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Oral Answers to Questions
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Hamish Falconer)
As these are the first departmental questions since the appointment of the shadow Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel), I welcome the shadow Front-Bench team to their place.
Alongside the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), the Foreign Secretary is establishing a new soft power council to advise Government and shape a new strategy to increase UK soft power and enhance it to deliver our foreign policy objectives. Promoting all our soft power assets, including the British Council, the BBC World Service, scholarships and values, is crucial if we are to generate growth, security and global impact for the UK.
Fabian Hamilton
The Government’s commitment to UK soft power was highlighted by the Chancellor’s additional funding for the BBC World Service in the recent Budget. Last week, I met Moldovan MPs, who are on the frontline of Russian aggression. They really valued the British Council’s presence, but it had to close owing to funding cuts. Does the Minister agree that it would be detrimental to Britain’s place on the world stage if the British Council was forced to close more offices, particularly where British values of freedom and democracy are needed most?
Hamish Falconer
The Foreign Secretary has made it clear that the UK is committed to supporting Moldova’s democratic choice to pursue a path of freedom, independence and European integration. The FCDO provided £511 million in grant in aid funding for the 2022 to 2025 spending review period. In an increasingly digital age, the British Council’s impact should be judged by operational, rather than physical, presence. The council retains a physical presence in over 100 countries. Those in other countries still access cultural engagements and teaching activities online.
Mr Speaker
Let’s take a new member of the Back Benches: Andrew Mitchell, on his return.
Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)
May I wish the new shadow Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), every success in her role? May I also wish the Minister and the entire Government foreign affairs team courage and wisdom as they deal with a world more dangerous than at any time in our lives? When it comes to soft power and development, I remind them of the importance of the words best articulated by former US Defence Secretary Mattis: “If you cut development spend, you have to order more ammunition.”
Hamish Falconer
I pay tribute to the right hon. Member’s long commitment to these issues. I returned last week from Pakistan where I was first deployed when he was the Secretary of State for International Development, so I know well his commitment to the issues over a long period.
I agree with the sentiments of the right hon. Member’s question. The aid budget is incredibly important and makes a significant contribution to our national security right across the world. We continue to work hard to ensure that our aid budget is fit for purpose and does the job it needs to do on behalf of the UK right across the world.
Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker. Whether it is the findings of the election monitors in Georgia, interference in the recent elections in Moldova, the illegal invasion of Ukraine, or the chill felt from the Baltics to Bucharest, Europe today is a much more contested space. This is the moment to pin our colours to the mast and be much more active in supporting those with Euro-Atlantic aspirations. How will the Minister build on the efforts of the last Government and use our considerable soft power to be much more proactive?
Hamish Falconer
We continue to engage heavily on those issues—the Foreign Secretary was in Moldova last week. We are committed to enhancing the UK’s soft power after a period of decline, and that is why the Foreign Secretary will be launching the soft power council with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in the coming weeks.
Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Mr David Lammy)
Palestinian communities have suffered horrific violence at the hands of Israeli settlers. In October, the Government sanctioned three outposts and four entities linked to violence in the west bank. I will not speculate about future sanctions designations—doing so would only reduce their impact—but we continue to explore all options to take tougher action.
Clive Jones
Settlement expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories remains one of the biggest barriers to peace in the middle east. In October the Foreign Secretary said:
“As long as violent extremists remain unaccountable, the UK and the international community will continue to act.”
Will he commit today to considering sanctions against the extremist Ministers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich of the Israeli Government?
Mr Lammy
I have been very clear in office. In October, I targeted the Amana settler group, which operates as a commercial construction company, and I was pleased that the US followed us in those sanctions just last week. I was also concerned about a religious school promoting violence against Jews, and I sanctioned it. A non-governmental organisation provided volunteers for illegal outposts, and I sanctioned it. Of course we continue to keep sanctions policy under consideration. We are very concerned by the violence, by the expansion, and by the rhetoric that we are hearing from members of the Israeli Government.
Mr Betts
I listened carefully to my right hon. Friend’s answer. He said that he will not speculate on future sanctions, but the two Israeli Ministers named are encouraging settler violence and have called for the annexation of the west bank by Israel. Does my right hon. Friend accept that, even if he will not talk about further sanctions today, he can recognise that the threat of annexation is real, and that until we come out clearly in support of an independent Palestinian state, the settlers will continue their violence in the belief that they will eventually achieve the annexation that they want?
Mr Lammy
I commend my hon. Friend for standing up on those issues. Let me be absolutely clear: annexation would be illegal and we would stand opposed to it. I make that fundamentally clear. He should be assured that we will continue to speak out both against illegal violence against settlers and against settler expansion.
Mr Tom Morrison (Cheadle) (LD)
International law is vital for us to build a platform for a more secure and peaceful world. Do the Government recognise and support the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction, and will they co-operate fully with the Court to ensure that it can carry out its work without obstruction?
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
I will also ask my right hon. Friend about Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, and perhaps if I ask in a different way, we might get an answer. Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton tells us that before the last general election, the Foreign Office was working up potential sanctions against those two most controversial and infamous settlers and Ministers. I appreciate that sanctions are kept under review, but is my right hon. Friend in a position to tell us when a decision might be made, or if one has already been made, about those Ministers?
Mr Lammy
I think the previous Foreign Secretary was wrong to talk about sanctions under consideration—particularly to talk about sanctions that he said were under consideration but then did not implement. I will not get drawn on sanctions policy at the Dispatch Box, but I am pleased that my right hon. Friend is raising issues of such importance. Anyone looking can see the strength of feeling in the House.
Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)
The comments last week by Finance Minister Smotrich advocating the annexation of the west bank, together with the continuing devastation in northern Gaza, have reinforced the idea that elements of the Israeli Cabinet have no interest in a two-state solution. There is now a real and imminent risk that the extremists in the Israeli Cabinet will succeed in annexing Palestinian territories before any negotiations can take place. In the light of that, does the Foreign Secretary agree that now is the time to recognise Palestine?
Mr Lammy
Yesterday at the G7 meeting in Rome, Foreign Ministers discussed that very issue. We were united—all of us—in condemning any suggestion of annexation. We would stand against it.
Chris Law (Dundee Central) (SNP)
The Minister for Development (Anneliese Dodds)
The Government are determined to rebuild the UK’s reputation on international development. We have announced a doubling of support for people hit by the humanitarian emergency in Sudan, as well as providing support for people in Gaza, in Lebanon and in other crisis situations.
Chris Law
The Government’s insistence on continuing to implement the Tories’ deep and damaging cuts to the aid budget and unprecedented levels of ODA spending on in-donor refugee costs is resulting in reductions, pauses and cancellations of overseas ODA projects.
Anneliese Dodds
I can tell the hon. Gentleman that our programme budget for the FCDO in 2025-26 will actually be at its highest level in recent years. We are able to deliver that because this Government are taking action on the issues that the previous Government did not tackle, in particular the in-donor refugee costs that have eaten into that budget. We just saw gimmicks; we did not see action. Instead, the new Government are taking action.
Harpreet Uppal (Huddersfield) (Lab)
The humanitarian crisis in Sudan is horrific, and it is clear that rape is being used as a weapon of war. Recent data from Médecins Sans Frontières highlights that 90% of sexual violence survivors in a hospital in Chad were abused by armed perpetrators, and 50% were attacked in their homes. This is happening in 2024. Can the Foreign Secretary provide details on how the UK’s recent pledges on humanitarian aid for Sudan and the region are being used to support survivors of sexual and gender-based violence?
Anneliese Dodds
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that incredibly concerning situation. The UK has been determined to do all that it can, particularly in relation to conflict-related sexual violence. In October 2024, it was the UK that led moves to secure the renewal of the mandate of the fact-finding mission at the United Nations Human Rights Council. As was just mentioned, we recently doubled humanitarian aid, and the Foreign Secretary also led efforts at the UN Security Council to take action on the humanitarian emergency in Sudan.
Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)
The Government appear to be in a complete tailspin over whether they will release the costs that will fall to the British taxpayer as a result of the rushed deal to give away the British Chagos islands. Given the reported trip to Mauritius by the special envoy, Jonathan Powell, can the Minister at least confirm today which budget the costs will come from, including whether they intend to use the aid budget? Will she tell the House how much it will cost each year and in total, and if the British Chagossians will actually have a genuine say? Would it not make more sense to keep these strategically important islands under the Crown, rather than the secretive deal negotiated? No deal is better than a bad deal.
Anneliese Dodds
My understanding is that there were actually 10 rounds of negotiations under the Conservatives, but we did not see the UK reaching the necessary agreements. This is a frankly bizarre argument coming from the Opposition. All the details of the situation are in the public domain, and quite rightly so. This is part of the UK ensuring that we follow international law.
Brian Leishman (Alloa and Grangemouth) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Mr David Lammy)
We are committed to securing consular access and the release of Mr el-Fattah. We continue to raise Mr el-Fattah’s case at the highest levels with the Egyptian Government. The Prime Minister raised this with President Sisi on 8 August, and I last raised it with the Egyptian Foreign Minister yesterday.
Brian Leishman
I thank the Foreign Secretary for his answer. Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s mother, Laila Soueif, is in the Gallery today on the 58th day of her hunger strike in protest at the continued imprisonment of her son, a British citizen, whose prison sentence in Egypt ended in September. I am sure that the Foreign Secretary feels the same as me and understands that Laila wants to know that her Government are doing everything they can to bring her son home. Will the Foreign Secretary guarantee that the UK Government will put a hold on any new economic or financial partnerships with Egypt unless and until British national Alaa Abd el-Fattah is freed?
Mr Lammy
I look forward to meeting Mr el-Fattah’s mother later on today. I reassure my hon. Friend personally that I share his determination and resolve to see Alaa reunited with his family, and I think their love and dedication to him is obvious to many parliamentarians whom they have met and campaigned with. My hon. Friend will understand that with the terrible situation in Gaza, it is important that this Government continue to speak to our Egyptian friends, who obviously have real proximity to Gaza. I understand the strength of feeling, and that is why the Prime Minister has raised this and I have raised this on successive occasions. Alaa is a dual national, and we will continue to lobby on his behalf.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
I fully support the call for Mr el-Fattah’s release, but in the same area, Ryan Cornelius has spent 16 years illegally held by the United Arab Emirates, much of it in solitary confinement. The Secretary of State says that he will pursue these cases rigorously, but when he went to the UAE recently, he did not raise the case of Ryan Cornelius.
Mr Lammy
I reassure the right hon. Gentleman that the situation of Ryan Cornelius has been raised with the UAE, and officials continue to provide consular access to Mr Cornelius and Mr Ridley and are in contact with their families at this time. It is a serious case; we are absolutely aware of it, and the UAE knows that we are very concerned.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Ind)
I completely understand and appreciate what the Foreign Secretary has said about maintaining a relationship with Egypt because of the issue in Gaza, but the reality is that Mr el-Fattah’s family has suffered enough, and President Sisi will move only if there is an economic threat. Therefore, after the Foreign Secretary meets the family tomorrow, can I ask him to contact the President’s office to make absolutely clear that our economic relationship will suffer unless this British citizen is released?
Mr Lammy
The right hon. Gentleman should be reassured that I spoke to the Egyptian Foreign Minister yesterday and said to him that I was meeting Mrs el-Fattah today. I urged him to look at what parliamentarians are saying about this case, which is of huge concern, and pressed him to do more. We have continued to do that with the Egyptians. It is obviously sensitive because of the situation in Gaza, but I do not think the Egyptians are in any doubt about how seriously this case is taken by the British system, the Government and this Parliament.
Brendan O’Hara (Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber) (SNP)
The all-party parliamentary group on arbitrary detention and hostage affairs has been hearing evidence from UK nationals who are being, or have been, detained. We were privileged to hear from Alaa’s mother just this morning. An oft-repeated concern is that if a UK national finds themselves in that awful situation, they are essentially on their own compared with other nationals. Does the Minister recognise that depiction, and if he does not, what can he point to as a unique advantage of having a British passport for someone who finds themselves arbitrarily detained?
Mr Lammy
I recognise that the hon. Gentleman has got some problem with having a British passport, but I have no such problem. I am proud to be a citizen of this great country, and we have some outstanding diplomats and officials in the FCDO. Of course, we recognised in opposition that there are issues in this area, which is why we have said that we will introduce a special representative to work with hostage families.
Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
Alaa’s friends and family, whom I have the privilege of representing as my constituents, just want their brother, uncle and son home safe. Previously, the Foreign Secretary—who has worked hard on this issue and, as he says, has raised it with the Egyptians—has talked about what we could do if the Egyptians will not restore consular access. They still have not done that, so could the Foreign Secretary update us? I know this House speaks as one in standing and demanding that Alaa be freed and able to come home to his family for this Christmas, but what more can and will the Foreign Secretary do if the Egyptians will not restore consular access for the family?
Mr Lammy
My hon. Friend has campaigned diligently on the family’s behalf. She will know that the Egyptians do not accept Mr el-Fattah’s dual nationality—that is an issue between us—and it is for that reason that they deny consular access. Currently, access is through Mr el-Fattah’s lawyer. I am urging the Egyptians to understand that he got his citizenship in the usual way, just like other members of his family. There was no conspiracy on the part of the state in the way that Mr el-Fattah got that citizenship, and I continue to press them on that very issue, which would allow him to have the consular access that he deserves.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Secretary of State for that answer and commend the hon. Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman) for raising the matter, but it is not the only case: the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) referred to another case, and I would add Jimmy Lai as a third. The UK and British passport must mean something. With that in mind, is it not time to set aside a specific section in the FCDO that looks at these cases and is tasked with getting our British citizens back home to this United Kingdom?
Mr Lammy
As the hon. Gentleman mentions Jimmy Lai, let me say once again that we call on the Hong Kong authorities to release immediately British national Jimmy Lai, who is a significant priority for this Government. That is why the Prime Minister raised the matter with the President of China last week and I raised it with the Foreign Minister of China. The hon. Gentleman is right: this does need a close look by the new Government. We are just over four months old, we are looking at it and we will come forward with proposals shortly.
John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Hamish Falconer)
Ensuring the safe release of all hostages, including British national Emily Damari and three other hostages with strong UK links, remains a top priority for this Government. We support the efforts of negotiators and call on the parties to return to negotiations. We continue to work alongside allies and partners in the region towards securing hostage releases. Negotiations remain the best chance to get hostages, cruelly detained by Hamas, home to their loved ones. I relayed these points to the Israeli deputy Foreign Minister yesterday.
John Lamont
The horrors endured by the 97 Israelis and foreign nationals held hostage by Hamas terrorists in Gaza for over 13 months are unthinkable. Given that the efforts to secure their release have not yet been successful, what further steps is the United Kingdom taking to bring home Emily Damari, a 28-year-old British citizen, and the rest of the captives?
Hamish Falconer
I am sure that the whole House will join me in saying to those families that we, as a House and a Government, will do absolutely everything we can. The horrors of being a hostage family are unbearable, and we have them in our mind each and every day. We are disappointed that talks to secure hostage releases appear to have stalled for the moment. We are urging all parties to return to the table. A deal remains the best prospect and we hope to work with our allies to see that come through.
Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)
On Friday, on account of a negative vote cast by a permanent member, the Security Council failed to adopt a text put forward by its 10 elected members calling for an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and demanding the release of all hostages. That is extremely disappointing, as it condemns thousands of people in the middle east to ongoing conflict and moves no further forward to securing the release of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, although I and many of my constituents welcome the fact that the UK voted for that resolution. What will the Minister’s next steps be in achieving greater global agreement on securing peace, a ceasefire and the release of the hostages?
Hamish Falconer
This Government will continue to do everything we can to press for a ceasefire, the release of all hostages and a reduction in violence in the middle east. The Foreign Secretary discussed these matters in the G7 and I discussed them with my Israeli counterpart yesterday, and we will continue to take all steps across a wide range of different conversations to try to advance the ceasefire that we so desperately need.
Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)
Last week, I spoke with Mandy Damari. The Minister has mentioned Emily, and I know the Foreign Secretary and his team have been in touch with the family as well. She and many other hostage families are going through the most unimaginable suffering, so can the Minister, on behalf of the Foreign Secretary, confirm whether any aid organisations have had humanitarian access to the hostages, and if not, what pressure is being exerted on those agencies? Clearly, welfare concerns are paramount, but these poor families are also suffering unimaginable horrors and our aid budget needs to be spent in the right way, so can the Minister tell us what work is being undertaken?
Hamish Falconer
Regrettably, no organisation has had access to the hostages. We continue to call for access for the International Committee of the Red Cross and any other appropriate non-governmental organisation in the usual way. Let us be clear: Hamas hold these hostages, and they are behaving abominably and outwith any international norm. They are not abiding by any convention that we could think of. We will continue to press them to ensure that there is the required access to British nationals, but it is regrettable for the whole House that we are in this position.
James MacCleary (Lewes) (LD)
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Stephen Doughty)
The Foreign Secretary attended the EU Foreign Affairs Council on 14 October. In the margins, he agreed with Josep Borrell, the EU High Representative for foreign affairs, to work towards a security partnership and committed to six-monthly foreign policy dialogues, starting in early 2025. Yesterday, I met Secretary-General Sannino of the European External Action Service to discuss, alongside ministerial colleagues, some of our vital shared interests, including Ukraine, hybrid threats and the western Balkans.
James MacCleary
President-elect Trump’s confirmation of tariffs on Canada, one of the US’s closest allies, raises serious concerns about his willingness to honour the US-UK special relationship. If that is the future of US relations with its closest partners, does the Minister agree that closer co-operation with the EU on defence and trade is now urgently needed, including access to the European customs union and the defence pact with the EU, going beyond the recent agreement with Germany?
Stephen Doughty
We have a thriving trading and investment relationship with the United States, with more than 1 million British citizens working for US firms, and vice versa. We look forward to working with President-elect Trump in office, including on his policy priorities and to improve our trading relations. Our need to work together in Europe on security issues is clear to all Members, whether that is the threat from Russia, the war in Ukraine, hybrid threats, the situation in Moldova or the situation in the western Balkans, and that is exactly what we are getting on with and doing.
Phil Brickell (Bolton West) (Lab)
I very much welcome the recent announcement of the UK-Germany bilateral defence agreement, which was signed at record-breaking pace by the new Government at Trinity House last month. It will bolster closer working with Europe’s largest economy on wider defence and security matters at a time of increasing Russian aggression across Europe. With that in mind, can the Minister therefore explain to the House how the Trinity House agreement fits into wider discussions with EU and NATO counterparts around defence and security?
Stephen Doughty
I thank my hon. Friend for his remarks on that important treaty work; I know he takes a keen interest in matters relating to UK-German relations. We continue to engage with German colleagues from across the spectrum. We are keen to get this treaty agreed as soon as possible. For me, it naturally fits with our NATO membership and the new enhanced dialogue we have with the EU on security and defence matters.
Steve Witherden (Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr) (Lab)
David Smith (North Northumberland) (Lab)
The Minister for Development (Anneliese Dodds)
The humanitarian situation in Gaza is catastrophic. The UK’s recent vote for the UN Security Council resolution on Gaza has already been mentioned. It called for a huge scale-up in aid across Gaza. We need that aid access, and restrictions on aid are unacceptable.
Steve Witherden
The International Development Committee heard testimony from Nizam Mamode, a surgeon who has recently returned from the Nasser hospital in Gaza. He described Israeli drones picking off injured children after bombings. His account echoed an October New York Times report, which cited 44 doctors, nurses and paramedics who witnessed numerous cases of pre-pubescent children being shot in the head or chest during the ongoing conflict in Gaza. What steps are the Government taking to prevent a genocide in Gaza?
Anneliese Dodds
We have heard a number of deeply concerning reports about developments in Gaza. I know that has also been the case for the Select Committee, as my hon. Friend mentioned. The UK Government’s position could not be clearer: international law, including international humanitarian law, must be held to, and that covers in particular the operations of healthcare workers. We pay tribute to them operating in such difficult circumstances.
David Smith
As we have been hearing, the situation in Gaza—especially northern Gaza—is dire, with the UN anticipating that this year up to 60,000 children under the age of five could be facing acute malnutrition. At the same time, the trucks entering Gaza have reduced by 63% since October 2023. I welcome the leading role that the Government are taking in providing vital humanitarian aid for Gaza, but does the Minister agree that the ongoing Israeli restrictions on the flow of essential aid are completely unacceptable and should be lifted immediately?
Anneliese Dodds
Yes. We are seeing a disturbing impact from those restrictions; we have seen it in the famine assessment and in the levels of malnutrition and ill health now prevalent in Gaza. Winter is now upon us, making the situation even worse. The restrictions on aid are unacceptable. They must be lifted immediately.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
When the Foreign Secretary was in Baku recently for COP29, did he discuss with his interlocutors across the region the extent to which the global finance goals would impact on humanitarian assistance in the middle east?
Anneliese Dodds
Yes, the Foreign Secretary did discuss those matters, including directly with Mia Mottley, the Premier of Barbados, who has been leading many of the small island developing states on these issues. Certainly, the UK is determined to play its part on humanitarian issues as well as globally on climate issues. That is so important for our own country as well as for the rest of the world.
Ayoub Khan (Birmingham Perry Barr) (Ind)
Some weeks ago, I asked the Foreign Secretary about getting assurances that children receiving polio vaccinations would not be killed after receiving them. Since then, thousands of children have been killed in northern Gaza. Given the ICC’s recent ruling about war crimes, the British public no doubt want to know why the Government are shying away from their legal and moral obligation to ban all arms and all trade.
Anneliese Dodds
The UK Government have been determined to use every mechanism to advance international humanitarian law. That includes within the UN Security Council, as we just discussed, but we have also been taking action at every bilateral and multilateral opportunity, including on polio, where the UK led efforts to get vaccination going in the first place.
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
In October, the Israeli Knesset passed two laws relating to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency: the law for cessation of UNRWA activities in the state of Israel; and the law for cessation of UNRWA activities. They will take effect on 28 January, and the consequence will be preventing aid distribution in Gaza and the prevention of primary care, education and refuse collection in the west bank.
Last week, my Committee was in Palestine and Jordan. There is huge concern that if that legislation takes effect, it will breach numerous international laws and have a catastrophic effect on the humanitarian and security situation in the region. What conversations have Ministers had with their Israeli counterparts to prevent that implementation, and what are they doing with the international community to protect a UN organisation?
Anneliese Dodds
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that and to her Committee for its work on this important issue. The UK Government have been absolutely clear that UNRWA is the only agency that can deliver aid at the scale and depth required in the middle of this humanitarian emergency.
My hon. Friend asked about representations being made by the UK Government. I have made those representations myself, including at the UN General Assembly. The Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Lincoln (Hamish Falconer), made those representations yesterday. The Foreign Secretary has made them a number of times, including to his Israeli counterpart. It is clear that the restrictions on the operation of UNRWA must not be implemented by the Israeli Government.
Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)
The humanitarian situation in the middle east is made worse by arms supply from within and beyond the region. The Liberal Democrats have a long-standing policy that the UK Government should not be exporting arms to Israel or to the Occupied Palestinian Territories given that they were referred to in the FCDO’s last human rights report. Will the FCDO extend the number of arms export licences denied to Israel by the UK?
Anneliese Dodds
I gently encourage the hon. Member to look at the action taken by the UK Government some weeks ago to suspend a number of arms licences. We believe that was important because of the risk towards breaking international humanitarian law. The UK Government take their responsibilities in that regard very seriously indeed.
Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)
The root cause of so much of the terrible humanitarian suffering in the middle east today is the regime in Tehran, fuelling the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah and brutally repressing its own people while bailing out Putin’s war machine, and even plotting to assassinate individuals based in the UK. Beyond sanctions with Iran—which we all support and successive Governments have put in place over the years—can the Minister tell us, on behalf of the Foreign Secretary, what exactly is the comprehensive plan to start dealing with this repressive regime that is causing so much brutality across the middle east?
Anneliese Dodds
We are deeply concerned about the destabilising impact of the Iranian regime within the region and beyond. The right hon. Lady mentioned a number of cases where we can see that impact clearly. I would also underline that the truly devastating humanitarian crisis in Yemen is very much connected to Iranian backing of the Houthis. We have repeatedly raised our concerns about this bilaterally and multilaterally. We are clear that we need a strong voice as a UK Government on these matters, and that is exactly what we are delivering.
Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Catherine West)
The ECHO 2 telephone contract for telephones in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is 79% completed, but is on track for completion in January 2025. Ministers and officials have been working day and night to fix the procurement mistakes of the previous Government.
Edward Morello
The ECHO 2 programme is crucial to delivering the new global communications network for the FCDO. The Minister mentioned that it is due for completion in January 2025, but will it remain within budget? What are the plans to ensure that it delivers its full technical and financial benefits? Does the Minister think that any additional support or adjustments will be needed to ensure its delivery?
Catherine West
With increased scrutiny and hard-working Ministers and officials, we will reach all targets. I will write to the hon. Gentleman with more details on his specific question.
Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes North) (Lab)
Laura Kyrke-Smith (Aylesbury) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Mr David Lammy)
I was proud to join Ministers across Government to show UK leadership on the climate and nature crisis at COP29. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced our ambitious 2035 emissions reduction target, and I reaffirmed our commitment to the global south through £11.6 billion in climate finance.
Chris Curtis
At COP29, under a Labour Government the UK reclaimed its position as a global leader on climate action. We recognise now that our security and prosperity hinge on addressing the crisis. Will my right hon. Friend join me in welcoming the progress made on climate finance, while acknowledging that there is much more to do to keep us on track on that road map and to keep 1.5° alive?
Mr Lammy
It was important that our Prime Minister was the only G7 Prime Minister to attend COP. My hon. Friend will recall that, last year, the Prime Minister at the time did not attend. It is hugely important that we reach the £300 billion for climate finance, which will help the global south get to clean energy. We hope that our global clean power alliance will be able to work with them, as they now have the money to do it.
Laura Kyrke-Smith
The world’s forests are the lungs of the earth, but we are losing them at an alarming rate. An area the size of Azerbaijan, where COP29 was hosted, is destroyed every year. Will the Foreign Secretary explain what the Government are doing to preserve the world’s forests and to support those who protect them?
Mr Lammy
I was very pleased to speak at COP on the issue of forests and to join inspirational indigenous leaders on that subject. That is why we found £3 billion for nature, of which £1.5 billion is dedicated to work on forests.
Blair McDougall (East Renfrewshire) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Stephen Doughty)
Ahead of the elections on 11 October, I expressed my concerns directly to Foreign Minister Darchiashvili about pressure on civil society and stigmatisation of minorities ahead of the parliamentary elections. Following the elections, I publicly expressed support for the preliminary findings of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in relation to the election. I called on the Georgian authorities to investigate all irregularities and reverse their declining commitment to an inclusive and open democracy.
Blair McDougall
I thank the Minister for his actions. I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and to the work I have done in the past with democratic activists in Georgia. Those activists are terrified that Georgia is now at a turning point. Will the Minister join me in calling for new elections under international oversight and an end to the attacks on civil society groups, especially the heroic LGBT groups who are under attack there? If those things do not take place, will the Government keep open the option of sanctions on the individuals who are responsible for democratic backsliding in Georgia?
Stephen Doughty
I recognise my hon. Friend’s long-standing interest in this issue and his strong views on it. Let me be clear. On 28 October, His Majesty’s ambassador to Georgia called on the Central Election Commission to transparently investigate all alleged incidences of election fraud. Following the session of the new Parliament, the embassy again reiterated our concerns about election violations and the need for independent investigation. He is absolutely right that the right to peaceful protest and a free civil society is a key attribute of any modern European democracy and must be respected. We will continue to make that clear.
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge) (Con)
I first pay tribute to the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Blair McDougall), whose focus on Georgia—not just on free elections in Georgia, but on the spread of Putin’s evil influence across Europe—has been incredibly important. What actions is the Minister taking to push back on Russia’s influence in the region and to push back in Russia itself using his budget for the BBC World Service to broadcast in sub-national languages inside Russia, so that the people of Russia know what is being done in their name and can understand what Putin is doing to them?
Stephen Doughty
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to point to the important work the BBC World Service does in this area, in particular through its language services. I have in the past met its fantastic staff who do that important work. It is important that people have access to free, accurate and impartial information, including in their own languages. We have been clear about the extent of Russian interference in Georgia for a long time and we are clear about Russian interference across Europe in democracies. That is why we are working so closely with NATO and EU partners on that very issue.
Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Mr David Lammy)
The United States is an indispensable ally and I am committed to the depth and breadth of the UK-US relationship. The Prime Minister and I met President-elect Trump in September for dinner, which was a good opportunity to get to know each other. We of course continue to work with the current Administration. I was with Tony Blinken just yesterday.
Jerome Mayhew
Defence spending is a key aspect of our relationship with the United States. Will the Foreign Secretary be able to tell our American allies the date on which we will increase defence spending to 2.5%? If he cannot, what influence will we have on European allies to increase their defence spending?
Mr Lammy
The hon. Gentleman is right to raise the issue of defence spending. It has been raised by US Presidents since Eisenhower. He is right that when Donald Trump came to power there were just four European countries spending above 2%. When Labour left government it was at 2.5%. We are sad that it dropped and we are determined to get it back to 2.5% of GDP.
Mr Richard Holden (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Mr David Lammy)
In the past month, growth was at the heart of my visit to Africa. We agreed work on a new global plan in South Africa and a new strategic partnership with Nigeria. During our UN Security Council presidency we have shown support for Ukraine 1,000 days into the war and pressed for a lasting peace in the middle east, and I condemned Russia’s shameful veto of a resolution on Sudan. Finally, throughout COP we have been restoring British leadership on climate.
Mr Holden
Since coming into office, the Government have suspended arms export licences to Israel; rolled over on the International Criminal Court, with nothing new against Hamas terrorists; and poured cash into the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, despite concerns over a significant number of its staff double-hatting with Hamas. Many of those things have been published in Arabic on the UK Government’s website. Who decides what should be published in Arabic? Why are they being published in Arabic? As they relate to Israel, why is nothing being published in Hebrew?
Mr Lammy
The art of diplomacy is speaking to foreign leaders and foreign nations as best we can in the UK’s national interest. That does sometimes involve foreign languages, which is why, for example, we support the BBC World Service. It was a slightly bizarre question.
Shaun Davies (Telford) (Lab)
Mr Lammy
My hon. Friend will be pleased to hear that I met the French Foreign Minister in London just last week, when we discussed these issues and agreed to co-ordinate better, and that the Home Secretary is working closely with the new French Interior Minister.
Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)
The relationship that the Government are building with China appears to be all give and no take. In order to convince the House that the situation is different, can the Foreign Secretary tell us what has been achieved with regard to advancing Britain’s interests in respect of security, economic practices and human rights since his recent visits to China, and what he expects to be achieved during his future visits?
Mr Lammy
I welcome the right hon. Lady to her place, and also remind her that under the last Government there were about seven different China policies and very little was achieved. We have had four and a half months. I was very pleased to be in China discussing issues on which we disagree, on which we agree and on which we challenge China, and I will continue to do that over the coming months and years.
Priti Patel
In the light of that response, can the Foreign Secretary state categorically whether, as part of his conversations with Chinese counterparts, the UK Government have explicitly called for the repeal of the national security law in Hong Kong, whether he has specifically called for Jimmy Lai be released, and whether he will ensure that no deals—such as China’s application for a new embassy—can go ahead until Jimmy Lai is free?
Mr Lammy
I thank the right hon. Lady for raising the situation in Hong Kong, which formed a substantial part of our conversation. Of course we raised issues relating to Jimmy Lai—as I have said in the House before—and the security law in Hong Kong. There are disagreements between us, and we were very clear about that. The right hon. Lady can be sure that matters involving both our representation in this country and China’s representation will pass through our system in the usual way without Government interference.
Patrick Hurley (Southport) (Lab)
Mr Lammy
It was very important for me to meet the families of those people a few weeks ago. The killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers, including those British nationals, in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza on 1 April was appalling, and a matter of great concern. We continue to urge the Military Advocate General in Israel to proceed with a proper investigation and inquiry, and to get on with it as quickly as possible.
Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)
I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s announcement that the UK will sanction Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, but I understand that the UK has not levied a single fine for breach of the existing sanctions on Russia’s oil. Will the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor now take more robust action to ensure that UK sanctions are complied with?
Mr Lammy
I was very pleased to see President Zelensky recognise just yesterday the UK’s leadership in challenging the shadow fleet. As the hon. Gentleman will know, I have made this part of my personal mission, and it has involved a record number of oil tankers. We are leading the world in sanctioning the shadow fleet. As the hon. Gentleman says, there are enforcement issues, which is why we have instigated a review.
Jack Abbott (Ipswich) (Lab/Co-op)
Mr Lammy
My hon. Friend raises a very important issue. A few months ago, I met Ukrainian children who had been taken to Russia and who had fortunately been brought back to Ukraine by a non-governmental organisation that we were supporting. We have increased our funds for that important work, both in Ukraine and in Moldova, where I was last week.
James MacCleary (Lewes) (LD)
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Stephen Doughty)
My colleagues in the Cabinet Office, me, the Foreign Secretary and others are engaged in a number of conversations with our EU counterparts, but I will not give a running commentary. We will look at EU proposals on a range of issues, but there are no plans for a youth mobility scheme; neither will we return to freedom of movement.
Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)
Stephen Doughty
Our support is absolute and resolute. I am happy to meet the hon. Member to discuss these issues further. We will maintain our position.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Will the Foreign Secretary take every opportunity to impress on the incoming President the importance of the article 5 guarantee, whereby the United States will come to the aid of any NATO country that is attacked? Will he impress on President Trump that we will do everything that we can to encourage other NATO allies to contribute more to the cost of defence?
Mr Lammy
Yes, yes, yes and more yes. I thank the right hon. Gentleman for highlighting this very important issue. The NATO alliance is the strongest and best alliance that the modern world has seen, and the UK will continue to impress that point on anyone who will listen.
Graeme Downie (Dunfermline and Dollar) (Lab)
Mr Lammy
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. On coming into government, it was important that we conducted a China audit right across Whitehall to look at the range of relationships. Underpinning that are the three Cs: we will co-operate with China where we can, we will compete with China where we should, and we will challenge China where we must.
Mr James Cleverly (Braintree) (Con)
What conversations did the Foreign Secretary have with the Defence Secretary about the diplomatic implications of scrapping key military capabilities such as HMS Albion and Bulwark, and of the failure to set a timeline for spending 2.5% of GDP on defence spending?
