to offer her some more reassurance during our meeting but, for the reasons I have already set out, the Government do not accept that Amendment 128B is a necessary amendment to the Bill. No doubt we can discuss this further in due course.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
The Minister has left me a little confused about numbers. He said that it would be a terrible thing if we admitted more asylum seekers by safe and legal routes than could be housed by local authorities. He has made much of the fact that this would be an exercise in futility—a “paper exercise”, he said. Can he say what assurances the Government got from local authorities about housing the 606,000 people in the net migration figures this year? It seems a bit odd that a much smaller number of asylum seekers should be subjected to these limitations whereas the much larger number is not.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
The noble Lord omits to understand that the obligation to assist an asylum seeker is born of Section 95 of the 1996 Act, which applies to destitute asylum seekers. Those entering the country on a visa—for example, as a student—would not be entitled to government support for housing. The noble Lord is perhaps eliding two points in a way that is not particularly helpful.
Lord Scriven (LD)
I am slightly confused on this point as well. On a number of occasions, the Minister has said that the cap will be set based on the number of available housing places that local authorities are able to provide. However, Clause 58(5) refers to:
“If in any year the number of persons who enter the United Kingdom using safe and legal routes exceeds the number specified in the regulations”.
I have two questions about that. Under what circumstances would the Minister and the Government expect that number to be exceeded? More importantly, if local authorities have said that they can deal with only a certain number in a year, where will the people who breach the cap go?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
Obviously, consultation with local authorities is important—they are the primary consultee set out in Clause 58(2)(a)—but, as the noble Lord will see from paragraph (b), other persons and bodies are also possible consultees. All this information will be fed into the decision to be taken by the Secretary of State in drawing up the regulations, and by this House and the other place in discussing them. It is not just about how many people we can house; it is about the whole network of support and integration that we can provide. As the noble Lord will immediately appreciate, Clause 58(5) is there as an enforcement mechanism for Parliament to ask a Secretary of State why they have permitted the cap to be exceeded. That is the purpose of making the Secretary of State lay before Parliament a statement setting out those breaches. That is the purpose of Clause 58(5). It is not envisaged that the Secretary of State will allow the cap to be exceeded, for the sensible reasons that the noble Lord provides.
I must make some progress. Amendment 129, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, seeks significantly to increase the current scope of the UK’s refugee family reunion policy to include additional family members. This amendment needs to be seen in the context of what I submit is already a very generous family reunion policy for bringing families together. Under this policy, we have granted more than 46,000 visas since 2015; that is no small feat, and a fact that the noble Baronesses, Lady Ludford and Lady Bennett, seem to have overlooked.
The focus of our refugee family reunion policy is on reuniting core family groups. This is as it should be. It allows immediate family members—that is, the partner and any children aged under 18—of those granted protection in the UK to join them here, if they formed part of a family unit before the sponsor left their country to seek protection. In exceptional circumstances, children over 18 are also eligible.
There are separate provisions in the Immigration Rules to allow extended family members to sponsor children to come here where there are serious and compelling circumstances. In addition, refugees can sponsor adult dependent relatives living overseas to join them where, due to age, illness or disability, that person requires long-term personal care that can be provided only by relatives in the UK. There is also discretion to grant leave outside of the Immigration Rules which caters for extended family members where there are compelling compassionate circumstances.
Amendment 129 would routinely extend the policy to cover a person’s parents, their adult unmarried children under the age of 25, and their siblings. Extending family reunion without careful consideration of the implications would significantly increase the number of people who would qualify to come here. We must carefully weigh the impact of eligibility criteria against the pressure that this would undoubtedly place on already strained central government and local services.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
I am afraid that the Minister’s use of the word “impact” triggered me. It would be very interesting to know, when we get the impact assessment— I hope sooner than “in due course”—the costings the Government would expect from something such as my amendment, or indeed my Private Member’s Bill.
I want to draw attention to something that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned. All the time, the Government imply that those of us who argue for better family reunion, the right to work and not having group 1 and group 2 refugees, are portrayed almost as though we are trying to obstruct the asylum system. Actually, we are trying to front-load it and make it more efficient and streamlined, so that in the end there would not be a backlog of160,000 asylum applications because the system would work better; people would be more integrated and more productive, and would not have to worry all the time about what was happening to their relations.
I am sorry that this has become a bit of a rant but I also have a question. Is the Minister going to cover the point that I felt was not answered in the Government’s response to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee? Why do the Government insist on having all these different definitions of family? Is it not all the time adding more complication into the immigration and asylum system? That is not the best way of getting caseworkers to be able to focus efficiently on their job. It means that, all the time, there are backlogs and inefficiency because the Government insist on not doing the rational thing.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I recall debating these topics and the very similar text of the noble Baroness’s Private Member’s Bill at its Third Reading. The reality is that she and I differ on the appropriate numbers that would come in and the resources that would then be necessary to attend them. It is simply a policy decision, and we differ on that.
I turn to Amendments 130 and 131, put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the noble Lord, Lord Purvis. These seek to create routes through which an individual may travel to the UK for the purpose of making a claim for asylum or protection. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and my noble friend Lord Kirkhope raised a similar point. The Government are clear that those in need of international protection should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach. This policy aligns with international law, and indeed with those of previous Governments, including the previous Labour Government. In answer to the question posed by the noble Lords, Lord Hannay, Lord Purvis and Lord Paddick, that is the fastest route to safety. Such schemes would only add further untold pressure to UK systems.
Amendment 130 defines an eligible applicant as someone who
“is present in a member State of the European Union”.
This underlines the point: EU member states are inherently safe countries with functioning asylum systems. There is therefore no reason why a person should not seek protection in the country concerned. Moreover, this amendment would also encourage more people to make dangerous and unnecessary journeys, including across the Mediterranean, to qualify for a safe passage visa.
Lord Winston (Lab)
Does the Minister think that the cost should also be measured in terms of the reputation of the United Kingdom, the country as it is and the way it feels about itself? It is not just money.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I clearly recognise the points the noble Lord makes—that it is believed that not providing a visa route of the type described in the amendment will damage our international reputation—but no countries that I am aware of currently have a visa route of the type suggested. I am afraid that this is a consideration to be weighed in the balance. It would seem irresponsible not to consider the potential extreme cost of the proposal.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
The Minister should not be conflating the two amendments: they are distinct amendments with distinct mechanisms and purpose behind them, so it is a wee bit cheeky of him to do that. As for an estimate of some of the costs, can he do me a deal now in the Committee? I am not sure if this is able to be negotiated across the Committee, but I will show him mine if he shows me his before Report. He needs to present the impact assessment, which will be the Government’s estimate of the tariff costs for their UK resettlement scheme expansion, which he is proposing, to be part of a new safe and alternative or additional safe and legal route. I will use the basis of the central core estimates of what the Home Office is estimating to be the expansion necessary in the tariff funds available, which are scored against overseas development assistance, and I will use that on the threshold of what a humanitarian visa scheme might be. His scheme suggests to an Iranian woman that she has to flee to a neighbouring country to go to the UNHCR; then she is processed by the UNHCR, to be resettled in the UK. Our scheme allows that woman within Iran to go through a similar threshold to be able to access the UK. Which is most efficient?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I look forward to reading the noble Lord’s document when it arrives.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
In due course— I am very grateful. All these questions make it clear that bringing up legal migration is irrelevant to the Bill, a point that relates to comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. The issue for the Bill is that the UK Government and local authorities have limited capacity to provide or arrange accommodation, hence a sensible cap is needed. There are other questions we need answers to. Are these safe passage visas to be given to young single men at the expense of those in more pressing need of sanctuary in the UK?
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
I hope the Minister will reflect before Report on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Winston. I do not recall a cap on Czechs in 1968 or on Hungarians in 1956. There was no cap on Germans and Austrians in 1938 and 1939. The reputational damage to this country done by the idea of a cap would be considerable. It could be defused if the Government would consider an amendment to Clause 58(3) which made it clear that a change of international circumstances, as well as a change of domestic circumstances, could create the need to change the number. To me, the horror is that we are doing this all endogenously, as if needs have nothing to do with what happens exogenously in the world out there—so if something awful happens in the world, we will pay no attention because we will be concerned about the consultation we had with local authorities about houses.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I am not sure the noble Lord and I actually differ on the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Winston. It seems to me that the impact on the national reputation of Britain is not relevant, given the provision for the cap to be varied in the event of an international emergency such as he outlined. As he will see, Clause 58(3) states:
“the Secretary of State considers that the number needs to be changed as a matter of urgency”.
He can provide that regulation to both Houses of Parliament without consulting, and therefore the matter will be capable of discussion and approval and the cap lifted. In reality, I do not think there is any risk to our national reputation as a place which takes its obligations of international protection seriously.
Lord Murray of Blidworth
Forgive me, I have taken an awful lot of interventions, and I am very conscious of the time. I ask the noble Lord to keep this intervention until the end and allow me to make some progress.
I will return to the amendment. If, on the other hand, some numerical limit is envisaged, these schemes will not stop the boats and they are not an alternative to the Bill. Those who do not qualify for a safe passage visa will continue to be exploited by the people smugglers, all too ready to continue to take their money on the false promise of a new life in the UK.
As I have set out, we are ready to expand existing safe and legal routes as we get a grip on illegal migration, and the Bill already provides for this. That is the way forward, not amendments which exacerbate the current challenges. I commend Clauses 58 and 59 to the Committee and invite the right reverend Prelate to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
I was very encouraged by the answer the Minister gave. He seems to be saying that the needs referred to in Clause 58(3) could be exogenous as well as endogenous: that the cap could be raised in response to an urgent need even if that need had nothing to do with housing here but something to do with massacre or war abroad. If that is the case, could that not be made clear in the Bill by a government amendment to Clause 58(3)?
Lord Murray of Blidworth
I can certainly think about that. I will take it away, but I do not think we are terribly far apart.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
My Lords, I thank the Minister for answering and clarifying some of the questions. My prophetic powers in saying “about two hours” were slightly wrong. The last two and a half hours will be memorable for a number of things—the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, quoting Ronald Reagan being one of them—and there were helpful reminders of no person being illegal. There were helpful alternatives to “safe and legal routes”, but I think that we will have to live with “safe and legal routes”. No one has implied that we will change the wording in the Bill. The Minister helpfully pointed out that there will be a definition in the regulations, so that helps us. I am not sure that the Minister answered the historical question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, about why the change happened around 2011 concerning the use of embassies, but I am not going to ask him to stand up.
Your Lordships will not be surprised to hear me say that, overall, I am disappointed that my amendment, not just about Hong Kong but particularly about Hong Kong, has not been accepted. It does not damage the Bill in any way to accept that amendment. Likewise, the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, tries to clarify. That is the purpose, and the Minister’s response has not helped us move forward on that. I have no doubt that all of us involved will find ourselves in discussions about what we might bring back on Report. The desire is to take things forward on safe and legal routes.
At this stage, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Miscarriages of Justice
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Woodley
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to prevent miscarriages of justice.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Bellamy) (Con)
My Lords, miscarriages of justice occur relatively rarely within our justice system. In criminal cases, the Criminal Cases Review Commission will investigate possible miscarriages of justice and, if necessary, refer the case to the Court of Appeal. The Government have recently increased legal aid for such cases. The Law Commission is also currently conducting an independent and wide-ranging review of our appeals system to ensure that it is operating effectively.
Lord Woodley (Lab)
My Lords, I appreciate the Minister’s Answer, but honestly, I am increasingly concerned that, whether through joint enterprise, guilt-by-association sentences or IPP sentences abolished a decade ago but not retrospectively, there are still thousands of prisoners who are rotting away with little or no hope of finding justice. It seems to be going nowhere. So, what is the Minister doing to correct these obvious miscarriages of justice, particularly as the Government have already accepted, at least on joint enterprise, that BAME groups are disproportionately affected?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
My Lords, first, on joint enterprise, it is a long-standing principle of the criminal law that persons who go together to commit a crime are jointly liable, irrespective of whoever threw the brick or fired the shot. There is a great deal of jurisprudence on this subject, and it is true that there is some concern that the existing case law does operate in a harsh way on certain young black boys and men. The CPS, to which I would like to pay tribute, is engaged in a six-month pilot, which started in February 2023, to review joint enterprise cases in several CPS areas. It has also established a joint enterprise national scrutiny panel to review the interim findings of the pilot and several finalised joint enterprise cases. At the end of September this year, the results of that review will be published. This, I understand, will also be considered in relation to the Law Commission’s investigation into the appeals process.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
My Lords, will the Minister assure the House that the Criminal Cases Review Commission, under its excellent new chair Helen Pitcher, will be given sufficient funding efficiently to ensure that miscarriages of justice are dealt with in a timely way? Also, will he consider allowing Professor Cheryl Thomas, who is the leading researcher into juries, to carry out more in-depth research into how juries actually reach their verdicts, in order that prosecutors can be better informed about how to prepare their cases?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
My Lords, the functioning of the Criminal Cases Review Commission—its resources, its governance and the test it applies—will be considered in the context of the Law Commission’s current review. The Government would like to thank the Westminster Commission in particular, in which my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier and the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, participated, for its work on that. It is of interest, and the Government look forward to hearing the Law Commission’s response to these difficult matters.
Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)
My Lords, a grave injustice, which should have been rectified years ago but continues to this day, is the failure to end imprisonment of the nearly 3,000 IPP prisoners. Following on from the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, the number of such prisoners being recalled has now overtaken those being released. The Justice Secretary himself recently described imprisonment for public protection as
“a stain on our justice system”.
The Conservative chair of the Justice Committee recommends resentencing as the only way to end this. Will the Minister look favourably at amendments to this effect when they are considered during the passage of the Victims and Prisoners Bill?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
My Lords, on IPP prisoners, the Government have responded to the Select Committee report by promulgating a very detailed action plan alongside a review by the Chief Inspector of Probation of the criteria and operation of the processes of recall. The Government will further consider the matter during the passage of the Victims and Prisoners Bill. This is very difficult because, unlike cases of people who are unfairly convicted, these persons have been fairly convicted; the only reason they are in prison is that the Parole Board does not consider them safe to release.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble and learned friend the Minister, whose department is seized of the work on the welfare of jurors, who are exposed to traumatic evidence in that peculiar environment where they are cut off from their daily routines and support structures because we do not want them harmed. However, in the context of this Question, could he raise this issue up the list of priorities? We do not want a juror to be so traumatised—I think that contempt of court rules allow them to reveal this —that they begin to question their capacity to deliberate, and then have a question mark over the verdict for that reason.
Lord Bellamy (Con)
My noble friend makes a perfectly fair point. It is essential to our system that jurors be properly looked after, and the Government will continue to consider the points raised in her question.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister agree with me that the easiest way for the Government to reduce miscarriages of justice is to reduce the courts’ backlog? One of the biggest sources of injustice is people—potential appellants—simply dropping out of the system because it is slow and complex and there is a long wait. This is within the Government’s powers to invest in; it is a direct way of reducing miscarriages of justice and is for the benefit of both victims and appellants.
Lord Bellamy (Con)
My Lords, with respect, the Government do not entirely agree with the analysis of the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, that there is a connection between miscarriages of justices and delays in the court system. The Government are doing their very best to reduce those delays, which no one wants. They are partly caused by the longer-term overhang of Covid and are particularly and more recently caused by the barristers’ strike. The Government are doing their very best to reduce those backlogs by introducing further judges and adding resources wherever they can.
Lord Sahota (Lab)
My Lords, I recently read the Lammy review. It states that 41% of black defendants who pleaded not guilty opted for their cases to be heard
“in Crown Courts … compared to 31% of white defendants. This means they lose the possibility of reduced sentences and it raises questions about trust in the system”.
It also states that
“for every 100 white women”
given a custodial sentence for drug offences, “227 black women” were given a custodial sentence for the same offence. Is that acceptable to the Government?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
Discrimination in the criminal justice system is not acceptable to the Government. The Government are conscious that there are concerns about the way that ethnic minority persons are treated within the system and are determined to ensure that those problems are ameliorated and addressed in the longer run.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, what justice can there be in retaining on the statute book sections of a statute of 1861, whereby a mother can be sent to prison for procuring an abortion? Surely it is time that we consider the lack of benefit to society, to her family and indeed to all women in retaining such an outdated and barbaric method of punishment.
Lord Bellamy (Con)
My Lords, all women have access to safe and legal abortions on the NHS up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. It is not appropriate for the Government to comment on any particular case, although your Lordships will no doubt be aware of the case to which the noble Baroness is referring. This is a contentious issue and the Government maintain a neutral position on possible changes to the relevant criminal law.
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)
My Lords, I appreciate that the Minister cannot comment on individual cases, and I need to declare my interest as chief executive of Cerebral Palsy Scotland, but I am very concerned by the case of Auriol Grey, a woman from Peterborough with cerebral palsy and potentially other disabilities, who has received a custodial sentence and been refused leave to appeal. Notwithstanding any of that, could the Minister please explain how the judiciary takes advice? Which disability organisations does it take advice from when ruling on cases of people with disabilities?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
My Lords, the relevant judges will decide cases depending on the evidence in that case. There is very substantial judicial training—probably more than there has ever been—on all kinds of issues, including the issues to which the noble Baroness refers.
Drugs: Supply and Availability
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Baroness Rawlings
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure the continued supply and availability of (1) prescription, and (2) non-prescription, drugs.
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
My Lords, the department is focused on helping to ensure continuity of supply of medicines to the NHS. We have a well-established process to manage and mitigate medicine supply issues, working closely with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the pharmaceutical industry, NHS England, devolved Governments and others operating in the supply chain to help prevent shortages and ensure that risks to patients are minimised when they arise.
Baroness Rawlings (Con)
I thank the Minister for his Answer. Despite what the Government are doing, would he agree that, even though there are pharmaceutical shortages worldwide, aspects of this in the UK have been exacerbated by Brexit? As of April 2023, there are 301 drugs in shortage—100 more than in the same time five years ago. I know the Government have kept a close eye on shortages and supplies, but what are HMG doing to prepare for the forecast shortages of sunblock creams—a vital skin cancer preventive—just in case we have a good and sunny summer?
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
My Lords, it looks like we have a good and sunny summer so far. The department recognises the important role that sunscreen creams play in preventing skin cancers by providing vital UVA and UVB protection. Suncreams are cosmetic products rather than medicines. The supply of cosmetic products is commercially driven and there is an extensive range of these products, with wide availability on the open market. Sunscreen creams may also be prescribed by clinicians if clinically appropriate, taking into account any NHS England guidance. I am not aware that there is a shortage of suncreams at the moment.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord says that he has a well-ordered system. Will he confirm that the number of price concessions—in other words, price increases—agreed to by his department when medicines are in short supply has shot up in recent months and that community pharmacies have to pay the gap between the set price and the newly agreed price? It then takes a long time for those community pharmacies to be compensated. Will he look at speeding up the compensation for community pharmacies?
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
Community pharmacies play a vital role in our communities. I will certainly take on board what the noble Lord has said and look into that.
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, all of us want the UK to be the best place in the world for excellent, new and innovative medicines. However, the pharma industry has complained about uncompetitive rebate rates for both voluntary and statutory schemes. Added to that, it has found it difficult to launch new medicines in the UK, and there is a great variation of availability to patients of medicines appraised by NICE of as much as 51%. What are the Government doing to address all these problems with solutions, so that patients can get the medicines they need?
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
The Government work closely with NICE on a multitude of new medicines and do a very good job of bringing them to the patients of need. If the noble Lord has any specific issues about any particular drugs, I can certainly look into that on his behalf.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, when a drug is in short supply and being replaced by an alternative, can the Minister say what guidance is given to GPs and pharmacists on how to ensure that the patient understands how to use the new product? This may be particularly important in the case of medical devices, such as those to control diabetes. I am thinking of pre-filled inulin pens, which all work in different ways and have different dosages. It is particularly important that the patient understands how to deliver it, when to deliver it and what the dosage should be.
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
The noble Baroness raises a very important point regarding medication for diabetes. She is absolutely right: when a patient is used to a medication, or indeed a device, it can be distressing and frustrating. We are aware of that. We want to assure noble Lords that the DHSC has well-established processes to manage supply issues, working with the supplier to resolve these issues as soon as possible. Where there is perhaps a shortage, it is very important that the patient gets training on the alternative device and that we get them back on to the device that they are familiar with.
Baroness Manzoor (Con)
My Lords, to follow on from the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, Ozempic, a drug approved by NICE, is to be made available to diabetics. The accessibility to this particular drug is poor, and yet it has been made available to non-diabetic patients, such as celebrities. My concerns are twofold. First, what is the access available for diabetic patients to this new and life-changing drug? Secondly, how are the Government ensuring that young girls in particular are not following celebrities in using this drug just to bring down their weight?
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
My noble friend raises a very important point. Social media has a detrimental effect on the health and well-being of young girls—celebrities latch on to these things and it goes viral. The prescribers, whether NHS or private, are accountable for their prescribing decisions. They are expected to take account of appropriate national guidance. It is for the responsible clinician to work with their patient and decide on the course of treatment, with the provision of the most clinically appropriate care for the individual always the primary consideration. We will always work with clinicians to ensure that these drugs are prescribed as safely as possible, alongside specialist weight-management services.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
My Lords, a recent survey by the Pharmaceutical Journal listed serious shortages over the last year in the availability of treatments for common conditions, including menopause symptoms, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and osteoporosis, such that pharmacists were unable to provide the necessary medication. What assessment has been made of the effect of medicine shortages on people with those conditions? Does the Minister share my concern about the associated impact of these shortages on the NHS, in pressures as well as increased costs?
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
I share the concerns of the noble Baroness. Medicine supply problems can occur for a number of reasons, and occasionally the NHS experiences shortages of specific medicines, which may be temporary and localised. We want to assure people that the department has well-established processes to prevent, manage and mitigate medicine shortages. The noble Baroness mentioned HRT. There are 70 hormone replacement therapy products, and the vast majority are in good supply. There have been issues with the supply of a limited numbers of HRT products, primarily due to a very sharp increase in demand, but the supply position for the majority of HRT products has improved considerably over the last year.
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, I draw the attention of the House to my registered interests. What assessment have His Majesty’s Government made of the importance of securing an effective environment for clinical research, in ensuring that major developers of innovative therapies continue to provide those therapies to the citizens of our country?
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
The noble Lord raises a very important point. The Government are always keen to engage with the development community on a case-by-case basis. As we have discussed from this Dispatch Box in the past, there are moneys available. It is very important that we all work closely together to make sure that those medicines of the future are made available for the population.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
My Lords, do the Government intend to take steps in response to the January report by the Medicines Manufacturing Industry Partnership to address the decline in medicines manufacturing and employment in the United Kingdom?
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
The Government recognise the valuable role that medicines manufacturing plays in the UK economy. It enables us to capitalise on our world-class research and development, create jobs and, significantly, create growth. Life science pharmaceutical manufacturing was responsible for more than £20 billion of exports in 2021. Our Life Sciences Vision set out the Government’s ambition to create a globally competitive environment for manufacturing investment. Last March, we launched the £60 million life sciences innovative manufacturing fund to encourage manufacturing investment in the UK. We will announce the fund’s winners later this year.
Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)
My Lords, for people to be able to access the drugs they need it is essential that there is a well-staffed network of local community pharmacies. Can the Minister confirm that there will be increased training of pharmacists in the Government’s long-awaited NHS workforce plan? When can we expect to see it?
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
I thank the noble Lord for that question. I assure him that, earlier this morning, before I came to this Dispatch Box, I asked for an update on the workforce plan. It is going to be released shortly—
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
That was my choice of words. I look forward to sharing the plan with noble Lords. The noble Lord raises an important point about community pharmacies. We all rely on them. Some 80% of the population can get to a pharmacy within 20 minutes, so there is a good distribution of community pharmacies in this country. With regard to training, my understanding is that it is rolled out, and pharmacists do an outstanding service for the country.
Football Matches: Violence
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Bassam of Brighton
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of concerns expressed by the Professional Footballers’ Association about violent incidents at football matches; and what consideration they are giving to strengthening (1) stewarding, (2) policing, and (3) other legal powers, to protect professional footballers and football club staff.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay) (Con)
My Lords, the safety of everyone at sporting events is of paramount importance to His Majesty’s Government. Stewards play an integral role in ensuring that safety, and the Sports Grounds Safety Authority is working to improve the quality of stewarding at football matches. The police and courts have a wide range of powers to protect footballers and club staff, including the use of football banning orders, which can now be applied to a wider range of offences thanks to recent changes made by the Government.
Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)
My Lords, this year’s EFL play-off semi-finals and final provided huge drama. The FA Cup had the first ever Manchester derby and the fastest ever cup final goal. However, despite multiple announcements in advance of full time, pitch invasions by fans were commonplace, putting players, staff and officials at risk. I have raised football disorder several times at the Dispatch Box. While I accept that Ministers alone cannot solve this, we need signs of progress. I remind the Minister that we are bidding, with Ireland, to hold the 2028 Euro championships. Will the Minister commit to using his off season productively to meet governing bodies and clubs to identify possible ways forward?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
It is an offence under Section 4 of the Football (Offences) Act 1991 for a person at a designated football match to go on to the playing area. Anyone found guilty of unlawfully doing so can be fined or can have a court preventive football banning order imposed on them. As I say, we have strengthened the football banning orders, and we keep these important matters under review. My department commissioned the Sports Grounds Safety Authority to conduct research into the long-term sustainability of stewarding. It is now working with football’s governing bodies and others to identify the challenges that it identified in its research. It has refined guidance and issued fact sheets to the football authorities. We keep these matters under review, including, as the noble Lord rightly reminds us, as we pursue our bid for Euro 2028.
Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as the chair of the Football Regulatory Authority. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, is right: throughout the season, commentators and pundits rightly condemn pitch invasions. However, somehow, at the end of the season, when it is the fans of teams who have secured promotion—or, in Everton’s case, fortuitously avoided relegation—streaming on to the pitch, those same commentators and pundits think it is a wonderful thing. It is actually very dangerous for players, match officials, stewards and the spectators themselves. Would my noble friend the Minister take note of the FA’s consistent work in this area and take this as an open invitation for him and anybody from his department to meet with me or anybody else at the FA to discuss these matters further?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I congratulate my noble friend on his recent appointment. I am sure my right honourable friend the Sports Minister would be very glad to speak to him. He will be a great impartial referee for football, even if he has strong views on certain teams. As I say, unlawful entry on to the playing area is already an offence. Even in exuberant moments of celebration, that should not be happening. It is not always possible to keep spectators off the pitch in moments of high celebration. Stewards and police make every effort to prevent it happening. Of course, the police investigate these incidents after the event as well to make sure people are prosecuted where appropriate.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, will the Minister agree that one of the ways of solving this is to make sure that the culture within the fan groups accepts that there will be consequences to attacking or going over the fence? Will the Government encourage football to make sure that, if fans behave like this, there will be a penalty for their club and the individuals, to encourage those around them to restrain them if necessary, or at least to deter them in some way? The fans can police themselves.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
Of course, the vast majority of fans want to go to and enjoy football matches safely; it is only a minority who sometimes seek to spoil that. The Government have worked with authorities across football to help to co-ordinate action in this area. We welcome the additional measures that have been introduced. The FA, the Premier League and the English Football League announced tougher sanctions, including automatic reporting to the police for anyone participating in anti-social or criminal behaviour, increased use of sniffer dogs and club bans for anyone who enters the pitch or uses pyrotechnics. The noble Lord is right: there is a role for fans and clubs themselves to help to maintain order and an enjoyable day out.
Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a lifelong supporter of the greatest team in south-east London, known to its supporters as “Charlton nil”. Can the Government encourage the football authorities to get the players to set an example on the field and not challenge authority in a way that only encourages hooliganism?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I mentioned some of the football authorities with which we work closely, and we also work closely with the Professional Footballers’ Association, which represents the safety of players. This was part of a round-table discussion that we held recently about fan disorder at football matches. My right honourable friend the Sports Minister recently sent a joint letter, with the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, to the authorities to remind all clubs of their duties with regard to player welfare and the maintenance of good order.
Lord Clark of Windermere (Lab)
My Lords, I have attended a great number of football matches, and I see what appears to be an inconsistency in various clubs’ attention and response to individuals running on to the pitch—they are probably the most dangerous individuals, because they have a contempt. I have an interest in Carlisle United, and we have a policy that, if someone comes on to the pitch, we exclude and ban them. Will the Minister consult every club in the Football League to make sure that they take the same strong action against individuals?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
The noble Lord makes an important point, and, yes, we work with clubs of all tiers and sizes across the country to look at this issue. The policing of football matches is an operational decision for local police forces—the local police commander will make a risk assessment and deploy resources accordingly. That is of course right, but we and the police speak regularly to clubs of all sizes about these issues.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Clark. Part of the answer is mainly in the hands of the clubs: even when there are mass invasions of pitches, they usually have CCTV of the pitch, and they often have images of their members, which is the only way they can buy tickets. The only question is whether they investigate to discover who these people are and then give them a penalty. The most effective penalty for most football fans is to exclude them from the ground via a season ticket. I am afraid that there is no incentive for the club to do that if it ends up with an empty ground or less revenue, so the regulators have a role to play with the clubs to ensure that these investigations happen, even when one can understand the emotion of the moment and why it happens. But there ought to be a consequence for it—perhaps the Minister will agree.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I certainly agree with the noble Lord, who speaks with great authority. There is an important role for clubs, fans and the police in all of this. As I say, after the event, police investigations follow up using CCTV and other things, as the noble Lord mentioned. While the Sports Minister was in Istanbul for the Champions League final, he took the opportunity to meet Chief Constable Mark Roberts, the head of the UK football policing unit—I hope that reassures the noble Lord that we are in constant contact with the police on this issue.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister has rightly referred to the excellent work of the Sports Grounds Safety Authority, which is, of course, operated from his department. Can he give an assurance that, instead of the rather hand-to-mouth funding arrangements with which the SGSA operates at present, he will be able to give longer-term funding so that it is able to do even better work than he has described? In particular, can funds be provided for sports grounds outside the professional game, such as non-league football, stadiums that stage women’s matches and so on? I declare an interest as vice-president of the National League.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
The question of budgets and resources is one for the authority and my right honourable friend the Sports Minister to discuss. I will certainly pass on the point made by the noble Lord, but as I say, they have taken action following the review which we commissioned to issue guidance and fact sheets to clubs on some of the action that can be taken to help the situation.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
My Lords, could the Minister tell us what arrangements he is making to ensure that football clubs pay the proper costs of policing the matches, both inside and outside the grounds, particularly those clubs that are perhaps less assiduous in making sure their fans behave?
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
This is a long-standing matter on which we are in discussion with the police, the Home Office and clubs themselves. I will take the point made by the noble Lord back to my right honourable friend the Sports Minister and make sure it is heard again.
UK Food Aid: Ethiopia
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Browne of Ladyton
To ask His Majesty’s Government, following the decision of the USAid and the UN World Food Programme to suspend food aid to Ethiopia, what steps they are taking to protect the integrity of UK food aid funding paid to the Productive Safety Net Programme run by the government of that country.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con)
My Lords, we are deeply concerned about the recent revelations of food aid diversion in Ethiopia. We welcome the Government of Ethiopia’s joint statement with USAID that commits to addressing the issue and holding those responsible to account. We have asked the World Bank to lead a review of aid diversion risks in the productive safety net programme, which provides 8 million people in the poorest areas of rural Ethiopia with critical assistance.
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)
My Lords, the infliction of starvation by Ethiopia and its allies on the civilian population of Tigray during the two-year war now seems to be continuing in the context of a peace process, a fundamental of which was to ensure unhindered access to aid, especially for women, children and the elderly. A criminal scheme co-ordinated by elements of the country’s federal and regional Governments has been stealing the food aid donated to the UN World Food Programme by the US, Ukraine, Japan and France and diverting it to feed military and ex-combatants and selling it on the open market. Now, because of diversion concerns—and this move is difficult to comprehend—the US Government and the World Food Programme have suspended food aid to Ethiopia and Tigray respectively, pending, as the Minister acknowledged, a USAID countrywide review in co-ordination with—of all people—the Government of Ethiopia. In the meantime, what if any alternative means are being considered by His Majesty’s Government, and recommended to the US Government and the UN, to get life-saving food to malnourished, starving children in Tigray?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
My Lords, we understand why the World Food Programme has taken the decision to temporarily halt food assistance to Ethiopia. It is worth adding that nutritional support and other programmes will continue. The demands placed by USAID and the World Food Programme are reasonable: they want independent investigations that target the people behind the aid diversion schemes, independent rather than government-managed targeting of humanitarian food assistance and independent—again, not government-managed—warehousing and distribution of food assistance. That is what they are demanding, and we understand why. As it happens, we have not yet found any diversion of UK aid, and we hope that does not change with the emergence of new evidence.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, the Minister knows that this region is suffering from the worst famine and hunger crisis for 30 years, but the UK support has been slashed from £861 million in 2017-18 to just £221 million last year. Notwithstanding that, we are still contributing a large amount of support for the people of this region. It is recognised that if combatants attack food supplies, it is considered a war crime. Is it the position of His Majesty’s Government that direct and deliberate food diversion away from civilians as part of a conflict will also be considered by the UK as a potential war crime?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I will have to put that specific question to the Minister for Africa. In principle we do not question the basis for the definition that the noble Lord has put forward, but it has always been our view across the board that determination of things such as genocide or war crimes should be made by a competent court rather than by the UK Government or a non-judicial body.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, the recent fifth failed rainy season and extreme climate events across the Horn of Africa mean that catastrophic hunger levels are likely to worsen across Ethiopia, as well as in Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan, yet those countries are among the least responsible for climate change. Can the Minister, who I know has a specific interest in this, tell us more about what the Government can do to help communities adapt to the impact of climate change?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
The noble Lord makes a hugely important point. It is worth saying that Ethiopia was long considered a success story. Over the last few decades, millions upon millions of people have been pulled out of poverty—with UK support, I should say; the UK has been a principal player in that process and can be proud of it—but those gains are being lost as a consequence of drought, conflict and the war in Ukraine, et cetera. The noble Lord raises the issue of adaptation. The UK has committed that half or thereabouts of our international climate finance should be spent on adaptation, the other half being spent on mitigation. A very big proportion of both will be invested in nature-based solutions to climate change, which provide both adaptation and mitigation. That is the lens through which we approach climate change, and it is the focus of all the investments in the £11.6 billion commitment that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson made at COP 26.
Lord Watts (Lab)
My Lords, I very much support the Government’s view about helping Africa in the way they have set out, but last time I was in Ethiopia it was clear that millions of women did not have access to family planning. Is it not the biggest scourge of Africa that those women have no ability to control the number of children they have?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
The noble Lord is right to identify that as a major issue, which is why family planning remains a big focus of UK aid across Africa. So many threats, risks, challenges and pressures face that continent, and climate change and environmental degradation, as mentioned in the previous question, are rapidly becoming the dominant threat facing many countries in the continent.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
My Lords, it happens time and again that Governments start diverting food aid and other aid away from the people who need it on the ground, and time and again we have learned that international organisations such as Christian Aid and the Red Cross, and local faith communities from all faiths, are often the very best at delivering aid and making sure it gets to the people most in need. Can the Minister tell us what is being done to try to get around the Ethiopian Government and use those organisations?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I strongly agree with the premise of the question. Many of those organisations are better placed to deploy aid than Governments, government agencies or some of the very clunky, large multilateral organisations. I mentioned earlier that the UK has not found evidence that our own aid has been diverted, but we are part of a UN-led diversion task force. We are pressing for a systemwide investigation into diversion risks across Ethiopia and working with our representatives at the UN and the World Bank to bring impetus to this process at the highest possible level. But there is an urgent need to maintain the humanitarian support that the right reverend Prelate identified in areas affected by ongoing regional conflict, flooding, cholera and so on. We follow strict processes to prevent aid diversion and have controls and risk management systems in place, and they seem to be working. We are acutely aware of the need to continue to provide humanitarian assistance for those in the greatest need.
Lord Kamall (Con)
My Lords, many noble Lords will recognise that the African Union has been trying to play a role in resolving the conflict in that region, but of course the African Union is also headquartered in Ethiopia. What is the Government’s view of how well the African Union is doing? Does it need more support from the UK and its allies? Do the Government have any concerns about its role in trying to resolve this conflict?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
It is absolutely right that the African Union should be front and centre in tackling this crisis, but I think I am the wrong person to provide an assessment of its role in the context of today’s discussion. I will have to get back to my noble friend via my colleague the Minister for Africa.
Hereditary Peers By-election
Lord Grocott (Lab)
—as is traditional on these occasions, I thank the returning officer for his work; it was more complicated this time, because there were quite a few voters. I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Russell, as the winner; I am sure he will do a good job in this House. I must also congratulate the Liberal Democrats on successfully retaining this seat. I suppose I should explain to anyone who does not follow these things closely that they were greatly assisted in that endeavour by the fact that all three candidates were Liberal Democrats. It is an unusual system in western democracies.
The electorate was 777 Peers; all of us were able to vote. But, unlike in by-elections in the House of Commons or in local government, for example, in our case when we were about to vote, we were not required to present our driving licences or passports. We coped without voter ID.
This now brings to a total of 53—the figure is obviously going up all the time—the number of Peers who have been successful in by-elections since this temporary measure, as it was intended to be, was introduced quarter of a century ago. Of those 53, the vast majority are Conservatives and Cross Benchers; Lib Dem by-elections are very rare occurrences. For anyone who is relatively new to the House, the last occasion of a Lib Dem by-election was the mother and father of all of them, in that there were seven candidates and three voters—twice as many candidates as voters. At least turnout was 100%. I tried to calculate the turnout for this election from the figures that we have been given and I think it was about 25% or thereabouts.
As a final point, this by-election was done entirely online. I found that slightly restricted my powers as a democrat, because I did try to spoil the ballot paper. It was probably my technological incompetence but I found it impossible to spoil. You simply could not forward it without filling in an answer—so that is a bad development. But at least we can now say that, unlike in any other election, when we elect a hereditary Peer in this country, it is done entirely electronically—so who can accuse the House of Lords of not moving with the times?
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Grocott for raising this issue with his customary good humour, used to make a very serious point. We all welcome our new colleague, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, to his membership of your Lordships’ House and we will make him welcome. But that does not mean that we approve of this method of entry into your Lordships’ House. The laughter around the Chamber as my noble friend outlined the process of coming here was testament to how we all think it is pretty ridiculous. There have been some elections when there have been more candidates than voters.
This House has said on numerous occasions that we wish to end the hereditary Peer by-elections. As my noble friend Lord Grocott said, they were a temporary measure. They really should be ended. I say this to the Government, notwithstanding any criticism of any Members who come to this House: when we are here, we are all of the same status and all Members of your Lordships’ House. But the time when we would elect a hereditary Peer from a very small electorate has long gone. We have voted against such by-elections on many occasions. If the Government do not act, I assure the House that we will.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
My Lords, I confess that I have not always been a great fan of the hereditary by-elections, but we must surely all acknowledge that the process has brought some people of quite exceptional talent and ability to this House who would not make it through the conventional appointment process.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, I always find it very confusing that we have these speeches condemning hereditary by-elections when all the rest of us are appointed by an extremely obscure system which very few of us really understand. The problem is the appointment of so many Members of this House, not the election, albeit by a small electorate, of the few who come in as hereditary Peers.
Lord Cormack (Con)
Can we express the hope that we will have no more resignation honours Peers in this House? We had seven too many last week, although each will of course be made welcome, but 40 days and 40 nights or thereabouts in Downing Street should not qualify anyone to nominate anyone to anything.
Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2023
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Bellamy
That the draft Order laid before the House on 24 April be approved.
Relevant document: 38th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Considered in Grand Committee on 13 June.
Illegal Migration Bill
Wednesday 14th June 2023
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Illegal Migration Act 2023 View all Illegal Migration Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 133-V Fifth marshalled list for Committee - (12 Jun 2023)
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I am, of course, hugely disappointed that some of our colleagues do not want to listen to a fascinating debate on Clause 60 of the Illegal Migration Bill, just as some of those who stayed until 4 am the other morning did not want to participate in the debates on the Bill. However, I am delighted that the noble Earl, Lord Russell, is joining our ranks. It is wonderful to have an Earl Russell back. Those who remember Conrad Russell will know what a formidable Member of this House he was, and I am sure that his son will do justice to his memory.
I am talking against Clause 60 standing part. This clause was added by the Government on Report in the Commons, so it was not discussed by MPs. It would amend a section of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 that is about factors that damage the credibility of an asylum applicant.
The point of Clause 60 is to expand the circumstances in which credibility would be damaged—where a claimant fails to produce or destroys an identity document or, indeed, where they refuse to disclose information such as a passcode that would enable access to information stored electronically, such as on a mobile phone. It is rather odd that we should be debating this poor, lonely little clause on its own. Indeed, there was perhaps a good argument that it should have been grouped with Clause 14, which my noble friend Lord German, on whichever day it was—
Baroness Ludford (LD)
Yes, when it was proposed that Clause 14 should not stand part of the Bill. My noble friend debated issues about the powers of the Government to extract information concealed behind PIN numbers on phones. If memory serves, Clause 14 was particularly in relation to people who are detained, while Clause 60 oddly stands on its own—apart from Clause 14. But they need to be looked at holistically, to try to get some assessment as to what new powers the Government want. Are we in danger of getting spillover to sectors other than asylum?
The failure to provide information, an identity document or a PIN number would be added as a type of behaviour considered damaging to a claimant’s credibility. It is not restricted to people who are caught by Clause 2; the intended effect seems to be directed more at people seeking asylum who arrive on a direct flight from the country in which they face persecution. In a sense, it does not have much to do with this Bill, which is another reason why it sets off a bit of an alarm bell. The problem is that making a direct journey from a country in which the person is at risk of persecution, perhaps where the persecutor is the state or an agent of the state, may require the person not to travel with documentation that would identify them if they presented that documentation or were searched as they passed through an airport. That would concern an identity document—so there are some issues around penalising a person because they have not produced such a document, and I would be grateful if the Minister could respond on that issue.
On the other arm of it, with regard to insisting on the person delivering the passcode or PIN for their phone, I am wondering how widely that is expected to apply and how it relates to Clause 14 on getting access to PIN numbers and, indeed, to handing over mobile phones. My noble friend Lady Hamwee raised the problem that that would mean asylum applicants not having access to their contacts. In the scenario that this Bill covers, that means that people could not phone their family to say, “I’m safe—I haven’t drowned in the channel”. So that is one aspect that arises. The other aspect is that of access and forcing someone to give up the PIN on their phone. When the Minister replied to the debate on Clause 14 and Schedule 2, he said that that the information on the phone
“can … assist in determining a person’s immigration status or right to be in the UK … We all know that mobile telephones contain a wealth of data relating not just to the owner of the phone but to where that phone has been and who they have been with—all of which can be used to build up an intelligence picture which can facilitate criminal prosecutions”.—[Official Report, 7/6/2023; col. 1542.]
We are all in favour of facilitating prosecutions. That is one of the reasons why we have been so dismayed by the provisions on victims of modern slavery and trafficking. Another reason is that there is nothing in the Bill to enhance the prosecution of smugglers and traffickers. Suddenly the Minister came out with this route which is supposed to facilitate criminal prosecutions. My noble friend Lord German referred to a High Court case which said that what the Government had been doing was illegal and that they were wrong to extract information concealed behind PINs on phones. The Minister said that the powers that have been put into the Bill in Clause 14 are fresh powers to respond to the High Court judgment, so this is a new suite of powers.
What we have got is in two different clauses. We have new powers, and the common theme across them is access to people’s mobile phones and other electronic devices by forcing them to give up PINs. I am wondering what the scope of this is, beyond people detained or caught by Clause 2, because Clause 60 appears to apply to anybody who is outwith the scope of the Bill. What are the boundaries of the powers that the Government are granting themselves to access people’s mobile phones? I cannot claim to be an expert on this issue, but I know there has been a lot of commentary and activity on the question of victims’ mobile phones in sexual abuse cases. Will the Minister clarify exactly what the purpose of Clauses 14 and 60 is? Why was Clause 60 brought in to stand on its own rather than Clause 14 being amended? What is the composite picture that the Government are painting? How are their powers going to be constrained? Are the rest of us going to find that one day all these powers apply to us as well? I am raising this point as a clause stand part debate because Clause 60 seems to raise some rather troubling questions about the powers that the Government want to give themselves to access mobile phones.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for introducing her clause stand part debate. As she said, the clause adds behaviours that would be considered damaging to the credibility of an asylum or human rights applicant by amending the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004 to widen false “passport” to false “identity document” which ensures that by presenting false documents, failing to produce documents or destroying documents an applicant damages their credibility. It also adds electronic information to the list. If an applicant fails to disclose passcodes or electronic devices, their credibility can be damaged.
In a sense, this would not be a particularly controversial part of the Bill. However, there have been reports about confiscation of mobile devices which has left migrants unable to contact the outside world or to provide the electronic documents needed for their applications. The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, referred to the recent High Court case where the Home Office policy on blanket mobile seizure was found unlawful. She also referred to the Minister saying that Clause 14 provides fresh powers through the Bill to respond to the High Court judgment.
I thought that the noble Baroness raised interesting questions about the scope of this clause and whether it goes beyond what is covered in Clause 2 and how widely it will apply. The tone with which she introduced her clause stand part notice seemed to be seeking information and reassurance regarding these enhanced powers. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Migration and Borders (Lord Murray of Blidworth) (Con)
My Lords, I am happy to provide that reassurance and explanation. I am grateful to the noble Baroness and the noble Lord for their thoughts on Clause 60.
Clause 60 clarifies and modernises Section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004, which relates to the credibility of asylum claimants. First, in response to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, this provision will not be relevant to those who meet the conditions in Clause 2, as their asylum claims will of course be inadmissible, but it will be relevant to other asylum seekers. It is appropriate that we use the opportunity afforded by the Bill to address this issue for the reasons that I will come to in a moment. The clause puts it beyond doubt that destroying, altering, disposing of or failing to produce any identity document—not just a passport—is behaviour that should be viewed by decision-makers as damaging a claimant’s credibility.
Secondly, the clause modernises Section 8 to reflect the fact that mobile phones and electronic devices play a much more significant role in people’s daily lives in storing relevant documents and information than they did 20 years ago. We have therefore expressly provided that refusing to disclose information, such as a passcode which would enable access to a person’s mobile phone or other electronic device, should be damaging to their credibility. In so doing, we are reading across provisions that exist in criminal law in relation to Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and equivalent provisions in Scotland. I hope noble Lords agree that it would be inconsistent to treat what would amount to the effective concealment of a document, by not providing access, stored electronically any differently from the concealment of a physical document.
Finally, the clause brings Section 8 of the 2004 Act up to date by clarifying that the provisions relating to documents apply where those documents are stored in electronic form.
Clause 14 is a separate part of the Bill and introduces new powers. We already have some powers to seize devices, but Clause 14 introduces new powers, as the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, observed, and as we discussed in Committee on the relevant group of amendments. Clause 60 will of course apply no matter which power of seizure is used.
I hope that I have provided the requested clarity, and I further hope that Clause 60 will stand part of the Bill.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for those explanations. It may be that my brain has gone to cotton wool—I will read his response in Hansard to try to see the whole picture. At the moment, I cannot see the overall coherence of this scheme.
The Minister is going to send me scurrying off to look up the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, of which I have just a vague memory. I am sure that colleagues on other Benches will know its provisions off the top of their heads, but is there any sort of reasonable suspicion trigger, or some such, in that Act, about investigating crime and suspected terrorism? I do not know, but my fear with all of this is of mission creep. I am not sure whether the Minister has fully removed that fear, but I will carefully read his response and I am sure that, with his normal courtesy, if I have any follow-up questions he will deal with them in writing.
Baroness Hamwee
“Operational efficiency(1) Within six months of the date on which this Act is passed the Secretary of State must publish a management review undertaken by management experts outside the Home Office, of—(a) the efficiency of the processing by UK Visas and Immigration of applications, and(b) the efficiency of the removal by Immigration Control of persons whose leave to remain has expired.(2) For the purposes of this section—(a) “efficiency” includes fairness, and(b) the review must include information regarding the numbers of appeals and their success rate.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to commission an independent management review of the efficiency of UK Visas and Immigration in processing applications and the efficiency of the removal process for those whose leave to remain has expired.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, this is the first of a number of proposed new clauses relating to the efficiency of the Home Office and the elusive—maybe even illusory—impact assessment statement. We know we will be told that the impact assessment will be published “in due course”. The timetabling may be clear to the Home Office but it is not to any other noble Lord who has spoken. It occurred to me that the Home Office could really teach even Avanti West Coast or TransPennine Express something about timetabling.
We cannot put into the Bill that it should not go to Report without an impact assessment. Amendment 149 is therefore one of a number that I have tabled, all following the same form of drafting, so that the Bill should
“not come into force until”
and unless various things had happened, one of them being the receipt of the impact assessment. I realised, on reflection, that it was not my cleverest thought because I did not mean any old sort of impact assessment; I meant the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, was referring to the other day, when he talked about due diligence. That is a term I understand pretty well, as I think most people would. However, the amendment enables me to make the point that noble Lords have been making throughout.
On Monday, the Minister certainly referred to an economic impact assessment, as I think he mentioned before. My reading of the debates is that noble Lords want far more than just an economic assessment. I do not need to spell out that the impact of the Bill on third-sector organisations and so on, as well as individuals, will be considerable.
Amendment 132 is about the operation of the Home Office. Frankly, it is a pretty mild amendment, especially given how often it is remarked—I agree with this—that the backlog of applications is the problem, not the number of asylum seekers. The amendment simply calls for a management review by independent experts.
Many people are calling for the Home Office to clear applications from asylum seekers who come from countries whose nationals succeed in their applications in almost every case. We have heard reference to this throughout the Committee. It should be quite straightforward, but I confess that I am in two minds about it. I am anxious that asylum seekers are not all in the same position or with the same characteristics, even if they come from the same country. It would be too easy not to see each asylum seeker as an individual whose application should be treated as that particular individual’s application. However, that does not invalidate the point that what has been happening—or not happening —in the Home Office, rather than in the channel, is at the heart of the situation.
I mentioned earlier today the Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee’s report, All Families Matter: An Inquiry Into Family Migration, and the Home Office’s response to it. During the inquiry that led to that report, the committee, which I chair, heard from witnesses vivid descriptions of their attempts to find out what was happening to their applications. To give one example, people said that they had to hold the line for long periods and had to give a credit card number in their details because they had to pay for the call. They paid to sit on the phone but then found, when they got through, that they were not speaking to the right person or that the number that they had been told to call was not the right one. The frustration and distress mount and mount. We know that the Home Office’s service standards were affected by the Ukraine visa scheme and that the Home Office aims—I stress that word—to begin republishing quarterly performance data as soon as possible. Let me stress that I do not think that any of this is the fault of individual officials; there is something about leadership and management that needs to be sorted.
I will not read a lot from the Government’s response to the committee’s report but I want to pick out a couple of points. We made these recommendations:
“The Home Office should adopt a new approach to communication … The Home Office should establish standards about its communication with applicants and routinely publish statistics on whether these standards are met. Applicants should be able to contact the Home Office free of charge”.
The Government’s response states that the Home Office
“is working on a notification service”;
it is “currently in test”, it says. It goes to say:
“All applications are proactively monitored, and customers”—
I hate the word “customers” in this context—
“are notified prior to the end date of the service standard”.
Communication does not seem to be the Home Office’s strongest point or its natural behaviour; it is not one of its characteristics. So much of this goes back to efficiency and sympathy for customers, which matters an awful lot. These people feel that, too often, too many of them are treated as statistics and numbers. The service is a poor one. That is one of the reasons why I have tabled Amendment 132, which I beg to move.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 139 in this group is in my name. This group is all about efficiency and administration. Amendment 139 is purely a probing amendment—there is no way that anyone would seek to engineer changes to the machinery of government via an opposition amendment to yet another immigration Bill—but I put it down to probe the tensions that have been emerging and increasing in recent years, even months and weeks, between the respective competencies and missions of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on the one hand and the Home Office on the other. I also tabled it to stress the vital importance of international co-operation in dealing with the worst refugee crisis since just after the Second World War. It is, I am afraid, a crisis that is only going to deepen with the threats posed not just by the various conflicts all over the globe but by the climate crisis, as others have said.