Mr Lammy
The right hon. Gentleman knows that I have huge respect for him, but that is a little bit rich, given the drop in defence spending that we saw under the last Government. The Prime Minister indicated just last week that we will set out our plans in due course. I am pleased that the Defence Secretary, on coming to power, launched a strategic defence review. Frankly, it should have been done under the last Government.
Katrina Murray (Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch) (Lab)
Mr Lammy
We are deeply concerned by Iran’s malign behaviour. The transfer of ballistic missiles to Ukraine was escalatory, which is why I sanctioned Iran Air and the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. I will continue to speak to the Foreign Minister in Iran about these issues. Clearly, we are very concerned about any attempts by Iran to get nuclear capability.
Stephen Gethins (Arbroath and Broughty Ferry) (SNP)
Scotland’s international brand is used to boost our economy throughout the world, selling Scottish products and experiences and boosting our soft power, so can the Foreign Secretary tell us how his Department will be marking St Andrew’s day on Saturday?
The Minister for Development (Anneliese Dodds)
I am delighted to be able to take this question, as one of many Scots in the House. We are incredibly proud of brand Scotland, and our Scottish Secretary has been driving that forward and really pushing the case for Scotland’s place in the world, working as part of the UK. We will most certainly be celebrating St Andrew’s day—I certainly will.
Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford) (Ind)
Mr Speaker
Order. I need to get other colleagues in. These are topical questions, and they are meant to be short and punchy.
Anneliese Dodds
We recognise the impact of sometimes repeated displacements on the population, with this happening up to nine times in some cases. We have used every opportunity to make clear the essential role of the UN, including UNRWA, in Gaza.
Bradley Thomas (Bromsgrove) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that the ICC’s decision does nothing to help secure the release of hostages, deliver more aid into Gaza or deliver a sustainable end to the war in the middle east?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Hamish Falconer)
As I set out to the House yesterday afternoon, the ICC is the primary method of accountability for war crimes, and it should be supported across the whole House. Our support for the ICC does not limit the actions we take in relation to the other issues. We have already talked about hostages this morning and about the vital importance of the ceasefire, and we will continue to—
Alan Strickland (Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor) (Lab)
I thank the Foreign Secretary for his leadership in tackling and sanctioning those aiding and abetting the illegal invasion of Ukraine, but what more can we do to tackle the wider issues of corruption and kleptocracy that define Putin’s cronies?
Mr Lammy
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. He served in Haringey before taking up his place in this House and we have been good friends over many years. He is right to raise this issue. We said that illicit finance would be a priority, and it will be. I hope to make further announcements on the back of the sanctions announcements that I made this week.
David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) (Con)
With World Aids Day approaching, I am sure the whole House will agree on the impact that the Global Fund has had on tackling HIV and AIDS globally. With our replenishment coming next year, will Ministers commit to the UK continuing to make a significant contribution to the Global Fund?
Anneliese Dodds
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his question and for the leadership that he has shown on this issue, along with others across the House. The UK is determined to see successful replenishments for all the health-related funds, and we have announced with the WHO just this week that we are definitely going to do that.
Alice Macdonald (Norwich North) (Lab/Co-op)
Innovation plays a key role in tackling hunger. Can the Minister expand on what efforts we are taking to tackle hunger and how we are supporting innovators such as Alora, based at Norwich Research Park, which is using revolutionary technology to create the world’s first ocean agriculture system?
Anneliese Dodds
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this. We have incredible facilities in Norwich working on agricultural innovation, and they are important not only for global food production but for UK farmers. The research is used intensively by our local farmers as well as by others globally.
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
It is ridiculous that Britain should even contemplate taking some of the 61 Sri Lankan asylum seekers on Diego Garcia as part of its agreement with Mauritius. There are serious concerns in Whitehall that some of those Sri Lankans have criminal records, and there are allegations that some of them may be involved in child abuse. I have raised this with the Home Office to no avail. Will Ministers in the Foreign Office make sure that all records are checked in Sri Lanka and in Diego Garcia to ensure that no such criminals or abusers are allowed into Britain?
Stephen Doughty
The Government inherited a situation in the British Indian Ocean Territory involving Tamil migrants from India and Sri Lanka who had arrived there. We are delivering a solution that protects migrants’ welfare but avoids opening a dangerous new migration route. The hon. Gentleman’s concerns regarding safeguarding and any other issues are absolutely at the heart of that and are being dealt with by Home Office and other ministerial colleagues.
Tracy Gilbert (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend will share my concern about the increasing number of women being given death sentences by the Iranian authorities. What urgent representations will he make to the Iranian Government to overturn those death sentences and ensure that women receive a fair trial?
Hamish Falconer
I can assure my hon. Friend that His Majesty’s ambassador to Iran will continue to raise this appalling issue directly with Iranian officials in Tehran. Furthermore, the UK was instrumental in the adoption of the Iran human rights resolution at the UN Third Committee last week. The resolution calls on Iran to establish a moratorium on executions and to end reprisals against women human rights defenders.
Aphra Brandreth (Chester South and Eddisbury) (Con)
The Government have indicated that they would arrest the democratically elected Prime Minister of Israel. Doing so would contradict an Act of Parliament and breach state and diplomatic immunity. Will the Foreign Secretary tell the House whether he believes compliance with the ICC’s decision sets a precedent for future decisions of a similar nature? Is he not concerned that he is contradicting international norms?
Hamish Falconer
We considered this question at exhaustive length yesterday. I repeat that the shadow Attorney General has written on the question of which elements of international law are most properly followed in this case, and the Attorney General is set to respond, although we suspect that this case would go to the courts in the usual way.
Rachel Blake (Cities of London and Westminster) (Lab/Co-op)
My constituent, the British citizen Jimmy Lai, is in failing health, and I thank the Foreign Secretary and his Department for all their work to uphold his rights under international law. Can the Foreign Secretary share his assessment of the scale of international support for Jimmy Lai’s release?
Mr Lammy
“Massive” is probably the word I would use. His case is being raised in America and across the European Union, and we are raising it too. His trial has begun, and he is now well into his 70s, which is why I have made the case to the Chinese that he should be released. This is becoming cruel and unusual punishment, frankly.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
The International Criminal Court has confirmed what we have all known for months, which is that the Israeli Government, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, have unleashed a concerted campaign of crimes against humanity on innocent Palestinian civilians. This is no longer a question of which side we are on, or of who is right or wrong. It is cold, hard legal fact, and we cannot allow it. Can the Secretary of State assure us that the Government are considering appropriate action against Netanyahu and Gallant to properly hold them to account?
Hamish Falconer
I can assure my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) that the UK Government intend to stand by our international obligations in relation to the ICC, and in relation to many other things, too.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Ind)
After the issuing of the arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, can the Foreign Secretary confirm when the Government will impose the scale of sanctions on Israel, not just individuals, that the Government rightly imposed on Russia after the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Putin? A war crime is a war crime, and an arrest warrant is an arrest warrant. All lives are equal, and we must ensure that there can be no accusations of double standards.
Hamish Falconer
Since the Government took office in July, I hope it has been clear how important questions of international law are to us, how soberly we treat these issues and how we ensure that in all matters, including in relation to the ICC cases that my hon. Friend describes, we follow due process, which is what we intend to do in relation to the ICC.
Kim Johnson (Liverpool Riverside) (Lab)
The civil war in Sudan is estimated to have killed around 150,000 people and displaced 14 million. UNICEF and the UN World Food Programme say that, unless efforts are stepped up, more than 700,000 children are projected to suffer acute malnutrition, so can the Minister tell us what steps the UK is taking as the UN penholder to end this malnutrition and support the Sudanese?
Anneliese Dodds
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this. The Foreign Secretary recently co-led a resolution on the protection of civilians in Sudan. Unfortunately, despite 14 votes in favour, Russia vetoed that resolution. We will continue to push on these issues, and we have doubled our aid to Sudan because of the dreadful crisis there.
Stephen Gethins
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Earlier, my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber (Brendan O’Hara) raised the very serious case of the detention of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a British passport holder whose family are with us in the Gallery today. In his response, the Foreign Secretary said that my hon. Friend has a problem with having a British passport. There are Members of the House who have very different views about the constitutional future of this country, be they from Scotland, Ireland or Wales, so will you, Mr Speaker, reassure me and my colleagues that regardless of our views about the future, everybody who holds a British passport has the right to be stuck up for by their Member of Parliament?
Mr Lammy
I confirm that, of course, everybody with a British passport has the right to representation. I would hope that we are the kind of country that supports all sorts of people in trouble who are in our country, whatever their background.
COP29
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Ed Miliband)
With permission, Mr Speaker, I shall make a statement about COP29.
May I start by extending my sympathy to all those affected by Storm Bert? It has been a devastating event for people in different parts of our country, particularly in Wales, and my heart goes out to the families of those who have lost their lives and to all those whose lives have been disrupted.
With permission, Mr Speaker, I also want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to Lord Prescott. He was a fighter for social justice and a champion of the environment. He rightfully has global recognition for his role in negotiating the Kyoto protocol, and he showed how politics can change lives for the better. I send my deepest condolences to Pauline and his family.
The UK attended COP29 to fight for our national interest—speeding up the clean energy transition in the interests of jobs, energy security and economic growth, and tackling the climate crisis for today’s and future generations. In Baku, our message was clear: Britain is back in the business of global climate leadership.
We know that the impacts of the climate crisis know no borders. We have already seen the extreme impacts we can face here in Britain, and we know that if we do not act those impacts will get much worse. That is why, as the Prime Minister said at COP29, there is no national security without climate security. It is precisely because Britain represents only around 1% of annual global emissions that we have to work with others to ensure the remaining 99% of emissions are addressed to protect the British people.
The focus of this COP was on finance for developing countries, because the reality is that unless we persuade developing countries to go down the path of clean energy development, we cannot hope to reduce emissions and prevent climate disaster. Those countries face the triple challenges of needing to invest in the clean energy transition, coping with the costs of climate vulnerability and needing to develop to take their population out of poverty. At the same time, developed countries, including Britain, face extreme pressure on our public finances.
The COP talks are always complex, but those circumstances made this set of talks particularly so. I put on record my thanks to our outstanding team of civil servants who supported me at COP. I was repeatedly struck by the enormous respect they have from so many countries around the world. The UK’s negotiating team was led by Alison Campbell, who is leaving to work with the UN Secretary-General. I want to put on record my special thanks to her in helping us to reach an agreement.
The agreement reached is to provide and mobilise at least $300 billion of climate finance by 2035 for developing countries. Much of that will come from the multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank, which have stepped up to set a target to substantially increase the climate finance they provide. Importantly, for the first time, the agreement reflects a new global landscape, where traditional donors will be joined by big emitters such as China to help finance the transition. That is fair and right.
The UK will decide what our own contribution will be in the context of our spending review and fiscal situation, and that will come from within the UK aid budget. I can inform the House that, if delivered with the same impact as UK climate finance, the $300 billion deal could lead to emissions reductions equivalent to more than 15 times the UK’s annual emissions, as well as helping to protect up to 1 billion people in developing countries from the effects of floods, heatwaves and droughts. Crucially, the agreement will accelerate the global clean energy transition, which offers the prospect of export and economic opportunities here in Britain. Let nobody be in any doubt: this agreement is absolutely in our national interest.
In other respects, the talks were more disappointing. At COP28, the world made a historic agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. That agreement stands, but we did not reach agreement this year on how to take the commitment forward, not because the text put forward was too ambitious, but because it was not ambitious enough. In particular, many developing countries, including the small island states, felt that the text was inadequate given the scale of the climate emergency. Developed countries, including Britain, agreed with that view. That offers an important lesson. Under this Government, Britain is part of a global coalition for ambitious climate action that spans global north and global south—it is at the global centre ground of climate politics. We will seek to build on the agreement at COP30 next year, in Brazil.
At COP29, the UK also made important announcements on countering deforestation, scaling up private finance and nuclear co-operation as part of the clean energy transition. The Prime Minister also announced our nationally determined contribution to reducing emissions by at least 81% by 2035, compared with 1990 levels, following the advice that we received from the independent Climate Change Committee. Let me be clear: that target is right for Britain—for energy security, good jobs and growth.
On the same day as the announcement, ScottishPower and Siemens announced a £1 billion deal to invest in wind manufacturing in Hull. That will boost British manufacturing and support 1,300 good jobs in our industrial heartlands. It shows what the clean energy mission can do for Britain, and builds on the steps that the Government have already taken, which include: lifting the onshore wind ban; giving consent for nearly 2 GW of solar; setting up Great British Energy; delivering a record-breaking renewables auction; kick-starting our carbon capture and hydrogen industries; and driving towards cheaper, cleaner heating through our warm homes plan.
It is in our national interest to use the power of our example to work with others to speed up the clean energy transition globally, just as the Climate Change Act 2008, which was supported by Members from across this House, inspired others to follow our lead. That is why at the G20 in Brazil, the Prime Minister launched the global clean power alliance, along with a number of other countries, to drive forward the transition.
That is just the start of the work that we need to do in the run-up to COP30 to make next year’s talks a success, because the truth is that despite progress over the last two weeks, we are halfway through the decisive decade for limiting warming to 1.5°C, and the world is way off-track. Other countries, such as Brazil, have also announced ambitious NDCs, and in the months ahead, we will continue to push others to go further, faster, on raising ambition, scaling up finance, protecting nature and forests, and driving forward the clean energy transition.
The COP process is tortuous and progress is too slow. However, this Government believe that while multilateralism—in other words, co-operating with others—is hard, it is truly the only way to fight for Britain. Those who say that we should disengage from the negotiations and step off the stage would let down our country, deprive us of a voice and leave future generations paying the price. Despite all the difficulties, at COP29, one truth was overwhelmingly clear: the global transition away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy is happening, and it is unstoppable because clean energy is the route to energy security, unstoppable because it is the economic opportunity of our time, and unstoppable because people in Britain and around the world can see that the climate crisis is here, and that unless we act, things will only get worse.
In less than five months, this Government have shown that we will seize the opportunities of speeding up at home, and have demonstrated climate leadership abroad, in order to deliver energy independence, lower bills, good jobs, economic growth and the security of a stable climate. We are doing all we can to keep the British people safe, now and for generations to come. I commend the statement to the House.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. I echo his comments on Storm Bert and thank the emergency services for all that they have done to help those in need. I start by passing on my personal condolences to the right hon. Gentleman on the passing of John Prescott. I know that he wanted him to lead the Paris accords in 2015, having admired his work in Kyoto, and I believe that, at the time, he described John as good at “bashing heads together”. I hope that, as the Secretary of State’s opposite number, I can achieve some of that head-bashing that he so clearly valued in John.
In that vein, the Secretary of State has talked a lot about regaining global leadership, but I fear that he is stuck in 2009. He may not want to acknowledge this, but for the past 14 years, we have been a global leader. We are the only major economy to have halved carbon emissions since 1990. In that same time, America’s emissions have stayed the same and China’s have tripled. However, we have seen that countries are not persuaded just by Britain going further, faster; they are persuaded by prosperity, and by living standards. We account for 1% of global emissions, and I fear that if he continues down the path that he has set out, our country will face hardship, and there will be no point in being world-leading because nobody will want to follow our lead. He would make us a warning, not an example to others.
Let us start with what the Secretary of State announced at the conference of the parties. He has set out a new target of cutting our greenhouse gas emissions by 81% by 2035. However, what we did not hear in his statement is how much this will cost the British people. The independent Climate Change Committee says that that target will require people to eat less meat and dairy, take fewer flights, and swap their boilers for heat pumps and their petrol cars for electric vehicles at a pace that will require taxes and mandation. Even the Chair of the Select Committee has acknowledged that people will be forced to change their lives. But the Secretary of State says not to worry, as he will deliver all the savings through energy policy, and those plans will lead to higher growth, a cut in bills, job creation and stronger national security, but when it comes to his plans, none of those things is true. The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has already said that his climate plans will not lead to growth. The National Energy System Operator’s report shows that his rush for clean power in 2030 will add eye-watering costs to our energy system, and that despite those very expensive costs, it would still leave gas pricing the system around 50% of the time—or it would leave the equivalent of millions of homes in the dark waiting for the wind to blow. I do not think that that is anybody’s idea of energy or national security.
The Secretary of State does not have to take my word for it. The head of offshore wind development at RWE, one of the country’s largest wind developers, has warned that the Secretary of State’s rush to meet his 2030 target will lead to price spikes, with consumers losing out. The chief executive of Octopus has warned about the £6 billion in costs that consumers will have to pay, because the right hon. Gentleman wants to build renewables without reforming the grid. The former head of MI6 has warned the Secretary of State—[Interruption.] This is worth listening to. He said that from the point of view of national security, the Secretary of State is pursuing
“a completely crazy energy policy”.
The Secretary of State’s plans to make our energy expensive and unreliable will see jobs fleeing to more polluting countries, because it is cheap energy and innovation that matter in the race for jobs. We need only ask China, which dominates clean tech supply chains and is the world’s largest polluter. That is where billions of pounds of our taxpayers’ money will be going to pay for his rushed transition—from our country, with all the investment that it has made in clean power, to a country still 60% powered by coal. We are talking about low growth, high bills, jobs lost and even blackouts, for more carbon in the atmosphere. That is the opposite of what he has been promising.
In Baku, while the Secretary of State was signing us up to these targets without talking about what they will do to the lives of British people, he was also signing away billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. He signed us up to a $300 billion annual climate finance target. I am afraid that it is not credible to say that taxpayers will not have to pay more. They will have to pay more, and they deserve to know how much more. Will he tell us today what that new target will mean for British taxpayers? Considering the increase in the target, the public will rightly question why countries such as Russia and particularly China, now the world’s largest polluter and second largest by historical standards, will not be obliged to pay a penny—I think he tried to insist that they would, but it is very clear that they will not be obliged at all to pay in—while Britain, which has invested billions in cutting its emissions and accounts for only 1% of global emissions, will have to pay more. Will the Secretary of State also set out an assessment of the impact of increased reliance on coal-powered Chinese imports for his 2030 zero carbon plans, and of what that means for global emissions?
The Secretary of State is not being honest with the British public. He promised them £300 off their energy bills by 2030, but just weeks ago, he whipped his Labour MPs to vote down that pledge. He took away the winter fuel payment, despite promising that the elderly would be looked after under his energy policy, and he now says that he can achieve stronger climate targets in a way that will require zero cost from the public. This is not a recipe for climate leadership, but a recipe for higher bills and lost jobs, and it will be a disaster for the British public.
Mr Speaker
I just remind those on the Front Benches that the reply to a statement should last no longer than five minutes.
Ed Miliband
Oh dear, oh dear! Let me deal with the shadow Secretary of State’s questions, such as they are. Let us start with our nationally determined contribution, announced at the conference of the parties. It is so interesting that she now opposes it, because the 2035 NDC announced by the Prime Minister is exactly the target that her Government legislated for in 2021, in the sixth carbon budget, which covers 2035. She is now opposing the very target that her Government put into law, and that she claimed, just a few months ago, that she was working towards as Secretary of State.
There is a pattern here, Mr Speaker. Every week, the right hon. Lady takes to Twitter to express her outrage about a policy, asking, “Who on earth could support this?” Every week, someone pops up in her replies and says politely, “You did, just a few months back.” It is not the only time that she has done this. Last week, she came out against the clean heat market mechanism—another policy that she proposed. [Interruption.] She says not, but I have a statement from her from only eight months ago, in which she said that the clean heat market mechanism would be introduced in April 2025, which is exactly what this Government are doing. The truth is that she will leap on any passing bandwagon, even if it means trashing her record.
Let me give the shadow Secretary of State a little lesson about opposition. The job of the Opposition is to oppose the Government, not to oppose themselves. This is where she has ended up: out the window goes any commitment to climate action. She is ignoring the fact that it is a route to energy security, good jobs and lower bills, ignoring the fact that it is backed by business, and ignoring the fact that this country has an honourable tradition of bipartisan consensus on the issue. I am happy to say that the previous Government proposed some ambitious targets, and that COP26 was an important milestone for the world. This is not just irresponsible, and not just crass opportunism; it has helped take the Conservative party down to its worst election defeat in 200 years, so this approach will not work for her.
Let me tell the shadow Secretary of State what the clean energy superpower mission means for Britain. It means cleaning up our power system, so that we do not leave the country exposed to fossil fuels, as the previous Government did. It means new jobs in carbon capture and storage as we decarbonise industry and re-industrialise. It means energy efficiency in homes, meaning lower bills, warmer homes and lower emissions. As for the NESO report that she talked about, I know that it is deeply disappointing to her, but we have an independent report that says that 2030 is achievable—she said that it was not. It also says that it will give us energy security—she says that it will not. It also says that it can lead to lower electricity, which she constantly denies.
The truth about the right hon. Lady is that she has nothing to say. The Conservative party is basically saying, “Stop the world—we want to get off.” That will do nothing for the British people. She has a lot to learn. I am afraid to say that she needs to start reflecting on where her Government went wrong. They went wrong in many different ways, and she does not seem to be learning any lessons.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
May I gently say to the shadow Secretary of State that she really should not believe dodgy headlines in The Daily Telegraph? In fact, I am not sure whether headlines in The Daily Telegraph are ever not dodgy, based on what she was quoting. More importantly, though, let me congratulate the Prime Minister on his leadership at the conference of the parties, and the Secretary of State on leading the negotiations, and not least on delivering the £300 billion of climate finance for developing countries. He set out this country’s achievement since the general election; to what extent will the combination of what this country showed at COP and what we have delivered at home since 4 July encourage countries around the world to play their part in addressing the climate crisis?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend asks an important question. Two truths came out of COP: first, the transition is unstoppable and, secondly, it is not going fast enough. There is such a difference from a decade ago—my hon. Friend, who was there with me, is nodding in agreement—because every country knows that the climate crisis is happening and is affecting them. The testimony I heard was like the testimony that we could provide about what people are seeing. Every country knows they have to act, and while they all face constraints in acting, they also know—this is the big change from a decade ago—that it is massively in their economic interests. There is a race on for the good jobs of the future, and the clean energy transition can provide them.
Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)
COP29 concluded with a deal that, while welcome, leaves much to be desired. I must stress that we need bolder, more decisive action if we are to face the greatest challenge of our time: the climate crisis. I know that the right hon. Gentleman’s heart is in the right place and has been for many years. We first met in the run-up to COP15 in 2009, and I express my thanks to him for his staunch leadership in the intervening years. I express Lib Dem support for a brave programme of action going forward and our willingness to work with his Department to help the UK step up and seize this opportunity for climate leadership.
While we welcome the Prime Minister’s commitment to ambitious emissions targets for 2035, commitments alone are not enough. Immediate action is needed to insulate homes, reduce energy costs and ensure that no one has to choose between heating and eating. The delay to Labour’s warm homes plan until spring 2025 is unacceptable when millions of people, including 1.2 million pensioners, face a cold and unaffordable winter due to the cut in the winter fuel allowance.
In my South Cotswolds constituency and all across the UK, we have seen at first hand the devastating effects of climate change, and never more so than over the last few days, with floods and storms becoming more frequent and severe. Towns and villages in my constituency, such as Purton, Great Somerford and Cirencester, have been severely affected by flooding, and we need urgent action now to mitigate climate change and help our communities adapt to the likely impacts now and in the future.
I associate myself with the thanks already expressed to the brave men and women of our emergency services in the aftermath of Storm Bert. Climate leadership must prioritise solutions that protect communities and restore nature. Natural flood defences, such as wetlands—
Dr Savage
May I finish with a question? Will the Secretary of State commit to including natural flood defences as a central part of the £5.2 billion flood defence spending to ensure that communities like those in the South Cotswolds are better protected from the worsening impacts of climate change while addressing biodiversity loss?
Ed Miliband
I thank the hon. Lady for her question and support for ambitious action, which is important.
Let me pick out a couple of the points she made. First, the point about the devastating effects of the climate crisis already being apparent is important. Part of the danger is that those effects will end up being the new normal, and we will just think of them as part of life. They are part of life in a sense and, as she said, we need the right flood defences in place and so on, but we also need to realise that those effects will get significantly worse if we do not act. Future generations will, frankly, hold us in infamy, saying, “You knew about the scale of the devastation and had seen a preview of what was to come, and you decided you couldn’t act,” so she is absolutely right.
Secondly, let me gently correct the hon. Lady on the warm homes plan. We are getting on with the warm homes plan; indeed, announcements were made last week about actions that will help over 300,000 families benefit from homes upgrades next year. There were announcements about heat pumps and a whole range of actions to help families do better and lower their energy bills.
I will make one more point, which is part of what the hon. Lady was saying: this is a climate crisis and a nature crisis. It is a climate and biodiversity crisis. It was a bit disappointing that the nature part of the agenda at COP did not get the attention it deserved, and that will be important for COP30 in Brazil.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
No one can doubt the leadership that the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State showed in Baku, and they deserve great credit for that. The Secretary of State is right that there is a danger of overselling the achievements of the COP. Developing nations have been critical about the financial agreement that was reached, and the commitments made in Paris on fossil fuels were not followed through, as he said. What are the main barriers right now to getting the action and pace of action that are needed? Does he have confidence that in Rio we will see the real breakthrough that the world is waiting for?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend asks absolutely the right question. The truth on the finance side is that this represents a significant scaling up at a time when developed and developing countries face extreme pressures on the public finances. There is a significant development whereby the flows to multilateral development banks from large emitters, such as China, will now count towards the overall finance goal. That is a big change and a big step forward.
On the transition away from fossil fuels, the barrier is that some countries are worried about what it means for them—that is totally understandable. Some countries think it will be problematic for their prosperity. The truth is that we will just have to make better efforts with the majority of countries that want to see action prevail at next year’s COP, and that will involve hard yards. Finally, we must have a campaign for—this is something we will work on with Brazil—ambitious NDCs because it is crucial that that is the job of the next COP.
David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) (Con)
I commend to the Secretary of State “The UK Small Island Developing States Strategy” report, which was produced by the International Development Committee just before Parliament was dissolved for the general election. A key focus of that report is the need to support those island states not just at COP, but all the time by the UK being an advocate for their needs and requirements across the international community.
Ed Miliband
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and he speaks with customary eloquence on the issue. This is literally an existential issue for the small island states. Their testimony at COP was compelling and deeply distressing, and that is why the finance deal is important. It was not everything they wanted, but it is a step forward.
Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement today and the agreement reached at COP29 in Baku. He and I go back a long way on COP, so we know what it is like when it goes wrong. I particularly welcome the nationally determined contribution to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 81% by 2035. Does he agree that the fundamental reason we have leadership on the global stage now, as distinct from what we have had for the past 14 years, is not just because of the target, but because we have a plan? This COP was supposed to be about implementation, and where we lead on implementation, others will follow.
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend is right. She was with me at Copenhagen, and I definitely had Copenhagen post-traumatic stress disorder at the talks at various moments in the middle of the night. Her point about the target and actions is absolutely right, and there is global recognition that this Government have upped the pace in the multiple ways I described in my statement, and that is incredibly important. That is also important because business sees it happening and thinks that Britain is a country that is clear about its direction and that they will invest there.
Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)
I can only speak for North Norfolk, but a green energy future is exciting for our local economy, especially at Bacton. Just along the coast, villages like Happisburgh are suffering from being part of the fastest eroding coastline in Europe. The Secretary of State touched on coastal erosion in answer to my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage), but can I push him specifically on how the outcomes of COP will provide reassurance to my residents who are worried about losing their homes to coastal erosion now?
Ed Miliband
As far as COP29 is concerned, we are speeding up global action. As I described in my statement, this finance deal could mean a reduction equivalent to 15 times the emissions of Britain. That is hard going, but it is the way to reduce the temperature rises that will take place. The world is in danger of busting through 1.5°C and going beyond that. That is why action is so urgent and why this finance deal really matters.
Josh MacAlister (Whitehaven and Workington) (Lab)
I strongly welcome the Secretary of State’s signing of a new UK-US advanced nuclear technologies agreement at COP. Will he share more details of that agreement, and does he agree that it could form the basis of a much more ambitious agreement between the UK and the US on civil nuclear development?
Ed Miliband
That is an important agreement and I am glad that my hon. Friend has drawn attention to it. This is about the next generation of nuclear power stations. The truth is—and this applies across clean energy, in nuclear, renewables and so on—that we can learn so much from and work with each other in global and bilateral co-operation. We can work with US and UK companies. There can be huge benefits right across the country.
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
Last Thursday, the Prime Minister implied that the new wind energy project in Hull would result in lower energy bills for my constituents, but he refused to say by when. When can my constituents and others across the country expect to see the £300 reduction in their bills that the Labour party promised?
Ed Miliband
The National Energy System Operator report, which is the advice given to us by the independent body, shows that this will lead to lower electricity bills. That is so important, because we get two protections from “Clean Power 2030”: one is lower bills, and the second is that we are protected against the devastating price spikes that affected the hon. Lady’s constituents during the gas price crisis of 2022.
Clive Efford (Eltham and Chislehurst) (Lab)
When I consider this sort of issue, I tend to think of my grandchildren and what the world will be like for them in years to come. I listen to my right hon. Friend talk about our achievements over the past five months, and then I listen to the response from the Conservative party, which fills me with horror. Despite what my right hon. Friend says, there were tough negotiations at this COP, and he must be congratulated on the role that he played in achieving the agreements that we got there. How essential is it that we continue with that leadership, considering what could have happened if the Conservatives had stayed in power?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend is right: although we have party political disagreements on some issues, this country has avoided a fraying and splitting of this consensus, as has happened in other countries. The consensus on climate action is so important precisely because of what he has set out: the fate of his grandchildren and all future generations, and the impact on them. I want to work with people across parties on this issue, because the more of a consensus we have, the better it is for the country.
Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)
Low-income countries were extremely disappointed by the finance agreements at COP—$300 billion does not come anywhere near the level of need. Critically, there was no clarity on how much of it would be grants, as opposed to loans, which would plunge global south countries further into debt. Does the Secretary of State share my concern about the potential dominance of loans and an overreliance on the private sector, and does he agree that considerable public finance could and should be raised through taxes on the most polluting companies?
Ed Miliband
I understand why the hon. Lady expresses that disappointment—indeed, a number of developing countries expressed that disappointment. However, I think that this is a considerable scaling-up of resources. That is to state the obvious, because $100 billion was the previous commitment. It is the provision and mobilisation of resources. She is right about the balance between grants and loans, and about the funds that are required for adaptation, but the truth is that public finance on its own will never meet the need. That is why the agreement on carbon markets that was part of this COP is important, and why the mobilisation of private finance, and working on a road map to that mobilisation, which is also part of the agreement, is so important.
Sally Jameson (Doncaster Central) (Lab/Co-op)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement and acknowledge that the UK is lucky to have unique resources that put us at the forefront of the energy transition. Does he acknowledge that industrial heartlands such as ours in Doncaster were let down by the last Government, with promise after promise and announcement after announcement, but no delivery? Will he set out what the Labour Government will do to back British industry and, more importantly, coalfields such as those in our constituencies?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend and constituency neighbour is absolutely right about that. This is where the opportunities are huge. For South Yorkshire, there are opportunities around hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and the jobs in insulating homes. We know that many of our industrial heartlands have been crying out for good jobs and good wages, and they have been crying out for them for a long time. This is the opportunity to make that happen.
James Wild (North West Norfolk) (Con)
COP leaders agreed to triple climate finance to $300 billion a year. The Secretary of State referred to the spending review in his statement, but the Prime Minister signed up to that international commitment. The Secretary of State must know how much the UK will have to pay. Will he tell the House?
Ed Miliband
That is not the way it works. We set a global total and then it is for individual countries to come forward with their contribution—that is the way it works.
Josh Fenton-Glynn (Calder Valley) (Lab)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. My constituency is at the mercy of climate change, as the floods showed at the weekend. It is deeply frustrating for many of my constituents to hear the Opposition fail to grasp the urgency. We are on the frontline of the impact of climate change, but we also want to be on the frontline of the response, so many of my constituents welcome the warm homes plan. What is he doing to ensure that we have the workforce to deliver that plan, particularly in constituencies such as mine that have houses that are quite hard to retrofit?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend makes an important point. We are working—through my Department and the Office for Clean Energy Jobs—with Skills England to ensure that we have that workforce plan. There are huge job opportunities here. We must ensure that we have the workforce plan, and that people have the assurance that work will be properly regulated and they can expect high standards. This is a massive national mission, and we will come forward with more proposals on it in the coming months.
Dave Doogan (Angus and Perthshire Glens) (SNP)
We learned three things from the statement. The first is that the climate finance will come from the existing UK aid budget. Can the Secretary of State reassure the House that the increase in the UK aid budget will be greater than the amount that has gone on climate finance, so that we can be confident that we are not robbing Peter to pay Paul in the developed world? Do the important agreements on deforestation mean that the UK will stop spending almost £11 billion on subsidies to burn trees in England to generate electricity—is that one of the important elements that he talked about on deforestation? He claimed in his statement that GB Energy is set up. Can he tell us where we can go and see it? [Laughter.]
Ed Miliband
Thanks so much for the support. Let me deal with the hon. Gentleman’s questions in turn. It has always been the case that climate finance is part of the aid budget—that is not some new announcement I have made. Obviously, that is a decision that we make, along with the Foreign Office and other colleagues across Government, about the right balance of resources and where the need is greatest.
As for GB Energy, he knows that it will be headquartered in Aberdeen. We are getting on with setting it up: we have a start-up chair in Juergen Maier, and it is ploughing ahead. We have been in office less than five months, but the legislation is going through, and that will happen.
The hon. Gentleman’s second question was about Drax. The previous Government issued a consultation on that, and we will respond in the months ahead.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Ind)
The Secretary of State was absolutely right to say at the close of the climate talks that the only way to keep the British people safe from extreme weather and economic disruption is to ensure that the world acts together. That requires funding, but it is clear that the COP in Azerbaijan did not deliver that at the scale needed. The Make Polluters Pay coalition is calling for the big oil companies worldwide, which have made grotesque profits while driving the climate crisis, to fund the required investment at home and abroad. Is that not the fair way to secure the necessary finance?
Ed Miliband
We obviously have to look at all these issues. These global levies and taxes are always quite complex and difficult things to make happen. We have said that we will support the idea of the maritime levy, but we need to proceed cautiously on these issues, because frankly it is important that the finance is provided, and we will obviously engage in those discussions in the months ahead.