Amendment 139 probes and sets out the kind of functions that sit with the Secretary of State. Noble Lords will remember that the Secretary of State is indivisible, so when Governments of various stripes move the deckchairs around and pass functions from one department to another or even rename or reconstruct departments, the Secretary of State is the Secretary of State. The kind of functions that I set out in my suggestion for an office for refugees and asylum seekers are those in general that are much more suited to the expertise and mission of the Foreign Office. That is why consideration of the various international obligations is set out, such as the function of considering safe passage and humanitarian protection and advising the Secretary of State in relation to aid and other action in conflict. It is the relationship between over there and over here.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
My Lords, I support Amendment 139 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti. I have put my name to Amendments 134 and 135 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and I will leave it to him to speak to them if he wishes to do so at any length. I support these amendments to ensure that we have accountability and review, and I do so on a probing basis.
I think the Minister who will reply to this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, has been in the Chamber when the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Blidworth, has been subjected to a considerable amount of attrition on the Bill—which he has treated with commendable control and self-restraint. Few have been provoked as much as he has in this Chamber in recent years. That said, I think the noble Lord, Lord Murray, would confirm in his private conversations with the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, that there is real concern in your Lordships’ House and in certain well-informed sectors in the country about the consequences of the Bill.
In the recent past we have had reviews—I and my noble friend Lord Anderson have been part of this in relation to terrorism—which have reported to Parliament in relation to controversial pieces of legislation that cause great concern, particularly to Members of the other place. I understand that, having been one. I simply ask the Government to take into account that such reviews are necessary in some form and to provide for accountability and review of the consequences of the Bill, if it becomes an Act of Parliament.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
My Lords, I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti. She made her case for transferring this responsibility from the Home Office to the Foreign Office on grounds of efficiency and good administration. In my totally unbiased view, it is of course the case that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is a model of efficiency and good administration. But on practical grounds, I really do not agree with this.
There is a Foreign Office role. The role of the treaty section is monitoring, ratification procedures and quality control over the treaties that we sign. There is a role for legal advisers, referred to by the noble Baroness, monitoring the Government’s respect for their treaty obligations and, if necessary, reminding other departments of the obligations that we have taken on.
There could be a role for our posts abroad. I strongly support the proposal in Amendment 130 for the safe passage visa. It would be very good if our posts abroad were allowed, say, to filter out applications that are clearly not unfounded and to assist applicants with the electronic application system. That would be very good, but the trend in the Home Office, which the noble Baroness in my view correctly described, to move more and more to being a department of the interior, with a bit of homeland security, would be increased if responsibility for carrying out our treaty obligations in respect of asylum seekers were transferred to another department.
Moreover, the Foreign Office really is not equipped to take on the enhanced teams required to deal with 178,000 applicants in the asylum queue. So, although I understand the noble Baroness’s motives and applaud her praise for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I am against this proposal.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
My Lords, the Minister ought to welcome Amendments 132, 134 and 135, because they simply ask for transparency of reporting back on the success of the Bill. The introduction says:
“The purpose of this Act is to prevent and deter unlawful migration, and in particular migration by unsafe and illegal routes”.
Most of the arguments have been around the Government’s conviction that this is the right way to stop the boats. Many of us in this Committee believe that it will not stop the boats, that we will end up with large numbers of people being detained for indefinite periods and that it will cost a huge amount of money.
I quite happily accept that the Minister will probably say that practically these amendments cannot work with one month and might need a different timescale and so on, but they are basically saying, “Please report that this is doing what the Bill set out to do”. Really, I cannot see how the Government can object to being required to report on their own successes.
Lord Kamall (Con)
My Lords, I hope noble Lords will forgive me that I was unable to speak at Second Reading and will allow me to make a few comments. Since I have returned to the Back Benches, I have tried to focus on a few amendments rather than speaking on everything, so this is my first intervention in this part. I want to speak because I have huge sympathy for Amendment 132 in this group and Amendment 150 in the next group about operational efficiency. In fact, I have submitted Written Questions on the issue of the backlog and what the Government are doing to tackle it, and I thank my noble friend the Minister for answering them. I hope noble Lords will forgive me, because this is the first and only time I will speak at this stage, if I make a few more general comments.
First, I am very concerned about the language we are using and the lack of compassion we are demonstrating. I do not think it right that we condemn people who are either fleeing persecution and torture or even coming to this country as economic migrants. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an economic migrant. My parents were economic migrants; they came here to seek a better life. I understand all that and I think we should show some sympathy and understanding, but I also think we should be proud that people want to come to the United Kingdom, because we are one of the most open countries in the world and we have, over the years, assimilated many immigrants who have fled persecution or come here for economic reasons, to contribute to this country.
Noble Lords will have often heard me say that we should be grateful to the people from the Commonwealth —my father came in the early 1950s—who saved British public services after the war. If it were not for these immigrants, our public services would be in trouble. On this specific issue, we should be clear that while we are proud that people want to come to the United Kingdom, and while our heart may want to help as many people as possible, our head says that we cannot let everyone in. Therefore, the debate is often about where we draw the line, particularly for those who are facing persecution.
If we could do it for Ukraine and Ukrainians, and it is right that we do, why can we not understand where the problems are in the system and throw resources at them? We could have internal hit squads that tackle specific issues. We did it for Ukraine: we were able to pull people off other things to tackle issues. We are not elected, but the voters and citizens out there want to understand what is slowing down the process. Why does it take so long to sort out the backlog? If we can identify those bits of the process that are taking too long—if there are particular legal problems, people are throwing away passports, there are problems with DNA tests or whatever—it would be helpful to the Government’s case to tell us where the problems are and what they are doing to tackle these issues.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lords, Lord Carlile and Lord Kerr, will be pleased with my remarks because this is my plea for the impact assessment.
I am delighted to see that we may get a different answer because we have a different Minister, although I have to tell the Minister that if he says “in due course” or “on the first day of Report”, he will get the reaction that his noble friend Lord Murray got. I say, half in jest, it was not great knowing that the Minister was going to reply to this point about the impact assessment, given what happened when he was replying to me yesterday with respect to the Public Order Bill, when the Explanatory Memorandum was published the day after the other place discussed the public order regulations and I received it at 2.27 pm for a 7.30 pm debate. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, having learned from that, is now on the case to ensure that the impact assessment will be with us well before Report.
The serious point is that all noble Lords are saying to the Home Office that it is simply unacceptable that we are flying in the dark here. We need the information before us. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, can come up with another phrase which gives us more hope and expectation, because that is the serious point here.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, for his support for Amendments 134 and 135, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for her support for Amendment 138. As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, what we have here is an attempt to bring accountability and review into the system. This is about Home Office operational efficiency. The asylum system is in chaos. If it is not in chaos, I would be grateful if the Minister could tell me what word he would use for the enormous backlog, the increase in the time that any decision is taking, the drop in the number of people being returned, the surges in people coming across the channel, and the individual injustices. I remind noble Lords, if they have not seen it, that 616 migrants crossed the channel on Sunday. I am not sure whether there have been any since, but on Sunday they came.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, was right: if I had known about Amendment 132—also in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick—requiring an independent review of the management and operation of the Home Office, I would have added my name to it. If we cannot get the bureaucracy, the applications and the decision-making process right, we will have a problem. No law will work if there is bureaucratic inefficiency, so I very much support that amendment.
Amendment 134, requiring the Government to publish an impact assessment of the financial consequences of the Bill, is a probing amendment, but you can see why we require one. We had more information from the Times newspaper about the potential cost of the Government’s reforms, when it went from £3 billion to £6 billion, than from the Government. All the Government can say is, “We don’t comment on leaks”. How on earth can we legislate when all we have to operate with are newspaper stories? We have no way of knowing. If the Government say this is not the case, then what is the case? What is the projected cost? Hence, there is Amendment 134.
Amendment 135 would require the Government to publish an impact assessment on the use of hotels and so on after the Bill has been enacted. Every now and again we read that the Government have bought a couple of barges; that certain hotels are not going to be used; that “it’s not going work at that military camp, so we’re going to try this one”. Then, suddenly, a disused liner sails into Weymouth. This is fag-packet policy. What are we doing? What is the plan? We have tabled this amendment because, clearly, the Government have a plan. In the Home Office, there will be an assessment of what is needed and how it will be done. There is a secret plan, which the Government will not share with us. If that is not the case, and instead it is a case of, “Goodness me, we’ll have to buy a barge”, then buy “Barge News” and see what is available next week. “Oh, I know: there’s a liner coming in”—
Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)
Has it occurred to the noble Lord that there may not even be a secret plan?
Lord Coaker (Lab)
It had not occurred to me—but it has now.
The serious point is that there must be a plan. It cannot just be a question of, “I know—we will buy a barge, get a liner or buy this military camp”. There must be some sort of strategy, secret plan, non-secret plan or memo saying what the Government are going to do, yet we are not allowed to see, share in or understand it. I have never known anything like it. This is a flagship government Bill. It is an important way of dealing with a challenge that we all know must be dealt with, yet we are having to deal with it in this way. It is nonsensical.
There is another reason why we need to know this. As noble Lord after noble Lord has said, the whole premise of the Bill is that every single migrant crossing the channel or entering illegally will be detained and subject to removal. That must mean that the Government have a figure for how many detention places they will need. If not, can the Minister say, “We have no idea what we will need”, “This is what we think we will need”, or, as would normally happen, describe the worst-case and best-case scenario, or best guess? We have no idea. How many detention places are the Government assuming they will need for their Illegal Migration Bill to work?
Lord Scriven (LD)
Does it surprise the noble Lord to learn that I have asked that as a Written Question, and that the Answer was that it would be in the impact assessment?
Lord Coaker (Lab)
No, it does not surprise me that the noble Lord asked the Question. I had not noticed it, but the Answer does not surprise me. The serious point is that the Government are clearly working to figures—they have to be—but they are not sharing them with the Chamber. It cannot be that they are just making it up as they go along. Hence the probing amendment: let us know something about the consequences of the measures and how many detention places the Government are planning for. Presumably, it will be as many as they need because of the number coming across—whatever that will be. The whole thing is predicated on the Government saying, “It will deter people from coming; therefore, we won’t need many”. So what is the figure and the deterrence effect assumption that the Government are working towards?
Amendment 138 is just to understand what police co-operation is taking place to deter the criminal smuggling gangs and tackle the people smugglers. Again, we would like to know. According to the figures I have—it will be interesting to know the figures from the Minister—there have been just three to four convictions per month for people smuggling across the channel, including a halving in total convictions for smuggling since 2018 to just 135 a year. Can the Minister confirm those figures? Can he confirm that over the past 12 months, criminal smuggling gangs have made, according to estimates, £180 million? Can he also confirm what co-operation is taking place between all the EU member states and beyond to tackle the criminal smuggling gangs and deal with the people we would all wish to be prosecuted and jailed for their horrific actions? An update on that would be helpful. Presumably, that would also be in an impact assessment, so we could understand it.
Finally, my Amendment 139FD would insert a new clause requiring the Government to report on the number of those removed due to the passing of the Act. How many people are the Government assuming that they will remove? As I said, the whole Bill is predicated on detention and removal—that is the whole raison d’être—so what assumption do the Government have? As we asked on earlier clauses, where are these people going to be removed to? I know we have had the debates about proper conformity to treaties, human rights and all those sorts of things, but again, we need some statistics and facts about what the Government intend to do—where they intend to remove people to, but also the number they are seeking to remove.
We are moving beyond the stage of platitudes and rhetoric. We want some hard statistical evidence to back up what the Government are saying alongside their proposals. We cannot act; we do not know the statistics and the impact assessment is being denied to us. I say again: the frank reality is that the Government have figures within the Home Office that they are working to. The only people who are not having those figures shared with them are the people legislating on the Bill, and that, frankly, is simply and utterly unacceptable.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, the main problem with the broken asylum system, which appeared to be working satisfactorily in 2010, is how it has come to create a disproportionately large backlog of those awaiting asylum decisions, set against a similar or smaller number of applications for asylum and a disproportionate number of failed asylum seekers awaiting removal. Amendment 132 seeks to address this. We will discuss with our Labour colleagues whether we should move to Report on the Bill in the absence of an impact assessment.
The Cabinet Office’s Guide to Making Legislation, last updated on 15 August 2022, says:
“The final impact assessment must be made available alongside bills published in draft for pre-legislative scrutiny or introduced to Parliament, with 80 copies sent to the Vote Office (30 of which should be marked for the attention of the Public Bill Office) and 10 to the Lords Printed Paper Office on introduction, and will need to be updated during parliamentary passage to reflect any changes made to the bill”.
Can the Minister say why the Government have not complied with the Cabinet Office’s Guide to Making Legislation in relation to this Bill?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Sharpe of Epsom) (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken to these amendments today, and I thank all noble Lords for their comments.
Amendment 132 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, would require the Home Secretary to commission an independent management review of the efficiency of UK Visas and Immigration in processing visa applications, and of Immigration Enforcement’s work in removing from the UK those whose right to remain has expired.
I recognise that we should always be striving for maximum efficiency, and indeed effectiveness, in everything we do. In that regard, I agree with my noble friend Lord Kamall. But making decisions quickly and accurately is obviously in the best interests of the individual concerned, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, explained, and represents value for money for the taxpayer; and, where there is misuse of the UK’s generous immigration system, so is ensuring that that is dealt with effectively. I am sure that noble Lords will join me in thanking the commitment of countless staff across the immigration system who uphold fairness and professionalism while making complex decisions every day. As regards the backlog, I do not have the precise figures to hand, but I note that the Home Secretary was speaking this morning in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee and was quoting some of those statistics, if noble Lords would like to refer to that.
Paying external management consultants to look into the efficiency of these Home Office operations would be unnecessary and not, I suggest, a good use of public funds. Reports by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, the National Audit Office and others continue to provide insights into how current operations can be improved, including by identifying and disseminating good practice. We also publish quarterly immigration statistics, including on asylum and returns, which help to shine a light on current performance and inform parliamentary scrutiny of the work of the Home Office.
I agree wholeheartedly that we need a culture of continuous improvement to enhance the efficiency, accuracy and fairness of our decision-making processes in respect of visa applications and the efficiency and effectiveness of our enforcement immigration operations. I am not persuaded that legislating for an independent management review is the most efficient way to go about this, but I of course welcome the intent behind the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee.
Lord Scriven (LD)
The Minister mentioned the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration reports. The 2021 report indicated four key issues: a shortage of technical specialist staff; inadequate training for asylum interviews; low morale and high turnover of staff because of lack of career progression; and the removal of the 2019 standard service to decide 98% of straightforward cases within six months. Recommendations have been made; how many have been implemented?
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
I am afraid I do not have answers to the noble Lord’s questions. I will have to come back to him on them, if he will permit me to do so.
Amendment 134, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and signed by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and Amendment 149, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, bring us back to the question of the publication of the impact assessment for this Bill. I will take this opportunity to remind noble Lords that the equality impact assessment for the Bill was published on 10 May. Unfortunately, on the economic impact assessment, I can but reiterate what my noble friend Lord Murray has said on a number of occasions: namely, that it will be published in due course.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
On the subject of impact assessments, I am sure that my noble friend meant to ask where the child rights impact assessment is. It should have been available and shaped the decisions affecting children made during the Bill process, yet we still do not have a copy of it.
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
I think that that question has been asked and answered by my noble friend; I cannot update the House on that at the moment.
As my noble friend set out on Monday, we will provide an update to the House before the first day of Report.
Lord German (LD)
In talking about this matter, could the Minister address the issue of why the Cabinet Office has issued guidance which the department has clearly ignored? Is there a need for the Cabinet Office to give guidance to Ministers on how they should produce legislation? If so, why have the Government not followed that advice?
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, the answer lies in the words the Home Secretary used this morning in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee. She said:
“We will be publishing it in due course”.
I am sorry to repeat those words again. She added:
“The issue is that there are many unknown factors … upon which the Bill’s success is contingent … For example, … the delivery of our Rwanda agreement. We are currently in litigation and those timelines are out of our control. We need to conclude our litigation relating to our Rwanda agreement. Once we have a clear view of the operability of Rwanda confirmed by the courts, then we will be able to take a very firm view about the economic impact of this Bill. … I would also say that to my mind it is pretty obvious what the economic impact … will be. We will stop spending £3 billion a year on … asylum cost”.
The Bill
“will lead to the cessation of 45,000 people in hotels and £6 million a day. To my mind, those are savings that we cannot ignore”.
I am afraid that I am unable to improve on that.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
The Minister has just asserted that he cannot improve on those words. I put on the record, on behalf of His Majesty’s Official Opposition—other noble Lords can speak for themselves—that that is disgraceful.
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
I am sorry to upset the noble Lord opposite, but that is the best I can do.
Amendment 138, again put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, is similar to his earlier amendment on returns agreements. It anticipates the debate we will come to later today about action to tackle people smuggling. As I do not want to pre-empt my noble and learned friend’s response to later amendments, I will keep my remarks brief at this stage. Suffice it to say that I support the broad intent of this amendment—namely, the need to strengthen the cross-border law enforcement response to modern slavery and people trafficking—but you do not advance such co-operation by setting out in a public document the UK’s negotiating strategy to agree co-operation agreements with other countries.
Moreover, there are also existing established channels which the NCA and others use when working with their counterparts to tackle human trafficking. Where new bilaterals or multilaterals are needed, we will pursue these, but, as I have said, there are well-established mechanisms which already support cross-border co-operation in this area.
In answer to the noble Lord’s questions about specific figures, I am afraid that I do not have those to hand; I will make those available to him later.
Amendment 135, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, looks to the Government to publish an assessment of the likely impacts of the Bill on the use of contingency asylum accommodation and the costs associated with any necessary increase in the use of contingency asylum accommodation. The Home Office is committed to ending the expensive use of hotels for asylum seekers, costing nearly £7 million a day. We recognise the need to take urgent action and will look at all available options for looking at reducing the use of hotels, including alternative sites and vessels. Asylum seekers will be in basic, safe and secure accommodation appropriate for this purpose, while providing value for money for the taxpayer. We are working closely to listen to the local communities’ views and to reduce the impact of these sites, including through providing on-site security and financial support.
Amendment 139, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, effectively seeks to transfer responsibility for the UK asylum system—the national referral mechanism, which considers and provides safe and legal routes and other similar functions—to the FCDO. She acknowledged that this is a probing amendment and put her case. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, gave a rather better explanation than I will give, but I will attempt to explain the status quo. The Home Office is responsible for all aspects of control of the UK border. Managing and controlling legal and illegal migration into the UK, including processing asylum claims and the designation and operation of safe and legal routes, are part and parcel of this strategic function. Different parts of the system cannot, and should not, be considered and managed in isolation.
To take one example, as we have previously debated, our capacity to admit people to the UK through safe and legal routes is impacted by the level of illegal migration, so hiving off aspects of immigration policy and operations to a separate department is a recipe for confusion, disjointed policy-making and ineffective operations. The migration and borders system is highly complicated and this change would serve only to add unnecessary complexity. However, I assure the noble Baroness that the Home Office already works closely with other government departments, including the FCDO, on all cross-cutting matters to ensure that relative interests are considered accordingly during the development and implementation of immigration and asylum policy, and it will continue to do so.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
I am grateful to the Minister. He was quite right about this being a probing amendment to demonstrate the importance of the joined-upness of this being over here and that over there. I am equally grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, who is doing his old department a great service in dodging that particular bullet. The Minister talked about respective competencies and so on, so the Foreign Office should keep doing foreign affairs, including negotiating treaties, for example. Why did the Home Secretary and the Home Department negotiate the Rwanda pact, as opposed to leaving treaty negotiation to the Foreign Office? That came into my mind because the Minister mentioned the Rwanda agreement in the context of the impact assessment. Just to help him, I suggest that the impact assessment should be provided on the basis that the Government believe they will succeed in the litigation, so the impact assessment could be produced without delay on the predication that the Government are confident that their litigation will succeed.
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
I will certainly ensure that the noble Baroness’s points are noted in the department.
Finally, Amendment 139FD would place a duty on the Home Secretary to publish quarterly statistics on the Bill’s operation after it is enacted. Again, I have no issue with the basic premise underpinning the amendment. We already publish a raft of immigration statistics on a quarterly basis and I have no doubt that these regular publications will be augmented to report on what is happening under this Bill once it is commenced. We will consider carefully what data it is appropriate to record and publish as part of our implementation planning. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and his Front-Bench colleagues in the other place will not be slow to press the Government for the kind of data referenced in the amendment.
I and my ministerial colleagues, in particularly my indefatigable noble friend Lord Murray, have heard loud and clear the calls from around the Committee that the economic impact assessment for the Bill should be available to your Lordships before the start of Report. My noble friend has committed to updating the House before the first day of Report and I have already read out the Home Secretary’s comments from this morning. However, having had this opportunity to debate the issue again, together with the other issues addressed in these amendments, I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, on the question of a secret plan or no plan, the announcement that came out the other day—it was almost not an announcement —that the provision about two classes of asylum seekers in last year’s Bill had been ditched suggests that there is no plan. On the question of external management consultants, I am not a particular fan of management cons; there has not been a success story so far, has there? My noble friend Lord Scriven’s reference to the ICIBI report was absolutely on point: reports from the ICIBI, the National Audit Office and so on do not seem to lead to any change, so one has to try something.
I am left with a very big query: why can the impact assessment not cover variables? It should address the “what ifs”. As I am reminded, it is required to provide options, and over the years I have seen so many impact assessments that do provide options: “if such and such, then so and so”. The Home Office is well on the way to out-Rumsfelding Rumsfeld. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Ludford
“Asylum seekers’ right to workThe Secretary of State must make regulations providing that adults applying for asylum in the United Kingdom may apply to the Secretary of State for permission to take up employment if a decision at first instance has not been taken on the applicant’s asylum application within 3 months of the date on which it was recorded.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause would require the Secretary of State to make regulations enabling asylum seekers to work once they have been waiting for a decision on their claim for 3 months or more.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
I was pleased to hear the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, who added another sensible and rational Conservative Back-Bench voice to the earlier remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope. Good heavens, I have just remembered that they are both former MEP colleagues of mine—not from the same political group, obviously—and perhaps that is where they learned a sensible approach to policy.
At first blush, the inclusion of this amendment with others about the asylum backlog might not seem the right context, but the rationale of the grouping is that, with such a big asylum backlog, the impact of not allowing asylum seekers to work is all the greater; not only are more people left to stew, unable to support themselves, but for longer. Some people wait not only months but years—many years in some cases—for resolution of their asylum claims.
To pick up something I said earlier, all of these attempts—most of them from the opposition parties but not entirely; there was lots of contribution from the Cross Benches—are trying, perhaps in a piecemeal way, to construct a more sensible asylum policy than is in this Bill or last year’s Bill. Many of us think that the Bill is not designed to work and that the mess will, I fear, be dumped on the next Government—I see the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, smiling. The Bill is designed to get the Government through the next election.
Some of us are trying to suggest elements of a more sane asylum policy—the Government could, with all the information resources at their disposal, go out and put a case to the public for why you need more sensible things to manage asylum. That is where this amendment, on the ability of asylum seekers to work, fits in. I happen to have put in the amendment that it would be after three months, but I am not particularly insistent on the time—it could be six months. The point is that, after the initial processing, and people having the ability to focus on something else, it makes sense to put people to work and give them the opportunity to contribute.
At the moment, people seeking asylum in the UK are effectively prohibited from working, such that they are forced to subsist on asylum support of £5.66 a day while they wait for a decision on their asylum claim. A lot of the public assume that such people are able to access welfare benefits and are just sitting idly in clover, but that is far from the case. They can apply for permission to work only if they have waited for a decision for over 12 months, and only for jobs on the Government’s highly restrictive shortage occupation list. This has not always been the case: until 2002, people were able to apply for permission to work if they had waited for a decision for more than six months, and only in 2010 was the right to work restricted to jobs on the shortage occupation list. Today, almost seven in 10 people who are waiting for a decision on their asylum claim have been waiting for more than six months.
This forced inactivity is totally at odds with government policy, which, in most instances, aims to move people away from any kind of dependency and into work. It also increases the difficulty of integration for those who are eventually permitted to stay. I remember as an MEP dealing with a refugee from the Middle East. I never saw the end result of his case, but he came to me after about three and a half years. He was a doctor, but his skills were obviously deteriorating and he was losing status in his family because he could not support them, and generally he was in a very deteriorated state—mentally, physically and in his whole ability to live any kind of decent life. That is a personal and social tragedy.
Not being able to work increases the difficulty of integration for those eventually permitted to stay and puts an unnecessary cost on the public purse, even with £5.66 a day. The Lift The Ban coalition, which I applaud for its campaigning, estimates that reform of this policy could lead to a gain to the public purse of almost £200 million, about three-quarters of which would be from tax and national insurance contributions. A study by British Future found that 71% of the public supports the right to work after six months—my amendment says three months but, as I say, I am not hung up on that figure. One of the members of the Lift the Ban coalition is the CBI. I heard its new director-general, Rain Newton-Smith, on the Laura Kuenssberg Sunday morning programme the Sunday before last, calling for asylum seekers to be able to work, so this is not just the cause of those with a lefty-liberal axe to grind. Mind you, I look at the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, and I would not dare put him in that category. It is because it makes sense, and makes sense for employers.
We have seen articles in the Financial Times saying the same thing. An article in Mach said that it is
“a human disaster for the refugees involved, and it hurts the economic prosperity of the places where asylum seekers live while waiting to have their claims processed”.
Another article of just over a year ago, under the headline,
“Keeping asylum seekers in limbo is bad for everyone”,
said:
“‘Human capital’ is damaged when people are shut out of labour markets”.
The article also made the point that:
“The UK stands out internationally for its reluctance to let asylum seekers work. In the EU”—
I remember, because I worked on that directive, and there was a fight over it—
“the law specifies they must be allowed access to the labour market after a maximum of nine months”.
The UK, which could choose whether to opt in, refused to opt in to that directive, for reasons that we will come to. The article continued by pointing out that many countries have shorter periods, with Sweden giving immediate access to its labour market, while Portugal puts just a one-month stay on it.
The argument for reform is that it would ensure that many people seeking asylum who have skills and experience in keyworker roles and the desire to contribute are able to do so. I know that we sometimes overuse the phrase no-brainer, but I suggest that this is one of those.
Another point is made by Professor David Cantor, director of the Refugee Law Initiative at the University of London, who says that the Government’s approach seems designed to push refugees into illegality. He asks:
“Why would a refugee present herself in good faith to the authorities on arrival, or stay in touch afterwards, if there is no prospect of protection, only detention and lack of status? If released on bail, why not simply disappear into irregularity?”
The ability to work would keep people plugged into the system, paying tax and national insurance, and they would necessarily be in touch with the Home Office—they would also have an incentive. They would not disappear into the shadows, but come forward and lawfully await the determination of their claim. That would put more order and sense into the system.