John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)
As champions of the North sea, the previous Government underpinned 200,000 jobs right across the UK. What does the Secretary of State say to Offshore Energies UK, which says that the Government’s energy tax has stripped out around £13 billion of investment in the North sea—money that will not be recovered by the anaemic and frankly invisible GB Energy?
Ed Miliband
We just disagree on the idea that we should not have taxed the unearned profits of the energy companies, which were paid for directly by the British people. If the hon. Gentleman wants to say that we should not have had a windfall tax on the oil and gas companies, he is way out of line with his constituents.
Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
My constituents are very proud that one of our own, Samia Dumbuya, was part of the Future Leaders Network working with the UK Youth Climate Coalition at Baku. I know that the Secretary of State will agree that young people need to be at the heart of what comes next following COP. They welcome the proposed NDCs, but they now need a direct and dedicated place in making them happen. Can he tell us what formal mechanism for the oversight and delivery of the reduction of emissions by 81% by 2035 he envisages for the young people of the UK?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend asks a really important question. I met with some of the youth campaigners and the youth coalition at COP, and I agreed with them. The UK has signed up to a youth clause in our NDC, which is about recognising young people as agents of change when it comes to climate and the need to engage with young people. I would love to talk to my hon. Friend and those young people about how we take those issues forward in the months ahead.
Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)
I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and agree that the UK must show global leadership on climate action. Peatlands are the largest natural terrestrial carbon store, yet damaged peatlands are responsible for almost 5% of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The UK imports 60% of peat used in horticulture, offshoring carbon emissions abroad. Does the Secretary of State agree that, beyond COP29, we must continue to show global leadership and protect the environment by committing to a phased ban on peat in horticulture?
Ed Miliband
I will deal with the wider issues of peatlands, because money was allocated in the Budget for these issues through the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. That is a very important issue, and the wider issue is also important. We also need to make progress at a global level. The other issues are actually a matter for DEFRA, but I will undertake to write to the hon. Lady on them.
Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. I was proud of the constructive role that the UK played in the negotiations, representing our country and also some of the poorest people on the planet, who are at the absolute frontline of climate change, partly due to the emissions from this country. But COP is not without its critics, despite it being the only platform to progress our climate ambitions. How does the Secretary of State think that the process could be improved? In particular, what gentle advice would he give to anyone thinking about taking over the presidency of a major world economy early next year?
Ed Miliband
I will resist the second half of my hon. Friend’s question, if you don’t mind, Mr Speaker. On the first part of his question, the COP process does have its critics, so I will say a couple of things. First, 15 years ago, when I last attended the COP as Secretary of State in Copenhagen, no country was signed up to net zero. Now, 90% of the world’s GDP is covered by net zero. That is not only because of the COP, but that process of international engagement is important, and it is a forcing mechanism to put world leaders on the spot. Secondly, the reason why it is hard is largely because we have 198 countries all trying to agree, which is difficult. If people can think of improvements to the system, that is great, but that engagement is really important.
Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)
Let me get this straight. The Secretary of State is welcoming a conference to deal with CO2 where the host country tried to use it to sell oil and gas deals; where the leaders of those countries that are the major producers of CO2 did not even bother turning up; where we sent 490 civil servants, flying them out to attend the conference; and where the main topic was how to extract money from countries that were guilty of the sin of industrialisation. The Secretary of State has shot out his chest today and said, “We are now leaders in global climate.” It is hard to be a leader when we have no followers, that is all I will say. How can the Secretary of State face the hard-pressed taxpayers of the United Kingdom, who are reeling under the impact of the latest Budget, and expect them to pay out billions to foreign countries—
Ed Miliband
The right hon. Gentleman and I have been debating these issues for 15 years, and I hazard a guess that we will not end up agreeing. The truth about the climate crisis is that it is the biggest potential cost that future generations can face. There will be trillions of costs across the world and tens and hundreds of billions of costs in the UK if we do not act. All the evidence is that the costs of acting on climate change are much lower than the costs of not acting.
Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley) (Lab/Co-op)
I was in Paris nine years ago when we started the process of negotiation on article 6 of the Paris agreement, which was concluded only with the gavel going down in Baku. It is an important process, ensuring a carbon market through the United Nations framework convention on climate change. How will the UK implement the new article 6 regulations? How will we support other countries in this important work, as we can utilise it for nature-based solutions such as reforestation and afforestation?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend makes a really important point—it may be a slight counter to the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson). Beneath the headlines, this is where the hard yards of work at COP happened. It has taken 10 years to do these article 6 negotiations and complete them, but this is about voluntary carbon markets. In answer to my hon. Friend’s question, we are consulting on some of the high-integrity principles for that, but again, this will make a difference to developing countries and get funds flowing to them. That is another reason why these COPs are worthwhile.
Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)
The Secretary of State is in consensus-building mode. May I offer him the opportunity to address the 10,975 members of my Spelthorne constituency who will lose their winter fuel payments, or the 100,000 pensioners who will be plunged into poverty? Can he explain to them why they are wrong when they see the Government taking money from their pockets in order to be able to have enough money to send overseas?
Ed Miliband
The hon. Gentleman is wrong to say that. The truth is that the last Government left the public finances in an appalling state, which is why those decisions were made. As I have explained, we have agreed a global total when it comes to climate, but UK contributions are a matter for us and our spending reviews and depend on our fiscal situation.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
Does the £1 billion Siemens deal in east Hull go to prove the Government’s commitment to making the UK a clean energy superpower?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend is right about that and has been a great champion on these issues. It shows the opportunities—there are countless opportunities across the world, including in relation to this finance deal, because this will create huge business opportunities. The truth is that Governments all across the world are alive to those opportunities, and I want Britain to win these jobs of the future.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
Where is the leadership, and what example does it set, in flying 470 officials and delegates—more than any other western European country—halfway across the world to a climate change jamboree? Can the Secretary of State say what the cost has been in terms of carbon and cash?
Ed Miliband
There is a long tradition of civil servants playing a really important role at these COPs. In fact, the right hon. Gentleman may be interested to know that we sent 100 fewer civil servants to this COP than to the last one under the previous Government. I absolutely defend public servants doing a brilliant job and going to these COPs. Why? Because it is absolutely in the British national interest.
John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)
To echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy), will my right hon. Friend consider taking a young person—perhaps from a sixth form or a university—along to the next COP meeting as an adviser, to remind our delegation and, indeed, delegations around the world that it is young people’s futures that are on the table?
Ed Miliband
There are indeed members of the UK Youth Climate Coalition who go to COPs. I do not want to interfere in UKYCC’s processes for picking those people, but my hon. Friend makes an important point about the voice of young people. They represent young people, but they also represent future generations, and hearing how those future generations will regard the actions that we do or do not take is incredibly important.
Llinos Medi (Ynys Môn) (PC)
Diolch, Madam Deputy Speaker. Despite today’s statement noting that it is in the UK’s interest to speed up clean energy, we still need urgent clarity on clean energy projects. Will the Secretary of State finally confirm the Government’s plan for nuclear at Wylfa in my constituency?
Ed Miliband
We do think that Wylfa has very important prospects. There is an important pipeline of nuclear projects that we are moving forward with, and we look forward to discussions about Wylfa in the coming months.
Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)
I commend the Secretary of State for his leadership and his statement, and join him in his bipartisanship. I am happy to recognise the contributions of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, but it says a lot that it takes Labour Members of Parliament to do that because Conservative Front Benchers are running so fast and so far away from those contributions. Does the Secretary of State agree that clean energy is how we achieve energy security, and that energy security is how we achieve national security when our world is in turmoil and this country faces threats like never before?
Ed Miliband
Both the points that my hon. Friend makes are right. I am happy to acknowledge the role of Theresa May in putting net zero into law, as well as that of Alok Sharma and even Boris Johnson, who fought to champion some of these issues. It is a real shame, and it speaks volumes, that we can say those things and the Conservatives do not.
Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)
I agree with the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes), who talked about there being no national security without energy security. We discovered after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine how dependent the UK was on imported gas. When talking to other countries, did the Government make the case for investment in clean energy, and how it can reduce dependency on malign petrostates such as Russia?
Ed Miliband
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the truth, which is that, unfortunately, fossil fuels do not give us energy security. Whether those fossil fuels came from the North sea or were imported, prices shot through the roof; our constituents paid the price, and the Government paid out £94 billion in support. That is why our clean energy superpower mission is so important, to give us the energy security that the Conservatives completely failed to give us.
Abtisam Mohamed (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
I commend the Energy Secretary on his work, both in the UK and his global leadership at COP29. Many developing countries continue to face the intensifying effects of the climate crisis. For their sake and for ours, we cannot afford inaction and delay. Can the Secretary of State clarify what specific work will be undertaken to improve global ambitions so that we can transition away from fossil fuels and keep alive the commitment to keep the world’s temperature rise below 1.5°C?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend asks absolutely the right question. That is the work that we will be undertaking with Brazil and other like-minded countries in the year ahead. Next year marks a very important moment: we have to set our nationally determined contributions for 2035, five years on from the last time the world did so. This is such an important moment, because it is how we need to get back on track for keeping temperature rises down. We will be straining every sinew to work with others to make that happen.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is always a pleasure to hear the Secretary of State committing to a strategy and a plan that looks forward, even though we may have some questions about it. My fear has always been about the funding that has been granted, which is incredibly substantial. How will the Secretary of State ensure that that huge pot of funding is used to achieve the necessary aims, not siphoned off or lost in the process? I say this bearing in mind that pushing a pen around and making a way through red tape can be a very costly endeavour. That money needs to go to the projects that make a difference. How can that be guaranteed before we allocate any more of our hard-pressed taxpayers’ money?
Ed Miliband
The hon. Gentleman raises a really important point. As much as developing countries wanted the biggest possible sum to support them, they were as worried about the quality of finance and their access to funds as they were about the quantum. Time and again, I heard from developing countries that they wait years to access the available funds, so ensuring that they are spent on the right things and are accessible will be crucial work for the months and years ahead.
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement and the leadership that this Government showed at COP29, recognising that with the global transition under way, the economic benefits will accrue to those who lead and shape it, rather than shy away from it and remain all too passive in the face of the economic forces that it heralds. Can the Secretary of State set out how we will ensure that we capture those benefits domestically and show the necessary leadership to drive investment, growth and opportunity to every part of the UK, so that we have a coherent economic strategy that touches every part of our nation?
Ed Miliband
Both parts of what my hon. Friend says are right. Since we contribute only 1% of global emissions, we must work with others to ensure that we tackle this problem. The biggest thing I find in this job is that clarity of purpose and direction makes a huge difference to private investors. Uncertainty is the enemy of investment, while the certainty and direction that this Government are providing is the friend of companies investing in the UK.
Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)
Constituencies such as mine and regions such as the north-east once powered the British economy. Does the Secretary of State agree that the leadership we are now showing must secure investment for those regions that have far too often been left behind, and that that investment must include new nuclear for towns such as Hartlepool?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is the route to reindustrialisation, and nuclear is a central part of this Government’s clean energy mission. As I always say, electricity use will at least double by 2050, so we need all the technologies at our disposal.
Mr Mark Sewards (Leeds South West and Morley) (Lab)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement, and thank him for showing such leadership on the world stage alongside the Prime Minister. As he mentioned in his statement, Britain must show leadership to get the 99% of emissions contributed by the rest of the world down, with nearly 1 billion people at risk of drought, flooding and heatwaves. Given the climate sceptics who now face him on the Opposition Front Bench, can my right hon. Friend restate for this House why it is in Britain’s interests to help those people?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. My constituents in Doncaster have faced two supposedly one-in-100-year flooding events over the past 10 years or so, and we know that those events will become much more extreme if we do not act, but the truth is that we cannot act on our own; we must act with others. That is the fundamental case for multilateral engagement and working with others on these climate issues, which the Conservative party used to believe, but no more it seems.
Tristan Osborne (Chatham and Aylesford) (Lab)
I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement and for his clear global leadership on this issue over many years. A constituent, Michael Jones—a leader in climate change education—attended Baku as part of the COP delegation with a delegation of students from across the UK as part of the climate change challenge, leading on efforts to educate policymakers on the impacts of climate change on the next generation. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the next generation deserve better and a Government who—unlike the Opposition, who flip-flop and show no consistency on the issue—have a firm commitment to deliver a reduction in emissions with the international community?
Ed Miliband
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. [Interruption.] Conservative Members are chuckling away but the truth is that this is a very serious and important point. The British people want us to act. They want us to act across parties on this issue. They know it is a massive threat to our country because they see it in their daily lives and they see it on the news, and they also know it is the biggest opportunity for our country. We believe it. The Conservatives used to believe it; I am afraid they are way out of step with the British people.
“Get Britain Working” White Paper
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Liz Kendall)
With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall make a statement on our “Get Britain Working” White Paper, bringing forward the biggest reforms to employment support in a generation, turning a Department for welfare into a Department for work, and taking the first steps towards delivering our bold ambition of an 80% employment rate in a decade of national renewal.
Nothing short of fundamental reform is needed to turn the page on the last 14 years, the legacy of which has left the UK as the only G7 country whose employment rate has not returned to pre-pandemic levels and with a near-record 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness, and almost 1 million young people not in education, employment or training and millions more stuck in low-paid insecure work. All those problems are far worse in the midlands and the north, parts of the country that were deindustrialised in the ’80s and ’90s—the very same places that have lower life expectancy and chronic poor health that the Conservative party repeatedly promised to level up but repeatedly failed to deliver on.
The result is an economic but, above all, social crisis, paid for in the life chances and living standards of people across this country, and by a benefits bill for sickness and disability that is set to rise by £26 billion by the end of this Parliament. We have ended up here because of the failure of Conservative Members to create good jobs in every part of the country, to deliver on the NHS, and to properly reform welfare. Under our Government, that will change, with new opportunities matched by the responsibility to take them up: under this Labour Government, if you can work, you must work.
Our White Paper brings in three major reforms. First, we will create a new jobs and careers service that overhauls jobcentres: from a one-size-fits-all service that overwhelmingly focuses on administering benefits, to a genuine public employment service that provides personalised support for all. We will bring jobcentres together with the National Careers Service in England, beginning with a pathfinder early next year, backed with £55 million of initial funding. We will work closely with mayors and local leaders to ensure that our new jobs and careers service is rooted in local communities and properly joined up with local help and support. We will also work closely with employers to develop the service, because only one in six businesses has ever used a jobcentre to recruit, and that must change.
For too many people, walking into a jobcentre feels like going back in time to the ’80s or ’90s, so we will trial a radically improved digital offer using the latest technologies and AI to provide up-to-date information on jobs, skills and other support, and to free up work coach time. We will also test video and phone support—because in the 2020s, rather than go into the jobcentre only every week or fortnight, people can have a jobcentre in their pocket. Our frontline staff are our greatest asset, so we will develop the work coach and careers adviser professions, including by launching a new coaching academy.
The second major reform is our new youth guarantee, so that every young person is earning or learning. This comes alongside our commitment to provide mental health support in every school, our work experience and careers advice offer, and our plans to reform the last Government’s failed apprenticeship levy to give more young people the opportunities they deserve. Our new youth guarantee will go further, bringing together all the support for 18 to 21-year-olds under the leadership of mayors and local areas so all young people have access to education, training and employment opportunities and no young person misses out. Today I can announce that we will establish eight trailblazer areas for our youth guarantee: the Liverpool city region, the west midlands, Tees valley, east midlands, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, west of England, and two areas within Greater London, backed by £45 million of additional funding.
I can also announce a new national partnership to provide exciting opportunities for young people in sports, arts and culture, starting with some of Britain’s most iconic cultural and sporting organisations, including the Premier League, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Channel 4, building on the brilliant work they already do to inspire and engage the younger generation and get them on the pathway to success.
This is our commitment to young people: “We value you, you are important, we will invest in you and give you the chances you deserve; but in return for these new opportunities, you have a responsibility to take them up, because being unemployed or lacking basic qualifications when you are young can harm your job prospects and wages for the rest of your life. And that is not good enough for young people or for our country.”
The third reform in our White Paper is our new plan to drive down economic inactivity caused by poor health. The Health Secretary is already taking action to get people back to health and back to work, with extra support to drive down waiting lists in the 20 NHS trusts with the highest levels of economic inactivity. We are joining up employment and health support, expanding individual placement support to reach an additional 140,000 people with mental health problems and delivering new WorkWell services, which include GPs referring patients to employment advisers and other work-related support such as the brilliant service in the Junction Medical Practice in North London we visited recently.
However, we will go much further and faster to tackle this issue. To meet the scale of the challenge, we will devolve new funding, new powers and new responsibilities to tackle economic inactivity to mayors and local areas, because local leaders know their communities best. We will support all areas in England to produce local “Get Britain Working” plans, joining up work, health and skills support.
Today I am announcing eight trailblazer areas backed by £125 million of additional funding in south Yorkshire, west Yorkshire, the north-east, Greater Manchester, Wales, York and north Yorkshire, and two Greater London areas. In three of these areas—south and west Yorkshire, and the north-east—this will include dedicated input and £45 million of funding for local NHS integrated care systems. We are also funding a new supported employment programme called Connect to Work, backed by £115 million of initial funding for next year. This will be included in the integrated settlements of combined authorities, starting with Greater Manchester and the west midlands.
Employers have such an important role to play in helping get people into work, and crucially to stay in work, so today I can announce a new independent “Keep Britain Working” review, looking at the role of UK employers and Government in tackling health-related inactivity and creating healthy workplaces. This will be led by the former chair of John Lewis, Sir Charlie Mayfield, and will report in the autumn.
Finally, we will bring forward a Green Paper on our proposals for reforming the health and disability benefits system, so that disabled people and those with health conditions have the same rights as everybody else, including the right to work; so that we treat disabled people with dignity and respect; and so that we shift the focus to prevention and respond to the complex and fluctuating nature of today’s health conditions. We will work closely with disabled people and their organisations as we develop our proposals, which we will publish in the spring.
This White Paper starts to turn the corner on the past 14 years, putting forward the real reforms we need to get more people into work and on at work, to give young people the very best start in life and to ensure our employment and social security system understands the fundamental issue that a healthy nation and a healthy economy are two sides of the same coin. This is how we get Britain working again. It is how we get Britain growing again, and I commend this statement to the House.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
I call the shadow Secretary of State.
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement. The Conservatives are the party of work and aspiration—[Interruption.] In the decade after we took over from Labour, we drove down unemployment—[Interruption.]
Helen Whately
In the decade after we took over from Labour, we drove down unemployment and economic inactivity year after year, including youth unemployment, which went down by 400,000 after the mess we inherited from the last Labour Government. During the pandemic, we took unprecedented action to protect jobs and livelihoods, but since the pandemic we have faced a new and difficult challenge in this country: rising economic inactivity, particularly among young people. In government, we were tackling that. I know that, because as a Health Minister I was working on it. I am delighted that the right hon. Lady and the Health Secretary visited one of our WorkWell pilots just the other day. I was working on our fit note reforms, our youth offer, which helped a million young people, and our universal support scheme, which I now hear the Secretary of State has quietly rebranded as her own Connect to Work scheme.
Far from being cross that the Government are pinching our ideas, I welcome the right hon. Lady taking our work forward. She is making the right noises about how important it is to fix this area. Economic inactivity is a big problem for our economy and for each and every individual who risks being written off to a life on benefits. Knowing that, I am disappointed by the substance of what she is announcing today, because far from matching her rhetoric, it appears to be little more than a pot of money for local councils, some disparaging language about the work of jobcentres and a consultation that will be launched in the spring. Given that the Government have had 14 years to prepare for this moment, is that it?
Where are the reforms to benefits that will make material savings to the taxpayer, such as the £12 billion we committed to save in our manifesto? Where are the reforms to fit notes, which we had handed over, ready to go? Where is the Secretary of State’s plan for reforming the work capability assessments? She has banked the £3 billion of savings from our plan, but has failed to set out her own. Her big announcement is making benefits for young people conditional. Did she forget that they already are?
The fact is that the Secretary of State has dodged the tough decisions. Every day that she kicks the can down the road costs the taxpayer millions of pounds. At this rate, spending on sickness benefits will rise to £100 billion by the end of this Parliament. They are taking that money from farmers, from pensioners and from businesses. To get people off benefits, we need jobs for them to go into. Those are the very jobs that businesses are saying, since the Budget, they will no longer be hiring for. While the right hon. Lady tries to get people into work, her Chancellor is busy destroying jobs—50,000 jobs lost from her first Budget alone.
If the Secretary of State wants to get more 18-year-olds into work, she should have a word with her Chancellor, who has made it so that from April it will cost £5,000 more for a business to employ them. She should have a word with her Business Secretary, whose Employment Rights Bill will, according to the Government’s own impact assessment, make it less likely for employers to take on young people. The Government cannot solve this problem on their own. Businesses are the engine of our economy that create jobs for people to do. It is telling that I cannot see a single business representative on the new Labour Market Advisory Board.
I did hear the right hon. Lady talk about some new partnerships, but this announcement is such a song and dance about so little that I feel sure she will qualify for one of her own Royal Shakespeare Company apprenticeships. She has kicked the can so far down the road that her new partner, the Premier League, is sure to be on the phone by the end of the day.
May I for a moment cut through the word soup of the announcement? It is time for the right hon. Lady to tell the House some facts. How many people will it help into work, and by when? What is the total she is saving the taxpayer? When will she reach her 80% employment target? What return on investment is she expecting from these plans? How will she measure her success or failure? This is so far from the bold grasping of the nettle that she is making it out to be and that this country needs for our economy, for taxpayers and for the millions of people missing out on the purpose and freedom that work brings. It is simply not good enough.
Liz Kendall
May I say gently to the hon. Lady, who I personally like and have a great deal of time for, that the only people who dodge difficult decisions on welfare are the Conservatives? The facts speak for themselves. By the end of this Parliament, the Office for Budget Responsibility says that 420,000 more people will be on health-related universal credit benefits, rising from a third now to a half at the end of the Parliament. That is her Government’s legacy. One in eight of all our young people are not in education, employment or training. We have seen a doubling in the number of young people out of work due to long-term sickness and a doubling of young people out of work because of mental health problems. After 14 years in government, who does she think is responsible for that? I am afraid that the truth is staring her in the face: the Conservatives are now the party of welfare, and Labour is the party of work.
The hon. Lady talks about British businesses. I know only too well the pressures that many businesses face. We have spoken to the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses and the British Chambers of Commerce, and they are keen to work with us on our proposals. They know that their members have hundreds of thousands of vacancies that they need to fill, one in three of which is because of skills gaps. They know that 300,000 people every single year fall out of work due to a health condition. They need support to try to tackle that problem. I believe that the Department for Work and Pensions and jobcentres should serve businesses’ needs and aspirations, not be the place of last resort. That is precisely what our reforms will deliver.
Finally, the biggest challenge we face today is the growing number of people out of work or at risk of falling out of work due to health problems or a disability. Our entire employment and benefits system is simply not geared up to deal with that. We will take examples of good practice from wherever we find them, but we have got to go much further. We need big reforms, not easy slogans that say people just felt a bit too bluesy to work, which do nothing to help people get to grips with the real issues in their lives. We are facing up to our responsibilities and the difficult decisions necessary to get Britain working again. It is time the hon. Lady and her party did the same.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
I call the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement, and I look forward to reading the White Paper later. The cross-departmental approach she is taking with colleagues is essential and is a breath of fresh air, particularly in relation to tackling the root causes of economic inactivity, which she has explained predominantly relate to ill health.
In addition to the need to tackle regional inequalities in employment, my right hon. Friend will be aware that there is a 30% disability employment gap, with 2.25 million disabled people wanting and able to work. How will she tackle that real injustice? We know that disabled people are more likely to be living in poverty than other groups. What are her specific plans in that regard?
Liz Kendall
I thank my hon. Friend for that important question. The Minister for Social Security and Disability and I are working hard to tear down the barriers to disabled people being able to get work and get on in work. We are taking action across Government, including reporting on the disability employment gap. We need to tackle the long waits for Access to Work and the adaptations and other support that people need.
We also need brilliant supported employment programmes for people with autism and learning difficulties, such as those that I and my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary recently visited in our own NHS trusts. They really provide a pathway to work, with the right help and support. There is much more that we need to do, and I look forward to discussing these issues with my hon. Friend and other members of the Committee.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)
Under the Conservatives the UK’s was the only economy to see employment rates fall over the last five years, leaving a legacy of wrecked apprenticeships, mental health services not fit for purpose and millions on waiting lists unable to work, as well as those with caring responsibilities staying at home to provide care for their loved ones because of the failure in our social care system. The Liberal Democrats welcome steps to improve access to skills, training and education. I praise the work of Fedcap and Maximus UK, which are doing just that in Chichester in conjunction with the jobcentres, working with those who have had long periods of economic inactivity or have additional challenges in finding work. But the insecurity and short-term nature of Government funding for such projects means that both organisations had to pause their referrals this year while they waited for the Government to confirm their continued funding. I am sure that the Secretary of State agrees that to get people back into work, the organisations already trying to do that need more security from the Government.
When it comes to tackling the mental health crisis, it is not enough to reverse the Conservatives’ lack of action. The Government must be proactive in improving mental health services. I invite the Secretary of State to take the proactive ideas that the Liberal Democrats laid out in our general election manifesto such as catching more mental health conditions early on by offering mental health MOTs and the introduction of mental health hubs in every community to deliver ease of access to walk-in services and support.
It is abundantly clear that ensuring people get the NHS treatment they need is critical to getting people back to work. The NHS cannot tackle its long waiting lists unless the Government get serious about fixing the crisis in social care. We have heard a lot of words from the Government on social care but seen little action, with the increase in the social care budget totally eroded by the national insurance contribution rise. Does the Secretary of State agree that a healthy society is a productive society and that fixing the health and social care crisis will get our country back to work?
Liz Kendall
I thank the hon. Lady for her questions. Yes, I agree that we have got to tackle the root causes of the problem and have an NHS and social care system that is fit for purpose. We have put forward our commitments on mental health support in every school and every community. We know that many mental health problems start before someone turns 18, so we have to try to prevent those problems in the first place, but there is much more that we need to do.
We are starting to see fantastic NHS services that provide employment advice as part of care. The evidence shows that if a person is in good work, a sense of purpose and structure is good for their mental health. My right hon. Friend the Health Secretary is pushing for that to be available in all parts of the country.
I am under no illusions about the scale of the challenge. Only 3% of people who are economically inactive get back to work in any given year, so we have to prevent the problems from happening in the first place as well as doing more to help those people into work.
Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)
Under the last Government, the DWP faced legal action for its unlawful treatment of disabled people. How will this White Paper, with its positive vision, rebuild trust and better support disabled people going forward?
Liz Kendall
The Government believe that disabled people have the same rights as everybody else, including the right to work. Our mission is to break down the barriers. Many disabled people would want to work if they could get the right help and support and a job that fits their needs and concerns, with greater flexibility. This is a really important challenge. I do not blame disabled people for often being frightened and worried when they hear about these discussions after what happened over the past 14 years, but we will work with disabled people and the organisations that represent them to get the world of work and the employment support system right and get a better-functioning system of disability benefits. This is a really big challenge for our country, but with these proposals we are taking an important step forward.
John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s ambition in many of the areas she has set out, and particularly the “Geep Britain Working” initiative. As a Parliament, we must come to terms with the obesity and mental health crises, so I welcome what she is doing with the Secretary of State for Health.
May I bring to the Secretary of State’s attention the work of South Wilts Mencap? I recently met Robin Clifford, and over 14 years I have seen the work that that group of trustees does with the adult learning disabled, a particular and special group of individuals in my constituency. I would welcome the opportunity to meet the Minister for Social Security and Disability to look at programmes that could be started or pilots that could be undertaken to get the learning disabled into meaningful activity where they can make some contribution through paid work.
Liz Kendall
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that important contribution. I and the Minister for Social Security and Disability would be keen to hear more about that work. I recently visited a supported employment programme—a year-long supported internship—run by my local health service for young people with autism and severe learning difficulties. It started by talking to the parents about what the young people could do, and not just what they could not do. The young people were got on the bus to get them to work. They tried three different jobs around the hospital to find the one that best matched their needs, and after that year every single young person was given a paid job. That is so successful that we are expanding it to the local university and to one of Leicester’s biggest hotel chains. These changes are possible, and I am keen to work with the right hon. Gentleman in his area to ensure that we give these opportunities.
Gill German (Clwyd North) (Lab)
I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. I believe that these reforms will be transformative, and it is not before time. In my constituency, we have long recognised the gaps that exist in the system. Our local authorities have put in place the brilliant “Working Denbighshire” programme and Conwy employment hub, which really drills down into what local people need and takes them on a pathway into work. Does the Secretary of State agree that devolving power and—crucially—funding in the way she set out is key to achieving the best results we can for local people in their area?
Liz Kendall
This is a major change in our approach. Local areas know best their needs and the different organisations that can help achieve goals. I know that economic inactivity in my city is predominantly driven by people with caring responsibilities; in other parts of the country, it is more about physical health or mental health problems. We need different things in different parts of the country—that is the best way to get the best results. It is a big change for the Department for Work and Pensions to be a much more localised service and to be much more joined up with other parts of government, both nationally and locally, but that is how we will deliver change.
Lewis Cocking (Broxbourne) (Con)
Businesses in my constituency are really worried and putting off investing and creating jobs because of the Labour party’s Budget, and in particular the increase in regulations and the national insurance increase. How does the Secretary of State plan to get everyone who should be in work back to work if no jobs exist out there?
Liz Kendall
I understand the pressures that many businesses are under. The Budget tried to deal with a very difficult issue: if we are spending more than we are earning, our public finances are not working. Anyone who runs a business knows that they have to get the finances right, but many organisations recognise that they need to recruit more people with the skills that meet their particular concerns. They are worried about the increasing number of health conditions and people leaving work because of them. I am determined to work with and serve local businesses. I would be very happy to meet the hon. Gentleman to talk about the specific needs of businesses in his constituency.
David Pinto-Duschinsky (Hendon) (Lab)
I warmly welcome the White Paper. I think it is a huge step forward. Mental health challenges have been the biggest single driver of rising inactivity among the young, and we know that mental health can be hugely helped by work. One study shows that just eight hours of work a week will reduce the risk of depression and anxiety by up to 30%. Given that, what will the Secretary of State do to help support those at risk from mental health issues to get back to work?
Liz Kendall
I have talked about what we aim to do to prevent mental health problems from happening in the first place, with more mental health support in schools and in the community. I see this as a fundamental overhaul of the way the DWP and the NHS work together, so that support to get people with mental health problems into the right jobs becomes part of what the NHS does, by putting employment advisers into the NHS. The individual placement and support service, which began under the last Government through the NHS, has shown quite phenomenal results—40% of people are in work after five years. Their use of the health service—the number of relapses and days they spend in hospital—are also reduced. That is better for work and for mental health. This requires a big change in the way we work, but my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary and I are determined to make that happen.
Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)
Many disabled or ill people were terrified by the Tories’ proposals to cut £3 billion from sickness benefit. Given that Labour is continuing that cut, will the Secretary of State promise to sign up to the principle of “nothing about us without us” and ensure that disabled people, those with ill health and those with lived experience of these systems are round the table, making the decisions on how this moves forward?
Liz Kendall
I have always been a big champion, including when I worked in social care, of working in partnership with people to get the decisions right first time. That is really important, which is why the Minister for Social Security and Disability and I are absolutely clear that we will work with disabled people in the relevant organisations to get this system right. I want to be really clear that the system is not working. People have to wait weeks on end to get an assessment, which often is overturned at tribunal. We do not do enough to prevent people from falling out of the workplace. Ninety per cent. of people who get back into work after a bout of sickness do so within the first year, but we do not use that opportunity to provide the help and support that they need. We need change. I understand how worried people are when they hear about change, but I think they would also say that the change needs to happen, and we are determined to put that in place.
Johanna Baxter (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (Lab)
I warmly welcome the statement by my right hon. Friend, because giving people the opportunity to get on in life and have dignity in good work is at the heart of what drove me to this place. Does the Secretary of State agree that helping people into work in Paisley and Renfrewshire South is about getting the economy growing again, as well as putting more money into people’s pockets? Will she say a little more about her discussions with the Scottish Government to ensure that they will play their full part in making sure that this works?
Liz Kendall
I am absolutely determined to get more people into better-paid jobs in every part of the country. That is the key to improving people’s living standards and to getting the economy growing again. Our new jobs and careers service will look different in Scotland because the Scottish Government are responsible for running the careers service there, but we are already in discussions about how to make sure that our plans meet the specific needs of people in Scotland, including in my hon. Friend’s constituency. I look forward to receiving her ideas and suggestions, which I know she will always provide.
Mr Richard Holden (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)
I want the Secretary of State to succeed, and I want her to be part of the first Labour majority Government ever to leave office with employment higher than when they started. I had hoped to hear a little more about reform, rather than just about a review, but this is a welcome step in the right direction. Businesses in Basildon and Billericay have been telling me that although they welcome some of the schemes—I am sure that some of them will do good things—they are absolutely terrified by both the taxes coming through national insurance and the hit on them through business rates. The Office for Budget Responsibility says that at least 50,000 jobs a year will go because of those changes, so where will the people who she is hoping to get off benefits and into work find that employment?
Liz Kendall
As I have said to other hon. Members, I am keen to talk to businesses right across the country, including in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, about the challenges that they face. We took a decision when we got into office that we could not continue with the fantasy economics. We cannot spend more than we earn. We have to invest in the long-term physical infrastructure of the country, but also in our people, who are our best assets. We must get the NHS back on its feet. I know the issues that businesses face, but they are also thinking about the longer term—the vacancies, and how on earth they get the skills that their business needs. I would be very happy to talk to the hon. Gentleman about that, if he likes.
Clive Efford (Eltham and Chislehurst) (Lab)
I welcome the statement from my right hon. Friend, and particularly what she said about the coaches and assistance for young people getting into work. What she describes seems to fit neatly with what the Government propose for the green economy, and its highly skilled, well-paid jobs. How will training for those jobs play a part in getting people from unemployment into work?
Liz Kendall
My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. The “Get Britain Working” White Paper is part of a much wider series of reforms that the Government are making to create more good jobs in every part of the country, including in green energy, through our modern industrial strategy, and through our plans, in the new deal for working people, to make work pay. Yesterday, I was at a college in Peterborough that is looking at how to upskill young people so that they can get the clean, green energy jobs of the future. That needs to happen in every part of the country, because we want the new jobs that we are creating to be available to those who need them most. We have not really managed to fit that together before—to get the DWP and our “Get Britain Working” plans underpinning our local growth plans. That is a big change that we have to deliver, if we are to make sure that everybody in this country benefits from the jobs we are creating.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
I welcome much of what the Secretary of State has said, and I am delighted that she has assured us that there will be discussions with the Scottish Government about plans for Scotland. Throughout the past two or three years, businesses in my constituency have told me that they are concerned that they cannot get people to work for them, so this strategy will be welcome. However, does the Secretary of State appreciate that many of us see a contradiction between this policy and the national insurance changes? A major employer in my constituency tells me that the changes will cost it £250,000 extra a year, and it will not take on seasonal workers because it cannot afford to. How does that damaging policy for business go alongside trying to encourage more people back to work?
Liz Kendall
Of course businesses face these pressures, but I think many of them understand that the Government have to look at the fundamentals. We faced a problem with the public finances when we got into government. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor took the decision that the only way we could sort out the country for the long term was to get the public finances back on a more sustainable footing. The businesses that I have met, including Tesco in my constituency, raised concerns with me, but they also said that they really want to get more young people who have mental health problems into work. Tesco has a brilliant partnership with the King’s Trust to get those young people into work and help them stay there, because it knows that the key to those young people’s future is to get those skills, so that they can grow business and make the changes that this country needs.
Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough and Thornaby East) (Lab)
I thank my right hon. Friend for her statement. My constituents will very much welcome the additional funding for young people in the Tees Valley, and the modernisation of jobcentres, which will benefit our wonderful jobcentre staff. Can the Secretary of State say how the changes will dovetail with the Employment Rights Bill? How will we ensure that young people are offered quality employment and training opportunities, and not pressured into accepting inadequate and insecure zero-hours jobs? Can she also say how the Government and Members can monitor and evaluate the combined authorities’ delivery of the youth trailblazer programme?
Liz Kendall
My hon. Friend will know of our plans to make work pay, bring in day one employment rights, end exploitative zero-hours contracts and improve flexibility at work. We need to do all those things to make sure that there are good-quality job options out there for young people. There will be new leadership roles for mayors in combined authorities, but also clear accountability for delivering the outcome that we want, which is that every young person has an opportunity to earn or learn. We will make sure that happens.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
To ensure that
“if you can work, you must work”,
will the Secretary of State familiarise herself with the works of Jeremy Bentham?
Alan Gemmell (Central Ayrshire) (Lab)
We have heard much about the failures of the Conservative party, but after 17 years of SNP failures, young people in Central Ayrshire are looking to this Government for the opportunity for a good job. What more will my right hon. Friend do, through today’s announcement, to help young people in Central Ayrshire and across Scotland?
Liz Kendall
It is hugely important that we deliver these new opportunities in every part of the country, including to people of all ages in Scotland. We will work with the Scottish Government on that, but also, really importantly, with local councils, who have a huge role to play. Our jobcentres really need to change. They need to meet the needs of employers and future employees in every part of the country. I look forward to working with my hon. Friend, to get his ideas on what will work best. Perhaps we could do a joint visit to his jobcentre.
Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)
It is all very well us talking about the Department for Work, but a challenge is often that we fail those in employment who are interacting with the benefit system. I have a number of constituents in North East Fife who are paid on a four-weekly basis but who also claim universal credit, which means that, one month a year, they lose their universal credit. Simply telling them to try to put money aside to bridge that gap is not, I think, a professional way for us to support those people. I know that has been an ongoing challenge, but will the consultation look at such issues?
Liz Kendall
The hon. Lady raises a really important point. We have a clear manifesto commitment to review universal credit, tackle poverty and make work pay. That issue has been raised a lot with me and the Minister for Social Security and Disability. I am sure that he will look closely at that. We need our benefits system to match the reality of people’s working lives today.
Yuan Yang (Earley and Woodley) (Lab)
I very much commend the Secretary of State for the youth guarantee. In my constituency, many businesses have invested in the hi-tech industries of the future. However, I speak to young people and their families who are concerned about those young people getting jobs on the first rung of the ladder. This year, there will be 3,000 undergraduates graduating from the University of Reading, and a further 3,000 people turning 18 in my constituency. What can the Secretary of State and her Department do for those young people to ensure that local jobs and training opportunities match the economic advantages of the area they are from?
Liz Kendall
I personally believe that we need to start much younger than 18, with good work experience and careers advice in schools. I have certainly seen that in my constituency; even in primary schools, teachers have brought in people with different jobs, in different professions, to open children’s eyes and minds to the possibilities of the world of work. We need to bring together everything that is happening in our schools, colleges and the world of work. That is how we open up possibilities for young people. I hope that the youth guarantee will do precisely that in local areas and provide the opportunities that my hon. Friend’s young constituents need and deserve.
Jim Allister (North Antrim) (TUV)
I note that the White Paper is called “Get Britain Working”, not “Get the United Kingdom Working”. I appreciate there are devolution issues, but when I listened to the Secretary of State’s statement, I found it very England-orientated. There are references to national partnerships, but how does the White Paper fit with getting the United Kingdom working? Will there be Barnett consequentials? And will things be left up to the sometimes failing devolved institutions?
Liz Kendall
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. Northern Ireland has one of the highest rates of economic inactivity in the United Kingdom, which is a real concern for me, and, I am sure, for him. I have already spoken to the Minister responsible. There are things happening in Northern Ireland that we can look at to see whether there are lessons that could be learned for elsewhere in the country. We will always work closely with the devolved Administrations to ensure that our plans match people’s needs in every part of the country, because that is what his constituents and the country as a whole deserve.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Ind)
Given the empty Opposition Benches, it looks like the Conservative party has adopted a policy of a three or two-day week to tackle the unemployment problem. I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as chair of the Public and Commercial Services Union parliamentary group. From the tone taken and the statement given today, my understanding is that the Government acknowledge that it will be support, not sanctions, that will tackle this issue overall, and that that support will come from new employment centres in our constituencies, staffed by fully trained, motivated and well-paid staff. The Secretary of State mentioned meeting businesses and mayors. May I ask that she also meets the trade unions? The PCS parliamentary group would welcome a meeting with her to talk through the roll-out of this programme, which will benefit both the staff and the recipients of their services.
Liz Kendall
I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. Our 16,000 work coaches and other frontline jobcentre staff are our biggest asset. Some have worked for the DWP for 25 or 30 years, because they care about their communities. They have been stifled by a system that had an overwhelming focus on monitoring and administering benefits. They know what their local areas want and need. I spoke to the head of the TUC yesterday about our plans. I am sure that either the Minister for Employment or I would be very happy to meet the PCS to talk about how we take these plans forward.
Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)
I thank the Secretary of State for her statement. Some 13% of jobs in Somerset are in manufacturing, and many of them are in the defence industry—in Thales in Templecombe, RNAS Yeovilton in my constituency, or Leonardo nearby. The manufacturing industry contributes £1.87 billion to our local economy, which is more than any other single industry. However, data shows that women represent only 30% of the STEM—science, technology, engineering and maths—workforce. Does the Secretary of State agree that we should be making more targeted interventions to support more women into this important industry?
Liz Kendall
One hundred per cent. I could not agree more with the hon. Lady. We need to get more women into manufacturing, engineering and all those STEM subjects. I met many apprentices yesterday on a visit to Peterborough college, including young women who said, “This is for me.” More women need to do this. They are great jobs and great careers, with great pay—100%.
Mr Connor Rand (Altrincham and Sale West) (Lab)
It is wonderful to hear from my right hon. Friend that Greater Manchester will be one of the trailblazer areas for these vital reforms. When I speak to businesses in Altrincham and Sale West, they tell me that the greatest challenge they face is recruiting people to fill vacancies. Can the Secretary of State outline a little further how these plans will ensure that businesses can recruit the skilled staff they need, and give young people in my constituency great opportunities in the process?
Liz Kendall
This is one of the biggest challenges that many employers face, and the reason that many of them are so keen on apprentices—as I was told yesterday—is that they can mould young people with the specific skills that their companies need. There are two points here. First, we are reforming the apprenticeship levy and transforming it into a new growth and skills levy, so that businesses have more flexibility in how they use it. Secondly, many young people have missed out on those basic skills of maths and English at GCSE, and cannot even get on to the apprenticeship scheme. We need that training or those foundation apprenticeships, because they are a key part of the changes that we want to make and to spread, through our youth guarantee, to areas including Greater Manchester.
Ann Davies (Caerfyrddin) (PC)
The Workways team, which is run by Carmarthenshire county council in my constituency, does impressive work in facilitating access to critical skills and giving career opportunities to people who are out of work. It has received funding through the shared prosperity fund, but that is due to end. Can the Minister tell me how such vital organisations in Wales will benefit from her Department’s plans?
Liz Kendall
The whole point of devolving responsibility and accountability to mayors and local leaders is that they will know best the organisations that they need to involve in tackling economic inactivity, delivering the youth guarantee and embedding jobcentres into local communities. There is an additional £900 million in the shared prosperity fund for 2025-26, and that is a key element that we need to join up with the rest of these measures, but if the hon. Lady will write to me with more detailed information, I shall be happy to look at it.
Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)
Barriers to employment and a lack of workplace support for disabled people remain persistent challenges, along with inadequate social security payments for everyone regardless of employment status. Can my right hon. Friend reassure disabled people that the Government’s new support measures will not be conditional on their being able to work, and that no one will be sanctioned for non-attendance at medical appointments?
Liz Kendall
Sanctioning people because they use the NHS to make themselves as fit and healthy as possible is completely the wrong approach. I understand why disabled people are worried when they hear talk about helping people into work or reforms of sickness and disability benefits—they are worried because of what has happened over the past 14 years—but we are determined to break down those barriers to work. I think that many disabled people, given the right help and support and the right flexibility to work, could work and would want to work. That is what we are focusing on, and that is what we are determined to deliver.
Bobby Dean (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
A fantastic local social enterprise in my constituency has been helping adults with disabilities back into work. It recently set up a café that is run entirely by adults with learning disabilities. How does the Department plan to take evidence from innovative organisations of that kind, and will the Secretary of State meet members of this organisation to find out about the work it has been doing?
Liz Kendall
The reason I am so passionate about devolving responsibility and accountability to local areas is that it is intended to engage precisely the kind of organisation that the hon. Gentleman has mentioned. For instance, I know the various organisations in Leicester but I do not know those in his constituency, so I believe that we need a much more localised system. If he will write to me with the details, I shall be very keen to look at them.
Claire Hughes (Bangor Aberconwy) (Lab)
Measures such as the young person’s guarantee, which are already working successfully in Wales, are welcome. Could the Secretary of State tell us a bit more about how she will work with the Welsh Government to deliver on the plan to make work pay?
Liz Kendall
As my hon. Friend says, there is already a young person’s guarantee in Wales. The jobcentre reforms will look different in Wales because the Welsh Government are responsible for the careers service, but we want to work with them and with employers to overhaul their approach, to unleash the ideas of our work coaches and free up their time to focus on those who need help the most, and to ensure that our jobcentres become the first port of call, not the last, for employers to recruit their next star employee. We want employers to be much more joined up with local skills support and health support. We will be having those conversations with the Welsh Government, and I am keen to receive my hon. Friend’s input as well.
Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)
My constituent Diana has a daughter who has autism and lives independently with some low-level support. She previously had a part-time role while living in Bath, with help from an employment support job coach, and she wishes to do the same having now moved to my constituency. However, she has found that much harder since moving, and is yet to find similar support in Sussex. How will the Secretary of State tackle the postcode lottery that exists for those in need of extra help to get into employment?
Liz Kendall
I am very sorry to hear that Diana’s daughter has not received the level of support that she had before. It is clear that with the right support she will be able to engage with the world of work as well as leading an independent life, which is what she wants. Our reforms are intended to ensure that such support is available everywhere. If the hon. Lady wishes to forward the details of that case, I shall be happy to take a look at them.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Ind)
It is vital that people are helped into fulfilling, well-paid work so that they can realise their potential. The Secretary of State rightly mentioned the importance that she places on discussing these changes and reforms with disabled people and disabled people’s groups. In the course of her discussions, will she ask those people and groups about the work capability assessment? Many people who visit my constituency surgery feel degraded and demeaned by the WCA tests, and many of the decisions that are made turn out to be wrong and are successfully appealed against later.
Liz Kendall
As my hon. Friend will know, that is why the manifesto on which we were all elected said that we would reform or replace the work capability assessment. People wait for that assessment, and for the personal independence payment, for an average of between 14 and 18 weeks, and about 70% of decisions on the WCA and PIP can be overturned at tribunal. We need a system that gets the decision right first time, because that is what disabled people need and deserve.
Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)
The Secretary of State has given us some positive new spending plans today, but she has also given some mixed messages to young people, with some investment on the one hand and new conditions, which she calls responsibilities, on the other. Will she commit herself to working with and empowering young people to shape this new spending in local areas and potentially challenge any new conditions on support? I am thinking in particular of neurodiverse young people, whose perspectives are vital and who are worried about what this will mean for their wellbeing and life chances.
Liz Kendall
The White Paper will provide for a new youth employment panel so that we can genuinely engage with young people in developing our proposals. I believe that it is vital for people to be in education, employment or training when they are young, because if they are not, the impact can be lifelong. To those who lack basic skills, today’s world is brutal, and being unemployed when young can have a permanent impact on someone’s job prospects and earnings potential. Alongside genuine new opportunities, there should be a responsibility to take them up—and do you know what? I have never met a young person who did not want to work, who did not want to obtain skills, who did not want a chance. We will fulfil our side of the bargain, and meet our responsibilities to provide those opportunities. I believe that, just as they did when the last Labour Government set up the new deal for young people and the future jobs fund, young people will take up those chances.
Sam Carling (North West Cambridgeshire) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for coming to the House to announce these measures. I am pleased to see that Cambridgeshire and Peterborough has been included as one of the areas for trailblazing the new youth guarantee. On Friday, I held a roundtable with local businesses, and one of the main themes that emerged was the lack of ability to recruit skilled people locally. Will the Secretary of State explain how these measures will help to address the situation?
Liz Kendall
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I have already spoken quite a lot about changes to the apprenticeship levy, which are important, but there are many other things that we can do. We have seen real success with sector-based work academies, which are run by jobcentres. Those are short, six-week courses that give the specific skills an employer needs, alongside guaranteed work experience for the potential employee and a guaranteed interview. They have had huge success for people looking for work and for employers, because they get someone with the skills they actually need. We are committed to doing that this year, and I hope we will roll it out further. That is just one of many examples of how we can change our jobcentres and the DWP to better serve employers and their needs.
Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)
Stepping Hill hospital in Hazel Grove has a huge repairs backlog, which is reported to cost £130 million. We have had buildings knocked down because they are no longer safe, medics wading through flooded corridors and, most recently, a light fitting falling down in a delivery suite when the couple were in active labour. This situation has a massive impact on waiting lists and, consequently, on how much my residents can work, including Anthony, who got in touch yesterday to say that he is waiting for rehab after having a heart attack in June. Can the Secretary of State confirm that any extra funding will go towards what local communities need in order to get back to work? Many of my constituents are as keen as mustard to do so, but they are on waiting lists. Even the most wonderful work coach can do very little when somebody is awaiting surgery.
Liz Kendall
The hon. Lady raises a massively important point, and I am really sorry to hear about what her constituents are experiencing. We have to get people back to health and back to work. It is no wonder that so many people are out of work due to long-term sickness, given that waiting lists are at near-record levels. That is why my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary is sending in extra help, including doctors, to drive down waiting lists in the areas that need help the most. It is a no-brainer that we have to get people off waiting lists to get them back to work. That is what I mean when I say that a healthy nation and a healthy workforce are two sides of the same coin.
Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)
Thurrock Lifestyle Solutions in my constituency is an excellent example of good practice in helping disabled people enter and stay in the workplace. It is particularly successful because it embodies the maxim, “Nothing about us without us”, as it is run by, led by and designed by disabled people themselves. Will the Secretary of State commit to taking such examples of best practice into consideration, and to ensuring that the voices of disabled people and those with long-term health conditions are put at the very heart of the strategy?
Liz Kendall
Yes. What my hon. Friend and many hon. Members have highlighted today are lots of individual examples of really good working, but we are not joining them up. They are not a central part of our employment system, but they absolutely should be. We know that we need extra investment, and the Chancellor has put £240 million into this endeavour, but we are not getting the most out of the money we are spending because it is not co-ordinated and joined up. That is what we mean by delivering investment and reform together. If it is locally led and involves people who are doing all this fantastic work, we can make a really big difference.
Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)
I welcome the initiatives and recognise that this is not a problem that has been created by the Government; it has been with us for a long time and started long before July this year. Northern Ireland has the highest level of economic inactivity in the UK, despite the fact that I can think of many initiatives in my own constituency for people with learning difficulties, for apprenticeships in certain sectors, for the work of local colleges and so on. Despite all that, the problem persists—and that is in a place with almost full employment. Can the Secretary of State give an assurance that, despite a Budget that will make it more difficult to recruit, she can set objectives for the number of people she believes can be brought from unemployment into work as a result of the initiatives?
Liz Kendall
The right hon. Gentleman raises many important points. As I said earlier, it is absolutely the case that Northern Ireland has the highest level of economic inactivity in the UK. We will set clear objectives for our plans as we work with the devolved Administrations, and at local level, to get the levels of economic inactivity down. That will be challenging because, as I said earlier, only 3% of people who are economically inactive get back to work each year. We need to increase that, and the only way we can do it is by more fully joining up work, health and skills support. Too much of the focus of welfare reform over the past 14 years has been on the benefit system alone. Clearly, the benefit system can incentivise or disincentivise work. We want it to incentivise work, but we also know that we need to join up work, health and skills if we are to get every part of the United Kingdom working again.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
This statement will run until 3 o’clock, so short questions and short answers would be very helpful.
Andrew Lewin (Welwyn Hatfield) (Lab)
It is a sad reality that there are fewer people in work today than in 2019, before the pandemic, so I am under no illusions about the scale of the challenge. When I talk to young people in Welwyn Hatfield, the thing that most concerns me is that they often cite problems with their mental health as being a barrier to getting into work or progressing in work. Can my right hon. Friend reassure me that she will work in lockstep with the Health Secretary? We on the Labour Benches understand that investment in a healthy workforce is a down payment on future prosperity for us all.
Ian Sollom (St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire) (LD)
St Neots in my constituency is the largest town in Cambridgeshire, and it does not have a jobcentre; residents have to travel up to Huntingdon each week for their benefits. In the absence of a jobcentre, social enterprise has taken place. Last week I attended the launch of the St Neots citizen hub, which aims to connect individuals with opportunities and employers with talent. It provides a safe space in the heart of the community to address the fundamental issues of skills gaps—including life skills—social isolation and financial insecurity, and it is a great example of the new model for jobcentres. Will the Secretary of State ensure that staff at the jobcentre in Huntingdon can come down for one day a week so that residents do not have to keep making the journey up to Huntingdon?
Liz Kendall
That is a really important point. We want to see more of our work coaches going to where people are, rather than always expecting them to come in. If all that help and support is being provided at the St Neots citizen hub, it sounds like exactly the sort of place where our work coaches should be based, and I will certainly bring that up with them.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
These changes are fantastic and are much needed to get Britain back to work after 14 years of dismissal and neglect of real lives and real people under the last Government. However, areas such as Portsmouth North do not have a devolution deal yet. Can the Secretary of State provide details on how those not in work in Portsmouth North will be able to get support and get back into work, and on how we can make our jobcentre accessible, to lift children out of poverty and to lift people back into the community?
Liz Kendall
I reassure my hon. Friend that it is the same for me and my city—we do not have a devolution deal. We are overhauling our jobcentres, and tackling economic inactivity with local “Get Britain Working” plans and our youth guarantee. Regardless of whether people are part of a mayoral or combined authority, that work will be led locally, including through the local council. We are determined to deliver in every corner of the country, because we believe that everybody deserves an opportunity to work. That is what our country needs to get growing again.
Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)
Steven Tysoe from east Devon used to be a Metropolitan police officer in London, and he showed me footage of his involvement in the riots in the capital over a decade ago. He was severely injured and was regarded by the DWP as disabled. Under the new right of disabled people to work, will the Secretary of State ensure that public servants who have been injured in the line of duty will not get hounded repeatedly by assessors?
Liz Kendall
I do not want to see people being hounded. If they are able to work, I want them to get the support they need to do that. That is the big challenge that we face. There are more disabled people working than ever before, but for many others their conditions might fluctuate and the world of work and the benefit system need to understand that. I am interested in providing people with support not hounding them—there should of course be conditions and responsibility within the social security system, as has been the case since it was set up—and I hope that is not happening to the hon. Gentleman’s constituent. If it is, perhaps he will write and tell me more about it.
Shaun Davies (Telford) (Lab)
Those who can work should work, but so should the support services. I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement on transforming that public service, which embraces many of the principles of the work done by the Local Government Association on “Work Local”. In Telford and Wrekin, where I was council leader, we were driving down youth unemployment under the previous Government, but we were expected to pay a charge to the DWP to share data. Will the Secretary of State assure me that that will not happen under these plans to work local?
Liz Kendall
It seems to me to be completely the wrong approach to put barriers in the way of data sharing. Some of the best innovations—I am thinking particularly of Barnsley council—have shared data between the health service, the jobcentre and the DWP about people facing barriers to work and what needs to happen to put that right. We have to enable that to happen everywhere. I want to tear down those barriers, not put more up, so I will definitely take away that issue.
Jim Dickson (Dartford) (Lab)
I welcome the innovation and energy in the White Paper. It will make a huge difference to people and businesses across the country. In relation to the welcome announcement of eight trailblazer schemes, can the Secretary of State set out how young people in areas without mayoral combined authorities will see support, including my residents in Dartford and across the Thames estuary, where we want to see the fair growth that the Government are offering?
Liz Kendall
I 100% want young people, and all my hon. Friend’s constituents in Dartford, to have the same chances. As I said earlier, I do not have a combined authority in my city, so I am acutely aware of this issue. This will be for local councils to lead. They will be developing local “Get Britain Working” plans. They will be the responsible and accountable body over our youth guarantee. We have to deliver this everywhere because talent is everywhere but opportunity is not, and that is what we all came into politics to change.
Andrew Pakes (Peterborough) (Lab)
This is a momentous White Paper by a momentous Secretary of State. Yesterday, I had the great privilege to take my right hon. Friend to Peterborough college to meet excellent businesses and apprentices doing brilliant work, including EML, Baker Perkins, Taylor Rose, Codem and Gen Phoenix. Those businesses and learners are excelling in a system that has failed too many of our young people. Apprenticeships are down and youth unemployment is up in my city. Can my right hon. Friend tell us how quickly we can get going on these new trailblazers?
Liz Kendall
I thank my hon. Friend for an amazing visit yesterday, and I hope he will pass on my thanks to Rachel at the local college and to all the local businesses and apprentices. I agree with him: the number of apprenticeship starts for young people dropped by 38% under the previous Government’s apprenticeship levy, and in Peterborough more than 1,350 young people are claiming benefits, with the majority not in work, so we must act swiftly, and we will. These programmes are starting immediately in the new year. I look forward to working with him and all those businesses and the college in Peterborough to put our plans into action, because we are determined to deliver.
Katrina Murray (Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch) (Lab)
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and to the work that I did prior to prior to entering this place. It is difficult enough for a disabled person to enter employment; it is even more difficult for a disabled person to remain in employment if the employers are not aware of or not accommodating their disabilities and the reasonable adjustments that they might need. Within the debate on this White Paper, will the Secretary of State ensure that the work of exemplar employers is picked up and credited? There must be a recognition of the value that disabled people can bring to all workplaces. I also invite her to come and meet my old team in the employability service within NHS Lanarkshire, who have worked not just with Project Search but with disabled—
Liz Kendall
The issue that my hon. Friend raises is so important, and Sir Charlie Mayfield, who will be running our “Keep Britain Working” review, will indeed look at best practice among some great employers who understand what needs to happen to help disabled people get work and stay in work. If my hon. Friend writes to me about that exemplar working, I will make sure that he sees it.
Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)
Yesterday I was proud to host a reception from the Royal National Institute of Blind People, at which I heard that, across the UK, people with failing eyesight are not getting the support they need from the health service, from local authorities or from employers, and that they are falling out of work because of this. Can this be addressed as part of the programme being outlined today?
Liz Kendall
We will certainly speak to the RNIB to ensure that those points are included as we take our “Get Britain Working” White Paper forward.
Blair McDougall (East Renfrewshire) (Lab)
If we search the record of this place, we see the phrase “no child left behind” mentioned over and over again, but during the pandemic, children were left behind. They have been washing up on the shores of social work, of the police sometimes, and of childhood mental health services, and I know from visiting my jobcentre in Barrhead that they are now washing up on its shores as well. What will this White Paper do to help that covid generation who were left behind?
Liz Kendall
When I visited my jobcentre in Leicester after being appointed to the work and pensions role in opposition, the very first thing its manager said to me was that the big problem was young people and mental health—the covid generation. They deserve more opportunities to earn and to learn. The country must do this. For me, the most concerning problem that we face is the rapid increase in young people not in education, training or employment. We know that we can deliver the youth guarantee, as we did the new deal for young people and the future jobs fund when we were last in government. This is a version of that, facing the problems of today and tomorrow to give that pandemic generation the chances and choices they need to build a better life.
Mr Mark Sewards (Leeds South West and Morley) (Lab)
May I start by welcoming the statement and the White Paper? The Secretary of State has confirmed that we are the party of work. There is so much good stuff in the statement and the White Paper, including reforms to jobcentres, the youth guarantee and joined-up health and job support, but I particularly welcome the talk of a right to work. Disabled constituents tell me that they are desperate to get into employment but cannot find employers who meet their needs. Without knowing the specifics, what general assurances can my right hon. Friend give those constituents that they will be able to find work under this White Paper?
Liz Kendall
This Government understand the importance of whether the benefit system incentivises or disincentivises work, but we must also address people’s skills, the barriers to work, including for disabled people, and the need to work much more closely with employers so that they understand the benefits of keeping people in work or getting them back to work. This is a huge agenda, and I think the DWP has been too centralised and too siloed in not joining up all this support. Our work coaches are desperate to make this happen, and under these reform programmes that is exactly what we will do.
John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that supporting people into work, through Government action nationally and, of course, locally, is an important part of being pro-business? Will she expand briefly on how the measures she has set out will benefit businesses of all sizes in my constituency, and will she reassure them that we are not only the party of work but a pro-business party?
Liz Kendall
Businesses in Rugby and across the country always say that they are desperate to recruit people with the right skills. If they do not have the right people, they will not be able to expand and thrive. This is a pro-business strategy to get Britain working again, so that we get Britain growing again. My hon. Friend the Minister for Employment says that we are the human resources department of the growth mission. I hope businesses in Rugby will see that and work with us to make sure we get it right.
Paul Waugh (Rochdale) (Lab/Co-op)
I warmly congratulate the Secretary of State on all her hard work to deliver this White Paper, which proves not only that hers is a Department for work but that Labour is the party of work. Whereas, judging from the sea of green opposite, the Tories are a party of slackers.
I warmly welcome the fact that Greater Manchester is one of the trailblazer areas. What is the Secretary of State most excited about in Andy Burnham’s plan to help tackle this massive problem in Greater Manchester?
Liz Kendall
Under Andy Burnham’s leadership, Greater Manchester is pioneering some of the changes that we want to see by fundamentally joining up work, health and skills support, by commissioning new talking therapy services for people seeking work, and by creating a new service to broker connections between jobseekers and employers. This will make sure that employers get the staff they need while also making the necessary adjustments.
We want to build on that and expand it, because we are indeed the party of work. We believe that work brings self-respect, dignity, control and improved living standards. I am very proud of that, and I hope and believe that these reforms will deliver in every corner of this great nation, so that we invest not just in Great Britain but in great Britons—this country’s greatest asset.
Point of Order
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Brendan O’Hara (Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber) (SNP)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. At Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office questions on 28 October, the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) asked the Foreign Secretary whether he believes a genocide is taking place in the middle east. In his reply, the Foreign Secretary appeared to suggest not, partly because not enough people had lost their lives.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I understand that you are not responsible for answers from the Dispatch Box, which is why, on 31 October, I wrote to the Foreign Secretary seeking urgent clarification of what he meant. On 1 November, I also wrote to the Attorney General asking that he immediately clarify the Government’s position and confirm that there had been no change in how the UK Government interpret the genocide convention.
As of this afternoon, I have had no reply to my correspondence from either the Foreign Secretary or the Attorney General. I therefore seek your guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker, on how I can get a reply to what I and many others regard as a matter of the utmost importance.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
I am grateful to the hon. Member for giving notice of his point of order. He is absolutely correct when he says that I am not responsible for the content of Ministers’ answers; nor indeed am I for their responses to correspondence from hon. Members. However, I must say that all hon. Members are entitled to expect timely responses to their letters to Ministers, and I am sure those on the Treasury Bench will have noted his comments this afternoon.
Treatment of Terminal Illness
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Dame Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about the liability of practitioners, and of the organisation which employs the practitioner, where a practitioner prescribes an unlicensed medicine to or carries out a non-standard treatment on a person who is terminally ill; to make provision about the import, storage and use of equipment and unlicensed medicines for the purpose of such prescriptions or such treatment; and for connected purposes.
Advances in medical science wait for no man or woman—unless, of course, they are one of the thousands of people in the UK each year diagnosed with a rare cancer. In that case, they are likely to receive NHS treatment that has remained unchanged for more than 30 years, with no improvement in outcomes, no access to drug trials and no access to the huge progress that has been made in individualised cancer vaccines or immunotherapy.
It does not have to be that way. In Germany, medical practitioners can offer experimental treatments to patients with a terminal diagnosis without fear that they, or the organisations that employ them, will be held liable or penalised. They can offer patients a lifeline that doctors in the UK are not allowed to offer. I am introducing this Bill to protect clinicians in the same way and to allow patients access to the latest medical treatments.
In truth, we know this ten-minute rule Bill has no prospect of becoming law. However, it serves another purpose: to give a voice to the thousands of terminally ill patients and the ordeal they are forced to endure in search of a lifeline; to expose the culture of fear among medical professionals in the NHS surrounding individualised treatment; and to suggest a better way forward.
Excuse my German pronunciation, but Individuelle Heilversuche is the German law that allows doctors to provide personalised, individual treatment plans. When a terminally ill patient has run out of traditional treatment options, medical practitioners can use treatments that have not been fully approved, or that have been approved for other purposes, as part of individual treatment programmes. They are able to prescribe drugs for off-label use—drugs that are known to save lives but are not yet available to patients with a specific condition. How can it be right not to offer the same rights to patients in the UK? Instead, the NHS—and healthcare in general—abandons them to die when the outdated and inadequate standard care fails. Understandably, many fight and take the hard choice to travel internationally—in this case, to Germany—to find the treatments denied to them in their own country.
I know this path, as I walked it with my sister. I held her head as she was sick into a bin on the concourse at Heathrow airport’s terminal 5. I obscured her from flight attendants in fear that they would take her off the plane, and that we would not get to Düsseldorf. One night, I wondered how I would explain her death in a foreign city, in a country where I did not speak the language or understand the emergency care. But I would do it all again, because I wanted to extend her life and there was nothing for her here in the UK.
We were lucky that we could pay for it. Thousands of people are currently following the same difficult path. For some, it is harder because they do not have the money. At a time of great distress, they are forced to sell their homes, run marathons or bake cakes to fund the treatment their loved one needs. Many are forced to travel alone because their partner cannot afford to go with them or cannot afford to take their children.
Laura was diagnosed with a glioblastoma when she was just 18. A first-year student at King’s College London, she was told that she had just 12 months to live under the standard care available through the NHS. For Laura’s family, this was just not good enough. In Germany, they found an individualised treatment plan that helped Laura to live four and a half years past her diagnosis, defying the mere 12 months that oncologists in the UK had given her.
Before she lost her battle with cancer, Laura completed her degree and a wonderful bucket list, including crossing the equator, presenting the weather and meeting Michelle Obama. This decision to travel overseas for highly expensive treatment is not to be taken lightly, but I ask the House the same question that Laura’s indomitable mum, Nicola, asked her oncologist, “What would you do if this was your child?”
When Zoe, a 35-year-old secondary school teacher with two young sons, was diagnosed with a grade 4 cancer, she found the NHS treatment available seemed old-fashioned and out of date. Her oncologist was against trying anything different, despite telling her she had just 15 months to live. Zoe was able to access experimental treatment in Germany—treatment that research has since highlighted results in an increase in survival time. She passed away two years after her diagnosis, but critically was able to access treatment that did not affect her quality of life, something that cannot be said for the treatment that would have been available in the UK.
Zoe’s husband told me:
“When you are handed a death sentence, your risk appetite changes.”
Zoe, along with the countless other patients who have reached out to me with a range of cancers and terminal illnesses, whose stories I wish I could share with the House, should never have had to travel for her treatment.
Margaret should never have had to travel. We know that in many cases individual treatment has been proven to lead to people surviving for far longer than their original prognosis. I can say with confidence that it did so for Margaret. It provides hope that we simply do not get from our current health system. That is why I propose we extend the opportunity of individual treatment programmes to the thousands of people with a terminal diagnosis in the UK. We must end the cruel practice of forcing our most vulnerable to travel overseas to access better care, at huge expense.
It is clear that legislation is needed to protect our doctors and to allow them to progress with the best standard of care. At the very least, we need to end the culture of fear among medical professionals in this country with regard to experimental and individual treatments, so that they can inform their patients of options that could lengthen their life expectancy. As Zoe’s husband said to me:
“Patients do not want the fatalism that many in this field have. Realism is fine, but no-one has the right to remove hope from a patient.”
This Bill would bring that hope back to thousands of people.
Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Dame Siobhain McDonagh, Jim Shannon, Uma Kumaran, Peter Lamb, Luke Murphy, Rachael Maskell, Tonia Antoniazzi, Valerie Vaz, Mary Glindon, Sorcha Eastwood, Helena Dollimore and Natasha Irons present the Bill.