In January, the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Blidworth, replied to the following oral question from the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard:
“Would the Minister agree that it would be better if those waiting in that internal queue were able to work—better for them, the Exchequer and the country?”—
very succinct. The noble Lord, Lord Murray, said:
“I am afraid that I must disagree with the noble Lord. It is clear that one of the major pull factors for people crossing the channel is that they hope to work in Britain”.—[Official Report, 17/1/23; col. 1700.]
This is replicating a debate that we had on the Nationality and Borders Bill last year. I should have mentioned it at the beginning, but in that debate, we were discussing an amendment led by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud. She told me earlier that she would have liked to be here to participate in the debate today because she continues, with admirable consistency, to support this cause, but she unfortunately had another commitment that she had to go to. However, I remember —and I am afraid that I am going to repeat—a citation that I made a year or so ago of the report from the Migration Advisory Committee. That is an independent committee that advises the Government. In a report of December 2021—some of us know this bit by heart—it took issue with the Home Office’s assertion about a pull factor. The report concluded:
“To the extent that the Home Office has robust evidence to support a link between the employment ban and a pull factor, they should of course make this evidence publicly available for scrutiny and review. That is how good policy is made”.
In other words, it is not made by making unsubstantiated assertions that every other commentator rebuts.
Indeed, the Home Office itself rebutted that assertion in a research report from September 2020 called Sovereign Borders: International Asylum Comparisons Report. It was produced by a unit called Home Office Analysis and Insight, and delightfully subtitled, Informing Decisions Through Evidence—which is what I think many of us would like the Home Office to do. One of its conclusions was:
“Economic rights do not act as a pull factor for asylum seekers. A review of the relationship between Right to Work and numbers of asylum applications concluded that no study reported a long-term correlation between labour market access and destination choice … Denied the right to work, many migrants may be forced to turn to clandestine work in highly insecure jobs in both the formal and informal labour markets to meet their basic needs”.
Perhaps it is not surprising that this report was labelled “Official Sensitive”, since if it got out into the public domain, it would be used to undercut the Government’s completely unsubstantiated assertions that the pull factor is the reason why they will not allow asylum seekers to work. Their own internal research, along with the independent Migration Advisory Committee, says: “You haven’t got a leg to stand on”.
There is no argument, except a gesture politics one, against allowing asylum seekers to work. Allowing people to work presses so many buttons in terms of their own personal well-being, the well-being of society and the well-being of the Exchequer. I hope that I will hear something positive from the Minister about this subject.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
My name is on Amendment 133, and I had planned to make a speech debunking our friend the pull factor. Unfortunately, my speech has just been made rather brilliantly by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. Let me try something slightly different on the Government: since we last debated this issue during the passage of the Nationality and Borders Act, the economic arguments for allowing asylum seekers the right to work have surely strengthened considerably. Our productivity problem is greater than it then was.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
My Lords, at an earlier stage in our debates on the Bill, I referred to the fact that I am a member of the Woolf Institute’s Commission on the Integration of Refugees, which is declared in the register of interests.
I and some other Members of both Houses of Parliament have had the advantage of going to a number of meetings where those with lived experience of applying for asylum and achieving it have told us about their experience. Unanimously, they say that being unable to work while there has been work obviously available for them has been the most dispiriting experience. It is the thing that has driven them—most of them young people with considerable skills, and some with professional and technological qualifications—near to total despair. It seems entirely unreasonable that they should not be able to work when, as my noble friend has said, there is clearly work available and the pull factor has been shown to be non-existent.
The other thing that people with lived experience have mentioned is the lack of availability of higher education in particular in some areas. I invite Ministers to take account of that issue too.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
My Lords, I support Amendment 133 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. My right reverend friend the Bishop of Chelmsford has added her name to it. She regrets that she cannot be here today; she is actually working with the Woolf Institute’s independent commission on refugee integration. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, and other noble Lords who have eloquently made the case for the amendment already.
As it stands, the Bill makes the case for a right to work for some asylum seekers more important than ever. Of course, it is a theme that has come up already. There is little prospect of potential removals being able to keep pace with the large population of asylum seekers who will be deemed inadmissible in the future, and currently we have a huge backlog. We risk the creation of a permanent underclass. Apart from the deleterious effects, that drives some of those people into the grey and black economies because they are not allowed to work openly.
In principle, there may be a grain of evidence on the pull factors but not very much at all, as has been noted already. Allowing a subset of asylum seekers to work does not undermine the duty on the Secretary of State to remove people or open up any path to citizenship or leave to remain. If the Government are able to deliver on their own timelines for processing people and deeming that they are refugees, or should be removed, not a single person will ever attain the right to work under the amendment. We ought to consider the amendment as nothing more than a failsafe aimed only at those who have been here far too long without the ability to support themselves easily and who wish to work and contribute to their own welfare, that of their local community and sometimes that of their family, back in the land they have come from, who are sometimes in semi-hiding.
I think of a friend of mine—I will share a bit of the story, but I do not want to identify them in any way—who has been given the right to work because their claim was not dealt with within 12 months. Because of the inefficiency of the system, it took nearly 12 months after that for them to be told they had the right to work. They are now working in the care sector, way below the level of qualifications and experience they have in their life; they could potentially offer huge amounts to this country. They fled because of persecution. What do they do with most of their money? They pay tax and so on, but they send most of it back to the home country to support their family who are in semi-hiding. It enables their dignity to feel able to support their family, as well as taking part in the life of the community and feeling they are contributing to a country that, they still hope, will welcome them.
This is entirely in line with Conservative economic arguments. It is in line with everything in the universal credit system about encouraging people into work and supporting themselves. Please, it is time to agree to this.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, I well remember a speech made on my first day in Parliament in 1970, on the Queen’s Speech. Sir John Nott was speaking; he was moving the Address, and I have never forgotten his remark that the real poor of the 20th century are those without hope. The same applies to the 21st century. We are dealing with a group of people who are pretty close to being without hope, and one thing that can give people a bit of hope is the opportunity to put something back into the community of which they wish to become a part. Therefore, it seems to me that the prohibition on working is consistent neither with Conservative principles, as the right reverend Prelate pointed out a few moments ago, nor with any principle of humanity. That is what we are really talking about today.
I hope there will be a positive response here because the other point, and the right reverend Prelate referred to this too, is that if they are not allowed to work, they will tend to drift into the black and grey economies, and perhaps become victims of modern slavery. We all know of those who man car washes and other things, who work under excruciatingly difficult circumstances and conditions, and who are effectively the creatures of those who employ them. Is that really what we want? I do not think we do; I do not think the nation wants that.
Of course, we all want to see sensible control of immigration. We all accept that the country cannot receive everybody for ever. I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, nodding vigorously at that point. But we are dealing with human beings and with people who deserve the opportunity to maintain their self-respect. This amendment is a little move in that direction, and I say to my noble friend who will reply that it would be entirely consistent with our Conservative principles of self-help and self-improvement to adopt an amendment along these lines, preferably a government amendment on Report.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
I will not make the speech I was going to, because all the points I planned to make have been made. In the early hours of yesterday morning, I criticised the Minister for not listening to what had been said. There is sometimes repetition because of a hope that it will eventually be heard.
We have heard such powerful arguments today, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, who has expressed the humanity behind this amendment. We have heard that giving the right to work is about human dignity, and we have heard about people with lived experience of that. They keep asking why they cannot do paid work and saying, “This is what we want to do”.
I am pleading to the Minister to put away whatever briefing he has been given, which talks about pull factors and so forth, and address the points that have been made in this debate.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, some very powerful remarks have been made in this short debate so far, some of which I will respond to in a moment. At the start of my contribution, it is important to emphasise an obvious statement of fact that bears repetition: the Bill is about dealing with immediate and urgent issues—the current situation in which we find ourselves and the practice of boats crossing the channel. This has to stop, as it is unacceptable not just on the basis of illegal entry into the country by that route being wrong in principle but because of the threat to life involved in those journeys.
Often, important and powerful points are made as if we can just deal with them quickly or with them and bigger issues at the same time. I support what the Government are trying to do here: they are trying to deal with an immediate issue. Through this legislation, I would like the Government to deal—as I think they are trying to do—with that problem, which is vexing not just the Government but the country at large. It is causing a widespread sense of concern and disquiet. Once that has been dealt with and we are on top of the issue, some of the topics raised in these debates will merit proper consideration and further thought.
The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, said in her opening remarks on this group—and I have heard her say it many times, as have other noble Lords who are raising objections to the Bill—that one of the problems with the Government’s approach to this legislation is that the assumption is being made that those claiming asylum must be accepted as asylum seekers and cannot be defined in any other way. Somehow, the fact that a lot of people are concerned by the legitimacy of that claim is not acceptable to many noble Lords. As I said at Second Reading—
Baroness Ludford (LD)
I hesitate to interrupt the noble Baroness as I will have a right of reply after the Minister, but I do not think I have said any such thing. I did not say that everybody who crosses the channel or comes in another way irregularly is entitled to refugee status. Obviously, they are defined as refugees under the refugee convention, but if they are seeking status in the UK, they have to go through a process and those who do not qualify should be removed—deported. That is what a rational, fair and proper asylum procedure looks like. Our objection to the Bill is its refusal to admit anybody to the determination process. I have never said, nor have any of my noble friends, that everybody who arrives should be allowed to stay, under whatever status. Of course you cannot run an asylum system in that way and we have never said that.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
What the noble Baroness does through many of her contributions is argue against anybody using the terminology “illegal immigrant” by virtue of the fact that they have come via that route and have claimed asylum. My understanding of what she is arguing is that their status as an asylum seeker should be accepted by virtue of the fact that they have made that claim.
I said at Second Reading that I based my remarks on conversations that I have had with people who work alongside immigrants in workplaces which are very different from the one we spend our time in. I said that if there was one way I could define the main message that they were seeking to make clear to me and to this House and to Parliament as we consider this legislation—I am quoting myself here—it was:
“Don’t assume or believe that everyone attempting to enter our country illegally is a genuine asylum seeker fleeing persecution”. —[Official Report, 10/5/23; col. 1814.]
I said that because I think that some of the arguments being made about being able to work are based on a desire for us to address that in a context where the noble Baroness’s perception of the situation is rather different from that of other people.
The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, invoked economic and productivity arguments in favour of allowing asylum seekers to work. Again, I can see where he is coming from and I do not in any way disagree with him or any noble Lord about the hard-working nature or enterprising disposition of people who come to this country. That is not something I would enter into any kind of discussion about. But I think that if we are going to raise economic arguments as a reason for the Government to accept these amendments and allow asylum seekers, at this current moment in time, to work in the way proposed, we must also remember that we have 5 million people on out-of-work benefits at a time when there is a record number of job vacancies.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
There are not 5 million people out of work on benefits. Universal credit applies to large numbers of people in work as well as out of work.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
The information I have is that there are 5 million people receiving out-of-work benefits. In my view, if they are qualifying for these, they are therefore out of work.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
I will give way in a moment; let me just finish the point I am trying to make. An argument on economic and productivity grounds is not as compelling as some noble Lords are seeking to make it, given that, as I said, a large proportion of our current population are not in work but could be, and are in receipt of out-of-work benefits. I give way to the noble Baroness.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
I appreciate that. Can the noble Baroness tell us what proportion of those people are not in work because of chronic sickness, disabilities that may get in the way of being in work, and caring responsibilities?
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
I cannot, and I am not here to get into a detailed discussion about that. I am simply trying to make this point. Noble Lords are raising the issue of productivity and the economy as a justification for accepting this right now in the Bill. As I said to the Committee earlier, there is some value and legitimacy, in principle, to some of the arguments being made. For instance, I would support the right reverend Prelate’s argument about ensuring that people who come to this country and are waiting for their application to be processed are able to make their contribution. However, we need to get to a position where the current rate of asylum seekers in the system is not that with which we are currently dealing.
Some noble Lords are arguing to be able to do both at the same time. Of course, I absolutely agree that the Home Office must be much better than it currently is at processing these things. I am not disagreeing with any of this. Unlike those noble Lords, however, I am saying that, for that kind of change to be accepted by the country at large, we have to take steps to get there. If you look at the bigger issue of immigration, part of what we are trying to do is to create a system that is acceptable and works for the country as a whole, and that everybody can have confidence in, so that they can feel much more in line with what the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, would like everyone to feel and believe regarding the changes she wishes to see. We cannot do it all at the same time.
That is what I am trying to do. I am not trying to argue about pull or push factors; just that the Bill is about an immediate issue that the Government are rightly trying to respond to—
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
I will finish my point and then I will give way. I think that some of the matters that noble Lords are advancing should not be dealt with at this time. I give way to the noble Lord.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
I am extremely grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. I wonder whether she will answer the next question with a yes or no, because I am confused by some of the things I have heard from her. If a job is available and an asylum seeker is the only person available who can realistically fill it, does she agree that, after three months or so, the asylum seeker should be allowed to take that job?
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
At the moment, if somebody is still awaiting a decision on their asylum status or their status as a citizen or resident of the country, they are not eligible for employment—no.
Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, I was not here at the start of the debate, so I am embarrassed to stand up and will be extremely brief. I just want to support very strongly this amendment. I have spoken over the years about just how ludicrous it is that we have asylum seekers here who cannot work, however long the Home Office takes to consider their application. This is an incredibly important amendment. I support the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, on the basis that surely this is one amendment that the Government should be able to support, and it will be in everybody’s interests if the Minister is able to do that.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
Surely noble Lords can speak only if they have been present throughout the debate from the very beginning.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
The noble Lord is absolutely right—that is correct.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
The noble Lord may be referring to my having to rush out urgently—I needed to get a glass of water. I shall catch up with the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, which I missed with great regret, but I was back for the next one.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
I do not want to be unkind, but the rest of us manage to persuade the door- keepers to bring us glasses of water.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
May I? Forgive me, I am normally somebody who is a stickler for us keeping to the Companion—absolutely, for sure. However, if the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, can contribute to this debate having not even been here at the beginning, when my noble friend was here at the beginning and nipped out to get a glass of water, I think we can hear from my noble friend. If the noble Lord is minded to object, I would hope he would have objected to his noble colleague speaking.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for raising this interesting point and for her proposed Amendment 133. The purpose of the Bill is to prevent and deter illegal migration, and it provides for swift removal, with very few exceptions. Therefore, I am not quite sure why a new clause after Clause 60 is necessary, particularly because, in respect of applications for work from asylum seekers who are already having their asylum claims processed, as far as I know—I am subject to correction here—those are covered under the 2016 Immigration Rules. Part 11B sets out the policy criteria, which can be found in paragraphs 360A, B and C.
I will also comment on various noble Lords’ claims about the potential contribution that asylum seekers can make to the economy. Yes, there may indeed be contributions which can be made, but perhaps we should also consider the costs, the compliance costs and the fact that the UK is trying to move to a high-skills economy, where people with higher skills or where there is a need already can apply to work here under the normal rules. I cannot see why we need this amendment to the Bill.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
I had not intended to say anything about this amendment, but I will say a couple of things. First, those of us who have met a number of asylum seekers have been very impressed by the high level of skills and enthusiasm for work that they exhibit. Secondly, in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, I understand the point that she is making about the objective of the Bill, but it has a very long Long Title and I doubt my noble friend would have been able to table her amendment had the clerks not agreed that it was in order.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
Excuse me? Somebody said, “For God’s sake”. I do not know who that was. Okay.
I am not trying to suggest to the Committee that the amendment is somehow outside of scope and therefore inadmissible—that is not my argument at all. If you want to describe the point I am making as political, it is perfectly legitimate to do that. However, I am trying to make the case, in terms of the political aims of the Bill, that I can see that it would be unwise to try to introduce something that the noble Baroness is seeking to do in this legislation—so I was not in any way arguing that.
To the noble Baroness’s other points about the merits of anybody who is claiming asylum in terms of their capabilities, I do not question that either. That is not my point. My point is that I want a migration system that has the confidence of everybody in this country, and I think that we are going to have to do it in stages.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, I am sorry if the noble Baroness misunderstood my first comment. It was in response to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
My Lords, I hope that the noble Baroness will not mind my using her as an excuse but, on reflection, I think that I was unkind to the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, and I wish to apologise to the House.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, shall I move on to Amendment 150? In fact, it takes us back to the previous group; I have no idea why it comes into this group. It would provide that the Act should not come into force until at least 28 days—I propose—after the Secretary of State has published a statement confirming the number of persons who, for a period of six months or more, have been awaiting final determination of their claim for asylum; and that, for not less than six months, that number has been not more than 20,000.
That may be a little circular and rambling but, basically, it proposes that we should get to a steady state in dealing with asylum applications. The periods may not be ones that noble Lords agree with, but I propose a figure of 20,000 people, which is not a negligible number of people. This amendment seeks to be realistic and provide a bit of—to our minds—common sense to the context of what we are debating.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, and my noble friend Lord Paddick—who probably had no option but to sign it. This is a serious amendment that follows on from the serious points made about the operations of the Home Office. It is the backlog that is the problem. So much of this debate has suggested, implicitly or explicitly, that the position that we are in is somehow the fault of those who are seeking asylum, which is not an easy thing to take on.
Baroness Neuberger (CB)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 150, to which I have added my name, and indeed to all the amendments in this group—I will be very brief.
Of course it is right that we should get the backlog down, and of course it is right that we should have a steady state, if you like, and be able to operate an asylum system that is humane, speedy and efficient. It is none of those things at present and we do not show any great signs of getting there any time soon. That is one reason why we suggest that the provisions of this Bill should not come into force until that has been achieved.
I am, along with my noble friend Lord Carlile, a member of the Woolf Institute’s Commission on the Integration of Refugees. I am also Rabbi Emerita of the West London Synagogue, which runs a drop-in for asylum seekers on a regular basis and has done for more than 10 years. I also chair a small family charity that provides scholarships for young asylum seekers to access education, which they otherwise could not do because they cannot get student loans. The reason I raise those things is that they mean that I talk to quite a lot of asylum seekers, for a variety of different reasons. I have never yet met an asylum seeker who has managed to get to this country who does not want to work or is not willing to work. Most of them are in fact very talented; the students we support are unbelievably talented and have been through absolute hell, but nevertheless show incredible determination and eventually get serious professional qualifications and very good degrees.
It seems to me that what we need to do in this House is look seriously at what we want to achieve by an asylum system. Surely we want to achieve the allowing in of those who are genuinely in fear of persecution, as well as all the other reasons that we allow asylum seekers in, and create a refugee system. In so doing, however, we want to treat people humanely, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said; his was a very impressive speech. We want to have coming here people who want to be here and make a contribution. We need to think quite hard about what we are trying to do. There is no pull factor, really—it just is not evidenced—but there is a very large number of desperate people seeking asylum in this country. Those who are genuine and can prove it should be treated humanely, accepted and allowed to work even if their full refugee status has not yet been achieved.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I rise to speak briefly only to Amendment 133, to which I would have attached my name had there been space. In the interests of time, I will overlook the other amendments in this group.
I do not know how many noble Lords took the opportunity of our lunch break to join the British Red Cross, which was holding an event with its VOICES Network downstairs. It was launching an excellent report that I commend to your Lordships’ House, We Want to be Strong, But We Don’t Have the Chance: Women’s Experiences of Seeking Asylum in the UK. A large number of the contributors to that report were at the event. It is of particular relevance to Amendment 133 that one of the first things one of them, a very senior medical professional—again, like the right reverend Prelate, I am going to anonymise this as much as I can to make sure that I do not identify anybody—said to me was, “I want to work”; we know how much need we have for her professional skills. Another, a business master’s graduate, also said to me that they wanted to work. These are people who are experts by experience, and that is one of the first things they say when they have an opportunity to speak to a politician.
I also want to make a point that no one else has made; I saw the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, earlier so he may have made this point already but I will make it in his place. In responding to the Migration Advisory Committee’s call for evidence in relation to shortage occupations in the UK, the Welsh Government stressed that asylum seekers should be allowed to work. Their submission said that
“asylum seekers bring with them a wealth of experience, skills and knowledge, and as such it is a missed opportunity to not allow asylum seekers to work. We urge the UK Government to reconsider its decision”
on this issue.
We have been talking in the abstract a lot so I want to draw on one other account—a piece of practical evidence of actual individuals. We have heard a lot about the housing of asylum seekers in hotels and, I am afraid, seen a great deal of horrific attempts to stir up xenophobia and local concern about that. However, I want to tell the story of the 100-plus asylum seekers who have been housed in a hotel in Thatcham in West Berkshire for up to a year. They started a litter-picking group, and then a broader volunteering group. Each charity shop in Newbury and Thatcham now has one or two asylum seekers there regularly to help out. They are a great example of people contributing despite our attempts to stop them doing so; indeed, they have won a local award recognising the contribution of their volunteering.
This is particularly relevant to Amendment 133 when we look at what those asylum seekers who have been litter picking and volunteering in charity shops are. They are doctors, teachers and engineers. They are making a wonderful contribution but surely it would make more sense to allow them to work.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My Lords, I want to speak briefly to the two amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Coaker. The new clause proposed in Amendment 139FA
“requires the Home Secretary to establish a process to fast-track asylum claims from safe countries”,
while the proposed new clause in Amendment 139FC
“seeks to require regular reports from the Secretary of State on progress toward eliminating the current backlog of asylum cases”.
As of March, there were 172,758 asylum seekers in the UK waiting an initial decision on their case, with 128,812—that is 75%—waiting longer than six months. The backlog is so extreme that the Government have tried to quietly drop a key measure of the Nationality and Borders Act to speed up 55,000 people who have arrived over the past year.
The purpose of these two amendments is first to re-establish, if you like, the fast-tracking so that the people who are very likely to succeed in their appeals are dealt with as quickly as possible and, secondly, to monitor the situation to see how it is progressing. In the press I read that Robert Jenrick, the Immigration Minister, said he believes that reducing the backlog would increase the pull factor for those seeking to apply for asylum. Can the Minister confirm whether the Government’s view is that by decreasing the backlog you are increasing the pull factor? People taking part in today’s debate would be very sceptical of that, but I wonder whether the Minister can confirm that that is indeed the Government’s view.
We have had a wide-ranging debate, and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, that the debate has gone far wider than the Bill and has been focusing on right to work and issues such as that, but what I seek to do in this brief contribution is to talk specifically to the amendments in my noble friend’s name, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, we support all the amendments in this group. On Amendment 133 in the name of my noble friend Lady Ludford, it makes complete sense to ensure that asylum seekers are not a burden on taxpayers as soon as practicable. If the Government do not agree, perhaps they should ensure that claims are decided within the three or six months suggested in the amendment.
As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham says, a lot of asylum seekers who are granted permission to work send money back home, as it were. Surely that helps to ensure that people stay in the country where they are and do not add to the problem of asylum seekers.
On Amendment 150, there is no point in creating an even greater backlog until the Government have addressed the existing one.
On the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, fast-tracking claims from countries with high rates of success makes complete sense and any ongoing impact assessment should include the impact of the Act on the backlog.
The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, made a significant contribution and I hope she does not mind me responding to it. I think she is absolutely right that we have to bear in mind how all this is viewed by members of the British public, but we have already heard one noble Lord— I cannot remember who it was—saying that 77% of the public support allowing asylum seekers to work.
On the issue that the noble Baroness raised around job vacancies versus UK citizens who are jobless, the adult social care system cannot attract British workers, to the extent that the Government allow special provision for foreign workers to come in and fill those vacancies. The agriculture sector cannot attract British workers—for example, seasonal workers to pick crops—and the Government make special provision to allow foreign workers to come into the country. I do not know whether the figure that the noble Baroness quotes of 5 million is right, but the Government allow foreign workers to come in and do those jobs. Why can asylum seekers not do those jobs while they wait for their application to be decided by the Government?
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
I will let my noble friend the Minister respond on behalf of the Government to the noble Lord’s point but, as he was responding to what I had argued, I have to say that what he has just described makes my point, if I may be so bold.
I argue that, yes, there may be schemes that are authorised for the recruitment of people from outside the UK for specific jobs, but that does not justify that we make those who arrive outside those schemes eligible for work. That would make crossing the channel a route that is seen as attractive for those who might not want to come and do those jobs in particular but certainly want to come here for economic reasons.
As far as the specific working environments that the noble Lord talks about, if the problem in those industries is that wages are insufficient, whether it is in the care sector or the food industry, then I argue very much that the employers need to address the wage issues to encourage more people to apply, if that is part of the barrier to people going to work in them in the first place.
Lord Paddick (LD)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness. I am not sure whether she heard the evidence provided by my noble friend Lady Ludford from the Home Office report, which said that providing work was not a pull factor in the way that the noble Baroness has suggested.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
My Lords, the amendments in this group all relate in one way or another to the operation of the asylum system. They variously seek to enable asylum seekers to work after three months and to reduce the backlog of asylum claims, an objective which we all share. Let me address each of these issues in turn.
Amendment 133, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, would enable asylum seekers to seek employment after three months. Asylum seekers are allowed to work in the UK if their claim has been outstanding for 12 months or more, through no fault of their own. Those permitted to work are restricted to jobs on the shortage occupation list which, in turn, is based on expert advice from the independent Migration Advisory Committee, about which we heard during the debate. The list comprises skilled jobs where there is an identified shortage which it is sensible to fill, at least in part, through immigration.
It is important that our policy approach distinguishes between those who need protection and those seeking to work here, who can apply for a work visa under the Immigration Rules. Asylum seekers do not need to make perilous journeys to seek employment in the United Kingdom. There are various safe and legal routes for those seeking to work in the UK under the points-based system. Amendment 133 would fundamentally undermine our immigration framework. Instead of people applying to work in the UK through the proper channels, this amendment would simply encourage them to come to the UK illegally or overstay on a visitor’s or student visa, and then claim asylum in the knowledge that they would be able to work after three months.
Lord Scriven (LD)
The Minister’s assertion needs evidence. Sweden allows asylum seekers to work immediately, Portugal after one month, Germany after three months and Belgium after four months. Per 10,000 people per capita, there is no outlier in those countries with the rest of Europe, so what evidence does the Minister have that allowing people to work after three months is a pull factor, when the evidence in other countries in Europe shows significantly that it is not?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I do not agree that the evidence from the rest of Europe is any indicator of what might drive people across the channel in small boats. It stands to reason that, if people want to come to the UK to work, they may well seek to circumvent our asylum system by crossing the boats in small channels—I mean crossing the channel in small boats, rather than crossing the small channel in big boats. It therefore clearly stands to reason that it is sensible to refuse asylum seekers the right to work unless there is a delay of 12 months which is not the fault of that individual. It cannot be gainsaid that simply because we cannot produce evidence of what is going on in the mind of someone seeking asylum there is no reason to adopt the policy. I simply do not accept the logic of the noble Lord’s proposition.
My noble friend Lady Stowell made some pertinent points about the UK employment market that go to the difficulties posed by the amendment. I also very much welcomed the thoughtful speech by my noble friend Lady Lawlor. It is for all these reasons that the Government cannot support this amendment, and certainly not in this Bill, focused as it is on stopping the boats.
Amendments 139FA, 139FC and 150 all concern the current asylum backlog. We can all agree on one thing: namely, the need to process asylum claims efficiently and effectively, so that robust decisions are taken in a timely manner. We do not need new legislation to achieve this, and certainly not Amendment 150, which, quite inappropriately, seeks to tie the commencement of the Bill, which is to deal with the small boat crossings, to a reduction in the asylum backlog.
That said, I will set out the steps we are taking to reduce the current backlog. As noble Lords will know, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister pledged to clear the backlog of 92,601 initial asylum decisions relating to claims made before 28 June 2022, or legacy claims, by the end of 2023. We are making good progress. We have reduced the initial decision legacy asylum backlog by 17,000 in the past five months. We know there is more to do to make sure that asylum seekers do not spend months or years living in the UK, at vast expense to the taxpayer, waiting for a decision. That is why our commitment to tackle the backlog has focused on people who have sat in the backlog for the longest, often living in expensive hotels, while we process their case.
One way in which we will achieve that is via the streamlined asylum process which is centred around accelerating the processing of manifestly well-founded asylum claims. Another way in which we will achieve this is by grouping asylum claims by cohort. This means grouping asylum claimants and prioritising claims based on, for example, the type or volume of claims from a particular nationality, grant rate or compliance rate, and those on asylum support rate. This process means to conclude more efficiently outstanding asylum claims made before 28 June 2022 by the end of the year. This will allow decisions to be assessed in a more efficient manner. We have already doubled our decision-makers over the past two years, and we are continuing to recruit more. This will take our headcount of the expected number of decision-makers to 1,800 by this summer and 2,500 by September 2023.
Lord Cormack (Con)
I am sorry to interrupt, but my noble friend referred to 17,000 claims having been processed. How many have been given permission to stay?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I do not have that figure to hand, but I will find out and write to my noble friend.
By tackling the backlog and processing asylum claims in a timely manner, we will address the issues raised by many noble Lords in relation to Amendment 133. I am sure we will return to these issues in the coming weeks and months, but for now I invite the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful for the Minister’s response, although I feel that he slightly demolished his own argument. He claims that the asylum system and working should be insulated from each other. The logic of that is that no asylum seeker would ever be allowed to work, yet government policy has the extremely unsatisfactory rule that they can apply after 12 months to a restricted list. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham said that the case that he knows of took another 12 months to get permission—yet more bureaucracy. All we ever get from the Home Office is more bureaucracy. The Minister cannot have his cake and eat it. If he does not think that asylum seekers should ever work, why does that government policy exist at the moment? It is very unsatisfactory.
Noble Lords have made some very good points. Like others, I much appreciated the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, who referred to “Conservative” principles of self-help and self-improvement. I would say that they are not uniquely Conservative, but they are also Conservative. That is why this policy makes sense to most people from all directions—on all Benches. It would help us have an orderly and well-run asylum system, as well as giving people the dignity and hope that have been mentioned.
I am afraid that I completely disagree with almost everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said. The policy would not encourage people to disappear. By keeping people plugged into the system, and assuming that they are paying tax and national insurance and are known to the authorities—it would help if we had labour market inspectors—it would be easier to keep track of them. If they do not succeed with their asylum claim, they should be removed from the country. I am trying not to get even more grumpy than I am after many days on this Bill—normally I am a completely ungrumpy person—but the suggestion that I, or anyone else on these Benches, want some kind of free-for-all where anybody can come, there are no borders or regulations and so on, is completely untrue. I totally deny that suggestion; indeed, I rather resent it. I am sorry to say that I found the noble Baroness’s contribution valiant but unconvincing.
It is certainly true that I object to the term “illegal” being used to describe a person. I have long held that view. I do not believe that any person is illegal. You can say, if you must, that they have arrived by illegal routes, but the refugee convention, which, unlike some people, I rather admire, talks about “irregular” arrival because people are allowed to arrive in a country to claim asylum—so they have not made illegal entry either. It is irregular but not illegal. I am a bit of a stickler for terminology, and I stick to that of the refugee convention. I am not sure whether I have to apologise for that, but I do not think so.
I have probably said everything that I can. I think the Government are wrong. I hope a future Government will revisit this issue—not in the manner of the Government of 20 years ago, who withdrew asylum seekers’ right to work—and implement the sense of this kind of provision. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
“People smuggling(1) Not less than six months before the other provisions of this Act come into force, the Secretary of State must lay before each House of Parliament a report regarding agreements and discussions with the governments and authorities of other countries, including those bordering the English Channel and the North Sea, concerning the steps taken or agreed or proposed to prevent or deter a person from—(a) charging refugees for assistance or purported assistance in travelling to or entering the United Kingdom;(b) endangering the safety of refugees travelling to the United Kingdom.(2) The report must focus on steps other than the provisions of this Act.(3) This section comes into force on the day on which this Act is passed.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause requires the Secretary of State to publish a report on the actions that are being taken to tackle people smugglers.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 136 is one of a series of amendments we have tabled on the criteria that should be met before the Bill—an Act by then—comes into force. Amendment 136 is about people smuggling, though the term is not used; about
“(a) charging refugees for assistance or purported assistance in travelling to or entering the United Kingdom; (b) endangering the safety of refugees”.
The answer to most questions, of course, is to stop the boats. I wondered during the debate on the previous group whether “stop the boats” actually features as a phrase in the Bill. I do not think it does, but it seems to be the answer to everything.
People smuggling, the criminal activity which is so closely related to small boats and which the Bill purports to deal with, led to subsection (2) of the proposed new clause: the steps that are included in the Bill are not, in our view, an answer to the problem. I find it very distressing that, with such a serious situation, we have a Bill that implicitly blames victims, and we hear very little other than platitudes about tackling the criminals. We know, of course, that people fleeing by boat, endangering their lives and losing their lives, is not unique to the channel and the North Sea, which are referred to in the amendment. Geographically, we are most closely affected by those, but a lot of lives have been lost by people fleeing from countries bordering the Mediterranean and further afield.
My name is attached to Amendment 139F in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. As she is not here, I will speak to it very briefly, because I think it would be a pity if there was no response from the Government, and I have no doubt that the Minister has a response—he is nodding. The noble Baroness’s proposal, supported by the noble Lords, Lord Alton of Liverpool and Lord Carlile of Berriew, as well as by me, is that
“Where a person meets the … conditions in Section 2”—
which is the fulcrum, if you like, of the Bill; and I like the way it is phrased, rather than “meets the criteria”—
“and is suspected of involvement in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, the Secretary of State is required as soon as reasonably practicable … to refer the person to relevant authorities in the UK for investigation and possible prosecution; … to cooperate with authorities in other safe countries and international tribunals who may be investigating the person”.
I look forward to the Government’s views on that and beg to move Amendment 136.
Lord Swire (Con)
My Lords, a more sensitive soul might be somewhat disheartened, having sat here for a large part of this debate only for the entire Chamber to empty at the very thought of me saying anything at all, but I will do my best. Perhaps I am getting an early reputation in this place already.
I will speak to the amendment in my name and those of my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier and my noble friend Lord Soames of Fletching, who unfortunately is unable to be with us but would have liked to have taken part in this debate had he been able to. There has been a lot of discussion about the Bill’s scope, and I was quite pleased to get this amendment through the Table Office, because it is slightly wide of what the Government are debating, which is stopping the boats. The Bill is about illegal immigration, and it is my view that a Government have an absolute duty to secure their own borders and to know who is coming into the country, who is in the country and who is leaving the country at any time. It seems extraordinary that there is still no passport control when people leave this country, as well as when they come into it. Only by knowing how many people there currently are in the United Kingdom can we have a proper, dispassionate and, to use that word, humane debate about what size we are prepared to let our population rise to.
The problem, of course, is with the official statistics—or rather the lack of them. The Government’s publication, Irregular migration to the UK, year ending March 2023, states:
“The statistics presented here relate to the number of people recorded being detected on, or shortly after, arrival to the UK on various routes. They do not provide an indication of the total number of people currently in the UK who have entered the UK via irregular routes or the number of irregular migrants present in the UK. It is not possible to know the exact size of the irregular population currently resident in the UK, nor the total number of people who enter the UK irregularly”.
The official population of the United Kingdom in 2023 is recorded as being just under 68 million, which represents a steady year-on-year increase. Some would have the real population of this country at least 1 million more. Then there is what I call the supermarket theory, which says that the real population of this country is many millions more. I have even read one report alleging that the real population of this country is not 68 million but nearer to 80 million. Of course, if you look on Twitter, you need not necessarily believe all those conspiracies.
My point is not to quibble about the size but to demand that the Government and their various agencies do more to find out the real population of this country. If the figure is 1 million or 2 million in excess of the published data, that, by definition, must mean that hundreds of thousands of people are living outside the system. How can they access healthcare and schools? What about national insurance contributions? What happens to them in old age? If they are outside the system, they are more vulnerable to low wages, abuse, poor housing, inadequate medicine and all the things that we take for granted. They are the losers, but so are we, as by definition they are not paying any tax, for TV licences or anything that people even on low incomes are obliged to pay. They are not participants in society; they are existing on the margins of it.
As it happens, I have no particular view on what should happen to those who have already settled here illegally. I am sympathetic to some sort of amnesty, but I am equally sympathetic to those who feel a sense of injustice that these people have in some way cheated the system—jumped the queue, if you like—and that they should retrospectively be subjected to the same rules on immigration as those who have sought to come after them. However, many of these illegal immigrants will be in low-paid and insecure jobs. Many businesses, certainly those in the hospitality sector, need these people. Indeed, because of Covid and, dare I say it, Brexit there is a critical shortage.
Equally, we must concede that many of those jobs could be filled by British people. I use that term to describe people who are here legally, regardless of whether they were born here or not. We need to be honest with one another. Of course, the argument goes that we need more immigrants to help grow the economy, but, equally, we should recognise and admit that the more people we have, the more schools we will need to open, the more hospitals we will need to build, the more investment in infrastructure we will need, and, critically and perhaps most contentiously of all, the more housing we will need to build. When we have done all that, and the economy has expanded, we will presumably need more immigrants to staff the increased size of our public services. That may well be acceptable, even desirable, but I believe that the British people should have the right to have a say on this. It is not just up to the politicians—or, indeed, if I might say so, the Church—to decide on the size of the population of this country.
I return to my original point. We cannot have an informed debate about this until the Government come to the table and lay before Parliament an annual estimate of the number of illegal immigrants already in this country. My noble friend the Minister will no doubt argue that this information is published, yet it is not published in a clear, unambiguous document—but it must be. Ministers and many others will ask, “If these people have been illegally operating in this country in the black or grey economy, how can we possibly find out who or where they are?” Perhaps identity cards are the answer. I am not convinced by that, but in this information-gathering world, where our data is increasingly harvested, there must be ways. Just look at the NHS app, which most of us signed up to during Covid.
Another approach—I am grateful to Migration Watch for suggesting this—would be that of residual methodology, which allows us to estimate the size of the illegal immigrant population by comparing a demographic estimate of the number of immigrants residing legally in the country with the total number of immigrants as measured by a survey. The difference is assumed to be the number of illegal immigrants in the survey, a number that later is adjusted for omissions from the survey.
I now turn to the second part of the amendment, which covers the issue of foreign national offenders held in our prisons. I am very aware of this because, when I was a Minister in the David Cameron Administration, we were all given countries to be responsible for. We were summoned regularly to No. 10, as he was trying to drive down the number of foreign national offenders and get them back to their countries of origin. It was an astonishingly difficult thing to do, not least because of the interventions of the legal teams who were trying to stop them having to go back. Further difficulties were from some countries which destroyed all the information about them, so it was very difficult to ascertain as to where they had come from and who they were. It is a difficult task, but it is an achievable one.
In March of this year, I asked a number of questions of the Home Office, which I shall not repeat now, on the number of foreign national offenders and how many we had repatriated. From that, it would seem that some 12% of the current total prison population of England and Wales—10,148 people—fall into that category. The cost alone of that is huge. The average cost of a prison place in England and Wales was £46,696 in 2021-22, so we are spending about half a billion pounds a year, by my very ropey maths, on housing these foreign national offenders. The Home Office must get a grip; we want more action and enforcement and fewer excuses as to why it is impossible to send those foreign national offenders home.
The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who is not now in his place, rather unfairly described the desire from the Government to do something about immigration as an attempt to address the demands of the red wall—non-traditional Tory areas of the country which voted overwhelmingly for this Conservative Government in the last election. That is not a fair accusation; I think that the majority of people in this country want a humane and fair system, and one that actually works and is seen to work. Between 70% and 80% of the British public support measures aimed at deterring illegal immigrants from remaining in the United Kingdom. The truth of the matter is that none of us knows the scale of illegal migration because no official estimate has been published since 2005.
I very much hope that the Government will support this amendment, as I hope that His Majesty’s loyal Opposition will. If they do not, they will need to explain why not. At its simplest, the amendment is to encourage the Government to find out, before we agree on the future immigration policy, how many illegal immigrants and foreign national offenders are in this country, and to publish that data clearly and unambiguously on an annual basis.
Lord Garnier (Con)
My Lords, I follow my noble friend since I too am a signatory of this amendment. I thank him for what he said. I will not take up much of the Committee’s time in supporting him.
Essentially, we are inviting the Government to find out the evidence and bring an end to government by guesswork, particularly within this area of public policy. Government by guesswork creates all sorts of frustrations and unwittingly encourages some of the less humane members of our population to behave badly and, because of that guesswork, to hold some utterly unattractive views. I entirely agree with my noble friend about the need for a humane and organised immigration policy. Until we have the numbers, the Government can do nothing other than stick their finger in the wind and say that it is “probably this” or “probably that”. That is government by guesswork, and it is time that it stopped.
I will stop now, to save the ears of noble Lords and the patience of my noble friend the Minister. Having heard my speech at Second Reading, he may never want to hear from me again, particularly on this interesting Bill. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Swire and hope that the Government listen carefully to him. I hope that others in the Committee will come behind us and speak in favour of what my noble friend asks for.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
My Lords, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Swire, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, that I have for months been calling for more statistics from the Government and for the publication of the impact assessment. They join me in calling on their noble friends on the Front Bench to publish the impact assessment.
I would be delighted if we knew how many people the Government were detaining and removing. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, made the point that numerous noble Lords have made all the way through: we have no statistics. Clearly, the Government have them and will not tell us them. I suspect that is because they are embarrassed or worried, or because it would set up some sort of mechanism by which they could be judged on whether they have succeeded or failed. We have all said it would be helpful to publish the number of people we are detaining, whom the Government regard as illegal, and the number we are removing. We have not demanded it for a year after the passing of the Bill. That would be helpful, but we are demanding to know now what the assumptions are behind the planning within the Bill.
Perhaps, just to help the noble Lord, Lord Swire, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, and the rest of us, the Minister could tell us now what assumptions the Government are working towards as to the number of people they expect to detain under the Bill and the number they expect to remove. That would make that part of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Swire, unnecessary, and it would help our deliberations.
There is one further thing that would be helpful on the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Swire. Before we had the cut-off date of 7 March 2023, how many people had failed their asylum application and were at that time waiting to be deported? It would be interesting to know how successful the Government’s policies had been up to that point in assessing whether people needed to be detained.
I particularly wanted to say a couple of things. I will leave Amendment 137; those debates about compatibility with various international conventions are well made, and we will return to them. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for signing and supporting that amendment. I do not want that to be seen as somehow meaning that they are not important. I hope the Minister will respond to the amendment, but the compatibility of the Bill with various international conventions has been debated all the way through Committee and I do not want to repeat those debates now. That is not to be taken to mean that those debates are not important; they are essential and will no doubt be returned to on Report.
I will focus particularly on Amendment 139FB in my name, which relates to our ability to tackle the gangs. There has been a lot of emphasis on victims, the potential number of asylum seekers and so on. These are government statistics. I repeat what I said earlier: the number of convictions for people-smuggling gangs has reduced considerably, has it not? Can the Minister give us an up-to-date figure on the number of smuggling gangs and a helpful comparison? Can he try to do us a favour by comparing with a year that gives a true reflection, rather than picking a year that gives a good percentage outcome? That would be helpful, because it is in all our interests to know exactly what is going on. Can he confirm my figure that over the last 12 months, the criminal smuggling gangs have made £180 million, and can he therefore tell us why so few people in smuggling gangs have been convicted?
As I understand it, there is some debate about whether the number of officers, officials and National Crime Agency staff working on this has gone up or down. Can we have an indication of the number of them involved in tackling this? My amendment deals with the National Crime Agency. Can the Government confirm that it is the law enforcement agency that is leading all this work? What other agencies, both national and international, are working to tackle the criminal gangs? My amendment says that to tackle organised immigration crime across the channel, there is a need to maintain a specific unit. Is a specific unit already in existence, making my amendment unnecessary? If not, would that help?
Essentially Amendment 139FB is a probing amendment to try to understand the current law enforcement activity with respect to tackling this heinous crime, from a national perspective but also an international one. I join the noble Lord, Lord Swire, in demanding from his Government some statistics, please.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
I will speak briefly to Amendment 137, which I was pleased to co-sign, as the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said. The amendment raises some important points in referencing Articles 524 and 763 of the trade and co-operation agreement.
Article 524, in the context of part 3 of the agreement on
“law enforcement and judicial cooperation in criminal matters”,
is predicated on respect for fundamental rights and legal principles, as reflected in the European Convention on Human Rights in particular. That is one of the reasons. One would expect the Government to be very careful about any undermining of the UK’s commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights in case they, for example, undermined this part of the TCA.
Indeed, Article 763, which underpins the whole of the TCA—not just the law enforcement and co-operation part—says that
“the Parties reaffirm their respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international human rights treaties to which they are parties”.
That must also cover the ECHR. So, basically, our co-operation with the EU in the trade and co-operation agreement depends on our commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights. So it is not just important in the context of the Bill and generally but it is also a factor in the EU regarding us as playing a good- faith part in the trade and co-operation agreement. Undermining our commitment to the ECHR has to be seen in that context.
We benefit from a data adequacy decision from the European Commission, which means that data can be transferred between the UK and the EU. This can apply in the law enforcement and police co-operation sector, but it is also important to businesses, such as those in the City, those in financial services, those in fintech and others, particularly in the services arena. So there is a connection between respect for human rights and data adequacy decisions and business, because one of the factors that can be considered in the grant of a data adequacy decision—I remember debating this several times when we did the Brexit withdrawal legislation, and indeed I worked on the GDPR when I was an MEP—is the human rights compliance of the partner country, which is the UK in this case.
In fact, we commented at the time that that plays more of a role for a third country than it does within the EU, because questions arise about the human rights compliance of some countries within the EU, and it is finding it difficult to deal with them. Unfortunately or not, the UK is in the position of having less leverage in this respect. Believe me, the European Parliament will have something to say on this subject as well. The data adequacy decision gets reviewed in 2025, so the Government need to be careful that they are not undermining the data adequacy decision by disrespecting human rights.
On the situation in Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission points out:
“The UK Government’s ‘Explainer’ document on Windsor Framework Article 2 acknowledges that its protections apply to everyone who is ‘subject to the law in Northern Ireland’. Asylum-seekers are part of the community, subject to the law in NI and are therefore protected by the Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity chapter of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. In court proceedings ongoing at the time of writing”—
about four weeks ago—
“the Home Office has not disputed the argument that the protections of the relevant chapter of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement extend to asylum-seekers and refugees”.
So that has to be considered in a United Kingdom Bill.
The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission also points out that, in the explainer on the Windsor Framework, the UK Government have confirmed that
“key rights and equality provisions in the [Belfast (Good Friday)] Agreement are supported by the ECHR.”
So, the ECHR and Article 2 of the Windsor Framework are intimately connected. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, along with the Northern Ireland Equality Commission, have identified several EU asylum directives—reception, procedures, qualification and the Dublin III regulation—as relevant to Article 2 of the Windsor Framework. They conclude:
“Given this analysis, failure to address compliance with Windsor Framework Article 2 in the Human Rights memorandum to the Bill is a matter of concern.”
Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, I rise to speak briefly, but I hope strongly, to support Amendment 139FB tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker. This amendment is incredibly simple and yet, it seems, immensely powerful. It gives the National Crime Agency a legal responsibility to tackle organised immigration crime across the channel and to maintain the specific unit to undertake work related to that responsibility.
It is surely extraordinary that the Home Secretary has produced a Bill of 67 clauses devoted entirely, as I understand it, to an attack on the victims of persecution, modern slavery and trafficking and incorporating every conceivable manoeuvre to prevent those victims achieving asylum in the UK. I think I am right in saying—and I know the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—that not one of the 67 clauses sets out a plan to prosecute the criminals who demand large sums from vulnerable individuals to bring them to the UK in small boats across the channel at great risk to their lives—we know many of them die.
The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, is doing the country a great favour, in my view, in offering, in Amendment 139FB, a way in which the Prime Minister could actually fulfil what he claims to be one of his top policy priorities—to stop the boats. I presume the Government will give tremendously strong support to this amendment, but whether they do or not, the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, is to be applauded for his amendment.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, I apologise for any confusion. Normally, the Labour Front-Bencher would be the last speaker but, when they have amendments to speak to, it is only right that we respond to what they have said.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, we believe that the Government are wrongly focused on prosecuting the victims of people traffickers rather than the people traffickers themselves. Amendment 136 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and Amendment 139FB in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, seek to refocus the Government on the real criminals in all this—the people traffickers.
Amendment 139E seems to make complete sense. I slightly disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, saying that the Government have the statistics that Amendment 139E wants them to produce. I am not sure that they do have those numbers. For example, the Government increased the number of countries whose citizens can use e-passport gates at airports, so in addition to EU and EEA citizens, citizens of Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and the USA can use e-passport gates. Once those people have passed through the e-passport gates, the Government have no idea where they have gone in the UK or whether they have left after the six months they are allowed under visa-free entry. There is no way to track where the people have gone, what they are doing or whether they are illegally employed. So I am not sure that the Government have those statistics. I absolutely agree that the Government—all of us—are entitled to know who those people are and how many are here.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
Just to show how it can be done: may I just say that the noble Lord might have a point?
Lord Paddick (LD)
High praise indeed from the noble Lord, Lord Coaker.
We also support Amendment 139F and Amendment 137, to which my noble friend Lady Ludford has just spoken comprehensively—so I do not need to.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Stewart of Dirleton) (Con)
My Lords, I see that the right reverend Prelate is absent from this place and not here to witness this outbreak of ecumenical harmony between two components of the opposition Benches.
I shall deal, if I may, with the points the two noble Lords have made as they emerge. I commence what I have to say on this group by assuring the Committee that the Government remain focused on doing everything they can to save lives, deter illegal migration and disrupt the people-smuggling gangs responsible for dangerous channel crossings.
Amendments 136 and 139FB, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, focus on tackling people smuggling. Amendment 136 calls for a report on the actions being taken to tackle people smuggling, while Amendment 139FB seeks to confer on the National Crime Agency a specific function in respect of tackling organised immigration crime. A variety of noble Lords have spoken to those points and, again, I shall refer to them in more detail as they arise.
The Committee will be aware that organised immigration crime, like other forms of serious and organised crime, endangers lives, has a corrosive effect on society, puts pressure on border security resources and diverts money from our economy. Organised crime groups continue to facilitate most illegal migrant journeys to the United Kingdom. The threat we are facing from organised immigration crime spans multiple countries, multiple nationalities and multiple criminal methodologies. Organised immigration crime is exceptionally complex, and the Government are working to tackle organised crime gangs that facilitate illegal travel from source countries to Europe and the United Kingdom. Addressing the threat from organised immigration crime and disrupting the organised crime gangs responsible is a priority for this Government.
I shall address the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, the noble Baronesses, Lady Meacher and Lady Hamwee, and—from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench—the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, seeking information about the steps the Government are taking to tackle what the noble Lord calls the “real criminals”. The noble Lord is entirely justified in using that phrase. I will also address some of the points raised on an earlier group with my noble friend Lord Sharpe of Epsom. I can tell the Committee that we have a dedicated multiagency organised immigration crime task force in place which is committed to dismantling international organised immigration crime groups, including the criminal networks that facilitate people smuggling from source countries to Europe and then the UK, knowingly putting people in life-threatening situations. This task force is currently active in 17 countries worldwide and works with partners to build intelligence-sharing as well as investigative and prosecution capability.
I have an example for the Committee. In a single operation last summer, the National Crime Agency worked with French, Belgian, German and Dutch partners to target an organised crime gang suspected of smuggling up to 10,000 people across the channel over a period of 12 to 18 months. In total, the operation saw around 40 people being arrested, and 135 boats, 45 engines and more than 1,200 life jackets being seized.
The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, from the Labour Front Bench, sought information from me about convictions for people smuggling. The information with which I am provided is that, between 28 June 2022 —that being the date of commencement of the Nationality and Borders Act—and 31 March 2023, immigration enforcement arrested in excess of 385 people for offences under the Act, resulting in 166 convictions and the imposition of sentences amounting to over 110 years’ imprisonment. Quite properly, the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, sought a comparator for the figure. I do not think I can give him a precise one, but I can give him additional data. I look forward to corresponding with the noble Lord to clear up anything that this has not furnished. Since 2015, there have been 1,400 arrests, giving rise to sentences being applied totalling 1,300 years’ imprisonment.
Following the pledge made by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister, on 13 December last year, to stop the dangerous small boat crossings, we have doubled funding for this task force for the next two financial years. The increased funding will aim to double the number of disruptions and enforcement activities against organised immigration crime and the criminal gangs that facilitate it.
But the Government must, at all times, be conscious of the need to remove the demand that keeps people smugglers in business. That is the core purpose of the Bill. We will break the business model of the people smugglers and deter those seeking illegally to enter the UK only by putting in place a system through which it is clear to all that anyone arriving illegally in this country will not be able to settle and build a new life here, and that they will instead be returned to their home country or removed to a safe third country such as Rwanda. The Government are conscious that the refoulement of persons to a country where they are in danger is unacceptable in terms of our international obligations.