Dame Siobhain McDonagh accordingly presented the Bill.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 17 January, and to be printed (Bill 139).
Tobacco and Vapes Bill
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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18:46 - The House divided: - Ayes: 415 / Noes: 47 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Wes Streeting)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Today, across the UK, 350 young people aged 25 and under will take up smoking. It is a decision that the vast majority will later regret. They will try to quit again and again, but most will not be able to break their addiction. They will suffer strokes, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stillbirth, dementia or asthma as a direct result of smoking. For two in three of those young people, the habit they are beginning today will eventually kill them.
Smoking takes 80,000 lives a year and causes one in four deaths from cancer in England, a hospital admission almost every minute and 100 GP appointments an hour. It is the leading cause of sickness, disability and death in our country. And today, Members of this House can consign it to the history books.
The Bill before the House will raise the legal age of the purchase of tobacco by one year every year, creating the first smokefree generation and, eventually, a smokefree nation. The Bill will enable the Government to extend the current indoor smoking ban to certain outdoor settings, and we will consult on banning smoking outside schools and hospitals and in playgrounds, protecting children and vulnerable people from the harms of second-hand smoke.
The Bill will come down on the vaping industry like a ton of bricks, to prevent a new generation of children and young people from getting hooked on nicotine. Taken together, these measures add up to the most significant public health intervention in a generation. They are a giant leap in this Government’s mission to build a healthy society and, in doing so, they will help to build a more healthy economy too.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
Can the Secretary of State imagine the plight of a shop assistant, some decades hence, when a middle-aged or elderly person presents themselves seeking to buy a packet of cigarettes? Is that shop assistant really expected to demand their bone fides?
Wes Streeting
I can not only imagine it, but I recently experienced a similar situation. There I was in Barkingside Sainsbury’s one evening, only weeks ago, buying a bottle of wine to have with dinner and, to my surprise, I was asked for my ID. I am afraid it is just a burden that those of us with youthful vim and vigour in our early 40s have to bear, and it is a price I am willing to pay—for good moisturiser. However, there is a serious point. Along with many others that I am sure we will encounter during the passage of the Bill, this is one of the cynical arguments being deployed by the mendacious smoking lobby, which would have us believe that, decades hence, there will be people who are at the margins—one aged 41 and one aged 40, for example—being asked for ID on the sale of cigarettes. The point is that the Bill will create a smokefree generation. Young people growing up in our country today will not be smokers, because we will have stopped the start. We will do everything we can to support adults who are currently smoking, because the vast majority want to break the habit but struggle to do so.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
If only proof of age was still asked of me.
The Secretary of State knows that I support the Bill and will vote for it this evening, but he will know that rural pubs are increasingly marginal in their operations. He has referred to further powers, post consultation, that may stop smoking outside in particular places once the Bill is on the statute book. Will he put the minds of rural MPs, from across the House, at rest by saying that he does not envisage at any point, either now or post-Royal Assent, the inclusion of a ban on smoking outside rural pubs? That would be a further nail in their business model at a time when we need them.
Wes Streeting
I was going to address that point later in my speech, but let me address it now. It is not often that a Government comment on leaks or welcome the events following a leak; I do not want to encourage future leaks, either. However, it is well known and a matter of accurate reporting, in this case, that we were considering an extension of the ban on outdoor smoking to include outdoor hospitality, including pubs, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned. Because of that leak, representations were heard from Members from across the House, including the hon. Gentleman, my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) and others. We took those representations very seriously because we know the hospitality industry has been through a torrid time, and not just in rural communities. I accept that rural pubs face a big challenge, but even high street pubs in towns and cities are struggling.
Our approach to public health always has to weigh up the upside benefits to public health against the downside consequences elsewhere. It is not in the national interest to see our high streets further suffer, so I reassure the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) and the hospitality industry—although I think it feels reassured on this already—that we will not be consulting on extending the powers to outdoor hospitality spaces. I hope that reassures people, as we embark on consultation on the measures that I am outlining today, that the Government listen, engage and consult seriously. Consultation is genuine with this Government.
Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)
I will not comment on how young I look, but I still get asked for ID when buying non-alcoholic wine.
It is 10 years since the smoking ban came into operation and there are 1.9 million fewer smokers in the UK. Does that show the Secretary of State the difference that a Government that take the matter seriously can make?
Wes Streeting
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am really proud of the impact that the last Labour Government made in reducing smoking harms and the prevalence of smoking in our country.
That brings me on to the next point that I wanted to make. President Truman famously said that it is amazing what you can accomplish
“if you do not care who gets the credit.”
When I first sat down with Rachel Sylvester of The Times in January 2023 and flew a kite to start a debate that a Labour Government might introduce a ban on children and young people today ever buying cigarettes, of the type introduced by our sister party in New Zealand, I was not necessarily convinced my own side would buy it, but I thought it was a debate worth having. I never imagined, in a million years, that I would tune into a Conservative party conference speech by a Conservative Prime Minister announcing his intention to legislate for such a ban. I will do something I do not often do with Conservative party conference speeches and quote extensively—and approvingly—what the then Prime Minister said.
“As Prime Minister I have an obligation to do what I think is the right thing for our country in the long term. And as Conservatives, we have never shirked that responsibility.”
I say that bit through gritted teeth.
“We have always been at the front of society, leading it—”
Who wrote this?
“And when we have the tools at our disposal…to do for our children what we all, in our heart of hearts, know is right, we must act, we must lead…we must put the next generation first.”
In that spirit, I pay tribute to the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), for picking up the proposal and running with it despite opposition from his own party. That took courage. While we have taken steps to improve this Bill compared with the one put forward by the previous Government, I hope that hon. and right hon. Members on the Conservative Benches will follow his lead, showing that the one nation tradition still has a constituency in the modern Conservative party, and vote for this Bill in the national interest.
The Darzi investigation into the NHS set out the twin challenges facing me, my Department and this Government. The national health service is broken; it is going through the worst crisis in its history. At the point we came into office, waiting lists stood at 7.6 million. We had worse cancer survival rates than most comparable countries, ambulances not arriving on time, the number of GPs falling and dentistry deserts across the country.
Some of the most shocking findings in Lord Darzi’s report, however, were about not the sickness in our NHS, but the sickness in our nation. Children are less healthy today than they were a decade ago. Life expectancy was extended by three and a half years over the course of the last Labour Government, but in the past 14 years, it has grown by just four months. Brits now live shorter lives than people in any other country in western Europe, and we spend fewer years living in good health, becoming sicker sooner. Those are huge costs, borne by all of us as individuals. It means less time in which we are able to live our lives to the full, to do all the things we love and to spend time with the people we love. Sickness is forcing many of us out of work long before retirement age, leaving us dependent on welfare, ridding us of the purpose and belonging that work provides, and for everyone else, it means higher costs to us as taxpayers. Our sick society is holding back our economy, and that is why we should act.
Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)
Will the Secretary of State give way?
Wes Streeting
I give way to the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee.
Layla Moran
In the spirit of cross-party working, I want to congratulate Members on the Conservative Benches for deciding, when the former Prime Minister put this policy forward, that it was a priority. It shows how important it is that No. 10 gets behind this kind of thing, and I hope we learn that lesson for the Government’s missions.
I gently say, however, that it is not just the evil tobacco lobby that has concerns about the age escalator. I completely agree with everything that the Secretary of State says, but if smoking is that much of an issue, why are we not just banning it for those under an age of, say, 25? That would have been another way to go. What is the thinking behind an age escalator, as opposed to a ban for those under a particular age so that people do not need new ID every time?
Wes Streeting
I recognise that there are people who have the freedom and the liberty to smoke today, the vast majority of whom, by the way, want to stop and struggle to do so. That is why we are announcing support to enable people to do that, with £70 million of investment in smoking cessation services. That is important, but for a future where people are no longer able to smoke, a phased approach is the right thing to do. It is also essential for the health of the individual, the nation and our economy.
Since 2018, our productivity has dropped by £25 billion due to worsening health alone. Some 900,000 more people are off work than would have been on pre-pandemic trends. That is more people than are employed by Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda put together. Smoking alone accounts for more than £18 billion in lost productivity. The rising tide of ill health, coupled with our ageing society, presents an existential challenge to our health service. If we do not act now, ever-increasing demands for healthcare threaten to overwhelm and bankrupt the NHS. That is the choice that we face.
Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)
Surely the Secretary of State realises that banning things rarely works. When tobacco was banned in South Africa during the covid pandemic, 95% of the trade went underground. Surely we should be promoting the concept of freedom with responsibility and allowing people to make choices about their own lives. I am glad that he goes shopping in Barkingside—he should go and speak to the shopkeepers in Collier Row, where local retailers will lose a lot of potential business if the ban comes in.
Wes Streeting
I am grateful for the intervention, because I anticipate that there will be similar arguments made from the Opposition Benches, particularly from a right-wing libertarian perspective. I want to engage seriously with those arguments.
Wes Streeting
I will just respond to the point made by the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell).
There is no liberty in addiction; there is no freedom in addiction. The logical extension of the libertarian argument the hon. Gentleman puts forward would be the end of the ban on indoor smoking. If we should take a live and let live approach, why not legalise cannabis? Why not legalise cocaine? We prescribe certain harmful substances, and there is, I think, an unanswerable case on tobacco because it is uniquely addictive and uniquely harmful. That is why we will take a tougher approach with this harmful substance than we would with something such as alcohol, or other harms such as gambling.
Jonathan Davies
The Secretary of State stole my line when he said that there is no freedom in addiction. I just want to thank him for his pragmatic approach to the hospitality industry, which has made representations to me on this matter. May I also impress on him that vapes are a valuable quitting aid for many adults, but many young people are now taking to vaping when they have never actually smoked at all? Can he say a little bit more about how we will address that?
Wes Streeting
I will certainly come on to the action that we are taking on vaping, and the case for it. I welcome the contribution that my hon. Friend has made in his first few months as a Member of this House. He brings enormous expertise and experience, particularly on health, which we very much value here in the Chamber.
One choice would be to continue paying an ever heavier price for failure. That is the road that we were heading down, under the previous Government. Our NHS already takes £4 for every £10 spent by the Government day to day. We are on course to go from being a nation with a national health service to a health service with a nation attached to it. It is projected that by the end of this Parliament, 4.3 million people will be on sickness benefit if we fail to act. Smoking could cause 300,000 patients to be diagnosed with cancer over the next five years, including 3,000 for whom that is the result of exposure to second-hand smoke. That is what happens if we only ever treat the symptoms of ill health. We end up spending more on the NHS than ever before, but with worse care for patients, a ballooning welfare bill due to more and more people being out of work, stagnant economic growth, and the heaviest tax burden in 70 years. In short, we will be paying more, but getting less.
Britain is like a ship with a hole. We are constantly battling to chuck enough water overboard to keep us afloat, as more and more floods in. We must break out of this cycle. Britain can break out of this cycle, but only if we are serious about tackling the causes of ill health, and shift our focus from treating the symptoms to preventing them. Plugging the hole in the ship is how we get back to growth, how we reduce the burden of taxation, and how we ensure that this Government can intrude more lightly on people’s lives.
Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
The argument that the Secretary of State puts forward is essentially one for banning smoking altogether. What he said earlier was misleading; he suggested that people of a particular age group will not be able to smoke. They will not be able to buy cigarettes, but they can still smoke. They can cadge cigarettes off other people. Is this not a half-baked measure?
Wes Streeting
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman was not accusing me of misleading the House. The argument that he puts forward is used against all sorts of laws and prohibitions. Most people in this country are law-abiding citizens who follow the law. In my constituency today, there will be people dumping fridges and mattresses on street corners—fly-tipping—because they are irresponsible and not law-abiding citizens. We will not always catch them, either through closed-circuit television or local authority enforcement, but that does not mean that we should not tackle them when they do those things.
By phasing in a generational smoking ban, we are taking a measured and reasonable way of creating a smokefree country. That is the right way to proceed, and it is sensible. I know that he does not agree, but he must accept the trade-off—the choices that he is making for the Opposition. First, he is accepting that people will pay a higher price for their healthcare, either through taxes, if he still believes in the national health service, or through the cost to the individual of their healthcare. Secondly, he must concede that, through the harm caused by smoking, he is fuelling welfare dependency. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions had a point when she said earlier that Labour is the party of work, and the Conservatives are the party of welfare. That is the logical conclusion of the hon. Gentleman’s opposition.
Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on introducing this once-in-a generation public health measure. As he acknowledges, too many people are dying young from the effects of smoking. They are losing out on being grandparents and on the opportunity to live a long and healthy life. Smoking is a leading cause of health inequality, so does he agree that the proposals will help close the shocking gap in life expectancy between the rich and poor?
Wes Streeting
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am afraid that one of my first experiences of death was watching my grandmother die a very long, slow, painful death from lung cancer as a result of a life of chain smoking. That is the consequence of this cruel addiction. People who start smoking come to regret it. They struggle to stop, and I am afraid that the stolen years that they could have spent with children and grandchildren are only part of the cost. Part of my argument today, particularly to some Opposition Members, is about better use of public money and reducing the taxation burden. Other arguments, too, may have some currency with Members who might be opposed to these measures for libertarian reasons. We should not forget for a moment the impact of this cruel addiction and the harms caused by smoking on people’s quality of life, family life, and memories.
Wes Streeting
I must make progress, otherwise we will not hear from anyone else in this debate—and I think that it will be a debate.
Taking action requires a reforming Government who are unafraid to take on the orthodoxies of both the right and the left. As I said, my right hon. Friend the Work and Pensions Secretary is today proposing radical reforms to the welfare system. Earlier this month, I set out a package of reforms to drive better productivity in the NHS. Today, we are proposing the biggest public health reform in a generation: phasing out smoking for the next generation by raising the legal age at which tobacco can be sold by one year every year, so that anyone aged 15 and under today will never legally be sold cigarettes. That will phase out smoking altogether.
Almost 20 years ago, the last Labour Government introduced the ban on smoking indoors in public places, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) said. We heard many of the same arguments, frankly, from opponents of that measure as we hear from opponents of the Bill today. They are free to correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think that Opposition Members who oppose the Bill are also proposing scrapping the indoor smoking ban. We have political consensus on the issue because of its success. The year after the ban came into force in 2007, hospital admissions for heart attacks dropped by 1,200. Admissions for children with asthma had been rising by 5% a year before the ban. After it was introduced, admissions fell by 18% in just three years. Since 2007, smoking rates have been cut by over a third, and as our understanding of second-hand smoke grew, the ban sparked a cultural change. People no longer thought it acceptable to smoke in front of their children, and many stepped outside, even in their own homes. It is time to build on that success.
No smoker intends to cause harm to others, but that is unintentionally what they do through second-hand smoke. The harms from second-hand smoke are less than from actively smoking, but the evidence shows they are still substantial. If people can smell smoke, they are inhaling it. Smoke near schools and playgrounds exposes children to smoke. Hospitals, by definition, have high numbers of medically vulnerable people on their grounds. The Bill will allow Government to extend the ban on indoor smoking to certain outdoor settings, and we will consult on banning smoking outside schools, playgrounds and hospitals to protect children and the most vulnerable.
As we act to prevent harms from smoking, we must also tackle the rising problem of youth vaping. It has more than doubled in the last five years, and one in four 11 to 15-year-olds tried vaping last year. A new generation of children is getting hooked on nicotine, and there should be no doubt about the cause, and no illusion that this has happened by accident. On any high street in the country, we can see shop windows filled with brightly coloured packaging for vapes, with flavours like blue razz lemonade and tongue twisters sour apple. Those products are designed, made, packaged, marketed and sold deliberately to children. This industry has cynically targeted its harmful products to kids.
Action is long overdue. We promised to stamp out youth vaping in our manifesto, and the Bill delivers the change that we promised. It will close loopholes that allow vapes to be sold or given away to children, provide powers to regulate the flavours, packaging and display of vapes, and introduce on-the-spot fines of £200 for under-age sales. Just as we took action on the advertising and sponsorship of tobacco products, we will bring the law into line for vaping products, too.
Wera Hobhouse
I do not know whether the Secretary of State will still be in the Chamber when I talk about Spice-spiked vapes. I see a gap in the Bill: it does not talk about refills. The harmful practice of spiking vapes with Spice comes from the refills. I hope that the Government will listen to my concerns and be flexible, as they have already shown themselves to be in other places. Perhaps, during the passage of the Bill, we can include something about refills. Would he agree to that?
Wes Streeting
We want to work in a genuinely collaborative and cross-party way, and I know that is true right across the House. As I look at the Opposition Benches, including Conservative Benches, I see long-standing campaigners for action on smoking and vaping. We want to listen and engage.
I feel strongly about the matter, as does the Prime Minister. In our manifesto, we set out Labour’s mission to improve the health of the nation. We will be far better served as a country if this is a truly national mission, and if we come together in common cause for action on public health.
Wes Streeting
In that spirit, I will give way to the hon. Gentleman—and then to some of my hon. Friends.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Can the Secretary of State tell us if there is any place for vapes as a step-down, in the context of the addictive aspects of tobacco? I seem to remember that when vaping first came along, it was heralded as a way to help wean people from their tobacco addictions. Sadly, it has turned into something else, as he describes, and starts children on the road towards nicotine addiction, but does it have a role as a step-down?
Wes Streeting
The right hon. Member is right to make that distinction. As a stop-smoking tool, vaping has a part to play. For smokers, vaping is a better alternative—a route away from smoking. We do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What we are interested in tackling is the scourge of youth vaping and the extent to which young people have been cynically addicted. It is important to say that we do not yet know the full extent of the harms caused by vaping, but we do know two things: first, it is better to vape than to smoke—that is why we are striking the balance in this legislation—and secondly, vapes are harmful. Ask any teacher in the country; they will talk about the signs of nicotine addiction that they see in their pupils, and about having to monitor school toilets to stop children congregating to vape. It is urgent and necessary to act today to protect this generation of kids from a new addiction, and that is exactly what we will do.
Peter Prinsley (Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket) (Lab)
As an ear, nose and throat surgeon, I can attest to the absolutely desperate trouble that cigarettes have caused over many generations. Implementing this measure is one of the best things that this Parliament could possibly do, and I expect that the measure will be widely supported all over the House. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for introducing it.
Wes Streeting
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, not least because of the expertise that he brings to the House as a clinician. We are well served by his expertise in debates on the health of the nation.
Opposite me sit many opponents of the Bill and of the Government’s prevention agenda. I acknowledge that their opposition is based on genuine, sincere beliefs about the limits of government and the size of the state, but I appeal to them by saying that the Bill is in the national interest and, ironically, in their ideological interest.
Robin Swann (South Antrim) (UUP)
I thank the Secretary of State for making a number of times the point that this is a truly national Bill that applies across the United Kingdom. I thank him for including Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the measures. When we in this place consider measures to promote health, we should do so equally for the entirety of the United Kingdom.
Wes Streeting
That is a very helpful intervention because it gives me the opportunity to say thank you to my counterparts in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. This is a genuinely four-nations Bill, and through it, we have an opportunity to create a smokefree generation in every corner of our country.
I say to people who have an ideological objection to the Bill that if they believe in lower taxes, as they say they do, and in maintaining a national health service, as they say they do, they cannot duck this simple equation: an ageing population plus a sicker society equals more spending on the NHS, paid through higher taxes. The Bill is just one measure, but it will make a significant difference to the health of our society, and to the balance of that equation.
The question that opponents of the Bill must answer is this: if they want our health and care services to continue having to spend £3 billion every year on the symptoms of smoking, are they willing to accept that that means higher taxes or higher healthcare charges for their constituents? Are they happy for their constituents to shoulder the welfare bill for smokers falling out of the workforce? Those are the consequences of what we are voting on today. Higher taxes and higher welfare are not the Labour way.
There are arguments about liberty from those who oppose based on libertarian belief. They say that the state should not deny individuals the choice to smoke if they want to, but three quarters of smokers want to stop and wish they had never started. It takes a smoker an average of 30 attempts to quit before they manage it. By definition, an addict is not free; there is no choice, no liberty and no freedom in addiction. Nor is choice afforded to anyone inhaling second-hand smoke. Tobacco is not only highly addictive but uniquely harmful. Yes, some smokers can quit, but most who want to cannot. Those who have help to quit are three times more likely to succeed. That is why the Government are, as I said, investing £70 million in smoking cessation services—an investment that will pay for itself several times over—but prevention is better than cure, and that is why we are taking action, through the Bill, to stop the start.
In conclusion, this Bill marks the start of a decade in which we will shift the focus of healthcare from treatment to prevention; take serious action on not just smoking, but obesity; reform the NHS, so that it catches problems earlier and gives patients the tools that they need to stay out of hospital; harness the revolution taking place in life sciences; and fundamentally transform the NHS, so that it predicts illness and prevents it from ever taking hold. That is the future available to us, and it is the future we must realise if we are going to put our welfare system, health service and public finances on a sustainable footing. It starts with this Bill. Smokers are more likely to need NHS services, be admitted to hospital, drop out of the workforce and on to welfare, and need social care years earlier than if they did not smoke. By taking the measures set out in the Bill, we are putting the UK on the road to becoming smokefree, building a healthier, wealthier nation with a health service fit for the future and leading the world as we do so. I commend this Bill to the House.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
I call the shadow Secretary of State.
Edward Argar (Melton and Syston) (Con)
I do not always do this, but I express my gratitude to the Secretary of State for the tone he has adopted in this debate and for recognising the strongly and sincerely held views of right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of it. I am also grateful to him for being typically willing to share with the House in support of his points something as personal as what happened to his grandmother. Sadly, it will not surprise him that no one asks me for my ID these days—I will have to take some tips from him on the moisturiser that he uses. [Interruption.] I will ignore the unkind comment that he has just made.
In many ways, this Bill is like the curate’s egg: it is good in parts—indeed, it is good in many parts—and started from a place of good intentions. As the Secretary of State set out, smoking has a huge cost to society and to individuals. We know that smoking is the single biggest entirely preventable cause of ill health, death and disability in this country, and we see in our NHS the impact of smoking every day. It is responsible for around 80,000 deaths in the UK each year and is estimated to cost the NHS and social care more than £3 billion a year, including 75,000 GP appointments every month. As the Secretary of State said, almost every minute someone is admitted to hospital because of smoking. It substantially increases the risk of many major health conditions throughout people’s lives, such as stroke, diabetes, heart disease, stillbirth, cancers, dementia and asthma.
As the Secretary of State has alluded to in the past, it is often people in more deprived areas who have higher smoking rates, lower healthy life expectancy and higher mortality rates linked to smoking. Some 230,000 households are estimated to live in smoking-induced poverty, and children of smokers are three times as likely to start to smoke, potentially perpetuating the cycle. Over 80% of smokers started before they turned 20—many started as children—yet more than half of current smokers want to quit; as the Secretary of State said, three quarters say that they would never have started smoking if they had the choice again. Let me be clear: reducing smoking, giving people the information and support to quit, and helping to protect children in particular are worthy ambitions.
Among all the doom and gloom, there is some positive news: smoking rates are falling anyway. While around 6 million people in the UK smoke, the number of smokers has been falling for decades. In 2023, just 10.5% of people aged 16 and over smoked, compared with 20.3% in 2010, 20.7% in 2000 and 30% a decade before that in 1990. Likewise, the number of children who smoke is falling. While this trend is welcome, it is understandable that there is a strong desire to see continued action to further drive down the prevalence of smoking and tackle the recent rise in vaping among non-smokers, especially among young people, and to protect future generations.
As was evidenced by the interventions that the Secretary of State kindly took from many hon. Members, I am sure that many of us in the House have been alarmed by the surge in youth vaping, which has doubled in the past five years. Despite it already being illegal to sell nicotine vapes to under-18s, a quarter of children tried vaping in 2023. While nicotine vapes can and do play an important part in helping adults to quit smoking, we are clear that children who do not smoke should not take up vaping. The nicotine content makes those products highly addictive, while the long-term impacts of the colours and flavours being inhaled are highly unlikely to be beneficial. Of course, the full effects may not be known for some years yet.
The uptake in youth vaping has been driven in part by the branding and promotion of products clearly aimed at children, with vapes, packaging, descriptions and marketing all designed to appeal specifically to young people. Grown adults trying to quit smoking are unlikely to see the appeal of cartoon characters on their vapes, but of course, children and young people will. Likewise, the bright colours and fruit flavours are far more likely to appeal to children than to those looking to quit tobacco smoking.
For those reasons, the last Government introduced a Bill that primarily targeted our interventions at young people. It would have restricted who could purchase tobacco products without impacting current adult smokers. It sought to tackle youth vaping by restricting flavours, introducing plain packaging and changing how vapes are displayed in shops so that they do not appeal to children. It would also have prohibited the sale of non-nicotine vapes and vaping alternatives such as nicotine pouches to under-18s, just as it is already illegal to sell nicotine vapes to children. In parallel, it would have introduced new fines for rogue retailers in order to tackle the illegal market, seeking to make sure that the law—such as age restrictions on purchasing vapes—was properly enforced.
That approach was targeted at the next generation of young people and aimed to prevent the take-up of smoking and vaping and break the cycle of nicotine addiction before it had even started. That Bill was not about demonising people who smoke or curtailing current smokers’ rights or entitlements in any way. None the less, it had challenging practical implementation impacts.
I have a lot of respect for the public health Minister, the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Andrew Gwynne)—I think that is his new constituency name—and know him well. I hope that when he winds up the debate, he will address some of the points I am about to make. My first point is about the impact on shopkeepers, particularly small shopkeepers, of enforcing and operating within increased restrictions, and the extent to which those restrictions are practically enforceable. In the context of what the Bill sets out to do, how does one avoid the existence of, or an increase in, a black-market economy in vapes or cigarettes?
We introduced our Bill before the general election. Since then, the new Government have introduced a Bill that may have the same name, but is not quite the same Bill that was introduced back in March. The Bill before us today gives the Secretary of State new, or significantly modified, powers under the Health Act 2006. It runs the risk of piling an unknown number of regulations on to retailers through a new licensing scheme, and it creates a whole new registration scheme. The challenge is that right hon. and hon. Members will not be told in detail what those schemes will look like, the specific impact they will have on businesses, or the detailed impact they will have on smoking and vaping rates until after the legislation has been passed. A hefty impact assessment—all 294 pages of it—has been produced. Given that the public health Minister has signed it, I fear he had to read every one of those pages before doing so. However, even with that impact assessment, the detailed impact of the individual regulations that may follow is unclear.
For example, clause 136 amends the Health Act 2006 to give the Secretary of State the power to extend smokefree places to some outdoor spaces. Of course, adults should be mindful and thoughtful about where they smoke or vape to be considerate to those around them, especially in areas with children or vulnerable young people, but the Bill risks giving the Secretary of State expanded powers to expand smokefree areas with minimal oversight. I acknowledge that the affirmative resolution procedure will be used, but as we in this House know, a statutory instrument and the procedures that accompany it are not as rigorous in their scrutiny as primary legislation.
Unlike previous laws, which banned smoking in confined areas such as pubs and bars, the Secretary of State is talking about bans in open spaces where the risks of second-hand smoking may be more limited. Page 64 of the delegated powers memorandum states:
“Under Section 4 of the 2006 Act, the Secretary of State could make regulations to designate additional places as smoke-free provided that they were of the opinion that there was a significant risk persons present in such a place would be exposed to significant quantities of smoke without a smoke-free designation…Section 5 of the 2006 Act gave the Secretary of State powers to make regulations for vehicles to be smoke-free.”
It goes on to say:
“Clause 136 amends the existing power in section 4 of the 2006 Act by omitting the risk condition.”
I would be grateful if the public health Minister could explain in his winding-up speech—I suspect he will be able to do so—why that condition is being removed. It was there for a reason: to give a sense of proportionality to anything that was done and to ensure that a particular bar had to be met, given the impact. Its removal effectively gives the Secretary of State much greater discretion to do as he wishes at a future date. I note that the Secretary of State has said today that he changed his mind on banning smoking in pub gardens or outside hospitality venues. I know him well, and he is an honourable man, so I take him at his word on that, but there is nothing in this proposed legislation to prevent a future Secretary of State from coming back, consulting and expanding beyond the areas where he proposes to restrict smoking to other venues and settings at a future date. Under clause 136, that could be done without the crucial risk criteria being applied. I would be grateful if the Minister could address that point, because it is hugely important. Members are being asked to decide now whether they support expanding smokefree places to an unknown list of outdoor spaces in the future, so it genuinely raises significant challenges and concerns if that gateway is not in place.
Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)
I am listening very carefully to what the right hon. Gentleman has to say. Some 13% of adults in Bracknell smoke, but we know that more than half of smokers would like to give up, so what I and my constituents are listening for is a commitment that his party will back concrete measures to end the public health epidemic of smoking once and for all—or are they just going to wrap up their objections in sophistry?
Edward Argar
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for most of what he just said. I will address precisely his point in a few paragraphs, but I say to him that my party brought forward legislation in March, which was debated in April, that did not have the mission-creep that I fear the Secretary of State is demonstrating with clause 136 and various other measures in this proposed legislation.
I must also challenge the Government on how they anticipate this measure being enforced. Will members of the public be encouraged to call the police if they see a parent smoking in a prohibited place? If there are no children in a park or playground, will it still be prohibited?
Concerns are also raised by the new licensing and registration schemes. While it is right that we had planned to expand the existing notification scheme to include non-nicotine vapes and nicotine products involved in the supply chain, this Bill goes a number of steps further. The Secretary of State will be able to create a new licensing regime for retailers for tobacco, vaping and nicotine products. Over 70% of convenience stores selling vapes and tobacco products are independent shops. How will they fare and how will they be assisted with the layers of added bureaucracy and cost that will be associated with the Bill? Do local authorities, which are already under pressure, have the capacity and additional funding allocated to administer such a licensing scheme in their areas?
Again, my fear is that we are unable to make a fully informed decision about the impact because the regulations will be set out only after the Bill has passed. The impact assessment states:
“A more restrictive licensing scheme would be expected to have a greater impact on public health and a greater economic impact on businesses.”
However, we simply do not know if that is what the Secretary of State has in mind or what the regulations will look like. Likewise, there is no detail on the impacts of a new registration scheme for all tobacco, vaping, nicotine and herbal products, as well as tobacco-related devices.
In the few months that the Government have been in office, they have sadly shown that they are not particularly a friend of business and have broken a number of their pre- election promises. Although I have confidence in the Secretary of State as an individual and as a right hon. Member of this House, I ask him to forgive the cynicism of those on the Opposition Benches over any attempted reassurances from the Government that they will take businesses’ concerns into account as they consult on their plans.
To the point made by the hon. Member for Bracknell (Peter Swallow), if a Division is called, in line with the precedent set last time this will be a free vote; each Conservative Member may vote as they choose. The Bill, as I have said, comes from a good intention to keep the population healthy, to ease costs for the NHS and to prevent children from taking up addictive habits that may follow them for the rest of their lives. I support those objectives, but I call on the Minister for public health, when he winds up, to give the reassurances I seek and roll back the additional measures that have been put in place, over and above what we were proposing.
It is important that information is available so that people can make informed decisions and that support is available for those who choose to stop smoking. Adult individuals are best placed to make decisions about their own lives, but we recognise that the same is not true for children. I look forward to the responses from the Minister for public health, which I hope will be constructive. I welcome the Secretary of State’s offer to be collaborative and constructive in his approach to the legislation.
Dr Beccy Cooper (Worthing West) (Lab)
Will the shadow Secretary of State give way?
Dr Cooper
I thank the shadow Secretary of State. As a public health doctor, I am delighted to hear him speak so freely, openly and positively about all the great things that this legislation will bring, but I remain unclear whether he will be voting in support of this generation-defining public health Bill this evening.
Edward Argar
That will depend on whether the Minister for public health gives the promises I seek that he will withdraw a number of the measures that the Government have added to the Bill. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson), who will take the Bill through Committee on behalf of the Opposition, and I know that she looks forward to constructive and collaborative engagement with the Minister. I hope he can offer reassurances when he gets up to the Dispatch Box in a few hours’ time.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
I declare an interest as the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health. Just over a year ago, I welcomed the previous Government’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill. As the House may know, I have called for a smokefree generation for many years. I was not best pleased when the Conservatives voted down my amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill in 2021. Those amendments called for a ban on flavours and packaging targeted at children, which the shadow Secretary of State has just brought to the House’s attention. If they had not been voted down, we would already have regulations to protect children from smoking and vaping.
I join the Secretary of State in congratulating the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak) on bringing the Smoking and Vapes Bill forward, but it was regrettable that the previous Government did not fast-track it in the wash-up before the general election. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the Labour Government for bringing this Bill forward. It is stronger than the previous legislation, and it responds to many of the issues that I and others raised in Committee with the previous Bill.
The comprehensive regulation of all vaping and nicotine products is important for addressing the concerns that vaping has become too widespread among young people. I strongly support regulations to reduce the appeal of such products, but we must ensure that the regulations are enforceable, robust and fit for purpose. My first of many questions to the Minister is this: will he confirm that a detailed policy paper will be forthcoming, setting out the policy objectives on vaping and how the new regulations will deliver against the objectives?
The Labour manifesto made a bold commitment on halving the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions in England. Tobacco control is the best way to close the gap. We cannot say it enough: the range of diseases that smoking causes is extraordinary, from stillbirths and asthma in children to heart disease, stroke, dementia in old age, poor mental health and many cancers.
It will never cease to amaze me that there are people in this place who are happy to be lobbied by the tobacco companies—including, I am guessing, the shadow Secretary of State—some of whom we have heard from already, knowing full well the damage caused to individuals, families and communities, as well as to our health services. That includes communities such as mine in the north-east of England, where smoking is still the key driver of health inequalities and has been the cause of 26% of all deaths in the last 50 years and the cause of 125,000 deaths since 2020.
In my constituency of City of Durham, smoking costs us over £95 million a year, and more than £3 million is spent on healthcare. In County Durham, smoking costs us over £500 million a year, and over £21 million is spent on healthcare. In the north-east, the cost is over £2 billion, with healthcare costs at over £93 million. Nationally, smoking is still the greatest cause of preventable death, still the leading cause of premature death and disability, and still responsible for half the difference in healthy life expectancy between the rich and poor. That is why I have asked time and again in this Chamber for action.