Amendment 139F was briefly introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, in the absence of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws. It would require the Secretary of State to refer a person who meets the four conditions in Clause 2, and is suspected of crimes against humanity, genocide or war crimes, to the relevant international authorities. The amendment is unnecessary, as protecting the British public is the Government’s first priority—the priority of any Government—and, in any scenario where a person is suspected of war crimes or crimes against humanity, the Government will work with international authorities as necessary.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
I am most grateful for what the noble and learned Lord has said, but he may have overlooked that we had a debate, at a much earlier stage, on the way in which the Government use the word “require”. The Minister says that nothing in the Bill requires the Government to take action that would be contrary to our obligations under the TCA. He seems to be overlooking—the use of the word “require” perhaps deliberately overlooks the fact—that the Bill empowers the Government to take action which, if taken, would bring us into conflict with our obligations under the TCA. Perhaps he could answer that point.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
Could the Minister confirm whether he agrees with the analysis of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, from which I cited extracts, on the various EU asylum directives that would continue to apply in Northern Ireland? I am afraid I have not checked what the noble Lord, Lord Murray, said in response to the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, the other day, but the trafficking directive and the victims directive also apply in Northern Ireland. What are the Government doing to make sure that all those directives are going to be respected in practice in Northern Ireland?
Lord Stewart of Dirleton (Con)
The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, from the Cross Benches, submitted my use of the verb “require” to a degree of philological scrutiny, which I had not taken into account when preparing my answer. I take the noble Lord’s point in relation to empowerment as opposed to obligation.
I regret to say that, in relation to the complex interrelating commitments to which the noble Baroness sought my views from the Dispatch Box, I will have to undertake to correspond with the noble Baroness and the noble Lord.
I sum up what has been a short debate by thanking noble Lords for their informed scrutiny of what has been said, not only by me but by others participating in earlier parts of the debate. From the perspective of this Committee, at this stage, the issues have been given a good airing. Noble Lords have referred to the inevitability that we will consider the matter at a later stage but, at present, I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, the debate was not that short, but perhaps it was shorter than those on some of the other groups.
I will just comment on the Minister’s response regarding people smuggling. I find it quite depressing that reliance is placed on deterring demand rather than on deterring criminals. I wonder whether the strategy might include, if it does not now, a communications component. We are told of successful prosecutions, but I am not sure that I ever really read about those in the press; perhaps I read the wrong media—I do not know.
Though I have heard what the Minister had to say, to me it is the criminality—the smuggling—that is at the heart of the problem. I am sure that we will come back to it as an issue in some form at the next stage. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
“Secure reporting for victims of crime(1) The Secretary of State must, by regulations, make provision for the prohibition of automatic sharing of personal data of a victim or witness of crime for the purposes of section 2(1).(2) In section 20 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 (power to supply information etc to Secretary of State), after subsection (2B) insert—“(2C) For the purposes of section 2(1) of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, this section does not apply to information held about a person as a result of the person reporting criminal behaviour which they are a victim of or a witness to.”” Member's explanatory statement
This new Clause would prevent immigration data being shared for the purposes of section 2(1) about a victim or witness of crime who reports an offence. This is to ensure victims are able to approach the authorities for assistance without fear of removal under section 2(1) as a result of that contact or resultant data sharing with immigration enforcement.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
Amendment 139A is in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew—who has managed to escape for the moment—has added his name to it, as has the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London.
This amendment seeks to prevent immigration data being shared for the purposes of Clause 2(1), under which the Secretary of State must make arrangements for the removal of people who meet the four conditions. I am very happy to have my name to this—I would not have signed it if I were not happy—because the issue of exemption from the Data Protection Act is one which my noble friend Lord Paddick and I have raised many times since we debated the then Data Protection Bill. The exemption from restrictions on sharing data for the purposes of immigration enforcement or immigration control—I do not recall which but it amounts to the same thing—is a very wide exemption.
The concern here is to ensure that victims can approach the authorities for assistance without the fear of removal as a result of that contact, or of data being shared with immigration enforcement. Noble Lords have frequently made the point about people without secure status having more confidence in smugglers and traffickers than they do in the authorities. The traffickers’ threats are not ones that they will take lightly; they control their victims, notwithstanding that the victims have “escaped”.
We have a number of other clause stand part notices, all amounting to the fact that we oppose the whole of the Bill. The clauses which are listed in this group are not substantive clauses; in other words, they are not about policy. I will mention just one, which is about financial provision. I am alarmed—we all are—at how much will be spent on what we consider to be the likely costs of the policy. I will not go over them again. We are firmly opposed; I do not think I need to spend time re-emphasising that point. I beg to move Amendment 139A.
Lord German (LD)
My Lords, I have two sets of amendments in this group. First, Amendments 142, 143, 144 and 147 seek to examine how the Brook House inquiry findings can influence the way in which the Bill will be enacted. Secondly, Amendment 139FE seeks to examine the devolution issues, which I will be looking at specifically through the legislation governing Wales and, very specifically, the Act of Parliament which I want to test the Government on.
First, my intention is to find out how the Government intend to deal with the recommendations of the Brook House inquiry when it reports and apply them to the changes that it will necessitate in the implementation of the Bill. Under the Inquiries Act 2005, the Brook House inquiry into mistreatment and abuse in breach of Article 3 of the ECHR at Brook House immigration removal centre was instituted in November 2019, following a judicial review proceeding. The inquiry has heard extensive evidence, and it is the first public inquiry into the mistreatment of those detained under immigration powers. The conditions of that detention provided a unique opportunity for public scrutiny of and accountability for detention practices and culture.
The inquiry, which we understand will be published in late summer, has heard evidence from detained persons, detention officers, healthcare providers, G4S—which was the contractor responsible for Brook House at the time—employees, Home Office officials, members of the independent monitoring board and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons. The inquiry also appointed and heard from three experts to address the key issues of the use of force, the institutional culture, and clinical care provision and safeguards. It also examined a vast amount of documentary material and video footage.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
My Lords, I will speak first to Amendment 139A, to which my right reverend friend the Bishop of London has added her name, and then I will turn to Amendment 139B in my name. I remind the Committee of my interests as laid out regarding RAMP and Reset.
As we have heard, Amendment 139A would prevent data about a victim of or a witness to a crime being automatically shared for the purpose of immigration enforcement. My right reverend friend the Bishop of London sponsored a similar amendment during the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act, and this issue remains hugely important.
Imkaan reports that more than 90% of abused women with insecure immigration status had their abusers use the threat of their removal from the UK to dissuade them from reporting their abuse. It is deeply disturbing that any person would be deterred from reporting a crime that they have been subjected to or have witnessed because they believe that their data will be passed on to immigration officials for the purposes of immigration control. This is especially pertinent for a domestic abuse victim, a modern slavery victim, someone who has been trafficked or someone who has been subject to violence.
In the context of this Bill, a lack of safe reporting pathways would be a major hindrance to the Government’s intent to “go after” the people smugglers who blight communities and destroy lives. Without the assurance of secure reporting to allow victims to come forward and report crimes committed against them, how will the Government ensure that they go after the perpetrators?
As well as a need for prosecution, we have a responsibility to victims. The Istanbul convention, to which the UK is a signatory, states in Articles 5 and 59 that victims of violence must be protected irrespective of their immigration status. It is crucial that we take all possible steps to comply with this and ensure that the right of every person, especially women and girls, to live free from violence is protected.
Since the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act, there has been a call for the overhaul of laws and policies on police data sharing with the Home Office. The Government committed to reviewing this, but stopped short of committing to a firewall. Many dedicated groups have been campaigning on this issue for many years. The House of Commons Justice Committee, in its pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft victims Bill, agreed with them:
“We call for an immediate end to the sharing of victims’ and witnesses’ data between the police and the Home Office for immigration enforcement purposes and the introduction of a complete firewall for those groups”.
What is set out in Amendment 139A would not prevent data sharing between services where it is required—for example, in healthcare—but would prevent data sharing for the purposes of Section 2(1) of this Bill, namely removal. At a time when trust in the police force is low, especially for minority groups, we must consider the impact of the Bill on the wider community and ensure that, when someone is subject to or a witness of a crime, they can report it without fear.
I turn to Amendment 139B in my name. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, for their support. I argue that this amendment is a common-sense proposal that offers the Government a procedure to ensure that statutory oversight of detention facilities and standards is maintained, without altering the Secretary of State’s power to detain on, undeniably, an extensive scale. The Bill establishes a comprehensive detention regime that many of us expected to have been consigned to history. It moves the system away from an administrative process to facilitate someone’s removal to a wider system of incarceration intended to deter asylum seekers from travelling to the UK. Although this signals a major transition in government policy, there is very little detail on the standards, safeguards or protective obligations on the Home Office that there will be when providing detention accommodation. In fact, Clause 10 grants the Secretary of State the power to detain people “in any place” that she “considers appropriate”.
I am grateful to the Minister for explaining that the Detention Centre Rules 2001 will be updated in light of this Bill and that all immigration removal centres must operate in compliance with the rules, including any additional sites that are opened. But the Government will appreciate that these standards are not in the Bill and, given that there is very little oversight for the potential mass detention of people, it would be unfathomable to proceed with these provisions without a detention inspection regime on a statutory footing.
This is all the more important given the fact that this legislation overturns the long-held common-law principle that it is for the courts to decide whether the detention of a person is for a period that is reasonable or even justified in principle. The Secretary of State’s duty to detain does not discriminate and, in the absence of any return agreements, thousands of people—including children of all ages, pregnant women, victims of trafficking and those who are disabled—may be detained at the discretion of the Home Secretary for an unrestricted duration. I am afraid that I am not reassured by Ministers saying that habeas corpus provides enough legal protection to challenge detention, as it concerns only whether there is a power to detain, not whether the power to detain was exercised lawfully or is reasonable. Am I not correct in this observation?
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I support Amendment 139B from the right reverend Prelate, to which I was pleased to add my name. I also support everything he said about Amendment 139A and thank Medical Justice for its helpful briefing. As the right reverend Prelate has stated, this Bill would dramatically increase the detention estate, with many vulnerable asylum seekers including children, pregnant women, and survivors of torture and trafficking experiencing the devastating harm that detention is known to inflict, particularly indefinite detention.
It is therefore imperative, as this amendment recommends, that the Home Secretary implements any relevant recommendations made by the Chief Inspector of Prisons. The chief inspector plays an integral role in monitoring immigration detention. The most recent report noted that following its inspection of all short-term holding facilities run by Border Force, children were sometimes restrained unnecessarily or inappropriately, which goes back to an earlier amendment on the use of force.
Disturbingly, that report mentioned
“documentation showing how Border Force staff at Tilbury took a child to foster accommodation in handcuffs”.
The chief inspector stated that:
“The use of handcuffs for this purpose was disproportionate and unacceptable”.
As already noted earlier in our discussion, the provisions in the Bill risk situations where there is little judicial scrutiny of the exercise of the power to detain for the first 28 days of detention with, as Medical Justice notes, only extremely limited scrutiny thereafter. This lack of accountability seems to be something of a theme in the Bill. In fact, the detention provisions ignore previous findings from the chief inspector, including that detention facilities built and operated according to prison standards should be ended and that a time limit should be introduced.
In conclusion, I echo the right reverend Prelate. Given that the Bill is likely to increase significantly the numbers of people who are held in immigration detention, including groups in particularly vulnerable circumstances, it is essential to strengthen the chief inspector’s role. Will the Government therefore commit to implementing in future the relevant recommendations made by the Chief Inspector of Prisons proposed by the right reverend Prelate?
Mortgage Market
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Livermore (Lab)
My Lords, every day brings more bad news for Britain’s mortgage holders. Two-year fixed-rate mortgages are now approaching 6%, and HSBC and Santander are just two lenders to have withdrawn all new mortgage deals from the market. The average mortgage holder is facing an increase in payments of £2,300 this year alone and borrowers are now being warned that mortgage rates are set to rise even further.
Interest rates first spiked dramatically last year when the disastrous mini-Budget sent markets into meltdown, but the two-year gilt yield has now exceeded even those levels above its US equivalent. With 1.5 million home owners set to come off fixed-rate mortgage deals this year, facing severe increases in their repayments, why is UK inflation not falling as quickly as the Government promised and why is inflation higher for longer in the UK than in many similar economies?
The Parliamentary Secretary, HM Treasury (Baroness Penn) (Con)
My Lords, the underlying causes of high inflation, as we all know, are driven by higher energy prices as a result of the war in Ukraine and a tight labour market. There are complex factors as that plays out but the Government are absolutely clear in their commitment to get inflation down. We have seen inflation begin to fall, and institutions such as the IMF have recognised the Government’s action in this area and that we are set on the right path to reduce inflation, which will help ease the pressure on not just mortgage holders but all people facing higher prices at the moment.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, will the Government set up an emergency mortgage protection fund, potentially recouped by a bank levy, to ensure that those struggling the most will not lose their homes and face financial wreckage and wreckage of their lives?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I hope the noble Baroness will take some comfort from the fact that mortgage arrears and repossessions remain below pre-pandemic levels. I reassure her that, if a borrower falls into financial difficulty, guidance from the FCA requires firms to offer tailored support and deal fairly with customers facing difficulties in meeting their payments. The Government also have a range of schemes in place to support borrowers, not least the support for mortgage interest scheme.
Lord Naseby (Con)
As my noble friend knows, the mortgage market is affected by interest rates, both the current rate and, even more importantly, the forecast rate. Is she aware that the pricing of housing is falling UK-wide, and falling extensively, partly because of mortgage costs but partly because of reasons that are nothing to do with mortgage cost: the policies of the Secretary of State, Mr Gove, which are very anti big builder? They are also causing difficulty in the rental market.
In that situation, with growth just showing the ability to come through, which is very encouraging, and with wages just beginning to show some positive response to the situation, is it not time that the Bank of England—although we are not responsible for it—recognise that rates should be held for the moment and allow the market to settle? Given the two factors I have mentioned—growth growing and inflation falling— I hope the interest rates recommended by the Bank of England will fall.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, interest rate decisions remain a matter for the independent Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, but I say to my noble friend that high inflation is also bad for the economy. To have high growth we must first have low inflation, so we absolutely support the Bank of England in its task of pursuing the 2% inflation target and the difficult decisions it will have to take to achieve that.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
My Lords, I cannot resist the temptation to draw to the House’s attention the fact that this is the 278th anniversary of the Battle of Naseby—I am not picking a fight with the noble Lord.
My question concerns the fact that this is going to have a massive effect on the buy-to-let market. We are expecting further increases in interest rates, given recent news. A report in the Times last week showed the relationship between increases in the bank rate and the knock-on effect on “underwater” buy-to-let owners. This will cause severe damage to the buy-to-let market. I have mixed feelings about that market, but to the extent that owners of such properties cannot maintain their property properly, this will have a deleterious effect on the UK’s housing stock. The Government should be seized of this issue. To me, the solution is that the Government should provide funds to local authorities in order that they can take over these underwater buy-to-let properties—interestingly, a large proportion of them are ex-council properties anyway—so that local authorities can address the housing problems in their local areas.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord will know that the Government have given local authorities many more powers and more discretion in how they approach housebuilding and house supply in their area in recent years. He is right that the changes to interest rates will affect those in rented accommodation as well as those who have mortgages through channels such as he described. The Government are putting in place further support for renters. We have a series of reforms coming in through the Renters (Reform) Bill which will improve quality and security in the private rented sector. For those on benefits, the Government boosted investment in the local housing allowance in April 2020 by nearly £1 billion, and rates have been maintained at this increased level.
Illegal Migration Bill
Wednesday 14th June 2023
(10 months, 4 weeks ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Illegal Migration Act 2023 View all Illegal Migration Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 133-V Fifth marshalled list for Committee - (12 Jun 2023)
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 139B, to which I have put my name. I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham for outlining the common-sense reason why this amendment is needed, particularly as the Bill will extend detention, meaning that far more people will be in detention, and restrict people’s ability to appeal their reason for detention, particularly in the first 28 days.
I put my name to the amendment because I have a long history since I came into this place of asking questions about and taking a keen interest in vulnerable people who have been put in detention, particularly LGBT individuals. That goes back to 2014, when the then Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, John Vine, investigated the Home Office’s handling of asylum claims with people on the grounds of sexual orientation. Since then, every time an independent inspection has been carried out, issues concerning LGBT individuals being held in detention and experiencing homophobia or physical violence, affecting their mental health, have been documented, including in two reports in 2016. The latest analysis, done in February this year in a study for Rainbow Migration carried out by Dr Laura Harvey of the University of Brighton, shows that this continues to happen.
Despite nearly 10 years of me and other noble lords putting questions to the Home Office, it repeatedly says that action plans have been put in place based on recommendations made by these independent inspections. However, they turn out to be more plan than action. That is the reality of the evidence to date, so the right reverend Prelate’s amendment is intended to ensure that the action plans are indeed action plans based on the recommendations of the Chief Inspector of Prisons.
When the Minister responds to this group of amendments, can he say according to what criteria the Home Office decides to implement the recommendations of the Chief Inspector of Prisons on detention? What criteria does it use to ignore and not implement the recommendations? It is clear to me that, if we have an independent inspector going in and making recommendations, the Home Office should be under a statutory obligation to ensure that they are carried out. They are not political; they are not inspections which come with any preconceived prejudice on the part of the Chief Inspector of Prisons. They are independent and professional and they are there to ensure the safety and dignity of those held in detention.
I am very pleased to support Amendment 139B and look forward to hearing the reasons why the recommendations are enacted or not. I believe that this is a common-sense amendment. It does not stop the Government’s desire to expand detention in the Bill, but it ensures that the safety and dignity of those held in detention are paramount when the inspections are carried out and the recommendations are made.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, we on these Benches support all the amendments in this group, for the reasons my noble friends have explained.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
The noble Lord has caught me out as I gather my notes.
Amendment 139A, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, spoke to, is about encouraging victims or witnesses to report offences. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham also spoke to this. I absolutely understand and support the sentiments behind that amendment. I thought I would reflect a little on my experience as a magistrate in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where I remember that, about 10 years ago, we had officials from the Home Office sitting in our courts. They were basically there to try to pick up business to do with illegal migrants and asylum seekers, whether they be offenders, witnesses or people who just appeared in court.
It just so happened that one of my magistrate colleagues was a Home Office official—particularly, part of the Border Force organisation but within the Home Office. She explained to me that it was a pilot that had worked for three months, I think from memory, but which was stopped after that period because they just did not pick up enough business. It was not worth the officials sitting in court for that period. I thought that was an interesting reflection on the points which the noble Baroness made. I absolutely understand the point which she and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham made about people being reluctant to come forward, because of their distrust of the criminal justice system as a whole, However, my practical experience of that, as just described—and Westminster Magistrates’ Court deals with perhaps the most diverse group of people to pass through the doors of any magistrates’ court in the country—was that not a lot of business was picked up. That is my first reflection.
My second reflection is on Amendment 139B, regarding the implementation of the report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons on immigrants in detention centres. This also goes to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord German, about the Brook House inquiry. Again, a few years ago I was a lay inspector and in that role I went to Littlehey Prison with the then chief inspector. It was an unannounced visit and extremely illuminating to see the prison itself, which was a sex offenders’ prison, but also to talk to the inspectors about how they conduct their activities and how important it is to have unannounced inspections. The way they explained it to me was that the inspections need to be, on the one hand, unannounced, but perhaps even more importantly, regular, and there need to be follow-up inspections. The prison officers and governors whom I met were very sure that they would be continually inspected over a period of time. It would be a working relationship with the inspectorate to try to ensure that standards were kept up.
I am sympathetic to Amendment 139B, as it is a process; it is not a one-off. I very much hope that the Government have confidence in their inspectorate to put in place, over time, an inspection regime which is in-depth and can do its best to maintain standards, while identifying any shortcomings it may see on its inspections. Nevertheless, I look forward to the Minister’s response.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Stewart of Dirleton) (Con)
My Lords, I will not detain the Committee by going through Clauses 61 to 67 in turn. They contain entirely standard provisions, relating, for example, to the making of regulations under the Bill, commencement, extent and the short title. Instead, I will focus on the various amendments in the group and on the contributions that noble Lords helpfully made from a variety of perspectives.
I will first deal briefly with government Amendment 139D. This relates to the standard power in Clause 66(5) which enables the Secretary of State, by regulations, to make transitional or saving provision in connection with the commencement of any provision of the Bill. Amendment 139D simply enables such regulations to make consequential, supplementary and incidental provision and different provision for different purposes. Again, this is an entirely standard provision to facilitate the smooth implementation of an Act.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
I am sorry to interrupt, but I twice heard the Minister say Amendment 139D, and I think he meant Amendment 139G.
Lord Stewart of Dirleton (Con)
I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate and my noble friend Lord Murray. I did indeed mean that, and I apologise. However, if I may, I will stay with the right reverend Prelate, because he opened the debate on Amendment 139A, which deals with data sharing in relation to victims of crime.
I understand fully the sentiment behind the amendment. The whole Committee, and indeed the whole House, can agree on the need to protect all victims of crime, regardless of their immigration status. As the right reverend Prelate will be aware, guidance issued by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, updated in 2020, makes it clear that victims of crime should be treated as victims first and foremost.
The NPCC guidance provides that police officers will not routinely search police databases for the purpose of establishing the immigration status of a victim or witness or routinely seek proof of their entitlement to reside in the United Kingdom. In addition, police officers must give careful consideration, on a case-by-case basis, to what information they share with the Home Office and when to do so. The reasons for sharing information must be recorded and the victim advised as to what has been shared and why. Noble Lords will appreciate that I am setting up a paper trail of responsibility. I should stress that any data sharing is on a case-by-case basis, so, to that extent, I respectfully submit to the Committee that subsection (1) of the proposed new clause is misconceived in referring to the “automatic” sharing of personal data.
We should not lose sight of the fact that benefits may flow from sharing information, as it can help to prevent perpetrators of crime coercing and controlling their victims on account of their insecure immigration status. Moreover, providing a victim with accurate information about their immigration status and bringing them into the immigration system can only benefit them.
We appreciate the need to protect women and girls from threats of violence. All that being said, the Committee will understand that the Government are duty-bound to maintain an effective immigration system, protect our public services and safeguard the most vulnerable from exploitation if that might happen because of their insecure immigration status.
Information is shared with the Home Office to help protect the public, including vulnerable migrants, from harm. The need for this was recognised by Parliament in the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, which permits the Home Office to share information for the purposes of crime prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution, and to receive information for the purposes of effective immigration control. As for the officers charged with fulfilling those duties, Immigration Enforcement has a person-first approach and will always seek to protect and safeguard any victim before any possible enforcement action is taken.
It is important to note that the mere fact that the Home Office is aware that a person does not have lawful status and is an immigration offender does not lead automatically to that person’s detention or removal. The decision on what may be the most appropriate course of action is based on many factors that require a full assessment of the individual’s circumstances, and evidence of vulnerability is an essential part of that assessment.
The public rightly expect that individuals in this country should be subject to its laws, and it is right that when individuals with an irregular immigration status are identified they should be supported to come within our immigration system and, where possible, to regularise their stay. The Home Office routinely helps migrant victims by directing them to legal advice to help regularise their stay. The NPCC guidance provides, I submit, an appropriate framework for data sharing between the police and the Home Office where a victim of crime has insecure immigration status. On that basis, I do not consider the amendment necessary.
Amendment 139B, tabled, again, by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, would place on the Home Secretary a duty to give effect to the recommendations of the Chief Inspector of Prisons in so far as they relate to immigration detention accommodation. I start by making the general observation that recommendations by an independent inspectorate are just that: recommendations and not directions. It is properly a matter for the Home Secretary to consider whether in all the circumstances it is appropriate for her to accept and give effect to relevant recommendations by the Chief Inspector of Prisons. We naturally take very seriously all reports and recommendations by the chief inspector and have accepted many practical recommendations to improve our immigration detention accommodation. The Home Office regularly publishes service improvement plans alongside His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons’ report on its website. However, on occasion, there may be good policy, operational or other reasons why it would not be appropriate to accept a particular recommendation, and it would be wrong to bind the Home Secretary’s hands in the way that Amendment 139B seeks to do. However, I assure the right reverend Prelate and others in the Committee that the duties to report will remain and that the existing inspection framework will apply to any new detention accommodation, as my noble friend Lord Murray said from the Dispatch Box at an earlier juncture of this Committee’s deliberations.
Turning to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, a moment ago, I compliment the noble Lord on his important work in the field of detention, in particular working with persons rendered especially vulnerable by their sexuality. I assure him and the Committee that the Home Office does not ignore, but rather considers carefully, the recommendations which come to it. Independent scrutiny is a vital part of assurance that our detention facilities are safe, secure and humane, and the Home Office carefully considers all recommendations made by the Chief Inspector of Prisons along with the service improvement plan which sets out the action that will be taken by the Home Office, and such a plan is published in response to any concerns raised.
The noble Lord, Lord German, spoke to two amendments. If I may, I will take them out of the order in which the noble Lord put them, so I shall start with Amendment 139FE. I assure the noble Lord that the power in Clause 62 to make consequential amendments to devolved legislation is commonplace. The examples that I put before the Committee are Section 205 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and Section 84 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022.
As the noble Lord knows, it is the Government’s contention that the Bill deals with matters—in this case, immigration—that are reserved to this Parliament rather than to the devolved Administrations. As we see in Clause 27, it may be necessary to make consequential amendments to devolved legislation pursuant to that reserved purpose. The standard power in Clause 62 simply enables regulations to make any further necessary consequential amendments to enactments. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee did not comment on this regulation-making power in its report, and any regulations that amend, repeal or revoke primary legislation would be subject to the affirmative procedure.
Lord German (LD)
The bit of procedure that I am looking for is whether the Government intend to do the proper consultation exercise, as laid out in the Cabinet Office directions about the way to manage that process, which is one of consultation and agreement rather than imposition. Two of these legislative reform memoranda have been laid already, and both concern that important section in the Welsh legislation on looking after children. In that area, we need some confidence that this will be a dialogue rather than an imposition.
Lord Stewart of Dirleton (Con)
I am grateful to the noble Lord for that intervention. I assure him, first, that the Government are aware of the legislative consent Motions to which he refers, but they are of the view that the LCM process is not engaged. None the less, I further assure the noble Lord that, although Clause 19 enables regulations to be made applying the provisions in Clauses 15 to 18, we will of course consult with the devolved Administrations—the process for which the noble Lord called—within the devolution settlement. In so doing, we will grant the respect that the noble Lord was keen to stress and the importance of which we on the Front Bench recognise.
The noble Lord also tabled Amendments 142, 143, 144 and 147, which seek to delay the commencement of the Bill until the current Brook House inquiry has reported. We acknowledge that these amendments are well intentioned. The whole Committee can agree that we want to see the conclusions of the Brook House inquiry, but, none the less, I cannot agree that the implementation of the Bill should be made conditional on this event, important as it is. It is worth adding that, as the Committee and certainly the noble Lord will be aware, this inquiry focused exclusively on one immigration removal centre, not the whole detention estate. Clearly, matters of great interest may well emerge and potentially apply across the whole estate, but I submit that we should not confine ourselves to proceeding on the basis of such evils as may be disclosed in this report and as are identified in a single case, rather than considering the estate as a whole.
As the noble Lord said in presenting his argument, the chair of the inquiry has indicated that she intends to issue her final report in the late summer, so the noble Lord and the Committee should not have too long to wait. But my point is that, as a Parliament, we should legislate from the general rather than the particular. Well intentioned though it is, the noble Lord’s amendment places the Brook House inquiry at the forefront and everything else would flow from that. I submit that that would not be the best course on which to proceed.
We will carefully consider the recommendations of this inquiry, including recommendations for that wider application to the immigration and detention estate and the practice of detention, but I submit that that is not a reason for delaying the commencement of the Bill. The debate has been interesting, and I am grateful to Members from across the Committee who contributed, but at this stage I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Scriven (LD)
Just before the Minister finishes his conclusions, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham asked a specific question about the standing commission of the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, which has carried out annual reviews of the effectiveness of Home Office policies and procedures with regard to adults in the immigration detention estate. The right reverend Prelate asked whether they would be resumed, and I wonder whether the Minister can inform the Committee whether that will be the case.
Lord Stewart of Dirleton (Con)
First, I present my apologies to the right reverend Prelate for not specifically answering that question; I am grateful to the noble Lord for reminding me of it. I had noted that I do not have the information directly to hand in any event.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
I did actually close by saying, “If you don’t have it, would you please write?”
Lord Stewart of Dirleton (Con)
Indeed, the right reverend Prelate did, and I confirm that I will happily correspond with him and copy in the noble Lord.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, I moved Amendment 139A. The right reverend Prelate and I have often had our names paired on amendments on these issues. The story from the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, about Home Office officials sitting in court to see what they can pick up was truly shocking, whatever other conclusions one might draw about it.
I am unclear why it is necessary to apply the restrictions about sharing data, automatically or otherwise, when the subject is already detained, but I come back to my principal point—sadly, it is not the first time we have made it from these Benches—that we thought that the effective immigration control exemption in the Data Protection Act, and so much now comes within that, was far too wide and had dangers inherent in it. The examples given by the right reverend Prelate in the field of domestic abuse bear this out.
We have heard a lot about the Government wanting co-operation from victims with regard to the investigation and prosecution of traffickers and smugglers. It does not seem to me that not agreeing to a firewall is the best way to go about getting that co-operation.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Beith) (LD)
Is the noble Baroness withdrawing her amendment?
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
I was just about to. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“Ten-year strategy on human trafficking(1) The Secretary of State must prepare a ten-year strategy for tackling human trafficking to the UK through collaboration with signatories to the European Convention against Trafficking or any other international agreement on human trafficking.(2) The Secretary of State must make and lay before Parliament a statement of policies for implementing the strategy.(3) The first statement must be made within twelve months of the passing of this Act; and a subsequent statement must be made within twelve months of the making of the previous statement.(4) A Minister of the Crown must, within 28 sitting days of the statement being laid before Parliament, table a motion for resolution in each House of Parliament in relation to the statement.(5) “Ten-year strategy” means a strategy for the period of ten years beginning with the day on which preparation of the strategy is completed.(6) “The European Convention against Trafficking” means the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings done at Warsaw on 16th May 2005.(7) A “sitting day”, in relation to each House of Parliament, means a day on which that House begins to sit.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to have a ten-year strategy for collaborating internationally to tackle human trafficking into the UK.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
My Lords, I introduce Amendment 139C, tabled in my name, and Amendment 144A, which is consequential to it. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett, Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, for co-signing it.
The amendment requires the Secretary of State to prepare a 10-year strategy for tackling human trafficking, in collaboration with international partners on this issue. A statement of policies for implementing the strategy must be presented to Parliament within a year of the Bill becoming law and every following year. Each time that a statement is made, an opportunity must be given for both Houses to debate and vote on it via a Motion for resolution.
The amendment, and my second amendment, relating to a 10-year strategy for an international refugee policy, are far from wrecking or negative amendments but seek to improve the Bill, as is our duty and right in this House. As I said at Second Reading, we need a Bill to reform migration and we need to stop the boats, but this Bill does not contain within it a sense of the long- term and global nature of the challenges that we face. To deal with global challenges, we need to engage in international collaboration towards global solutions.
The trade in people is one such global challenge. In 2022, in the UK, there were 16,938 potential victims of modern slavery referred to the Home Office via the NRM—a 33% increase compared to the preceding year and the highest annual number since the NRM began in 2009. The real number of victims in the UK may be much higher. Walk Free’s global slavery index believes that there could be more than 100,000 victims living in slavery in the UK. However, that same index found that, globally, 50 million people were living in modern slavery in the world on any given day in 2021 —a 10 million increase since the 2018 index.
Not all forms of slavery counted in this number will involve people trafficking, but a significant number will have been trafficked at some point in their story of exploitation. In the UK, we are often dealing with the very end of what is a global supply chain. If we want truly to have an impact on the root of the problem, we need to follow the supply chain of trafficking back to its source and target the traffickers there and at every step along the way to people eventually arriving here. A cross-border trade requires cross-border solutions. We have long agreed that when it comes to drugs.
The Anglican Communion has a helpful perspective here, as it is present in 165 countries around the world. There are Anglicans and other people of faith present in both source and destination countries for migration and trafficking. Since 2014, the Anglican Alliance has been working on these issues in partnership with the Salvation Army, Caritas Internationalis and the Clewer Initiative, among others, convening global and regional consultations, developing toolkits to equip churches, and establishing regional and interregional communities of practice. The global reach and connectedness of the Anglican Communion allows us to connect up work that is going on upstream and downstream in the supply chain, to help to ensure that migration happens safely and to prevent trafficking and other forms of exploitation.
The Clewer Initiative, the Church of England’s national work to combat modern slavery, has also been working since 2020 with the World Council of Churches to challenge issues of modern slavery. One part of the focus is to facilitate networking between churches and partners in countries of origin and those in countries of arrival to enable collaboration and broader strategy. Ending human trafficking was mentioned explicitly in the targets of the UN sustainable development goals 5, 8 and 16, to be achieved by 2030. However, progress has been slow, and as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has highlighted, national responses, particularly in developing states, appear to be deteriorating. Detection rates fell by 11% in 2020 and convictions fell by 27%, which it says illustrates
“a worldwide slowdown in the criminal justice response to trafficking”.
I am sure that all in this Committee agree that our target should be the total eradication of this evil, and that part of the 10-year strategy being proposed here should be plans for collaboration with international partners to set up an international anti-trafficking force, funded by Governments and mandated with the authority to target and arrest human traffickers wherever they might be found. That would be taking action upstream, focusing on the traffickers rather than their victims—an incidental effect of this Bill—and getting us closer to addressing the root of the issue. We did something similar with 17th-century piracy and 19th-century slave-trading, where we led the world. This is an equally serious crime, and we must go after perpetrators with speed and accuracy and the full force of international law.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)
My Lords, it is a great honour for me to support this amendment in the name of the most reverend Primate. In opening my remarks I want to say that here we have a Bill called the Illegal Migration Bill. I say that the illegality which we should always address first is the illegality of the people who traffic those who are brought to our country —the criminals that we ought to be searching for, internationally and domestically. That is where the illegality lies, not with these poor people who are suffering and trying to escape from oppression and aggression.
Human trafficking needs immediate attention. It is a grave violation of human rights, and it requires a comprehensive, co-ordinated, well-thought-through and long-term response. That is why I agree so much with this amendment. It is imperative that we recognise the urgency of the matter, and that we take decisive action to protect the vulnerable and to hold those perpetrators fully to account. I hope that this amendment will be reacted to in a positive way by the Government.
I emphasise the critical significance of implementing a long-term strategy, as is proposed. Dealing with heinous crime requires planning, and this amendment, which would require the Secretary of State to develop a 10-year plan, would ensure a sustained and focused approach to tackle it. It is essential that we recognise the urgency and complexity of the issue, and the need for that long-term commitment.
The 10-year strategy also provides us with a framework that extends beyond simple short-term solutions. It will allow us to get involved with thorough planning, resource allocation and evaluation of effort. By adopting such a strategy, we send a powerful message: our commitment to eradicating human trafficking must be unwavering. It demonstrates our recognition that this pervasive crime requires a sustained and co-ordinated response—as I said, both domestically and internationally. Collaboration lies at the heart of the strategy. This amendment emphasises the need for the Secretary of State to work closely with partners elsewhere, particularly —as noble Lords might expect me to say—with our European partners, who are signatories to the European convention against trafficking.
Human trafficking knows no borders. By joining forces with other nations, we enhance our collective capacity to identify trafficking patterns, share intelligence and dismantle criminal networks wherever they may be. Through this collaborative approach, we can strengthen prevention measures and ensure that those involved in trafficking are brought to full justice. It is only through co-ordinated action and shared responsibility that we can provide protection to the victims, disrupt the networks, bring those responsible to justice and eradicate human trafficking from our shores to create a safer, more compassionate society for all. Stop the boats—of course we agree with it, but how do we do it? In my view, this amendment helps us to achieve it.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, and to add my name to the most reverend Primate’s amendment calling for a 10-year strategy on combating human trafficking with our international partners. As he said, the intention of the amendment is to encourage the Government to focus on the long-term, global nature of the challenges we face in relation to migration and to work collaboratively with international partners. The most reverend Primate is right to emphasise the statutory nature of what is being proposed. One hesitates to go through the list of Home Secretaries any Government may have. The need for stability in policy-making in this area and agreement with our international partners is very clear indeed.
Going back to Second Reading, a number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, were critical of those who were critical of the Bill. They said that we had not produced any coherent answer to the problem that the Bill is meant to address. But in some of the debates over the last few days, the lack of coherence in the Bill, the real unwillingness of the Government to be explicit about their intentions and the lack of an impact assessment, despite Cabinet Office guidance to the contrary, lend themselves to criticism of what seems to be a very short-term, dog-whistle approach. We really need to see an improvement.
The JCHR’s magisterial critique is, of course, outstandingly clear that the Bill will deny the vast majority of refugees access to the UK’s asylum system, despite the fact that there will be many cases for them to enter the UK by safe and legal routes. I thought that the debate earlier today around the definition of safe and legal—or, indeed, the Government’s unwillingness as yet to say what exactly they plan to do, and how they plan for people to receive assessment and, where appropriate, get protection—said it all.
We even have to await regulations, which in the end Parliament will have to accept, for a definition of “safe and legal”. As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said earlier, the Government could have come forward today with deliverable measures on this, but they have made no attempt to place concrete proposals for safe and legal routes. As the most reverend Primate has said, we could play a leading role. Instead, we are condemning ourselves to isolation in the international community. This is an international problem, and we have to find an international solution.
That is why the most reverend Primate’s call for a long-term approach is so important. His remarks about dealing with the supply chain at source were very telling, focusing on the traffickers rather than the victims. I hope that the Government listen on this occasion and agree to consider this. In all the unhappiness that this debate has caused because of the provisions in the Bill, surely we must at least hope that we can find a consensual way forward to deal with the real issues instead of coming down hard on these poor, innocent victims.
Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, the most reverend Primate has offered the Government a very helpful amendment. It enables them to show that their present Bill, much of which I deeply resent, is not just a one-off, convenient electoral activity but part of a properly thought-out programme for dealing with the issues with which they are concerned. We have to think about it in these terms. Otherwise, we cannot think about it at all.
I commend the most reverend Primate’s use of the concept of the supply chain. I spend a lot of my time advising people on supply chains in my business life, and I cannot imagine anybody who deals with a supply chain merely dealing with the last person in the supply chain. They go right back to where it starts to discover how it hangs together and then correct it if that is what they seek to do. The most reverend Primate’s use of that phrase is extreme valuable, particularly for a Government so committed to private sector and private enterprise, where the supply chain is so vital.
It is also true that unless we think about this internationally, we are not facing the longer-term situation we will find. I remind the Committee of my chairmanship of the Climate Change Committee. The problems with which we are faced at the moment are tiny compared with the ones we are going to be faced with as climate change drives more and more people from the countries in which they live. Who will try to benefit from that? The very people who run the present scandalous, wicked systems dealing with pathetic people seeking somewhere to live. We talk about people moving to have a better life. Climate change will mean that many people will move to have a life at all, because hotter weather in a country such as Niger will make it impossible for people to live, work and farm. In those circumstances, who will try to benefit? It will be the very people who are running these rackets. We have to deal with those rackets.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, I support these amendments that the most reverend Primate has put down and thank him, again, for initiating a whole day’s debate here last December on Britain’s immigration policy and the need to take an overall approach, a general approach, not just dealing with it like the little Dutch boy, running around sticking his finger in one hole in the dyke and another hole comes—that is what we are faced with with this Bill. The most reverend Primate is helping us to avoid the mistake of a patchwork approach, so I welcome these amendments. I think it is a shame, myself, that we should be debating this at this hour in the evening in a rather scantily attended House, just in order to save one extra day in Committee; it would have been much better to have had that.
The point that the most reverend Primate is making about the need for an overall approach—this long-term approach which Governments of both parties no doubt would stick to—must be the right one. The other point he has made very forcefully in this context is the need for international co-operation. That is also absolutely vital.
Unfortunately, as innumerable speeches in Committee have shown, there is a very strong view, supported by many outside this House and many international bodies, that the action in the Bill is contrary to our international obligations. That in itself is bad enough, but what is worse is that it is totally inimical to getting the wider international co-operation we will need if we are to handle these problems. If we insist on going ahead and breaking our international obligations, we will get zero co-operation from other countries which are also bound by them and which believe that they are being broken by the Bill.
I wish the Minister would listen to what I was saying rather than having a conversation. That would be very helpful. I will wait until he stops having his conversation. He has stopped; I thank him very much.
I think the Government need to address this point—oh dear, he is talking again.
If what we are planning to do in the Bill breaks our international obligations in the view of many of our closest partners—the ones in the rest of Europe, for example, without whose co-operation we will get absolutely nowhere with the measures being proposed—we are not going to get that co-operation. That would be extremely serious, with its knock-on effects on the trade and co-operation agreement and so on.
I hope the Government will listen carefully to this debate, on both the amendments in the name of the most reverend Primate, and see that there is a great need to go down that road.
Lord German (LD)
My Lords, I am pleased to offer our support from these Benches. The most reverend Primate has delivered what I would call a swerve ball: he has gone around the side of what is being proposed by the Bill and tried to find a route for what will follow it. He raised the issue of the Modern Slavery Act at the beginning, which we have debated in Committee as being something this Parliament has been very proud of indeed. All of that has been put to one side in order for the Government to make these short-term decisions.
It is interesting that, on many occasions, Ministers on the Government Front Bench have referred to the Bill as dealing with an emergency, whereas they have not yet recognised the context that what is happening is a global problem. The interesting figures at the beginning of the Joint Committee on Human Rights report on the Bill enlighten us:
“In mid-2022, the UN Refugee Agency … estimated that there were 103 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. Of those, 32.5 million are refugees and 4.9 million are seeking asylum — the highest number since the UNHCR was created in 1950. This number is likely to increase given the deadly conflict that has erupted in Sudan”.
Over the page, it says that we will not solve this on our own. Treating this as an emergency will never satisfy the issue that the Government are trying to address of trying to deal with the problem at source.
The Government say that they will stop criminal gangs with the Bill, but many in the Committee believe that this simply will not happen. Many of your Lordships believe that the Bill, as it stands, is as a gift to traffickers, who know that their victims will be too frightened of the threat of removal to approach authorities.
The logic behind the most reverend Primate’s amendment is quite clear to us, in relation to trafficking. It focuses on efforts to tackle the traffickers rather than penalise the victims. What most of us find most abhorrent about the Bill is that it tackles the victims to try to deal with a problem that is well beyond its reach. I absolutely support the view of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, on the supply chain process: it is just silly—not sensible—to think that it will work.
That is why we need a global and collaborative approach with international partners. That is what is needed when traffickers operate across national boundaries and borders. This amendment therefore addresses the question: what next? It puts co-operation front and centre of its approach and it seeks a role for the UK in which it is a leader, rather than a follower and a country trying to pull up a drawbridge. Trafficking is an abhorrent crime and we need to play our part in tackling the crime at source. It needs a global perspective and collaboration, rather than headlines with an election in mind.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, as other noble Lords have said, a 10-year strategy, implementation plan and associated measures are needed to tackle human trafficking, particularly, as the most reverend Primate’s amendment suggests, through international collaboration to deal with issues upstream and downstream—as the former oilman said. His experience of supply chains is similar to that of the noble Lord, Lord Deben.
However, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, raised a justified concern about the reluctance of other partners, who would be central to the success of such a strategy, if they believed that the United Kingdom were breaking its international commitments, whether regarding the European Convention on Human Rights or the European convention on trafficking. The most reverend Primate highlights the worrying slowdown in prosecutions for human trafficking, which must be reversed.
I have one concern about the most reverend Primate’s plan. I understand the need to establish a long-term strategy, but an incoming Home Secretary could thwart a 10-year strategy by asking Parliament to repeal any law that contains the provisions in this amendment. Sadly, enshrining a 10-year strategy in law does not guarantee its longevity, but it would make it more difficult to dislodge. That is why we support these amendments.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great privilege to address the Chamber briefly in support of the amendment before us from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. My points will build on the excellent speeches and comments that have been made.
As others have said, this amendment presents the Government with a phenomenal opportunity. All our debate has been very contentious and will remain so when the Bill is on Report, but here is an opportunity, in one amendment, for the Government to take a different approach in line with the 10-year strategy that has been laid before us.
Let me say this as well: the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is right that this discussion deserves a wider audience. We ought to think about how we could generate that in the context of the Bill and perhaps in other ways to ensure that this issue gets the audience that it deserves. Why do I say that? I do so not only because I agree with it. Yesterday, we debated the purpose of this Chamber in a different context. We had a debate among ourselves and disagreement on the constitutional role of the Lords and what it should be with regard to legislation. As a relatively new Member here, I think that that is a really important role for this House to play.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
My Lords, I too am grateful to the most reverend Primate for setting out the case for these amendments, which would require the Home Secretary to produce a 10-year strategy for tackling human trafficking.
I can confirm, of course, that the Government are absolutely committed to taking a long-term approach to this issue. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord German, we certainly appreciate that this is a massive global problem. Work on modern slavery and human trafficking is based on three strategic pillars: prevention, enforcement, and identification and support. I can assure the most reverend Primate that this Government are working tirelessly with our international and domestic partners to tackle human trafficking. If I may, I will take just a moment to share some of that work with noble Lords.
The UK’s international efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking are supported by our overseas programmes, including through the Home Office’s Modern Slavery Fund—over £37 million has been committed to the fund between 2016 and March 2023. Projects across Europe, Africa and Asia seek to identify and protect victims from re-trafficking, strengthen national responses and criminal investigations and reduce vulnerability to exploitation. A snapshot of previous successes includes direct support to over 2,500 victims of trafficking and targeted outreach work to prevent modern slavery with over 180,000 vulnerable people.
Further, the Government have continued to strengthen our international co-operation. For example, we have issued a joint communiqué with Albania and signed a joint action plan with Romania, both of which reinforce our commitment to working collaboratively to tackle modern slavery and human trafficking, in both the short and long term. We continue to engage with the international community on a global scale by working with multilateral fora such as the G7, the G20, the Commonwealth and the UN. Article 32 of ECAT requires parties to co-operate in tackling human trafficking and we take that obligation very seriously.
The Government collaborate with law enforcement and criminal justice agencies, including the police, the National Crime Agency, the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, the Crown Prosecution Service and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to ensure that policy and legislation are incorporated into operational policy and practice, to target and disrupt crimes and bring perpetrators to justice. In addition, the Home Office has continued to invest in policing to improve the national response to modern slavery and human trafficking by providing £17.8 million since 2016 to support the work of the Modern Slavery and Organised Immigration Crime unit, about which we heard in the previous group.
I also add that the United Kingdom is the first country in the world to require businesses to report on the steps that they have taken to tackle modern slavery in their operations and supply chains. This has driven a change in business culture, spotlighting modern slavery risks on boardroom agendas and in the international human rights community.
Strategies have their place; I do not want to downplay the impact that they can have in the right circumstances to help focus attention on a particular issue and drive change. But they are not a silver bullet. A strategy in and of itself will not enhance the collective response to a particular challenge. It is a moot point whether a 10-year strategy is too long a horizon in this area. The most reverend Primate pointed out that policies can change with changes of government—and, indeed, one Government cannot bind their successor. There is also always a risk that resources are consumed preparing strategies and monitoring their implementation rather than getting on with the vital core task at hand.
The Government remain committed to strengthening our response, both domestically and internationally, to combat modern slavery and human trafficking, and we are considering the next steps on our strategic approach. The immediate focus of this Bill, however, is stopping the boats. If we do not tackle and substantially reduce the current scale of illegal entry into the UK, our resources will continue to be sapped by the sheer numbers crossing the channel, necessarily impacting on our capacity to address the strategic challenges that the most reverend Primate has clearly articulated.
Lord Deben (Con)
My noble friend has very helpfully gone through a whole series of things that the Government are doing and will do. Why is he opposed to that forming a strategy? Any business would do it that way. No one would have merely a series of things which one can put out in that way. Why can he not accept that a strategy that you are implementing would be much better than a series of individual things which defend where you are?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I am afraid that I have already—in the last few moments—outlined why it would be inappropriate for it to be in the Bill. The reasons are that, clearly, one can have strategies without them being in primary legislation and, secondly, it would not be right to fix a strategy for 10 years in length for the reasons I have given, not least because one Government cannot bind their successor. Indeed, as my noble friend Lord Deben made some wider and insightful points in his earlier address about the drivers of refugee crises, such as the impact of climate change, those topics take us into the next group. I am sure there will be other remarks we can address at that point. I noted that my noble friend said that he takes the Church’s Whip; that might explain a lot.
Lord Deben (Con)
As my noble friend has mentioned that, I said I would take the Church’s Whip because I happen to believe that moral issues overcome any other issues. The Churches are united in saying that we have to be more sensible about this Bill. I am a Catholic; I take the Church’s Whip on this because it is a moral issue and we should stand up for moral duties.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
With respect to my noble friend, I would say that the Government’s position is the moral position, but that is possibly an argument for a different type of debate, so I will revert to the topic of the proposed amendment from the most reverend Primate.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
The most reverend Primate’s amendment does not say what the strategy should be; it says just that there should be a strategy. Is the Minister really suggesting that another Government would say, “We’re not bothered about slavery; we don’t want a strategy on slavery”? The whole point is to get Governments to think strategically.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I assure the noble Baroness that this Government certainly do think strategically, but there is no reason for such a strategy to be required by reason of a statutory amendment. I appreciate that the most reverend Primate has laid this amendment, and I do not think that he realistically expects such an amendment to be accepted by the Government. What is clear is that—
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
For the reasons I have already given; shouting “why” from a sedentary position does not assist.
I am very grateful to the most reverend Primate for raising this issue. It is very important that the Committee has had a chance to step back and discuss these strategic issues in the way that it has. I am very grateful to him for affording us this opportunity to debate this issue but, having done so, I hope he will be content to withdraw his amendment. Of course, we will shortly consider the wider context of the refugee question.
Lord Paddick (LD)
Just before the most reverend Primate responds, what I heard the Minister say from the Dispatch Box was that the Government do not believe in strategy, not that the Government oppose strategy being in primary legislation. Perhaps I misheard him.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
No, I certainly did not say that the Government do not believe in strategy.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
My Lords, it is as likely that the Government did not believe in strategy as to find that a bishop did not believe in God.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
Without wishing to channel “Yes, Prime Minister”.
I am very grateful, in addition to those who so kindly co-signed the amendment, to noble Lords who contributed to this debate: the noble Lords, Lord Hannay, Lord German, Lord Paddick and Lord Coaker. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, really worried me, because every time he said something, I found it was in my speech on the next group. That is going to make the speech shorter, which is a great advantage, but it does slightly worry me as to whether he has a hitherto unsuspected hacking habit.
“Ten-year strategy on refugees(1) The Secretary of State must prepare a ten-year strategy for tackling refugee crises driving people to enter the UK as refugees through collaboration with signatories to the Refugee Convention or any other international agreement on the rights of refugees.(2) The Secretary of State must make and lay before Parliament a statement of policies for implementing the strategy.(3) The first statement must be made within twelve months of the passing of this Act; and a subsequent statement for the strategy must be made within twelve months of the making of the previous statement. (4) A Minister of the Crown must, within 28 sitting days of the statement being laid before Parliament, table a motion for resolution in each House of Parliament in relation to the statement.(5) “Ten-year strategy” means a strategy for the period of ten years beginning with the day on which preparation of the strategy is completed.(6) “The Refugee Convention” means the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees done at Geneva on 28th July 1951 and its Protocol.(7) A “sitting day”, in relation to each House of Parliament, means a day on which that House begins to sit.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to have a ten-year strategy for collaborating internationally to tackle refugee crises driving people to enter the UK as refugees.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
My Lords, I hope this section may be a bit shorter. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, already knows, because he just said it, I am rising to introduce Amendment 139D tabled in my name and Amendment 144B, which is consequential to it. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and the noble Lords, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth and Lord Blunkett, for co-signing it. I have had letters of apology from the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who are not able to be here for very good and sufficient reasons.
I particularly appreciate when we come to this that the Government are taking action—I am not suggesting for a moment that they are not. The Chişinău statement made in Moldova recently by the Prime Minister was striking, as were the recent raids by the National Crime Agency in tackling criminals involved in this area.