It is a tragedy when we consider the further health implications. According to Cancer Research UK, the most deprived communities will not be smokefree until 2050. I urge the Government to restate their intention to publish a road map to a smokefree country and outline how support will be targeted at those who most need to quit. Smoking is also directly and indirectly linked to poor mental health. Nearly 40% of those who have a severe mental health problem smoke, and smoking accounts for two thirds of the reduction in life expectancy among that group.
I want to touch on the “polluter pays” levy. The Darzi review found that our health service is in real trouble. The Secretary of State is right that to rebalance supply and demand in our healthcare system, we need a major shift from sickness to prevention. The Khan review and the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health have advocated for a “polluter pays” levy, which could raise £700 million a year to create a smokefree fund. That would ensure that the tobacco companies—not the public—pay for the harm that they inflict. Will the Minister consider that approach to fund the work needed to reduce smoking across society and to protect the NHS?
I should add that public health initiatives to tackle smoking are remarkably good value for money and that failing to fund efforts to tackle smoking is a false economy. Initiatives such as Fresh—the north-east’s tobacco control programme—have led the way in tackling smoking in our region. Fresh and others could provide best practice for the Department.
The Minister will know that the UK Government are party to the World Health Organisation framework convention on tobacco control. Article 5.3 seeks to protect policymaking from industry influence, but we have already seen that influence even at this stage of the Bill. Will the Minister confirm that the Government will live up to their obligations under the FCTC and commit to protecting the Bill from industry influence throughout its parliamentary process and the following regulations?
I am proud to vote for a Bill that will improve people’s lives and extinguish the injustice that smoking causes to individuals and society. Smoking is never about choice, and it is pathetic that some Members have argued that this is an issue of freedom; it is absolutely nothing of the sort. Tobacco companies target children and young people. Smoking is an addiction, and the only free choice is that first cigarette. When someone is in hospital, struggling to breathe because of smoking-induced lung cancer, where is their freedom? Today, we have the opportunity to give people the freedom to live healthy lives, free from disease and the inequalities that smoking causes.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)
I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
I can confirm that it has been a very long time since anyone has asked me for ID to make a purchase—a moment that is even further into the past than the last time I bought a packet of cigarettes. That experience will inform some of my comments today. I support this legislation, but it will be a free vote for my Liberal Democrat colleagues, and I will use my speech to explain why.
First of all, the Bill is split into two sets of measures: one to deal with smoking and one to deal with vaping. We are 100% supportive of the set of measures dealing with vaping, which is in line with our party policy that was passed at our 2023 conference. I think everyone in this House is united in agreeing that the targeting of nicotine products at young people and children through bright colours and attractive flavours is a shameful practice. Measures need to be taken to prevent that.
I am the mum of a teenager—lucky me—and he reports that some of his friends are unable to concentrate through a 40-minute lesson, because they have been exposed to such high levels of nicotine in the vaping products that they use that they are even more addicted to nicotine than someone who might have taken up smoking many years ago when I was young. We welcome the changes to prevent the targeting of vaping at children, and the recent ban on disposable vapes. We also acknowledge that vaping is an important part of smoking cessation, and legal vaping needs to continue into the future.
The introduction of a phased smoking ban is problematic, and not because Liberal Democrats want to see people smoke themselves into an early grave—far from it—but because it raises issues of practicality and civil liberties, which I will run through on behalf of my colleagues. The first question is, practically, how will this work? My son was born in January 2009. He will be one of the first people to benefit from a smokefree generation, and I sincerely hope that he never takes up smoking, but if his friends who are just a few weeks older choose to take up smoking, they will be able to continue to do that for the rest of their lives. Under this Bill, those future adults will be able to buy tobacco products for themselves but it will be illegal for them to pass them on to others a few weeks younger, such as my son. Problematic enforcement causes some concern and leads us to question why there was not an alternative way, perhaps by setting a very high minimum age to buy cigarettes, so that most people get through the flourish of rebellious youth and do not take up smoking in the first place. The concerns about practicality are legitimate.
The Bill also raises the spectre of an ID card, because those people who choose to start smoking will potentially be forced to carry an ID card or some other form of ID with them for the rest of their lives. That is a concern for the Liberal Democrats, who are strongly opposed to requiring people to carry ID around with them, for various issues of privacy and personal liberty. There is also an ideological point about discriminating between two people because of their age. We are generally opposed to that as a society, but the Bill does that.
The concerns about retailers suffering abuse are also legitimate. They are already suffering from a wave of shoplifting and antisocial behaviour. Some of the abuse directed at them comes from the enforcement of age legislation for things such as alcohol and existing tobacco legislation. We need to be cognisant of the decimation of community policing under the previous Government. We need to be sure that those retailers are fully protected. The Bill creates an extra risk for them.
Finally on the risks, there is a concern for the licensing authorities, which presumably will be local councils, although we do not have the detail on that yet. Lots of local councils are unable to carry out much more than their statutory duties currently, so I would appreciate confirmation that licensing will be fully funded for them, so that they are not put in charge of enforcing something that will be impossible.
I want to touch on what for me is quite an important area: the creation of a black market. Criminal gangs exploit young people in North Shropshire by getting them hooked on cannabis. It is an extremely difficult problem. Young people get into debt to those criminal gangs and are hooked into criminality for life. They see things people should never see and are extremely damaged by that exploitation. I share the concern that progressively banning tobacco products will increase the scope for the black market and the risk to children.
For all those reasons, as some Members may be aware, I abstained on the vote last time the legislation was brought through the House. It would be a legitimate question to ask me why I have changed my mind. I met somebody called Linda Chambers, a Liberal Democrat councillor in Hull, who came along to an event organised by Action on Smoking and Health to encourage Members to support the Bill. Linda was devastated when she lost her husband of 50 years to cardiovascular disease. As with a number of other speakers at the event who also spoke very powerfully about their experiences, her loved one had tried on several occasions to give up smoking but had been unsuccessful. The speakers at the event explained that the nicotine addiction had taken away the personal choice of their loved ones to live the lives they wanted to live. They were not exercising their personal choice any more. For a liberal, that is a very powerful argument. Personal choice is so important, and addiction really does take that away.
As the asthmatic daughter of two smokers who have repeatedly tried and struggled to give up over the years, Members might perhaps have expected me to understand that argument a little bit earlier. Typically, as the daughter of two smokers, I took up smoking myself. I did not smoke very much and did not smoke for very long, but I still occasionally have the odd craving for reasons I cannot explain, especially when I am in a traffic jam. But it is not funny, is it? Tobacco is uniquely harmful and uniquely addictive, and that is why I support the measures we are taking to address that.
Another really important, persuasive and powerful argument I heard in the previous Parliament was when Dame Andrea Leadsom, the responsible Minister at the time, and Chris Whitty took the time to provide a briefing to the Liberal Democrats. One point they highlighted was health inequality. A point that struck me—at the time, I was the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss—was that 21.1% of pregnant women in the most deprived areas of the country are likely to smoke while pregnant, whereas in the least deprived parts of the country only 5.6% are likely to be a smoker. That huge difference correlates to a horrifying differential in the rate of stillbirth. Women who smoke while pregnant are more likely to have a stillbirth, and stillbirth rates in the most deprived areas of the country are 50% higher than in the least deprived areas. If we are serious about tackling health inequality rather than just paying it lip service, we have to take additional measures to tackle those inequalities.
For all the reasons I have outlined, I will support the Bill. However, I retain a few concerns, and I would be grateful if the Minister could address them in his wind up. The powers in the Bill effectively allow the Secretary of State to make any public place or workplace a no-smoking area. That is very far reaching. I would prefer to introduce measures in Committee that would require him to come back to Parliament before extending the areas affected. That would protect the hospitality industry, which, as hon. Members have pointed out, is struggling, particularly in rural areas. I will also point out the obvious, which is that anybody who is currently over 16 could potentially be a smoker for life.
There are many, many people who took up smoking and who want to give up but are unable to. We must reverse the cuts to the public health budget and the smoking cessation budget to enable those people to benefit from stopping smoking. The Conservatives have slashed the public health budget since 2015. We would like the Secretary of State to use the money provided for health in the Budget to address that problem. A quarter of cancer deaths are caused by smoking and 75,000 GP appointments every month are for smoking-related illness. Many women who smoke during pregnancy will continue to smoke for up to another decade.
Despite my concerns, I will support the Bill to ensure that people like Linda do not have to lose their loved ones to an addiction they were unable to end. I urge the Secretary of State to look at measures to deal with the practical considerations we have outlined and to support the current generation of smokers to quit if they want to.
Mary Glindon (Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend) (Lab)
I apologise for the fact that I may not be able to stay in the Chamber for the winding-up speeches, owing to a long-standing appointment this evening.
Although smoking is the No. 1 preventable cause of death and ill health, there are still more than 6 million smokers in the country. While the Government are right to press on with the Bill in the current Parliament, I hope that it can be improved even more compared with the version presented by the last Government. It will help the country to become smokefree by 2030.
As Members may know, I am a strong advocate of vaping, and I will concentrate on that in my speech. I have witnessed many of my friends and family members make the switch from smoking to vaping, and it is my honour to chair the responsible vaping all-party parliamentary group. Vaping is 95% safer than smoking, according to both King’s College hospital and the former Public Health England, and it is the most successful tool to help smokers to quit. According to data from ASH, 3 million adult vapers are ex-smokers. I fully support the health message that those who smoke should change to vaping, but “if you don’t smoke, don’t vape”. However, we now need urgent Government action to prevent youth vaping, which has become far too prevalent in recent years. We have already heard the statistics this afternoon.
In campaigning on vaping, I have been privileged to work with the vaping industry. I was disappointed that during the passage of the earlier Bill the last Government did not engage with the industry to find the best solutions to tackle both youth vaping and the illicit trade, which is largely responsible for children and young people having access to the vape market. At a forum held recently by the UK Vaping Industry Association, its director general, John Dunne, praised our Front-Bench team for the way in which they had already engaged with the industry, whose proposals will, I know, help the Bill achieve its objectives.
Like the industry, I have always supported the introduction of a licensing scheme as a helpful tool for better enforcement of the market, helping trading standards to identify non-compliant businesses, impose tough penalties and close down premises. I do not understand why restricting the number of shops and supermarkets selling vapes increases regulatory compliance. Shops and supermarkets that sell vapes responsibly should not be penalised, and we need to ensure that specialist vaping retailers can continue to operate, especially as they provide a such a critical service in helping smokers to quit. Flavour names that appeal to those under 18 are unacceptable and must be banned, but flavours are a key factor in helping smokers to make the transition to vaping. Research shows that about 65% of adult vapers find fruit-flavoured or sweet liquids preferable. If only tobacco flavours are available, many ex-smokers will return to smoking.
According to the Government’s own impact assessment, restricting vape flavours could affect 87% of adults who vape. Hopefully, meaningful consultation on flavours will lead to a safe solution to curtail youth vaping while also ensuring that vaping is an attractive alternative for adult smokers. It may well be that increasing fixed penalty notice fines to £200 is not a strong enough deterrent to irresponsible retailers and pales into insignificance compared with the profits made from the sale of cheap vapes on the illicit market, and I hope that the Bill can be amended to increase the fine significantly so that it acts as a real deterrent to those who now happily sell vapes to children.
Keeping in mind the UK’s 6 million smokers, who need help to quit, it is important to ensure that as we bring in the strongest possible measures to prevent under-age access to vaping products, the Bill must not over-regulate and, in doing so, undermine the power of vapes as a smoking cessation tool. I have been pleased to learn recently of new technical solutions that could help the Government to end youth vaping. Current laws require age verification at the point of sale, which has fundamentally failed to stop young people getting hold of vapes. The Government could go further and require continuous age verification at the point of use.
I recently met representatives of a company that has developed open-standard technology that can be applied by all manufacturers. It meets regulatory requirements for security and privacy, and can lock or unlock a device at the point of use. Vapes on sale in the UK market could be required to have secure Bluetooth technology installed—a low-cost chip that can be integrated into vaping products. Such chips provide a simple on/off switch that can be controlled via a mobile app. Users would have to verify their age via the app, in the same way as when accessing other services. This simple and straightforward approach would mean that no matter how a child got hold of a vape, they would be unable to use it. As the process would be quick and user-friendly, it would not prevent adult vapers from using vaping products as they do currently. I hope the Minister will consider looking at this technology in more detail as the Bill progresses.
The Minister knows that I am not a lobbyist for the vaping industry—some people may I think that I am, but I can categorically say that it is not true. I do not even vape myself, but I do want the Bill to be effective. I genuinely believe that including the vaping industry as a consultee is essential to ensure that this Bill helps meet the Government’s aim of creating the first smokefree generation, and I hope that the Minister can confirm today that the industry will be consulted during the progression of the Bill.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
I welcome this Bill, and I think the country should welcome it and salute the Government for effectively taking on the Bill—they have polished and finessed some elements—that was introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) under the previous Government. The gracious remarks of the Secretary of State in his opening speech will have resonated on the Conservative Benches and been appreciated.
A lot has happened in our country’s relationship with tobacco. I am pretty certain that had we known in the past what we know now about the harms of tobacco for so many thousands of our citizens, both societally and in terms of health, Queen Elizabeth would have probably said to the merchant adventurers, “Thank you very much for bringing it over, but please take it back.” It would not have taken root, but it has done. We have moved through a time when medics were paid by the industry to tell us of the beneficial effects of tobacco—for example, the idea that menthol was good for clearing people’s lungs. As we know, the medical profession has very much changed its tune. Rather like the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley), my late father-in-law was an ENT surgeon, and I well remember talking to him about the devastating impacts that he saw on people’s health and the cost that such terrible and avoidable conditions can have, both to the economy and to the health service.
As I mentioned to the Secretary of State, I am no longer asked for proof of ID when I go into shops to buy anything. However, I can well remember that as a young schoolboy —this just goes to show how this country’s relationship with tobacco has changed—the headmaster at my local primary school seemed to be addicted to Piccadilly cigarettes. I do not know whether they are still made, but it was my job every morning—I obviously had a trustworthy face—to trot up Wyndham Crescent, go round the corner into Severn Road, go into Tony’s, the newsagent, and pick up either 20 or 40. I knew it was going to be a bad day if my headmaster needed two packets of 20. It is amazing that a nine-year-old schoolboy could be given cigarettes, but so trusting was Tony, the newsagent, that we did not have to pay. We did that on Fridays, and there was always 10p left over, which would allow me to have a comic, two packets of crisps or a bag of Chewits. When I say this to my children, who are either in or approaching their teenage years, they look at me with glee but also as though I am talking about a different age, which of course I am. What on earth can we buy for 10p these days?
As I said in my intervention on the Secretary of State, I welcome the Bill. I was grateful to him and to the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Andrew Gwynne), for a brief conversation we had today about the Government’s intention not to include within the scope of this Bill—or, indeed, in any future consultation—a prohibition on smoking outside a hospitality venue. I entirely take the Secretary of State’s point that it is not just the rural hospitality sector that would be affected, but a number of publicans in my constituency have said to me that it really would be the death knell for their business if smokers were not allowed to have a cigarette and a pint outside the pub, in the designated smoking area. Their businesses are very marginal, as the Minister knows and as the Secretary of State recognises, so I am grateful to them for that.
The licences that the Bill envisages will be useful for providing a record of who is doing what, where, for the benefit of officialdom in its many guises, but I urge the Government—and local government, if this gets passported down to it—not to see those licences as a cash cow. They should not be a profit centre, and the requirements to secure a licence should not be onerous. The constraints of the Bill are clear. Hon. Members have asked why, if smoking is so bad, we do not just stop sales completely. The Government are not going down that route, so those who are going about a legal business should not be made to feel like criminals or societal pariahs for selling what is still a legal product to those who are legally entitled to purchase it.
I disagree almost fundamentally with the assessment of vaping from the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend (Mary Glindon). I have three kids at our local high school, and too many of their cohort have got entrapped into vaping, brought in by the colours, the flavours, the smells, the packaging and the novelty factor. I understand entirely the intention for vaping to be a passport away from tobacco, but for too many, it seems to be an entry to smoking, and then moves them on to tobacco. That is entirely not what was envisaged, so I support fundamentally the robust approach that the Bill takes to the vaping sector.
I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to the concerns raised about smuggling. One can make something illegal, prohibit it or narrow access to it, but that does not necessarily, in the first instance, choke off market demand, and people will seek it. There will clearly have to be some robust empowering of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs agents and others to ensure that we do not see a burgeoning black market in tobacco products.
On the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend’s point, I remember hearing a presentation from British American Tobacco, and a point that resonated with me was that there are legal vapes, the ingredients of which we know and are listed, and then there is a huge black market for vapes, principally from China, and nobody knows what the hell is in them. I think an awful lot of parents think that those vapes are just producing steam, and have no idea about their dangerous chemical composition. I think too many teachers and headteachers also thought that, and the learning curve has been steep.
James McMurdock (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Reform)
I have an interesting thought on the supply and demand issue, and the challenges it will pose from a control perspective. The hon. Gentleman paints a nice image of a day gone by when one of the kids could be sent down to the shop to pick up something for an adult, and I ask Members to consider what kind of world and country we want to live in. Do we want to live in a country where we could send one of the kids down to the shop to pick up something for us, or do we want to live in a country where we are forced to police each other’s behaviour in parks? We should think very carefully about the Government’s remit.
Simon Hoare
The hon. Gentleman takes me neatly to my closing point. If I understand him correctly, he is making an argument about civil liberties and freedoms. One does not have to be a libertarian to cherish freedom and liberty, as I hope we all do in this House. Libertarianism is the extreme form. It is the difference between liberty regulated and controlled—parametered, if one will—and liberty laissez-faire. It strikes me as rather incongruous for a libertarian to wish to become a lawmaker, because most laws are there to control, prohibit and regulate. It seems masochistic: “I am a free market libertarian, yet I have decided to put myself in the shackles of lawmaking in order to restrict the liberties that I cherish.” The hon. Gentleman makes a serious point, but we have to deal with society as it is, rather than as we might like it to be. Things have changed.
The ultra-libertarian would ask why we force people to wear seatbelts, as people should be free to hurl themselves through their windscreen at speed. Why do we have speed limits? The libertarian would say that we should be absolutely free to drive at whatever speed, irrespective of the conditions. I remember, back at university, hearing an eccentric American—that can sometimes be a tautology—questioning, from the extreme wing of libertarianism, the merits or otherwise of ages of sexual consent.
I suggest that all we do, and our inspiration for doing it, is benign and kindly. Too often, it is interpreted as being paternalistic and patronising, but I like what the Secretary of State said about this approach to lawmaking being in the proud one nation tradition of the Conservative party, because Tories like order, not disorder.
Simon Hoare
Here is a man who adores order nearly as much as he adores Margaret Thatcher.
Andrew Rosindell
One of my reasons for getting involved in politics is that I believe in a free society, and I believe that people should make choices about their own life. I do not believe that the state should govern how people live their life, but that does not mean I am an extreme libertarian. It just means that I believe in freedom with responsibility.
As my hon. Friend has said, attitudes to tobacco have evolved over the years. People have naturally decided not to smoke and, speaking as a Conservative, surely it is better to educate and let people make their own choices than to impose decisions on them.
Simon Hoare
My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I readily accept that it has a huge intellectual underpinning, but we have had public health campaigns for years on the dangers of smoking tobacco. In some instances, it has worked. We have also used taxation and the pricing mechanism. My late father told my mother that he would give up when cigarettes reached 10 shillings a packet. He eventually gave up when smoking was banned in public buildings and the like. The question that remains is: do we allow unfettered freedom if it harms only the individual who is exercising it, and step in when the exercise of that unfettered freedom has negative impacts on society?
The Secretary of State and others have dilated, perfectly correctly, on the impact on demand and supply in the national health service. A disproportionate amount of resource goes to dealing with smoking-related diseases, illnesses and conditions. We can do something about that. We know full well the negative impact of passive smoking on other people’s health, so the impact of the exercise of that liberty is not limited to the individual. I suggest respectfully that my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) would have a stronger point if it was limited to the individual. Then we could say, “Provide the information and let the individual take the decision.” However, that decision impacts many other people. It affects the productivity of the nation and the national health service, and the health of family and society.
I suggest to my hon. Friend that it is an entirely Conservative instinct to say, when all the levers have been pulled and buttons pushed—when there has been public information, education and some forms of prohibition—“It has worked up to a point, but not enough and not at the right speed. We will have to do something else.” I accept that not everybody who describes themselves as a Conservative, as my hon. Friend and I both do, will make the same analysis and arrive at the same position as me. I voted for the Bill in its last iteration, and I will vote for it again today, because I think it is the next lever that we need to pull and the next button that we have to push.
Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we have an NHS and a Government who are expected to provide and pay for treatment when people are ill, so there is a duty and an onus on the Government to try to keep people healthy, and to provide information about well-known dangers to people’s health? This is not about having a nanny state, but about nudging people to make the right choices, because it costs money to treat people, and we want to save money as well.
Simon Hoare
The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. One can nudge, prod, push and exhort as much as one can, but the Bill is probably the final stepping stone in quite a long line of stepping stones to try to wean people off their dependency on tobacco.
The House has been generous with its time, as have you with your patience, Madam Deputy Speaker. In closing, I echo and endorse the point made by the Secretary of State and other contributors from the Government Benches: people who have an addiction are not free. They are trapped by their addiction, and that affects many areas of their life. If someone is terribly well off, they can afford the addiction to tobacco, and it will make not a jot or tittle of difference to the household budget or income, or to their standard of life—
Simon Hoare
I will not, I am afraid, because I want to conclude. The disproportionate hammer blow is felt by families who would describe themselves as poor, on low or fixed incomes. When the choice between feeding the addiction and feeding the children comes into play, then feeding the addiction seems to have the trump hand. The Government are right to have picked up the ball and taken the Bill forward. It is an entirely Conservative measure. This is not a restriction of liberty in the abstract. The Bill is about public health. It is about taking the data, extrapolating the facts and recognising the harms, and, as responsible legislators, responding to that to make a difference to all our communities up and down the country.
Tristan Osborne (Chatham and Aylesford) (Lab)
Like previous speakers, I have not been challenged on my age, even though I use moisturiser; perhaps it is my receding hairline. I thank the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) for his eloquent speech about the Conservative party’s one nation tradition and his support for the Bill. It is absolutely the case that this legislation comes on the back of decades of other Bills and Acts that have acknowledged the challenges around smoking in our society. He eloquently articulates that evolution in our body politic.
I celebrate the fact that the Bill follows other landmark Acts of Parliament under the previous Labour Government, one of which had an impact on me when I worked in the retail industry. The ban on smoking in workplaces made a fundamental change to many people’s lives and overnight improved the life chances of many millions of our citizens. As has been said by Members across the Chamber, there is a consensus that smoking remains one of the leading causes of death, claiming 80,000 lives annually and costing the NHS billions of pounds, with some estimates putting it at between £3 billion and £5 billion.
Andrew Rosindell
On that basis, would the hon. Gentleman also ban alcohol? Would he ban all types of unhealthy foods, or chocolate—where does it end?
Tristan Osborne
We have age restrictions on alcohol sales and the Bill proposes doing the same. Similarly, for other substances in society, we look in a proportionate way at their health consequences; for instance, we class particular categories of drugs as A, B and C. All those things need to be taken as individual elements. Certainly, we will look at other proposals, but on this particular element, smoking and tobacco have been widely acknowledged as a public concern over many decades.
The vaping industry has seen some positive outcomes, with people transferring from cigarettes to vaping, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend (Mary Glindon) pointed out. Indeed, that use for those products has been acknowledged by the NHS. As a former teacher, however, I have also seen the consequences for young people and that has been acknowledged by many parents in the Chamber. I have unfortunately seen in the classroom, through confiscation and the illicit behaviours of some young people, that blue razz lemonade, watermelon bubble gum and strawberry raspberry cherry ice are all flavours of vapes. They are being marketed at young people, whether directly or indirectly, because we know, as does the tobacco industry, that young people are where the use of tobacco-based products starts.
I have seen at first hand the consequences of the proliferation of vaping in schools and its ubiquitous presence across my area in Chatham and Aylesford. I agree that the Bill’s removal of disposable, single-use vapes, which are currently so easily accessible and cynically marketed, is a sensible move and should reverse the recent trend of young people who have never smoked turning to vapes as an initial access point. It should also stop vapes being seen as a gateway to other types of drugs. Sadly, I have to report that cannabis-based products and other illicit products are gaining ground among disposable vape products.
At the same time, millions of single-use electrical devices blight our local landscapes. Many disposable vapes are deposited on roadsides and in parks, and while it is not specifically part of the content of the Bill, the reality is that vapes have environmental consequences.
The branding of some flavours has been a key driver of youth take-up. To prevent under-age appeal, flavours should be adult-focused and restricted to such flavours as tobacco, menthol and a handful of responsibly branded fruit flavours. I note that some in the industry are already promoting that agenda.
The age restrictions are sensible, and I think that the rising age escalator will be enforceable. Indeed, many supermarkets already have an age limit well above that which is legally required and challenge at the point of disposal.
Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the upper-age escalator could prove difficult later on, particularly in respect of the ability of those who sell tobacco? At the moment, if a young person sells alcohol, they have to get a supervisor who is older to allow it. When the people selling alcohol are in their thirties, but were born after 2009, and everyone else in the shop is in their thirties, who will be allowed to sell the tobacco? Does he have any thoughts on that?
Tristan Osborne
The licensing regime will be looked at in detail, but the reality is that, when I am buying alcohol in a supermarket, I might be challenged on my age by someone at the counter who is over the age of 16. I think I am correct in saying that I would then have to prove my age at point of sale. I am happy to be corrected if I am wrong on that.
Enforcement is very welcome. As a former council portfolio holder for licensing, it was always very difficult to respond to emails from residents seeking redress around the sale of vaping products. Some products were being sold over the counter in unlicensed premises, so enforcement was very difficult. Other products were being marketed using very aggressive advertising. I welcome the licensing element of the Bill and look forward to hearing more details. Councils, I believe, are ready to take on the mantle of licensing. They license many other types of premises, and I suspect that this latest measure will just be an addition to the existing regime. The measure will challenge bad faith actors and illicit products. I have been asking questions about a digital tax on vaping products to see whether we can treat this sector in a similar way to other tobacco-based products.
I welcome the Bill because it will put us back on the front foot as a world leader in tobacco harm reduction, and help us lead the way in improving standards in cigarette alternatives. If we get this right, which I believe we will with this Bill, we can maintain a healthy balance, with vape usage targeted at the adult market and used as a means to reduce addiction to other nicotine-based products. The Bill balances the liberty of individuals to make choices with the responsibility of the state to uphold the public health of the most vulnerable and our young people, and I urge colleagues to support it.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
May I declare my interest as a former chair, for nine years, of the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health? In this new Parliament, I co-chair the same group with the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy).
I am passionate about preventing young people from starting to smoke and encouraging people who do smoke to give up because of my personal experience. The Secretary of State related his personal experience, and I think it is right that I should relate mine. Both of my parents died from smoking-related cancer. My late mother was only 47 when she died. She was a very heavy smoker all her life. I was then left as a 23-year-old with three younger sisters to bring up as a family. I do not want any family in this country to go through what our family went through. So this, for me, is personal as well as political.
I listened to the Secretary of State when he talked about the speech that the former Prime Minister made at the Conservative party conference. If he examines the Westminster Hall speech that I made some two months earlier, he will see that it was almost the same—word for word. I have not called my right hon. Friend out for his plagiarism before.
This House has a very long history of tobacco control. Those measures have been introduced mainly from the Back Benches. I know that the Government will proclaim that a Labour Government brought in the ban on smoking indoors, but it should be remembered that it was a senior Labour Back Bencher—a former Member of this House—who said that unless the Government introduced the measure, he would table a cross-party amendment to the Health Bill and it would be carried by a heavy majority. He did not need to do that, and I welcomed the provision.
I am delighted that this Bill builds on the Bill that was presented in the previous Parliament. I was proud to speak in that debate and to sit on the Bill Committee as we tried to improve the Bill. The then Minister, Andrea Leadsom, took away many of our amendments and said that she did not yet have the authority to agree them, but was willing to review them in the round. Clearly, we did not get to the point of doing that. It is important to remember that from 2011 to 2023, the number of people smoking dropped from 20% of the population to 11.9%, which is a big fall. The previous Government should be commended for that. Indeed, the last Government made it illegal in 2012 to display tobacco products at the point of sale. I remember that I led a debate in Westminster Hall in September 2013 calling for the standardisation of tobacco products to be made mandatory. Both the Conservative and Labour Front Benches opposed the position. Two years later, it was passed by this House. That shows how the Back Benches lead and Governments often follow.
At the same time, children were protected from harmful second-hand smoke by a law that made it illegal to smoke in a vehicle containing anyone under 18. That is difficult to enforce, and I remember many colleagues saying, “If you can’t enforce it, it won’t happen,” but most colleagues will remember sitting in a car where their parents were smoking and suffering that second-hand smoke. We won that argument. It was once again a Back Bencher—the senior Back Bencher Alex Cunningham—who brought that forward, and we were proud to support it.
We won the argument on the smokefree generation. The then Health Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Jeremy Hunt), built the cross-party consensus then, and we reached the consensus on raising the age of sale for tobacco by one year every year. In the vote on Second Reading of the last Tobacco and Vapes Bill, it was rightly backed by a huge majority across the House.
I welcome the new measures, which include the amendments tabled to the original Bill. It takes into account most, if not all, the amendments we proposed last time in Committee. The Government have not yet met the standards set by the last Government, though, in addressing smoking among the 5.6 million smokers in England. The last Government committed £15 million in funding for mass media campaigns, £30 million for enforcement and £70 million for local stop smoking services. I note that the Secretary of State mentioned the £70 million for smoking cessation services, but not the other items. When the Minister responds, will he commit to the same level of support for the “swap to stop” scheme to support adult smokers to switch to vapes and a national financial incentive programme, particularly aimed at pregnant women who want to stop smoking?
Today, the Government confirmed funding for stop smoking services and enforcement. That is welcome, but only if the funding is sustained for the next five years in line with the commitments made by the previous Government. I am also concerned that while the enforcement duties in the Bill are greater than before, that has not been matched by additional funding. Will the Minister confirm that a full assessment of the cost of enforcement will be undertaken as a matter of urgency and that the funding will be reviewed following that and the passage of the Bill?
Between 2022-23 and 2023-24, we saw the biggest single drop in maternal smoking rates since records began, from 8.8% to 7.3%—an 18% decline in the number of women smoking during pregnancy. The fall was a credit to the services established under the last Government to support women to quit. Keeping up that level of progress will not be easy, but by maintaining the world-leading national financial incentive scheme, that rate of decline can be maintained, giving children the gift of a smokefree start in life. However, the funding for the scheme is due to come to an end in March next year. Will the Minister confirm whether the Government will extend the scheme and ensure that every baby gets the best possible start in life—something I know his predecessor would have strongly supported?
Most of the Bill comes from the Khan review. One item is not in the Bill that certainly should be. The difficult fiscal environment that the Government find themselves in means that discussions on funding can lead to tense shoulders on the Government Benches. However, I bring good news: there is a way to raise revenue, by passing the costs directly on to tobacco companies—those responsible for the blight on our population’s health and wealth. Will the Minister agree to come to the APPG and address the matter, so that we can talk about the implementation of a “polluter pays” tobacco levy on the profits of big tobacco, which would address issues with market prices and limit the profitability of the industry? That can all be done without impacting the cost of tobacco to the consumer or, indeed, on the wholesale market.
As co-chair of the all-party group, I congratulate the Government on adopting so many of the amendments that we tabled in the last Parliament, including on the introduction of a licensing scheme. I am pleased that the Bill indicates that that scheme will be more robust that the current scheme for alcohol, meaning that it can be used to improve public health, which I am sure we all agree with. At the Committee stage of the previous Bill, I also tabled an amendment to require age verification for everyone who purchases tobacco. That would aid enforcement and simplify the process for shop workers, who would not have to guess whether customers were over the legal age of sale or explain to some why they were being asked for proof of age. The requirement to ask for proof of age has been strengthened but not mandated, so in Committee will the Minister consider introducing mandatory age verification?
I welcome the ban on vape sponsorship and advertising, which was, once again, discussed in the previous Bill Committee. The promotion of vaping products for anything other than smoking cessation does not support public health goals. However, I am pleased that the Bill ensures that public health organisations can still promote vapes as a quit-smoking aid. Can the Minister confirm that the Advertising Standards Agency will work with public health organisations to ensure that that works in practice, so that smokers are still informed about the benefit of switching and, more importantly, of giving up tobacco altogether?
The Bill includes new powers to extend and designate smokefree places as vape-free. It is a shame that a consultation on where those powers should apply was curtailed before the Bill ever reached Parliament, because we need an open debate on that subject, and it would be better led by evidence rather than by decisions made behind closed doors at the Department. Will the Minister consider that aspect and see whether we can have a proper consultation so that all members of the public can participate?
The Bill consolidates many existing powers around tobacco control and brings them into one place, and I welcome that proposal. It will, I hope, ensure that legislation is future-proofed against any loopholes or escape clauses. We know how hard big tobacco works to get around the legislation we pass in this place. An issue that I do not believe is covered by the Bill—although I stand to be corrected—is that of chewing tobacco. Paan, for example, is often mixed with tobacco and sold with different products in different outlets, and it is sold loose, so it is difficult to monitor. Often, existing laws on oral tobacco are not enforced properly, so the populations who use those products, who tend to come from the Indian subcontinent, do not realise the risks that they are running. We know that mouth and throat cancers are particularly prevalent among people from the Indian subcontinent. We must combat that by ensuring that such products are properly regulated. Will the Minister consider regulating all forms of tobacco and ensuring that trading standards and others have the resources to enforce the regulations properly?
I congratulate the House on the continued consensus on reducing smoking, and take this moment to mark the significance of the Bill’s return to Parliament. I am very proud that it was a Conservative Government who first introduced the policy. No other consumer product kills up to two thirds of its long-term users; it is uniquely lethal and requires a regulatory approach. Government intervention is justified against this addiction, which steals the health and wealth of our population. To those who say that this is a matter of freedom of choice, I say that there is freedom of choice only in taking the first cigarette, after which people are addicted for life and either have to try to quit—some try up to 30 times, as we have said—or face shortened lives and horrible deaths.
We in this country have been a world leader in tobacco control, standing up to big tobacco’s repeated efforts to block our progress. The creation of a smokefree generation would have been absolutely unthinkable a few years ago, but it is so close—we can see it coming now—and it will be a credit to this Parliament and the previous one. I remember the Minister saying that it would be a Labour Government who created a smokefree England by 2030. Let us hope that we can do it faster than that.
Jenny Riddell-Carpenter (Suffolk Coastal) (Lab)
I start by welcoming this Bill, which will create the first smokefree generation. Children turning 15 this year will never legally be able to be sold tobacco.
As we look to reform and transform our NHS and improve health outcomes for our country, we cannot do so without tackling the root causes. The long-term chronic health issues that stem from smoking and the impact that they have on our NHS are well known and have been well covered today; they do not need rehearsing by me. It is worth noting that fewer young people take up smoking each year, which is good news and should be welcomed by Members. The proportion of adults aged 16 and over in the UK who said that they smoked cigarettes decreased significantly from 12.7% in 2021 to 11.2% in 2022, continuing the downwards trend seen since 1974. Recent research by Go Smoke Free shows from analysis of Office for National Statistics figures that between 2015 and 2023 the percentage of adults who smoke in Suffolk has declined to 10.6%, down from 16% in 2016.
That positive downwards trend does not mean that young people are safe from the addictions of smoking or that further interventions by this Government are not needed. Alongside the decrease in young people taking up smoking and the decline in adults in Suffolk smoking, we have seen an increase in young people and children taking up vaping. The vaping epidemic among children and young people should be a great concern to us all on both sides of this Chamber. In 2023, 20% of children had tried vaping, which was almost double the figure in 2020, before the first covid lockdown. This rapid trajectory is frightening, and I share the concerns of many parents who have written to me about the availability of vapes and the marketing of them, which so often seems as if it is targeted directly at children.
We know that disposable vapes are the products of choice for the majority of children vaping today, and I therefore welcome the ban on disposable vapes that this Bill will bring forward. The new legislation will not only protect the environment, but help to make huge strides in reducing the appeal of vapes to young people and help to keep them out of the hands of the most vulnerable children. I also welcome the Bill’s drive to ban the advertising and sponsorship of vapes and nicotine products and allow regulation of the flavours, packaging and display of vapes so that they cannot be marketed to appeal to children. It is astonishing that it is currently legal for vapes to be sold from locations such as the back of taxis, toy stores and confectioners. This practice must stop, and I am glad that the Bill seeks to tackle that—in particular, it will be hugely welcome to constituents in Suffolk Coastal.
In my constituency, we have vape shops clearly targeting children and young people and advertising products along with sweets in a clear attempt to market and sell them to those aged under 18. Residents in Felixstowe have been rightly outraged by the recent opening of an American sweet and vape store right on the high street in a prime location that is so clearly targeting children. I hope that under the terms of the Bill, stores such as that will be in breach of the law. I will follow the detail closely. I am also reassured that the £200 fixed penalty notice will enable trading standards officers to act on the spot to clamp down on under-age sales.
This Bill is welcome, and it should be welcomed by Members on both sides of the House. I look forward to voting in favour of it later, and I will do so on behalf of the residents of my constituency who have expressed their direct concerns to me.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)
After the next speech, I will impose a six-minute time limit.
James MacCleary (Lewes) (LD)
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate about a Bill that seeks to change the way in which our society approaches smoking and vaping particularly for future generations.
I have never smoked in my life, and I would not wish my children or anyone else’s to pick up the habit. Smoking is undeniably dangerous, highly addictive, and a significant burden on public health. The Government data is stark: smoking causes 80,000 deaths in England every year and costs the NHS and the economy billions.
At the same time, however, I firmly believe in individual choice. It is not the role of the state to dictate every aspect of a person’s lifestyle. Like alcohol, smoking is harmful. Some Members have made the argument that the justification for banning smoking is that the practice also harms others. I ask those Members why we do not also ban the consumption of alcohol, which places a massive burden on the NHS as well as contributing to violent crime, including—with yesterday’s White Ribbon Day in mind—domestic violence. Should we not also look at gambling, which is also highly addictive and destroys families all over the country? Instead, we educate people and provide support for those who wish to quit. I believe that is the balance that liberalism stands for—freedom with responsibility.
The Bill takes a much-needed step forward on vaping. We know that vaping is increasingly marketed in ways that appeal to children, from brightly coloured packaging to sweet, toy-like flavours. That is unacceptable. The Liberal Democrats have long called for tougher regulation of vapes, and I welcome the provisions to ban advertising, restrict packaging and flavours and enforce age restrictions. These are sensible measures that will protect young people without penalising adults who use vaping as a tool to quit smoking.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
The hon. Gentleman is probably aware of this, but there are a lot of safety issues with vapes and smoking, especially for young people. One of the issues seems to be that it is unknown just yet what effect vapes may have on adults, but even more so on children. For that reason, does the hon. Gentleman agree that further consideration must be given to the safety issues before we can let young people fully use vapes?
James MacCleary
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) has already raised the issue of spiced vapes in a debate in this House. I think there are a lot of safety concerns relating to vaping, and hopefully this Bill can start to address some of those issues. As a party, we earlier supported the Government’s move to ban single-use vapes on environmental grounds. Vaping has a role in smoking cessation, but as the hon. Gentleman has pointed out, it has to be regulated to prevent harm to children.
On smoking, however, the Bill ventures into more contentious territory, in my view. The proposal to ban the sale of tobacco products to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 is somewhat problematic. While I appreciate the ambition behind creating a smokefree generation, I worry about the long-term implications of this measure. For one, history teaches us that outright bans often lead to unintended consequences. As we have seen with other prohibitions, a black market can emerge, making it harder to regulate the quality and safety of tobacco products. Then there is the question of principle: should the state prevent grown, consenting adults from engaging in legal activities? I believe we must tread carefully when legislating against personal freedoms, even when those freedoms carry risk. A more effective approach would be to invest in public health measures, such as smoking-cessation programmes, early cancer detection and better treatment facilities.
The Bill also grants the Secretary of State sweeping powers to declare any public space smokefree. While I support protecting children in playgrounds, schools and hospitals, these powers go far beyond that, removing the requirement that a space must pose a significant risk of smoke exposure to be designated as smokefree. This raises concerns about potential overreach, which is understandably creating concern in the hospitality and night-time industry sectors. I urge the Government to clarify this issue when the Bill is in Committee.
Smoking rates in this country are already declining, particularly among young people. In 2021, just 1% of school pupils reported smoking regularly, compared with 30% in 1996. That trend is encouraging, suggesting that education and public health initiatives are working, so while I share the Government’s goal of reducing smoking and vaping rates, I believe this Bill goes beyond what is necessary or proportionate. We should focus on supporting people to make better choices, not remove those choices altogether. There is much to welcome and commend in the Bill, and I congratulate the Secretary of State and the Government on bringing it forward. I hope the Government will consider refining their approach in Committee in some of the areas I have raised, balancing public health priorities with the liberal principle of individual freedom.
Dr Beccy Cooper (Worthing West) (Lab)
It is a privilege to take part in this debate and to hear the broad consensus across the House on this excellent Bill. We have come a long way since the 2004 White Paper proposed a smoking ban in almost all public places in England and Wales. Smoking on public transport and in workplaces now feels inconceivable thanks to decades of work by campaigners and public health professionals and bold action from Government.
As a public health consultant, I pay special tribute to my public health colleagues who have worked so tirelessly in this area, from the seminal 1956 research undertaken by Sir Richard Doll and team that first established the link between smoking and lung cancer—something we take for granted today—through to the smoking cessation advisers who work daily to help people combat this destructive addiction.
Mark Twain is reported to have said:
“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world…I’ve done it thousands of times.”
In my career to date I have been fortunate enough to undertake smoking cessation training and I can testify to the incredible amount of hard work and determination that both the quitter and the adviser put in to overcome the nicotine receptors that demand to be fed. This is an addiction, not a choice.
So it is better by far not to start this destructive habit in the first place. Currently, every day about 350 young adults still start smoking and about 160 people are diagnosed with cancer caused by smoking. Smoking is still the leading cause of premature death and disability in the UK, and is responsible for half the difference in healthy life expectancy between rich and poor. Other Members have talked about the appalling health inequalities in this country and how the Bill will really contribute to reducing them.
So it is right that this Bill will phase out the sale of tobacco and create a smokefree generation. Already ever fewer people smoke, and this legislation will increase the rate of decline. By increasing the age of sale by one year every year we can expect smoking rates among 14 to 30-year-olds to reach zero by 2050. As a mum of two young sons, I greatly welcome that.
I welcome, too, the increased powers to tackle vaping in the Government’s Bill. Vaping can be an effective aid for adult smokers to quit, but much tougher measures are needed to regulate products designed to appeal to young people. As ASH puts it:
“Vaping is an adult quitting aid, not a children’s toy.”
The chief medical officer further underlines this by stating:
“If you smoke, vaping is much safer; if you don’t smoke, don’t vape; marketing vapes to children is utterly unacceptable.”
This Bill will give the Government far greater control over the marketing and design of vapes and the flexibility to adjust regulations in the future if the market or evidence changes.
Robin Swann
Does the hon. Member agree that that is also why it is important that we control vending machine sales?
Wera Hobhouse
We should also look at online sales. A lot of young people purchase products online. May I ask the Minister what the Bill says about that?
Dr Cooper
I do not disagree. The Bill will give the Government far greater control over the marketing side of vapes and the flexibility to adjust regulations in the future. Life evolves outside this Chamber, and we need to be able to evolve with it flexibly.
Alongside the measures in this Bill, this Government have made important commitments to integrating smoking cessation into routine care and ensuring that the most disadvantaged groups are not left behind as we move towards a smokefree Britain. When I was undertaking my training in public health, a director of public health told me that our profession is where medicine meets politics—I am not sure how he would feel about me going into politics, but there we go. In this Bill, I am delighted to see the evidence and data provided by my profession working in synergy with this Government’s policy development to bring forward a Bill that will allow our young people to enjoy healthier futures and allow us all to live in a healthier environment. I thank all Members across the House for their work on this issue, and I offer my wholehearted support for the Bill.
Seamus Logan (Aberdeenshire North and Moray East) (SNP)
I rise to speak as a not yet reformed smoker, being in the pre-contemplative phase of my addiction, but I am pleased to speak today in favour of this Bill, part 2 of which specifically relates to Scotland. While this is only its Second Reading, the Bill certainly looks to be a promising piece of legislation that will benefit lives across the UK. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable deaths in both Scotland and the UK. As parliamentarians, we have a duty to safeguard future generations from the addiction of smoking and to reduce preventable deaths across the UK.
My unique contribution is this: I am concerned by what I see as the rise in the number of leading actors in television and film whose characters are featured as smokers. If I am right, I invite Members to consider that the next time they enjoy their favourite programme or film. It seems to me that it is the most subliminal form of product placement on our screens these days, and I often wonder to what extent the tobacco industry might be behind it in the form of indirect sponsorship.
Turning to the matter at hand, as Members will know, healthcare is a devolved matter for the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Government’s record on smoking controls is excellent. Scotland was the first UK nation to introduce and endorse the smoking ban. Scotland led the overhaul of the tobacco sale and display law. Scotland established the UK’s first tobacco retail register in 2011, and Scotland is in the process of implementing the deliberately ambitious goal of a tobacco-free nation by 2034.
I pay tribute to my party colleague, Kirsten Oswald, the former Member for East Renfrewshire, who dedicated a significant amount of her time and effort in this place to this important issue. During the debate in the last Parliament on the previous Tobacco and Vapes Bill, Kirsten powerfully stated that
“any arguments put forward about personal choice or personal freedom make no sense at all when we are talking about children and a highly addictive substance. Smoking is not a free choice; it is an addiction.”—[Official Report, 16 April 2024; Vol. 748, c. 208.]
With this Bill, we have the opportunity to directly address not only preventable deaths, but youth vaping. While decades of research have shown the harm that smoking does, we are only at the very beginning of our understanding of the harm that might be caused by vaping. There is emerging evidence in this area, but as yet, we simply do not know enough. However, we can act in a preventive way, and I heard what the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend (Mary Glindon) said about vaping being 95% safer. I am not so sure that the evidence supports that; I am more inclined to agree with what the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) said on that point.
The rise in youth vaping across the UK is concerning. Vaping products are not intended to be used by children, but we know all too well of the shocking usage of these products by children. In 2022, 3% of 11-year-olds, 10% of 13-year-olds and 25% of 15-year-olds in Scotland said that they had used an e-cigarette in the last 30 days. To that end, the SNP welcomes the range of new powers in the Bill to regulate the sale of vapes aimed at young people and to tackle youth vaping. Measures to tackle youth vaping cannot come soon enough. The SNP supports the new minimum age regime for tobacco sales, meaning that no one born in 2009 or later will ever legally purchase cigarettes. That will aid in the Scottish Government’s goal of a smokefree Scotland, as I have already alluded to.
The Bill follows lengthy work and co-operation between the UK and devolved Governments, including a UK-wide consultation on tackling smoking and vaping, and I am pleased to see that that work was productive. I note that Scottish Government requests have been added to the Bill, such as in clauses 52 and 53. The Scottish Government previously laid a legislative consent memorandum in the Scottish Parliament, and will do so again. Intergovernmental work and co-operation are vital on this island, especially on a topic as important as tackling preventable deaths. For Scotland, it is vital that the UK Secretary of State sets out as soon as possible after the passage of the Bill, and in consultation with the Scottish Government and other devolved Governments, his plans to make best use of the various UK-wide powers contained in the Bill. That is particularly important for the powers relating to the specifications and sale of vapes, which are vital in tackling youth vaping.
To conclude, I am happy to support the Bill, as are my colleagues in the SNP. I look forward to seeing further co-operation between the UK and Scottish Governments to tackle this important issue.
Darren Paffey (Southampton Itchen) (Lab)
I am proud to be part of a Government who are creating the first smokefree generation and protecting the British public. This Bill will protect my constituents from avoidable illnesses and death, so I very much welcome it.
Like other Members who have spoken throughout the debate, I am one of those people who can only dream of being asked for ID these days. In fact, I am so old that I can remember growing up seeing huge billboards and bus stops with cigarette advertisements on them, and cigarette companies sponsoring entire sporting events. What a different time we live in now, and that is because our knowledge has progressed so much. We now know that there is no safe level of exposure to smoking or even to second-hand passive smoking. As the Secretary of State set out, we know the consequences, which are 75,000 GP appointments attributed to smoking every single month; 80,000 smoking-related deaths each year; and one person admitted to hospital every minute because of smoking. That is all at a cost to the NHS of more than £3 billion a year, adding to the pressure on it when we know it is at breaking point.
There is also the economic cost, with £18 billion of productivity squandered each year—dare I say, £18 billion up in smoke? Phasing out this harmful addiction is not just a health priority but a societal and economic necessity. The urgency is especially clear in Southampton, where we have had 527 emergency hospital admissions per 100,000 people for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a disease from which my mum died, despite never having smoked but being the child of heavy-smoking parents. Compare that rate to the average in England of 326 per 100,000—that represents a 61% higher rate in Southampton. There is clearly an urgent need for the Bill to bring change nationally and in my city. I do not want the children of Southampton Itchen to have to grow up vulnerable to the same smoking-related health issues that my generation and the generations before us did.
This excellent Bill will rewrite the culture around smoking and vaping, freeing our next generation from addiction, from school-age pressures and from harmful trends. Despite the troubling statistics, there is great work going on locally to tackle this issue. Before the election, I visited Professor Kath Woods-Townsend and her team at a research-based project called LifeLab, which is a collaboration between the University of Southampton, University Hospital Southampton and the National Institute for Health and Care Research biomedical research centre. The project is centred around improving the health education of young people through practical visits to its labs at the hospital and involving them in its research processes. One of its recent studies found that some vaping brands are designed to mimic sweets and that some children are persuaded that there is an element of healthiness to fruit-flavoured vapes.
Imagine being a company that plays on that. Imagine being a company that knows about the risks of vaping—knows that it can cause lung-scarring and asthma as well as bringing an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, exposure to chemicals and breathing in metal in the aerosol—and yet wraps its product up in bright colours and fruit flavours and deliberately markets it towards our children, knowing the addictive nature of vapes and knowing the vulnerability of children and the social pressures they face. The job of business is to contribute to the economy, to innovate and to create jobs and wealth, not to run rampant with our children’s health to make a quick buck for shareholders. Effective educational programmes such as LifeLab, working in tandem with the Government’s sensible legislation and action, will promote better understanding and reduce harm.
We have seen before what legislation can do: when smoking under 18, proxy purchasing and advertising on cigarette packaging were banned, all those vital steps drove down the smoking rate. Now, it is time to stub out this habit—forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker—once and for all.
The Labour Government are doing what is right by the youth of today by prioritising health over profit and ensuring that the next generation can grow up free from this addiction and its preventable diseases. Today, with cross-party support, I hope that we will take another ambitious step towards a future where our children’s wellbeing comes first. I am proud to be part of that.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
I congratulate the Government on their very strong stance on tobacco and protecting children, but—the Minister will know what is coming—when it comes to refillable vapes, the Bill is missing the mark. Research by Professor Chris Pudney at the University of Bath discovered that one in six vapes confiscated in schools contained the synthetic drug Spice—a highly addictive and dangerous drug commonly found in prisons. It causes very dangerous health conditions, including damage to vital organs. On our streets, users are often slumped in a semi-conscious state, unable to function. In our schools, children are collapsing. Some are rushed to intensive care; others are left battling lifelong addiction. The highly addictive nature of Spice makes it a gateway to criminal activity, coercion and abuse.
I have spoken about this alarming issue on several occasions, and I have had some assurances from the Government, but so far I have not seen anything on it in the Bill. It will not do anything to stop the trend of Spice-spiked vapes in schools, because the vapes that contain Spice are almost all refillable. Refillable vapes are rechargeable and feature an empty pod that can be filled up with a liquid of choice. Banning disposable vapes will not address that problem. Many of the confiscated vapes containing Spice were made to look exactly like a normal product from a shop, and they are usually sold as containing THC—tetrahydrocannabinol—also an illegal product in this country. Children are inadvertently consuming Spice under the impression that it is cannabis.
Vapes containing THC are widespread in parts of the United States where they are legal, but importing them to the UK is costly and difficult. Spice, however, is cheap, readily available and highly addictive. Dealers exploit that by passing off Spice as cannabis, preying on young people and putting them at serious risk. This drug has the potential to condemn young people, in particular vulnerable young people, to a life of crime and addiction.
When such Bills come along, we have the opportunity to make them as strong as possible. There are other issues associated with Spice-spiked vapes, but I urge the Government to really look at what they can do to strengthen the Bill to address this serious problem. There are opportunities in the Bill, but focusing solely on disposable vapes risks backfiring; it may push demand towards refillable vapes, which are even easier to tamper with for illegal use. Have the Government really prepared for the potential unintended consequences? I hope that they acknowledge the points that I have raised. I look forward to seeing them addressed as the Bill progresses. I support the Government on their very strong stance and on what they want to achieve, but I hope that the Bill can be strengthened.
Andrew Cooper (Mid Cheshire) (Lab)
This piece of legislation carries immense significance for the health of our nation, and I welcome the steps being taken to protect people from the harms of tobacco, to create a smokefree generation and to tackle youth vaping. We are all too aware that smoking remains the biggest cause of preventable illness and death in our country, with decades of evidence in support of that. One in four cancers is driven by smoking. Around 160 people every day are diagnosed with a smoking-related cancer. Smoking causes asthma, stillbirths and dementia. The evidence around second-hand smoke is overwhelming; it causes increased rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—the list goes on.
Tobacco consumption is a primary driver of health inequalities right across the country. In the most deprived areas, the mortality rate ascribed to smoking is more than double that in the least deprived areas, as we have heard. This Bill is about not just health but alleviating the economic burden on our healthcare system. According to Action on Smoking and Health, smoking-related illnesses cost the NHS £1.9 billion each year in England alone. In Mid Cheshire, the cost of smoking exceeds £52 million annually, and more than £2 million in direct healthcare costs alone. By curbing tobacco use, we can alleviate some of that financial strain and redirect those resources towards more urgent health needs. Investing in prevention is far more cost-effective than treating diseases caused by tobacco.
In the time that I have, I want to focus on the regulation of vaping in the Bill. It is important to strike the right balance between reducing harm from tobacco and protecting young people. Vaping has a role to play in helping adults to quit smoking, and there are estimates that as many as an extra 70,000 people in England quit smoking by using vapes as an aid. However, youth vaping has more than doubled in the last five years, while almost six times more 11 to 17-year-olds vape now than did a decade ago. Many vaping products have very clearly been targeted at children through their packaging, flavours and marketing. While vaping is less harmful than tobacco, the vast majority of vaping liquids still contain nicotine, which is highly addictive and more impactful on children’s brains when they are trying to quit. Many of the long-term health effects of inhaled ingredients such as colourings and flavourings are unknown.
It is our responsibility to safeguard the health of our communities, particularly our children, who are vulnerable to the allure of smoking and vaping. I certainly welcome the Bill’s emphasis on more responsible regulation of vaping products. The power for the Secretary of State to require producers to produce studies on the ingredients of their products will be a vital tool in demonstrating the long-term effects of what is being put into vaping liquids.
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill is a crucial piece of legislation that aims to tackle a critical public health challenge. It will promote informed choices and alleviate economic burdens, and ultimately help us achieve our ambition of creating a smokefree UK. That is why I am proud to support this important Bill.
Robin Swann (South Antrim) (UUP)
I noticed from the opening comments that the Opposition have a free vote on the legislation, as do the Lib Dems. I assure the Minister that the Ulster Unionist party group in this House is 100% behind the Bill, which means: I am.
I sincerely hope it is second time lucky for the Bill. Prior to getting elected to this House, I was the Minister of Health in Northern Ireland in the re-established Assembly when it came back in February 2024. The Bill was then going through this House. Despite hugely challenging pressures, there was a much appreciated latitude from the public health Minister, Andrea Leadsom, who worked with the devolved Administrations to ensure that the Bill had a four-nations approach. I thank the Government for continuing that approach. As the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) described happening in Scotland, a legislative consent motion went through the Northern Ireland Assembly. More importantly, it received the full support of the four parties in the Northern Ireland Executive.
It was only right and proper that the profound public health benefits be extended to Northern Ireland. Like Scotland, Northern Ireland was included in the UK-wide consultation exercise, which closed in December 2023. There was particularly strong support for the measures from the people back home. The consultation received a proportionately higher response rate from the Northern Ireland population than the UK-wide population. While 62.5% of UK respondents were in favour of an ambitious smokefree generation proposal, the Northern Ireland figure stood at 79%. That was by far the greatest support from among the UK regions. Support was also much higher in Northern Ireland for a range of other proposals, such as restricting vape flavourings and displays.
Some of the flavours that attract children have been mentioned. There is also a move towards flavours, labels and names that appeal to older age groups. We now have “Brain Freeze” and “Killer Kustard.” The producers are moving on from young people who are already addicted to early teens, and are making sure that their addictions embed. It is important that this Bill addresses that.
While I am glad of the support that many of the measures have received across Northern Ireland, we need to remain mindful of the fact that if passed, the Bill will be a literal lifesaver for decades to come. Tobacco use is a leading cause of health inequalities in Northern Ireland. It is a tragedy, but an avoidable one, that the lung cancer incidence rate in the most deprived areas of Northern Ireland is about two and a half times the rate in the least deprived areas. A recent health inequalities report from the Department of Health in Northern Ireland showed that the gap between the healthy life expectancy of women in the most deprived areas and those of women in the least deprived stood at 14.2 years—not months, but years. That differential will be dealt with by this Bill and others like it. Moreover, smoking rates in the most deprived areas are typically almost three times higher than the rate in the least deprived. I therefore fully support any and all efforts to dissuade people, especially young people, from taking up the habit in the first place.
This Bill goes even further than the one that fell before the last general election. I will be honest and admit that at the time, I was hugely frustrated that the previous Bill was not given the time to succeed, and I feared that a once-in-a-generation chance to do something transformative might have been missed. Looking at the Bill now, however, I am pleased to see that, rather than potential being lost, it has the potential to be even more impactful, given all its enhancements. Mike Nesbitt, my successor as Minister of Health and the leader of my party, has been able to use the little extra time to consider the licensing provisions carefully. While Northern Ireland’s tobacco retailers register is a helpful enforcement tool, it has limitations, and a new licensing regime would be another significant step forward for my constituents.
I acknowledge that, like its predecessor, this Bill is complicated by our somewhat messy post-Brexit arrangements, but I take reassurance from this Government and the last Government on that, because surely they cannot both be wrong.
Mr Alex Barros-Curtis (Cardiff West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow such powerful contributions from Members on both sides of the House—from my hon. Friends the Members for Suffolk Coastal (Jenny Riddell-Carpenter), for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey), for Worthing West (Dr Beccy Cooper) and for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper), and the hon. Members for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and for Bath (Wera Hobhouse)—as well as the entire Ulster Unionist party delegation in the form of the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann).
I support this landmark legislation, which is an important step towards delivering on this Government’s manifesto commitment to ensuring that the next generation can never legally buy cigarettes, and to creating the first smokefree generation. This is an overdue natural step towards tackling the scourge of smoking, which claims about 80,000 lives a year in the United Kingdom. Smoking is the No. 1 preventable cause of death, disability and ill health in our United Kingdom, and it is responsible for one in four cancer deaths, killing up to two thirds of smokers. In Wales, tobacco causes 3,100 cancer cases every year, and smoking is still the leading cause of cancer there. However, cancer does not respect borders, so the Bill will serve the health interests of our entire United Kingdom. I welcome that, and I also welcome the Welsh Government’s commitment to supporting this legislation and bringing it into force in Wales from 2025.
In fact, the Welsh Government have been well ahead of the curve on this issue. As far back as 2016, my constituency colleague Mark Drakeford presented legislation that would have banned cigarette use in public spaces, but it fell owing to shameless politicking on the part of Plaid Cymru—whose Members, I note, have not been present at all for this important debate. Rather than agreeing with the Welsh Government and introducing what would have been landmark public health legislation, Plaid Cymru’s Members were joined by the Welsh Conservatives and the Members of the United Kingdom Independence party—remember them?—all of whom described it as unnecessary Government regulation. Plaid Cymru sided with the populist right in Wales to make a political point, and the people of Wales were worse off because of it.
Undeterred, in 2021 the Welsh Government launched their tobacco control action plan, which includes actions to protect children and young people from the dangers of vaping, such as tighter regulations on advertising and on the sale of e-cigarettes. That is a clear sign that the Welsh Government take this issue seriously, and it is our responsibility here in Westminster to support and complement those efforts. This Bill illustrates that this Government take seriously their commitment to create the first smokefree generation, and to protect children from becoming hooked on vaping.
Let us be clear: vaping is not harmless. In 2023, Action on Smoking and Health estimated that 20.5% of children aged 11 to 17 had tried vaping. Although vaping can be an effective way for adults to quit smoking, vaping cannot be recommended for children, as it carries a serious risk of addiction and future harm. Accordingly, rather than being a deterrent to smoking, vaping will see more children, not fewer, being exposed to nicotine if left unregulated. That is why the measures set out in the Bill to implement a total ban on vape advertising and sponsorship, and, subject to consultation, on the sale of vape flavours that overtly appeal to children, are so important. I fully support them.
This Bill is legislation that our teachers, headteachers, medical professionals and health services are all calling for. The vaping industry has been allowed to attract kids with different flavours and bright packaging. We would not allow that with any other addictive drug, and we should not allow it with vaping. In addition, the Bill does not deal with an aspect of vaping that I would be grateful for the Government to consider as the Bill continues its passage through Parliament. Currently, police officers do not have specific powers to confiscate vapes from children—a power that they do have with traditional cigarettes, pursuant to section 7(3) of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933.
Having spoken to South Wales police officers and police community support officers, I know that the power of confiscation is an important tool that they use to deal with antisocial behaviour in designated areas of Cardiff, but their work is neutered if they cannot confiscate vapes. Although I recognise that if this Bill is passed, such powers will not be necessary in time—indeed, it will omit section 7(3) of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 from 2027 onwards—I ask the Government to consider whether it would be useful to retain the power of confiscation and expand it to include vapes for the period between now and 2027, so that our police officers have the same legal powers across cigarettes and vapes as a tool in their armoury to combat antisocial behaviour.
Aside from that specific point, I reiterate my support for this important piece of legislation. Not only will it align this Parliament with the progressive actions of the Welsh Government on such important health matters; it will bolster our commitment in this place to safeguarding public health. In so doing, it will save many thousands of lives from the scourge of cancer and protect children from becoming hooked on vaping.
Jim Allister (North Antrim) (TUV)
I will vote for this Bill. I admit that I am sceptical about the enforceability of the age escalator, but fundamentally the legislation addresses a huge problem in our society. There can be no doubt that smoking is a killer, so it is our responsibility to seek to diminish the death toll. Vaping is a totally unregulated sector, and I fear that it is a gateway to smoking for many young people. Therefore, it is right that it, too, comes within the ambit of the Bill.
The Secretary of State said this afternoon that this is a “four-nations Bill”. I welcome that, and I trust that it is right. That is the point I want to test in my contribution, and I will seek reassurance from the Minister about it. The reason I want to test it is that Northern Ireland, and Northern Ireland alone, is still subject to the EU’s tobacco directive. We are subject to the EU’s tobacco directive because it is one of the 289 EU laws listed in annex 2 of the protocol—or the Windsor framework, as it is now called—that remain in force in a part of this United Kingdom. Article 24 of the tobacco directive says:
“Member States may not…prohibit or restrict the placing on the market of tobacco or related products”.
Does this Bill, by its necessary steps, restrict the placing on the market of tobacco? If it does, it will fall foul of the tobacco directive and will therefore be unenforceable in Northern Ireland, because of our ridiculous subjection to foreign laws that we do not make and cannot change.
We have an illustration of what might happen, because in 2022 Denmark sought to introduce almost identical legislation. It had to withdraw it, and in withdrawing it, the Health Minister told the Danish Parliament on 6 April 2022:
“The ministry…therefore considers that a ban on the sale of tobacco and nicotine products to people born in 2010 or later would require an amendment to the European Tobacco Products Directive”.
On that basis, they withdrew it. Earlier this year, the Irish Republic was minded to introduce legislation like this, but it did not proceed for the same reason.
If we are in a situation where a part of this United Kingdom quite absurdly cannot be governed by laws that this Parliament wishes to make, we are in a very sad situation indeed. It is my fear that, like in Denmark, the imprimatur would not be forthcoming from the tobacco directive and we could therefore have a situation where laws that we want to make and apply throughout the United Kingdom cannot be applied because of our subservience to foreign jurisdiction. If that is so, it will be an appalling situation. The House will have an opportunity to do something about this when my private Member’s Bill comes before it on 6 December, and I trust that Members will take that opportunity to liberate Northern Ireland from the bind of foreign jurisdiction and foreign law.
There are vested interests who will try to challenge the Bill’s applicability in Northern Ireland because of the tobacco directive, and I am fearful of the line that the courts might take, because we have had some examples. This House passed—for better or for worse—the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023. It also passed the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024. I am not commenting on their merits; I am making it clear that when they went to the High Court in Belfast, both were declared inoperable in Northern Ireland. Why? Because of the supremacy of EU law.
If that were to happen with this Bill, it would be an absolute scandal. We would not be able to afford the people of Northern Ireland the same health protections that the Bill will afford to everyone else in the United Kingdom. And why not? Because we are subject to a foreign jurisdiction. It is the lifting of that jurisdiction that will bring us liberty to be governed as this House would wish us to be governed, and I trust that the Minister will be able to assure us that those fears are unfounded, that the Danes were wrong to withdraw their Act, and that our courts will—
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Andrew Gwynne)
I am grateful to the hon. and learned Gentleman for giving way. I fully understand his concern. That is why this Government need to give credit to the previous Government, who worked so hard to make this a four-nation approach. I want to give him and the House the assurance that it is the responsibility of the UK Government to ensure the compatibility of the Bill with the Windsor framework. The Government have taken into account all domestic and international obligations in bringing forward this Bill today.
Jim Allister
It gives me no assurance if the Government’s commitment is to ensure compliance with the Windsor framework, because it is the Windsor framework that imposes EU law on Northern Ireland. Because the tobacco directive is one of the laws listed in annex 2 that continue to apply to Northern Ireland, it could trump this Bill. There is no point in the Government saying to this House, or to my constituents, that they will abide by the Windsor framework, because the Windsor framework binds us to EU law. It is only by setting it aside that we can have liberty.
Andrew Gwynne
I am sorry to detain the House, but I make it clear that this is a United Kingdom law. It covers all four nations of the United Kingdom, and we are assured that it complies with the requirements of the Windsor framework. This law will stand.
Jim Allister
The previous Government told this House—and Government lawyers probably said the same—that the Rwanda Act would apply to Northern Ireland and that the legacy Act was unchallengeable, yet it turned out that both fell under the supremacy of EU law. On the face of it, the tobacco directive suppresses this Bill and still has legal force in Northern Ireland. If that is how it turns out, I would like to hear a commitment from the Minister that the Government will override any suppression of this law in Northern Ireland and stand up for UK sovereignty in my part of the United Kingdom.
Jim Dickson (Dartford) (Lab)
It is a privilege to speak in this debate on a Bill that delivers on our manifesto commitment to finish the job started by the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak) at the back end of the last Parliament. We should be proud that, once the Bill receives Royal Assent, it will be the most advanced legislation of its kind in the world.
I should declare at the outset that I was a smoker, and that experience gives me particular clarity on the need for change. I am also honoured to be vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health. I will use my six minutes to say a little about why this Bill is so necessary and—I hope the Minister does not mind —to gently set out where I think it could go further.
We often hear that smoking is about choice. The only choices I made were to have my first cigarette at the age of 15 and then, almost 15 years and thousands of cigarettes later, the much more difficult choice to finally give up.
According to the wonderful Action on Smoking and Health, which has been quoted widely in this debate, the majority of smokers wish they had never started, and it takes, on average, 30 attempts to quit. This legislation will ensure that future generations in this country, including in Dartford, will not have their freedom to choose stolen by a deadly addiction.