This amendment mandates the Secretary of State to produce a 10-year strategy for tackling the global refugee crisis—I do say “crisis”—working in collaboration with signatories to the 1951 refugee convention and others. As with human trafficking, a statement of policies for implementing the strategy must be presented to Parliament within a year of the Bill becoming law and every following year. Of course, a subsequent Government can change that. Each time a statement is made, an opportunity must be given for both Houses to debate and vote on it via a Motion for resolution.
As with my previous amendment, Amendment 139C, this amendment is intended to require the Government to consider the long-term global nature of the refugee crisis, only a very small part of which—a minute, almost unmeasurably small part of which—are we seeing on our shores in Dover, in the Canterbury diocese which I serve and where we work extremely hard with those who are arriving. This Bill currently focuses solely on our domestic situation; the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, spoke very eloquently on that in the last group. It proposes action that not only is unlikely to achieve its aim domestically but also undermines the principles of the global refugee system, which the UK was influential in setting up in the first place. The call for a 10-year strategy for international collaboration on the refugee crisis is an attempt to address this by requiring the Government to look beyond our shores and into the longer term, and to lead internationally, as this country should and as it did in 1951.
On the global crisis, some figures have come but they were for the middle of 2022: I happen to have the ones for the end of 2022 and they are worse. At the end of 2022, there were 108.4 million people displaced; 35.3 million were refugees; 62.5 million were internally displaced; and 5.4 million were seeking asylum. As I said at Second Reading, conflict and climate change mean that these numbers are predicted widely to increase as much as tenfold in the next 25 years. The number arriving in small boats in the UK—45,755 in 2022—is tiny when set in such a horrifying context. Other countries, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, are taking far more refugees. Turkey alone was hosting nearly 3.6 million at the end of 2022. It is greatly to be admired, as are Rwanda, Uganda, the DRC and South Sudan, itself after 10 years of civil war having received almost three-quarters of a million people since the war broke out in Khartoum a few weeks ago.
Many other European countries also are taking more, including France and Germany. It is not a competition, but the UK ranked 18th in Europe for our intake of asylum applications per head of the population in the year ending September 2021. Most crucially, 76% of refugees are being hosted in low and middle-income countries—countries infinitely poorer than our own—and 70% in countries neighbouring their home countries. It is neither morally right nor strategically sensible to fail to engage with the global context or to leave other countries to deal with the crisis alone. Doing so damages our reputation as a nation, but it also risks unbearable pressures being placed on other countries and the possibility of state collapse and an ever-growing avalanche of further numbers of refugees across the world, adding to the problems we face.
The 1951 convention is a fundamental bedrock for the care and protection of refugees. To be very clear, this amendment is not proposing that the convention be scrapped or rewritten, where there might be a risk of it being watered down and protections removed. Instead, I am suggesting that the convention should be built upon and added to for the very different context we face today from 1951.
One area where work is needed is clarity on protection for certain types of refugee, such as those fleeing due to climate change or gender-based violence, who are not currently covered, or consistently covered, by the convention and would find themselves in great trouble under this Bill. Another is clarity on the allocation of state responsibility for refugees, including the safe third country principle, and the support for countries dealing with far greater numbers of refugees. Professor Alexander Betts, Enver Solomon and others have proposed a possible approach for this in the form of a state-led solidarity pact, an intergovernmental coalition of donor and host countries which clarifies respective state responsibilities and is supported by what they call the global refugee fund, administered to support host countries affected by large refugee movements.
Although the European Union’s agreement on migration, announced just in the last day or two, is a major step forward, it does not go as far as this. It does however give an example of numerous countries working out how to share their burden, and when the burden is so huge, that must be the way we go.
There have been many suggested policies and alternatives presented in this area and I am not going to waste your Lordships’ time by going into detail on them. This amendment does not specify exactly what should be pursued; it simply mandates the Government to engage seriously with other countries about the options through existing groups such as the Global Refugee Forum—whose meetings I understand the Foreign Office attends but not the Home Office, though I am happy to be corrected by the Minister. Given that refugees under this Bill come under the Home Office, that would seem to be something that might be changed. The amendment further mandates the Government to report back to Parliament annually on action and progress.
Again, if the Minister replies, as I anticipate, by saying that the Government already have longer-term strategies and that this Bill and amendment are not the place for them, I ask him to explain clearly the one place and one plan where we can find them. What guarantees are there that the Government are working and will continue to work with international partners? The amendment seeks to ensure that this Government and future Governments have to consider this rather than focus solely on the domestic context.
I regret that to date there has been little agreement in this Committee between Ministers and those on these Benches or, in fact, any other Benches—and, of course, the previous amendment was supported by every Bench, including the Conservative Benches. I wish to make it entirely clear that we are always willing to work in close partnership, as we have done with the Government on community sponsorship, on receiving Ukrainian citizens fleeing that terrible war and many other projects, including interfaith projects.
If the Government as part of their strategy wish to work in partnership with faith groups and NGOs to identify and support refugees anywhere in the world where we have a presence, we would be delighted to work with them—we normally have excellent sources of information on such things. We want the UK again to be a moral leader on the world stage. We are more than capable of it. A global crisis requires global solutions, and we need to develop them now. If all other counties adopted the approach the UK Government are taking with this Bill, the whole international refugee system would collapse. That is not in our interests—regardless of morality, purely pragmatically—nor any other country’s, never mind those in need of protection.
I urge the Government to take an opportunity for the UK to lead again in the care for and protection of refugees as we have in the past, to set their sights on effective, equitable long-term solutions to this crisis, working with international partners. In this amendment we seek, as were quite rightly challenged to do by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, to put forward a practical solution with practical ways of dealing with this and practical outcomes. If the Government have other ways of achieving the same ends which give security for the plans, I am very happy, as are my colleagues, to meet the Minister and discuss how that can be done. In the meantime, I beg to move.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 139D in the name of the most revered Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury; the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, are also signatories.
In passing, I note that it is highly undesirable that Peers have been forced to withdraw from speaking to amendments and giving their views because of the way that things have been organised. I do not lay blame anywhere for that, as I know that the usual channels have tried to accommodate it, but I hope that, when we reach Report, we can have a more reasoned way of dealing with the hours that Members are sitting and the way that we are approaching these things. That would be highly desirable.
I declare my interests as set out in the register. I am strongly of the view that a 10-year strategy is appropriate. I do not quite understand the Minister’s stance of not wanting a long-term strategy. As the most revered Primate set out, we have strategies that are long-term on all sorts of things. We also currently have a strategy for the refugee convention; it has been there for 70 years, and successive Governments have supported it. It seems to me that, rather than have individual approaches by countries around the world on such a global and international issue, it is clearly of interest that we all come together to work on a global and international solution. This problem is not going to go away; it will get much more serious as time goes on, as is clearly the case, with climate change refugees and issues of food security, gender-based violence and so on.
I accept that the Government are doing individual things, but I do not understand why they cannot be developed into a strategy in relation to both trafficking, which we looked at in the last group of amendments, and to the refugee convention, which we are looking at in this group. I anticipate that the Minister will not be any warmer towards this amendment than he was to the last one, but I hope that I stand to be corrected; perhaps I am wrong on that.
It seems to me that on something such as this there is truly an international scenario after 30 years of the refugee convention. Admittedly, the convention has a protocol, but, in essence, it was introduced to deal with the aftermath of World War II and issues related to the Holocaust and so on. We are living in a very different world, and we need a different solution; we need a different strategy to be developed to deal with this issue. I hope that the Minister will see that point, but it seems to me that he has set his face against dealing with something so obvious, and I do not understand why. As I said, I hope I am proved wrong.
We need that international effort. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, talked about regional solutions as well, which is part of it, but, clearly, the UN would be the most appropriate way of bringing this towards some sort of international order and of dealing with what will be a much more serious problem than we have seen hitherto. It is absolutely right that it has affected the UK—I accept totally that we need to do something about it—but it has not affected us nearly as much as our European neighbours, and certainly not as much as many countries around the world.
The idea that we can deal with this in a piecemeal way, with every single country doing something differently, is for the birds. In fact, where we have had success at all—I accept that we have had some—is in talking to partners, including France. I do not understand why the Government set themselves against dealing with this on a broader front. The Minister shakes his head; if he wants to intervene on me, I am very happy to take an intervention. I hope that he can accept the case for international action being necessary.
We have had differences of opinion during the debates on the Bill—understandably, passions have been running high; it has very often been fractious—but here we have a chance to unite as a House and to say that this is something that can be done in a very constructive way to meet the challenges of the future—and, I hope, to deal with some of the issues that have been dividing the House as we have moved through the debates. Frankly, what we have at the moment is something that appears to be an ad hoc approach to dealing with the issue, of coming up with a conglomeration of different ideas, of throwing paint at a wall Jackson Pollock-like and hoping for the best, rather than developing something with a bit more vision of Michelangelo about it.
I hope that the Minister will respond in a positive way, particularly given the ecumenical way that we have been developing, with two new bishops nominating themselves and my noble friend Lord Deben and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, wanting to join the Spiritual Benches—which shows the fluid nature of the House. As I say, I hope we will be able to come back on Report with something a bit more constructive than the Minister has given us sight of so far. I know that the Minister’s intentions are good. I am sure that he will be going back to the department to seek to convince the Home Secretary, who I know will be listening carefully, how we can move on these issues.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I very much welcome this amendment. I should say that this is not a bid to join the Bishops’ Benches and I thank the most reverend Primate for introducing it. I want to make just three points.
The first has been implicit in quite a lot of what has been said by the most reverend Primate and by other noble Lords on the previous amendment. It is that, if we are to have a global, collaborative strategy, it has to be from a different mindset from the one that underpins the Bill, because that mindset would prevent such a global strategy. We have to stop acting as if we are somehow uniquely burdened by this global refugee crisis. The figures have been given showing how other countries are pulling their weight much more than we are. Countries with far fewer resources than we have are doing so, yet with the Bill we act as if somehow the poor UK is under siege from this global crisis. To think globally means thinking differently, and we have to think and act with compassion. Compassion has certainly been lacking in this Bill and in the approach being taken.
My second point, which links with this, is that we have to start using a different language. The point has been made a number of times during our debates: people are not illegal and journeys are not illegal, but they are being turned illegal when they arrive here. Please let us not talk about “illegal routes” or “illegal migrants”. They are coming by irregular routes but they are not illegal. This goes right back to the beginning, when we talked about the language that is often used by some politicians and by the media: the language of invasion, cannibalisation and so forth.
It reminds me that I spoke in an even later debate—I think it was at about 2 am—on Albania. I met a group of young Albanians and have just discovered the notes I made from that meeting. I could not find them anywhere, and now I have. They talked about how disturbing they found the way that they were talked about in the media. In one newspaper—I leave the Committee to guess which—they were called “vermin”. I wrote down what they said: they felt violated, unsafe, scared, despised and unwanted. It is dreadful that young people feel that because of the way that we talk about them, so we have to change our language when we talk about the future migration strategy. The research of HOPE not hate suggests that every time politicians or the media talk negatively, it leads to a spike in far-right activity against migrants. Again, that is no basis for building a strategy.
Thirdly and perhaps more positively—this goes back to something that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham said earlier—if we are going to develop a strategy, and I hope that we will, we will have to involve refugees themselves in its development. We need the expertise of their experience of what it is like to flee countries and start a new life elsewhere. We have to base our strategy on that understanding, and it involves what the right reverend Prelate referred to earlier as “co-production”. It is not good enough for politicians to sit in their offices and come up with a strategy, then talk to politicians in another country and say, “Right, here’s our strategy”. We need to work from the very start with those people who are experiencing this. That is simply all I want to say.
I wish we could have had this debate at a better time. I am very sorry I was not able to be part of the debate that the most reverend Primate instigated in December, but I have read it and know that there were some inspiring speeches and lots of ideas that could go into the strategy. As I said in my earlier intervention, this is not requiring the Government to do X, Y and Z so that the next Government have to do X, Y and Z; it is simply saying that there has to be a strategic framework, and then Governments work within that. It does not matter what the complexion of the Government is. I certainly hope that my party in government would want to develop a strategic approach towards refugees and, as I say, one that works with refugees in building that.
Lord German (LD)
My Lords, it is a privilege to be able to follow the words we have just heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and my erstwhile colleague the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth. There are just a few things I want to add to what I said on the previous amendment. I think that, as a principle—the principle that the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, espoused just now—we need to look beyond ourselves. It is only by looking beyond ourselves that we will find a sustainable and effective solution for the problems we have in front of us.
I was thinking about the models for the sort of process that the most reverend Primate is suggesting. One is the Global Campaign for Education. It is known for its Let me Learn campaign, and it works across the globe to bring together people. I have been in meetings in this House with children from around the globe, from the poorest countries to the richest, using modern technology. The Global Campaign for Education basically wants to ensure that every child in this world has the right and the privilege to be educated by being sent to school. That level of collaboration brings together the United Nations, the rich countries and the donor countries, who then meet the poorer countries—there is a whole structure that sits around it. Unless we start thinking about this as being outward looking, and unless we look beyond ourselves, we are never going to find a sustainable solution.
We support this amendment, as it is seeking to recognise that our UK response to refugees has to be considered by how it interconnects with the global community. We cannot pretend that we can pull up the drawbridge and be isolated from the global issues around us. What we do impacts on other countries.
There are some countries which would follow the lead that the UK takes, but that is a race to the bottom. If we seek to discharge responsibilities for refugees to other countries, there is every chance that other countries will follow the UK’s lead. As countries do this, refugees will be pushed back to the border countries and further to the regions from which they fled. A smaller number of countries will end up shouldering the world’s refugee resources, which will be stretched, and regions will be destabilised. That is a real possibility around the globe.
The UK will be impacted in one way or another, and we cannot separate ourselves from this. The whole global refugee protection system would be at risk of collapse. Forced displacement is a global issue which requires a global response. We need to work towards these ends as described in this amendment, and we need to be seen as a country which is able to take a lead.
The Lord Bishop of Durham
My Lords, the most reverend Primate might be nervous—he did not know I was going to stand up and he has no clue about what I will say. But I will start by saying I fully support his amendment. I will ask the Minister about the Global Compact on Refugees. The UN has been seeking to develop a global strategy on refugees for a number of years, and it was my privilege to join the Home Office team dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis in Geneva in 2018, at its request. It asked me to make an address. I say this partly in answer to my colleague: actually, the Home Office as well as the FCDO has been engaged in some of those discussions. But it seems to me that we have almost lost sight of the fact that we signed up to the global compact. I accept that the Minister may need to write on this, but I ask him: where are we now with our commitment to the global compact on refugees and our commitment to engage in that ongoing development of a UN strategy that responds to refugees? Are Home Office people still involved in those discussions, or has it all moved to the FCDO?
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, I will not repeat the comments I made on the last group, some of which equally apply here, but, as this is the end of Committee, I feel at liberty to repeat one of the remarks I made at Second Reading. I studied moral philosophy at university—Oxford, I am afraid—and one of the acid tests for whether something was morally right was: what would happen if everyone did the same thing? As the most reverend Primate said, if everyone followed the path that the Government propose to take with the Bill, the whole established global system for dealing with refugees would collapse. International collaboration to tackle refugee crises is essential, as are these amendments, which we support.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
My Lords, it is a privilege to make a short contribution on an amendment that we very much support. Before I make general remarks, I ask the Minister to reflect again on the importance of a strategy and why strategies can move between Governments, as I know from having seen Governments change. That does not mean that they stay exactly the same, and a strategic framework may not bind another Government, but that does not stop Governments producing strategies for themselves. I ask the Minister to reflect on that—I am sure that others who have had experience in government would bear that out.
I was reflecting more generally about the references to the 1951 refugee convention. I mention that because the world faced a global crisis in 1951, and what did it do? Visionary people came together to sort the problem out as best they could and to deal with the challenges that they faced. As the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, said, it was more than regional; it was global, affecting the global institutions and world powers, which had major conflicting differences—poverty and goodness only knows what else was going on, with countless millions of people displaced.
I am not saying that the world is currently in a post-World War II situation, but I agree with the most reverend Primate that we face a global crisis that cannot be solved by one country on its own—it just cannot. The world will be driven by a common interest, in some ways, to sort this out. Whatever we think of other countries, their own self-interest will drive them to sort it out. Countries will try to sort it out on their own, but they will not be able to.
Without being a prophet of doom about this, I say that things are going to get more difficult. I do not mean that we are at the edge of the end of the world, or anything like that, but you can see the impacts of regional and ethnic conflict as well as overpopulation, failing crops, the changing climate, water and energy competition and the food crisis, as well as millions of people moving—in fact, countless millions. I know that figures have been arrived at. Many noble Lords have been to parts of the world where it is unbelievable to see some of the poorest countries in the world dealing with millions of people. If those people came into some of the richest countries, I am not sure how they would deal with it. I went to Angola 20 years ago, after the civil war, and you just could not believe it. I went to one refugee camp and there were 1 million people in it—and that was internationally supported, so it was fantastic. I went to Jordan and the number of people who had flooded across the border from Syria into temporary camps there was unbelievable. There were huge numbers of people—and you can replicate that. I do not think that it is going to stop any time soon, and we need to understand how we are going to deal with that and cope with it. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, was quite right to point out the various impacts.
The most reverend Primate is not trying to say that therefore that means that the UK should just allow in anybody who wants to come—that is just trivialising the argument. Of course you have to have control and manage the situation. The point that the amendment seeks to make is that, if this is going to be sorted out—over and above the problem of the boats, which we accept needs to be dealt with—the UK is still a significant power. It is challenged at the moment through some of its attitudes to international conferences, conventions and treaties, but we are still a member of the United Nations Security Council, NATO and the Commonwealth, which we have not mentioned. When you travel, you recognise, understand and see the influence that the UK still has.
In backing the amendment proposed by the most reverend Primate, though the initiatives that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham has mentioned—with the Clewer Initiative and the Anglican community across the world—I say that in the end people are going to have to come together to sort this out. Somewhere along the line, it will need big, visionary people to stand up and say, “We’re going to do that”.
I am going to make this point—and I am going to take a minute on this issue. The argument in this country, which those of us who stood for election know is difficult, and the conflation between immigration, migration, refugees and asylum makes things actually really difficult, because it is all lumped together as one problem. Somewhere along the line, part of what a strategy does is to get people to step back and reflect. The British public, along with all the publics in the world, can do that. If people are presented even with difficult choices that they may not wish to confront, they are not stupid—they know that sometimes things have to be dealt with.
This is a really important point: people are decent. I know that sometimes they will rant and rave about how this is happening and they cannot believe that everybody is coming here, but I have seen myself, and I am sure that everyone has seen it in their own communities, that if you try to deport one family that has lived in community for a considerable period of time, there will be a campaign in that community to stop them being removed. That is because people are decent. If you look at it as individual children and grandparents, individual men and women, we all know from our own personal experiences that people look at it in a different way. All that the amendment proposed by the most reverend Primate is doing is to say that we should harness that and bring it together into a way of addressing a problem that we have as a country but which we have globally as well. If we do not try to sort it out globally, we will have a problem, because the problem will not go away—but it is a challenge that we can meet. This gives us an opportunity to develop a strategy that has at its heart using the privileged position that our country has as a world leader to be an agent for change in a way that would bring about a better world and offer hope to millions of the poorest people in the world.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
As before, I am grateful to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for explaining so clearly the case for a 10-year strategy for tackling refugee crises. I agree with him that an assessment of the root causes of refugee migration to the UK, and indeed any country, is a worthwhile endeavour. However, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, by extension from his remarks, in questioning whether the British Government, or indeed any one national Government, are the appropriate body to develop such a strategy.
Indeed, the most reverend Primate also acknowledged in his speech on Amendment 139C that developing global solutions to such issues cannot be done by one country alone. None the less, I assure my noble friend Lord Bourne that this Government are strongly committed to international action and collaboration in this area. Indeed, as many have noted, we have a strong track record of international collaboration with both state and non-state actors, such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Bank, non-governmental organisations and other donors, and through our direct engagement with major refugee-hosting countries.
The UNHCR has a global mandate to protect and safeguard the rights of refugees and to support internally displaced populations and people who are stateless or whose nationality is disputed. We will of course continue to work with the UNHCR, as we have done many times before, to respond to displacement crises globally and offer safe routes to protection in the UK.
I understand the most reverend Primate’s reasoning for introducing his amendment; after all, the UNHCR estimated that, as of mid-2022, the number of forcibly displaced persons exceeded 100 million. We heard earlier today that the figure is now said to be in excess of 110 million. That figure results from armed conflict, violence, persecution, climate change, economic uncertainty and food insecurity—all of which are on the rise.
As the most reverend Primate and my noble friend Lord Bourne indicated, the international community can address displacement on this scale only collectively, through a holistic approach, utilising, where appropriate, developmental, diplomatic, military and humanitarian interventions. I also acknowledge our work with faith groups, not least the Anglican community, in furthering our policy objectives in this area. That is the approach that the UK has taken. Recognising the need for a holistic approach in our own strategy, rather than creating a siloed refugee strategy, the UK Government have already embedded actions to tackle refugee crises throughout existing cross-government strategies, including the Integrated Review Refresh, as well as the international development strategy and the humanitarian framework.
We already take a long-term approach to tackling refugee crises. The UK has been one of the largest donors to the agencies working on the front line over many years. We have also played a key role in intergovernmental processes that have shaped the way in which the international community responds to displacement crises, such as through the development of the Global Compact on Refugees—mentioned earlier by the right reverend Prelate—which was adopted by the international community in 2018, and, before that, through the World Humanitarian Summit, as well as through our engagement with major development actors such as the World Bank. In particular, the Global Compact on Refugees provides the international community with a shared strategy for tackling refugee crises, and a shared vision and strategy for how to operationalise the principles of predictable and equitable burden and responsibility sharing—principles that underpin refugee protection.
In response to the point raised by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, the Home Office continues to work closely with the FCDO in preparation for the next Global Refugee Forum in December.
The Government are constantly considering the longer-term drivers, impacts and policy implications of migration, alongside delivering more immediate improvements to the system. Our approach is cross-government: we work with a wide range of departments on diplomacy and development, and with law enforcement agencies, in developing this. I believe that this is the most appropriate means by which to do so.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
My Lords, I am very grateful to those who have contributed, as well as the co-signatories to the amendment, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the noble Lord, Lord German, in encouraging us to look beyond ourselves. I accept willingly—well, reluctantly—the apology from the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for going to Oxford.
I was very worried about what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham was about to say; if you had sat with him over the last 10 years in the House of Bishops, you would be worried too. But it is well known that, on these Benches, we do not use whips—I leave the imagination of noble Lords to run riot. In fact, over the past 10 years, I have noticed that, when it comes to Report, as often as not these Benches cancel themselves out by voting in different directions. So when the Minister is doing his calculations, he may find that encouraging.
Turning to what the Minister said, I am again disappointed but not surprised. But I genuinely think that it is unwise—I am not saying that it is bad, just unwise. Surely the role of Parliament is to contribute to the Government’s thinking and to call them to account, and to do that not by having to burrow into the highways and byways of policy and commitment but to be able, as we do on defence and other areas where strategies are published, to have the opportunity to look at the whole at once and take a global view. Not being able to do that is, I think, not of advantage to the way this country is governed or to what the Government do or, particularly, to the way that this House operates.
I am happy to be corrected but I think the Minister slightly misunderstood the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in suggesting that he said that Britain could not take a lead and it had to be the UN. I think it was more or less the opposite. One of the great privileges of the last few years has been to have a growing relationship with the Secretary-General of the United Nations, with whom we work extensively in Mozambique, the DRC and other places, through our local bishops and clergy. One of the things he would say again and again is that for the UN to work it needs leadership, not from within but from members of the P5. Their leadership makes an enormous difference. This country provided the first Secretary-General as one of the key founders of the United Nations. Of course we should do it through the United Nations—no one could doubt that—but what is there in us that we should lose confidence in our ability to lead the world? We have done it for hundreds of years, morally and brilliantly at times. Let us regain our confidence and not hide back and hope that someone else creeps forward on to the front line to deal with this issue. I appeal to the Minister: let there be less fear and more faith in this country. It deserves it.
Finally, there is one other way of dealing with this—the boats must be stopped—which is by increasing the speed of returns and getting the current system working effectively and efficiently. We can make an enormous difference, and not be putting people on barges. I was in Weymouth, in Salisbury diocese, over the weekend, meeting 130 community leaders. There is going to be a barge in Weymouth Harbour; it is being fitted out at the moment and will be there in the next few days, I believe. The mayors and the MPs were there— everyone was there—and I asked how much consultation there had been from the Government. The answer was none whatever—none, zero, zilch. That is an example of the consequences of lack of strategy. Strategy sends a group of people down from the Home Office, a task force, to work with local people. As the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said, we are a kind, hospitable and gentle nation who would receive people happily.
I am aware of the time—it is almost 10.40 pm. I feel that there are probably two minutes more of words that I need to say.
Lord Coaker (Lab)
I thought the most reverend Primate the Archbishop would welcome my support for what he said about our country regaining its confidence. To reassure the Minister, I was talking about the international bodies, and the United Nations in particular, but with Britain playing a leadership role in those organisations to bring about the change that we would all want to see across the world. I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for allowing me to reinforce the point he made on my behalf; it is an exceedingly important one.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
I am grateful to the noble Lord. This is an international problem, and it requires an international strategy. Britain has the capacity to deliver it and lead on it. We must stop the boats. We require an international approach to do that.
We must control our borders. That cannot be done simply by cutting off people who arrive; it must be done by cutting them off far further back. To cut them off simply when they arrive is like what happens in the parts of the Diocese of Canterbury which are prone to flooding: thinking that by putting up sandbags at the front door, you can stop the water coming in round the back.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
The point was made earlier in relation to the previous amendment about our international obligations: we cannot expect international collaboration and to provide the kind of leadership that is being talked about if we do not meet our international obligations. One criticism of the Bill is that it does not do so, and that it undermines our international obligations.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and the noble Baroness have made the same point with great eloquence. It is obviously essential.
I have a final quote. I am going to quote the Bible —I am sorry about that but it is sort of my job. It comes from the Old Testament, where one of the prophets asks: “What are we called to do?” We are called to love mercy, to act justly and to walk humbly with our God. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Murray of Blidworth
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment has the effect that the power for regulations under the Bill to make consequential etc provision and to make different provision for different purposes applies to the power to make transitional and saving provision in connection with the coming into force of the Bill.
Lord Murray of Blidworth
“national | section 3(11)” |
This amendment is consequential on the amendment in the name of Lord Murray of Blidworth at page 5, line 38.