The latest figures, before their collection was interrupted by the pandemic, show that in Kent, nearly 6,000 people died from smoking between 2017 and 2019, with 10,000 hospital admissions due to smoking during 2019 and 2020 alone. Before being elected to this place, I was, for many years, a local councillor working on public health issues, and I saw at first hand the burden that smoking places on my local community. Now that I have the great honour of representing the wonderful constituency of Dartford, I see smoking taking a similar toll.
No matter where we are in the country, we will hear the same stories of loved ones lost too soon, of people becoming addicted as children and of the most disadvantaged groups bearing the heaviest burden. We cannot, and must not, accept a situation in which more than 74,000 deaths a year are attributable to smoking. We now know, with more clarity than ever, the damage that smoking causes. Smoking can lead to at least 16 different types of cancer, and it cost England £21.8 billion in 2023, mainly in lost economic productivity.
We have a chance to change this. Modelling by the Department of Health and Social Care estimates that raising the age of sale by one year every year will prevent almost 500,000 cases of stroke, heart disease, lung cancer and other lung diseases by the end of the century. It will save tens of thousands of lives and help untold numbers of people to lead healthier and more enjoyable lives.
An issue that often comes up when discussing measures of this nature is how we make them enforceable. The legislation enjoys widespread public support, with 69% of the public in favour of the measures, according to polling undertaken by YouGov for ASH earlier this year, and even a slim majority of smokers in favour, which indicates that many smokers recognise that we do not want the next generation to grow up addicted to smoking. The measures command high levels of public support, and when such policies are done with and not to people, compliance is self-enforcing and high.
Turning to where the Bill might go a little further, I welcome the additional powers to create smokefree outdoor spaces and to designate smokefree places as vape-free. However, I admit slight disappointment that the Government seem to have ruled out hospitality premises from the scope of the regulations, rather than setting out options via a consultation about how we might proceed. I hope the Minister will recognise that there are options other than an outright ban.
As the number of smokers in the UK continues to decline, there are discussions to be had about how we use public spaces and protect individuals from second-hand smoke, particularly children and those with health conditions. From my time in local government, I know that councils can play a vital role in improving the health of their communities. Councils across the country have used the pavement licensing system to create smokefree outdoor spaces. That has proved popular with businesses and customers, particularly families with children. I gently urge the Minister to consider whether the Bill might be amended to allow local authorities to decide which additional spaces, beyond those regulated nationally, they might like to make smokefree in the best interests of communities.
My final point, which reflects those made by other hon. Members, is about the “polluter pays” principle. We all know that public finances are under significant strain. If the funding we desperately need to create a smokefree country cannot be found in our existing budgets, I would urge Ministers to consider the imposition of a “polluter pays” levy on tobacco manufacturers.
Mr Lee Dillon (Newbury) (LD)
I was a smoker for 15 years, I have vaped for 12 years and I have three children under 12, who I hope will follow neither habit. I support the ambition to create a smokefree society. The harm to individuals is clear, as smoking causes 80,000 deaths per year, and the cost to the country is just as clear, with smoking costing the economy nearly £22 billion a year.
However, I have concerns about the ability of retailers to enforce the age escalator proposals. Will the Minister look at increasing the age at which people can buy tobacco by a year every year, rather than linking it to when a child is born? That would mean that people of the same age would have the same right, rather than two people being 37, for example, and one not being able to purchase tobacco because of exactly when they were born during the year.
My biggest concern about the Bill is the inclusion of vapes, alongside tobacco. Vaping is the fastest growing smoking-cessation method, and evidence has found that it is twice as effective as other tools used to stop smoking. I took part in the statutory instrument debate on 13 November and I support the ban on disposable vapes that that regulation enacted. The regulation will reduce the number of children vaping, the amount of dangerous fake vapes and the impact on the environment.
However, the Bill could go too far on vaping. The all-party parliamentary group on responsible vaping has provided a useful briefing. I believe the House will pass the Bill’s Second Reading later today, so I ask hon. Members to look at the briefing before we get to Committee. Part 5, clause 92 of the Bill has the ability to undo the Government’s ambition of a smokefree country, by potentially banning flavours under a future statutory instrument. A study of more than 20,000 vapers showed that those who start with flavoured vapes or move from tobacco to flavoured vapes are more likely to quit smoking.
That was my experience too. I first purchased a refillable vape in France, which came with a tobacco flavour and a cherry flavour. I went back to the gîte with my friends where we were on holiday. I knew what tobacco tasted like—I had my cigarettes in my pocket—so I tried the cherry flavour and enjoyed it so much that I never opened the tobacco-flavoured vape pot. I took the cigarettes I had in my pocket back home to England. They were on my bedside table for six months, after which I screwed the packet up and threw it away. I have not had a cigarette since.
I honestly feel that the provisions in the Bill for Ministers to be able to ban flavours for adults goes too far. For the record, I vape something called blueberry sour raspberry. It is not aimed at children—I buy it from a specialist vape shop where customers have to be over 18. I have the bottle in my pocket and it has no bright colours or fancy graphics on it. That is my preference as an adult to vape and it stops me wanting to pick up a cigarette again. If the Bill passes its Second Reading this evening, clause 92 should require that vape flavours are regulated with a balance between the impact on adults who would otherwise be smoking and the potential for youth uptake. Hon. Members should remember that disposable vapes have already been banned by the statutory instrument passed a couple of weeks ago.
Finally, before Ministers use the affirmative resolution procedure on any of the Bill’s parts or clauses, I urge them to undertake a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to vaping regulations. I will not vote against the Bill at this stage, but I hope the Government are open to practical amendments in Committee that support the ambition to have a smokefree generation without penalising those who already rely on vapes to lead a healthier lifestyle.
Madam Deputy Speaker
We have three remaining contributions from Back-Bench Members. This is fair notice for colleagues who have contributed to the debate to make their way to the Chamber for wind ups. I call Kirith Entwistle.
Kirith Entwistle (Bolton North East) (Lab)
I declare that I am a member of the responsible vaping APPG. This is a long overdue and important piece of legislation, and I commend my hon. and right hon. Friends on the Front Bench for bringing it before the House.
My home of Bolton is confronting a dual crisis: the devastating impact of smoking and the escalating problem of youth vaping. Smoking continues to ruin lives and places a heavy burden on our NHS, which many of my hon. Friends and hon. Members from across the House have also mentioned. In Bolton North East, the crisis is deeply personal. More than 14% of our population still smoke, which is well above the national average. Tragically, between 2017 and 2019, smoking claimed the lives of 1,147 people in our community, including beloved parents, siblings and friends, leaving behind grieving families and stolen futures. Beyond its devastating human toll, smoking imposes an immense economic burden on Bolton North East. Nearly £100 million is drained every year in lost productivity and increased demands on health and social care. We desperately need that money to rebuild services and support local families.
I am proud that the Bill takes critical steps to address the harms of smoking and works towards creating the first smokefree generation. Yet while smoking is a crisis we know well, there is a new and growing threat: the epidemic of child vaping. In the latest Greater Manchester: Testing and Research on Emergent and New Drugs young person survey, 76% of respondents reported using a nicotine vape in the past year. Schoolchildren are now twice as likely to encounter nicotine through vaping as through cigarettes or tobacco. Flavours such as bubble gum and rainbow candy paired with colourful, cartoon-like packaging are blatantly targeting children.
Flavourings play an undoubtedly important role in helping adults to quit smoking, but we must be honest about how too many vapes are being deliberately designed as a gateway to nicotine for children who have never smoked. I welcome the measures included in the Bill outlined by the Secretary of State earlier, and I am pleased to see our Government taking the issue seriously. As a mother, I look forward to further discussions on how we can protect our children while continuing to support adults who are using vaping as a tool to quit smoking.
What concerns me most is how easily young people can obtain vapes, many of which are illegal and unregulated. In Bolton, we now have the second highest number of vape stores per capita in the country. That is more than twice the national average. Although most stores operate within the law, this widespread availability creates opportunities for illegal vapes to enter the market—vapes that violate safety standards, contain unsafe ingredients and pose serious health risks to our children.
Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) (LD)
Does the hon. Lady share my concern that there is a real problem with vapes being used in the coercion of children for grooming purposes as well?
Kirith Entwistle
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention and, yes, I share those concerns quite deeply.
Bolton council has been doing excellent work to clamp down on illegal vapes. In September, 350 vapes were seized in raids across five locations in Bolton. Just this month, a shop received a closure order for selling illegal tobacco and vapes. I am pleased that this Bill responds to the needs of councils such as Bolton by introducing new powers for trading standards officers that will tackle the black market while protecting legitimate businesses.
The Bill is a commitment to the health and wellbeing of our communities and our future generations. It takes into account the need for the safeguarding of our children. For the families who have lost loved ones to smoking-related illnesses, for the schools that have been overwhelmed by the vaping epidemic, and for the young people being targeted by unscrupulous marketing, this Bill is for them and I commend it to the House.
Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)
It is a rare thing in politics to have a moment when there is an absolute right thing to do, but consigning smoking to the history books for our children, our grandchildren and every generation that follows is one of those times. We should be under no illusion that the decision that we take today will, at some point in the future—long after we have left this place—result in a time when nobody smokes. That will be the legacy of this decision today.
I ask the House to indulge me for a moment. Let us imagine that, at that point in the future, somebody brings forward a Bill to decriminalise smoking, and the Minister, clutching their impact assessment, tells the House that it will kill only 80,000 people a year, that it will cost our NHS £3.6 billion and that 80% of the people who take it up will be under 20. Which one of us would vote for it? Which party leader would refuse to direct their troops in such a vote? Who would argue that it is freedom of choice to smoke in those circumstances? It is nonsense. The decision we are taking today is clear and it is for the good of this country.
Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)
The hon. Member talks about choice. I agree with what he has said so far, but does he agree that, when it comes to the banning of smoking for people born after 1 January 2009, there is no removal of choice in the Bill, because they cannot smoke anyway at the moment? Therefore, there is no removal of choice from those people.
Mr Brash
The hon. Member is completely correct in what he says, and it is the proportionate way to do it. Some of the arguments that I have heard today about freedom of choice are genuinely confusing. One Member asked earlier why we do not ban sugary foods or alcohol on that basis. I say that we have to draw the line somewhere. That is an argument for the decriminalisation of everything—cocaine, heroin, you name it, let’s go for it. No, we have to draw the line somewhere and, given the statistics around smoking, it is clear that this is the right line to draw.
I do not want to say a great deal more on this issue other than to reflect on the conversations that I have had with my children. We have been on a long journey when it comes to smoking in this country. I remember telling my children that they could eat a meal in a restaurant, and that those on the table next to them, in the smoking zone, would be smoking while they ate. They thought I was mad. I remember going to school on the bus and seeing the little cigarette holders in front of me because people used to be able to smoke on the bus. My children think that is madness. I can only hope that not long in the future children will look back and think that it was mad that we smoked at all.
I was asked about this Bill soon after I was elected by a friend, who is a parent. He knew it had fallen prior to the general election. He asked, “Will it be back?” and I said, “I am confident that it will be back.” He said, “But will it be in time?” and I said, “In time for what?” He said, “In time for her” and pointed to his teenage daughter. I am pleased to say to Mark, Kim and their daughter Bella that we are bringing it back in time and that it will make a massive difference to the lives of people in this country.
Phil Brickell (Bolton West) (Lab)
I would like to place on the record my support for the Bill, which the Government are right to describe as the biggest public health intervention in a generation. As someone who grew up around the NHS, with my first job being at Bolton hospital, I have seen at first hand the huge cost of smoking and vaping in my constituency. In Bolton, smoking claims around 380 lives a year. Across the UK, that number is 80,000, and tobacco-related illnesses put tremendous pressure on the NHS, with smoking responsible for one in four cancer deaths. Indeed, every single minute someone is put in hospital because of smoking. The appointments, the scans, the treatment—it all adds up. Smoking costs the taxpayer over £3 billion each year in healthcare bills.
The tide of public opinion has turned irrevocably. Eight in 10 Greater Manchester adults support ending smoking, according to the Make Smoking History campaign. I suspect that many have had family or friends impacted by smoking-related harms. Five years ago, the previous Government announced their ambition for England to be smokefree by 2030. Despite a stark warning from the Khan review in 2022 that
“without further action, England will miss the smokefree 2030 target by at least 7 years”,
I find it regrettable that the Conservatives did not get round to these literal life-and-death reforms before it was too late to legislate before the general election.
I am delighted that just a few months in we are already delivering on our manifesto pledges. A generational ban on purchasing tobacco for anyone born after 1 January 2009, new regulations for the extension of smokefree areas to include our schools and hospitals, and new restrictions on oral tobacco products such as snus are hugely welcome in our fight against smoking-related illnesses.
The Bill is hugely important, and I will focus the remainder of my remarks on vaping in particular. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle) noted, Bolton is regrettably one of the two vaping capitals of the UK, with over 20 vape shops registered per 100,000 people according to reporting in the Bolton News. Vaping can be a genuine aid for those seeking to wean themselves off smoking, but while it is clear that vapes, in combination with behavioural support, can support quitting, the health advice is unambiguous: children and adults who have never smoked should never vape.
What disturbs me is that vaping products are obviously marketed at children. Indeed, a number of vape stores in Horwich and Westhoughton in my constituency are not only garish eyesores but directly associate vapes with sweets and toys in their shop fronts. I have no doubt that many of my colleagues in the Chamber will be familiar with similar stores in their own constituencies. It is clear that bubble gum and candy floss flavours are not aimed at those adults genuinely trying to wean themselves off tobacco. This is not harmless; youth vaping has more than doubled in the past five years, while Bolton council has been told that children as young as 13 are unable to go an hour at school without vaping. Just last Friday, I visited St Catherine’s primary school in Horwich and was shocked to hear children no older than 11 directly raise their concerns around vaping with me. St Joseph’s high school in Horwich, which I had the pleasure of meeting last week here in Parliament, has had to install vape sensors, while the headmaster Tony McCabe has said he has already seen a rise in young people acquiring vapes from the black market. I hope the Minister will consider how to tackle the already expanding black market for these products. That is why I especially welcome the measures in the Bill to provide the Secretary of State with powers to regulate vaping products, including their content, flavour, packaging and product requirements.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about illegal tobacco and other substances. It is really important that we bear down on that illicit trade. Illegal tobacco not only deprives the Exchequer of funds but means that all kinds of other nefarious activities can take place in the shops that sell it. Also, the illegal cigarettes sold do not extinguish. A few years ago in my constituency there was a house fire with fatalities as a direct result of illegal cigarettes.
Phil Brickell
I thank the right hon. Member for his contribution. I will take assurance from the Minister on that when he winds up.
I place on record my enthusiasm for the separate ban on single-use vapes from June 2025, which the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr Dillon) mentioned. As other Members have noted, not only are they particularly cheap and therefore accessible to young adults, but they are an inefficient use of critical resources, difficult to recycle and frequently littered around the countryside.
By introducing these world-leading reforms, we can create a smokefree generation and break the cycle of addiction and disadvantage. I am proud that it is a Labour Government who are delivering this legislation.
Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
Prevention is better than cure. As we have heard, smoking is a cause of many premature deaths and much serious ill health. That was why the previous Government introduced legislation to tackle it and restrict access to tobacco purchases for those born after 1 January 2009. This Bill builds on many measures in the previous one.
As we have heard, this is a Bill of two parts: tobacco and vapes. Those two parts have been received differently, a bit like Marmite and chocolate spread—part controversial, part pretty universally liked. The section on smoking and tobacco has proved to be a bit like Marmite—some people have liked it. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) spoke eloquently of his passion for stop-smoking measures, his successful campaigning, and the previous Government’s success in reducing rates of smoking. My hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) spoke eloquently about the balance between libertarianism and choice, and the need for order, societal norms and the protection of others in society. The hon. Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) spoke about the dangers of smoking and the difficulties and challenges for people trying to quit.
On the other hand, other Members expressed concern about the Bill. The hon. Member for Lewes (James MacCleary) talked about how the Secretary of State might use powers relating to outside places where people may smoke. The hon. Member for Newbury (Mr Dillon) shared his concerns about how measures on the age of sale will work in practice. Those will indeed be clunky measures for shopkeepers to try to enforce, and will have an effect on the cohort of individuals who are just either side of the threshold, who will require ID throughout their lives. The hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister) spoke about how that measure will work in Northern Ireland, and although he received some assurances from the Minister, I am not sure that they were completely effective.
Although I confess that I do not like Marmite, it is a free vote this evening for Conservative Members, and I will support the Bill. The Secretary of State said in opening that 350 young people will start smoking today, most of whom will regret it, so why was 1 January 2009 chosen? I appreciate that that was the date in the previous Bill, but why did he choose it for his Bill too?
Let me move on to the area of chocolate spread—the part of the Bill on vaping. I think it was universally welcomed, and was supported by the hon. Members for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend (Mary Glindon) and for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) among others. It includes measures to tackle vaping among children, on which I have personally campaigned. As others have said, the chief medical officer has been clear that for someone who smokes, vaping may be better, but if they do not smoke, they should not vape. As a Member of Parliament and a children’s doctor, I have been increasingly concerned about the sharp increase in children addicted to vaping and, more recently, to other nicotine products such as pouches. Schoolteachers have reported that children are unable to concentrate, or even complete a whole lesson, without visiting the bathroom to vape.
Sir John Hayes
I very rarely disagree with my hon. Friend. She is of course right about vaping, the effect that it has on children and the difficulty that schools have in managing it, as headteachers will no doubt have told Members across the House, but can she really go into the Division Lobby to support the Bill with this nonsense about age? The idea that someone aged 30 could smoke and someone aged 29 could not, and the idea that that could be policed or managed in any practical way, is just nonsensical. It was daft when the last Government introduced it, and it is daft now this Government have done so.
Dr Johnson
The challenge is that if we were to ban it altogether, we could risk criminalising people who were already addicted to tobacco products—adults who had made that choice. That is the reason why both present and past Governments put forward a measure to increase the age gradually, but I understand the points that have been made about the difficulties for shopkeepers and others in enforcing it over time.
I return to vaping. Doctors report a growing body of evidence suggesting that children may be having difficulty in school and suffering health problems as a result of vaping. A report from Healthwatch said that 31% of the more than 4,000 under-18s it surveyed were regularly vaping. Nicotine is a powerfully addictive product. Young people are particularly susceptible to it, so it is very important that we protect children from vaping and other nicotine products. After all, vaping is an adult activity; it is apparently designed to help smokers quit. While the industry may argue that the flavours and colours are enjoyed by adults—and they may well be—I struggle to understand why adults would want a vape flavoured like a unicorn milkshake, whatever a unicorn’s milk tastes like. The Healthwatch survey showed that fruit flavours are very popular with children, and the same has been repeated by various teaching unions, the British Medical Association, of which I am a member, Cancer Research UK and even a Government report from last year. I also do not see why an adult stop-smoking device needs to be disguised in the form of a highlighter pen, which could perhaps be hidden in a child’s pencil case, or created in the shape of a children’s cartoon character. Enticing and luring children into a lifetime of unwanted and potentially harmful addiction is immoral.
The Secretary of State is taking powers to regulate the flavours, colours and packaging of vapes, but how will he ensure that he stays one step ahead of an industry whose income depends on a new generation of addicts? He has taken quite extensive powers, which I know is of concern to some hon. and right hon. Members, but how and when does he intend to use them? What support will be given to children who are already addicted to vaping to help them quit?
Finally, while this is a free vote issue, I am pleased on a personal level to see some of the proposals that I put forward on the last Bill being incorporated into this one, particularly on the sponsorship and advertising of vending machines. Whatever our views on this Bill, it is a bold piece of legislation of good intention. It aims to improve the health of our nation and of our children in particular and to reduce smoking and prevent nicotine addiction in the young. It is not clear whether it will work, but we have to hope, for the health of all of us and our children, that it does.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Andrew Gwynne)
It is a pleasure to close this debate on behalf of the Government. I commend my hon. Friends the Members for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy), for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend (Mary Glindon), for Chatham and Aylesford (Tristan Osborne), for Suffolk Coastal (Jenny Riddell-Carpenter), for Worthing West (Dr Cooper), for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey), for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper), for Cardiff West (Mr Barros-Curtis), for Dartford (Jim Dickson), for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle), for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) and for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) and, on the Opposition Benches, the hon. Members for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), for Lewes (James MacCleary), for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan), for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) and for South Antrim (Robin Swann), the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister) and the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr Dillon), for a series of outstanding contributions this afternoon. Many of us on the Labour Benches remember the last Labour Government’s proud history of public health measures—indeed, some of us were in this place at the time. From the indoor smoking ban to putting an end to cigarette advertising, we took the bold action to drive down smoking prevalence, and the country is still feeling the benefits of those policies today. However, after 14 years of public health neglect, we have seen much of our hard work squandered. Health inequalities have grown worse, and life expectancy is stalling. Most appallingly, life expectancy is going into reverse in some communities.
Afzal Khan (Manchester Rusholme) (Lab)
I welcome this Bill. Some 6,000 children in Greater Manchester take up smoking each year, allowing tobacco and vape companies to profit from increasing health inequalities. If we eradicate smoking, Greater Manchester’s economy will gain over £2.5 billion each year, funds that could be allocated to our health and social care sector. Does the Minister agree that if we follow the recommendations of the smoking review by Professor Javed Khan OBE, who did an excellent job on that review, we have the unique opportunity to both save lives and reduce poverty, creating a healthier and more equal society?
Andrew Gwynne
I thank my hon. Friend for that contribution, not least because it allows me to place on record this Government’s thanks to Javed Khan for the work he did in his review of smoking. My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head, because in the parts of Greater Manchester that he and I represent, health inequalities are stark and visible. We are going to turn them around. Our health mission pledged to tackle the social inequalities that influence health, and to ensure that children have the very best start possible, in which they are given the building blocks for a healthy life. That will be an immense challenge, but every member of this Government is up for the battle.
Colleagues have made a number of points, and I will try to answer as many as I can in the time we have left. First, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Harrow East for the work he has done on this issue over a number of years. I assure him that all tobacco products are covered by this Bill, including the chewing tobacco product that he referred to. My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham, who has also been a passionate spokesperson for tackling smoking harm, is absolutely right to raise the issue of article 5.3. The new Labour Government take very seriously their obligations as a party to the World Health Organisation’s framework convention on tobacco control, and we remain fully committed to that convention, including the important commitment, under article 5.3, to protecting public health policies on tobacco control from
“commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry”.
The shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Melton and Syston (Edward Argar), referred to the powers to bring in smokefree places. We will consult on extending smokefree places to include areas outside schools, children’s playgrounds and hospitals in England. We believe that strikes the right balance between protecting the most vulnerable and recognising the pressures facing the hospitality sector. I want to make the shadow Secretary of State aware, though, that the Bill was designed in full consultation with, and to meet the needs of, the devolved Governments across the whole of the United Kingdom. It is a UK Bill, with powers that meet the requirements of each of the component parts of our country, and I reiterate that as far as England is concerned, this Government will seek to consult on schools, children’s playgrounds and hospitals only.
A number of Members, including the hon. Member for Harrow East, raised the topic of stop smoking services. We are putting an extra £70 million into local stop smoking services, which could help with up to 200,000 successful quits a year. We are still rolling out a smokefree pregnancy incentive scheme, which will support pregnant women in quitting and ensure that more babies do not suffer a hit to their life chances before they are even born.
Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
I am very sorry that I was not in the Chamber for the beginning of the debate. I have very strong views on this matter, because my father died of cancer—I quit 20 years ago, thank God. It occurs to me that we have heard from other people who have quit, and that we who have quit could be mobilised to help others quit. Why do the Government not use us? We could do a lot of good and provide a lot of help.
Andrew Gwynne
I think the hon. Gentleman has just talked himself into a job. He is absolutely right that the best people to advocate for stopping smoking are former smokers.
We will still encourage adult smokers to switch to vaping through Swap to Stop in England, and I am delighted that localities have asked for over half a million starter kits so far. On advertising regulations, of course the consultation will take place after Royal Assent, but I hope that I can assure the hon. Member for Harrow East that we will take away his point about ensuring that the NHS can still advertise Swap to Stop under those regulations. On a tobacco industry levy, fiscal matters are for the Treasury, but I am sure that his views and those of others have been communicated to Treasury Ministers.
The hon. Member for Lewes mentioned the rise of the black market. This is a line that has been parroted by the tobacco industry for years, so we need to spell out the facts. Whenever Governments of any guise have introduced targeted tobacco control measures, the black market actually has not prospered. Consumption of illegal tobacco has gone from 15 billion cigarettes nearly 25 years ago to just one 10th of that amount last year, and when the last Labour Government raised the age of sale from 16 to 18, the number of illicit cigarettes fell by a quarter. However, this requires better enforcement, and we will use every second of the generously long buffer period to support businesses in preparing for and implementing the changes, including through information campaigns. We are providing £10 million to trading standards to increase their capacity and capabilities next year, and there is £100 million for Border Force and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs over the next five years to tackle illicit and under-age sales. The Bill also allows trading standards to issue on-the-spot fines of £200, and to reinvest the proceeds of those fines, and indeed the licensing regime, back into further enforcement.
Bob Blackman
Will the Minister consider ensuring that the fines are raised by at least inflation each year? Fines could be increased on a scale, to make sure that they keep progress with changes.
Andrew Gwynne
We have already doubled the fine proposed in the previous Government’s Bill, which is a step. I listened very carefully to the hon. Gentleman’s argument, and he might wish to pursue it in Committee, should he be fortunate enough to be a Committee member. I look forward to the debates we might have.
A number of questions about the licensing regime were posed by the shadow Secretary of State, as well as by the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) and others. I reassure the House that across the sector, there is broad consensus among retailers about a licensing scheme; more than four fifths of them have expressed their support. Unlike alcohol, there is no licensing requirement for tobacco. A lot of people outside this House would find that hard to understand. They assume that convenience stores, supermarkets and other places that sell alcohol are licensed in a similar way to sell tobacco products, but that is not the case. We will bring in a licensing scheme, because we know that will have a huge public health impact, as other licensing regimes do.
Tristan Osborne
When I was on a council, I had a portfolio managing licensing. Councils already manage significant licensing functions, so it would be very convenient to simply add this function to those. That would not necessarily be a significant bureaucratic hurdle, as has been said.
Andrew Gwynne
Local government will take the lead on this matter, and we will consult widely on how we bring forward the licensing regime, and on how we implement it through secondary legislation, following that consultation. An impact assessment will be prepared before the secondary legislation is introduced, but I want to work with local government across England—I am sure that ministerial counterparts in other parts of the United Kingdom seeking to bring in a licensing regime will do the same—to ensure that we get this right for local government. That includes ensuring that the cost of running a licensing regime is met by the regime itself.
Mr Brash
We have mentioned the fact that local government is responsible for public health. I have had our director of public health email me just today to say how supportive they are of this Bill. Local government wants this opportunity to try to improve the health of local people. The fears that local government would be under pressure are simply wrong, are they not?
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. From the engagement that I have had with members across all parties in local government—elected members, officers and directors of public health—I know that they want these measures. They are up for introducing them, and for helping us to get them right.
The hon. Member for North Shropshire raised the issue of ID checks, as did a number of others. I gently say to those who expressed a degree of scepticism that most retailers already follow recommended practice and regularly ask customers for ID. We are stopping people from ever starting smoking, and 83% of smokers start before the age of 20. That means that someone who has never previously smoked is highly unlikely to want to take up smoking later in life. Our published modelling shows that smoking rates in England for 14 to 30-year-olds could be close to 0% as early as 2050 with the measures in this Bill.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
As a former teacher, I hope that the Government are working across Departments. Will we work with the Department for Education to ensure that these conversations are had in our schools, right from the beginning, at primary level, and all the way through?
Andrew Gwynne
That is absolutely crucial. With this legislation, we have to make sure that we do not take our foot off the pedal when it comes to education and informing the next generation of children of the harms of smoking and vaping through our public health initiative.
Johanna Baxter (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (Lab)
My constituents in Paisley and Renfrewshire South need a health service that moves from sickness to prevention, so can my hon. Friend confirm that this UK-wide Bill will impact my constituents? Has he had discussions with the Scottish Government about ensuring its implementation north of the border?
Andrew Gwynne
That is an important point, and it allows me to place on record my thanks to the Health Ministers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for how they have approached our desire to bring all parts of the United Kingdom together to make a smokefree United Kingdom, not just a smokefree England, through this legislation. I hope that I can reassure my hon. Friend that I have had incredibly fruitful conversations with the Health Minister in the SNP Scottish Government. She is as wedded and committed to this Bill and its measures as we are in this House today. I am reassured that across the whole United Kingdom, we will be walking in step to ensure that the next generation of children never takes up smoking.
Several hon. Members rose—
Andrew Gwynne
I will not give way now, as I have to end my speech. I know that you are keeping a careful eye on the clock, Madam Deputy Speaker.
If I had had more time, I would have talked about the huge public health benefits of the Bill that will do so much to prevent death, dementia and disability in old age. I could have gone into further detail about the economic benefits of the Bill, such as getting people back into work and saving untold sums of money for our NHS, but, from my perspective, the single most important thing that the Bill will do is tackle those stark inequalities across our country, because this fight is personal to me.
I have seen the harmful effects of tobacco on the people around me my entire life. As a schoolboy, I was educated about the harms of smoking, but it did nothing to stop a number of my peers from getting addicted to cigarettes. As an MP, I have seen at first hand how tobacco has devastated deprived communities across our country, not least in Greater Manchester. As the Minister for public health, I am determined to end the cycle of poverty and ill health, the blight of addition, disease and despair caused by smoking. No longer will it sap the strength of our cities—Stoke, Sunderland, Salford and so many others. This is the will of His Majesty’s Government, this is the promise of the Bill, and I urge colleagues across the House to vote with us to protect their constituents and do the right thing.
Question put, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Business without Debate
Delegated Legislation
Pimping websites and paying for sex
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
I rise to present a petition on behalf of my constituents regarding commercial sexual exploitation—the day after the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and on day two of the United Nations’ 16 days of activism. Perpetrated primarily against women and girls, the global trade in sexual exploitation is bigger than ever. We know that demand from the minority of men who pay for sex is driving the prostitution and sex trafficking trade, and that this sexual exploitation is being facilitated by pimping websites that are free to advertise their victims with impunity.
The petition states:
“The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to outlaw pimping websites and paying for sex, and provide support, not sanctions, to victims of sexual exploitation.
And the petitioners remain, etc.”
Following is the full text of the petition:
[The petition of residents of the constituency of Gower,
Declares that demand from the minority of men who pay for sex is driving the prostitution and sex trafficking trade, and this sexual exploitation is being facilitated by pimping websites that operate with impunity.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to outlaw pimping websites and paying for sex, and provide support, not sanctions, to victims of sexual exploitation.
And the petitioners remain, etc.]
[P003020]
Coastal Infrastructure: Scotland
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate
Graeme Downie (Dunfermline and Dollar) (Lab)
Scotland’s history is intertwined with our coastal communities. From shipbuilding on the Clyde to fishing off Peterhead and Fraserburgh, these areas helped fuel the UK’s growth as a global power. Closer to my home, the Forth estuary has a proud industrial legacy. Longannet power station, near Kincardine, once powered UK industry and, to this day, the Babcock dockyard in Rosyth plays a pivotal role in naval shipbuilding. The Forth remains an active and busy waterway, with tankers and barges constantly on the move. None the less, in common with other areas, the decline in industry in the Forth is obvious. In some places, industry has been partially replaced by tourism, with 9 million visitors coming to Fife last year and contributing £570 million to the local economy.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the hon. Member for bringing forward this issue. I congratulate him on securing his second Adjournment debate in two weeks, which is fantastic. As he will know, he and I—if we go back far enough—are Gaelic cousins: I am descended from the Stewarts of the lowlands of Scotland, who came across to Northern Ireland. It is very important for us in Northern Ireland and those across the Irish sea to have a relationship through tourism. Does the hon. Member agree that greater support and funding for the ferry service between our two great countries, and therefore for tourism, would only yield greater connectivity and prosperity for both our nations? I know that many people in my constituency go to Scotland every year for a holiday, and I am sure that the same applies in the other direction.
Graeme Downie
I could not agree more. I had the pleasure of being in Belfast just a couple of weeks ago for a family occasion. I was not able to take the ferry on that short trip—sadly, I had to fly—but I could not agree more with the hon. Gentleman’s point.
For coastal communities in my constituency, such as Kincardine, Culross and Torryburn, tourism is indeed a welcome industry, with the Fife coastal path and the Pilgrim Way welcoming thousands of people a year to enjoy the beautiful Fife coastline. Across Scotland in 2022, marine and coastal tourism was worth £633 million, providing a total of 31,000 jobs. However, although tourism is welcomed by such communities, it can bring difficulties as well. Villages that were never designed to deal with hundreds or thousands of visitors sometimes feel swamped, with locals understandably resentful. The situation has not been aided over the years by SNP cuts to local council budgets, which have delayed upgrades to critical infrastructure, including roads, paths, play parks and other local facilities.
However, our coastal communities are not just scenic backdrops but economic powerhouses, cultural treasures and key players in our green future. They need our continued support and investment. In August this year, the Prime Minister said that our coastal communities are the lifeblood of Britain’s maritime economy. From supporting international trade to driving innovation in renewable energy, these areas must be at the heart of our plans to build a stronger, greener, and more prosperous future for the UK.
Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on obtaining his second Adjournment debate. Does he agree that in the transition away from industrial ports and towards tourism, both the UK and Scottish Governments must invest to avoid the pressure of tourism hotspots? We must use the full force of both Governments, and of capital, to invest in and change our ports to make them fit for the green transition to renewables. Given the challenge of climate change, does he agree that we must defend our coastal communities and invest in causeways such as the Baleshare causeway in my constituency, and in ports and harbours all around the coast, to makes sure that they are defended from rising tides and the effects of climate change?
Graeme Downie
Once again, I could not agree more. My hon. Friend has the pleasure of representing one of the most beautiful parts of the world, and I have been able to spend a bit of time there. He is absolutely correct about the challenges that our coastal communities face, and programmes such as Great British Energy have huge potential for green jobs. We must always make sure that the transition is carried out with sensitivity and in partnership with communities wherever we can.
The Prime Minister is someone with whom I would always choose to agree, and I could not agree more with his views on coastal communities and the maritime economy. The national wealth fund announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a potentially transformative opportunity for our coastal communities, with at least £5.8 billion of the NWF’s capital focused on sectors such as ports, green hydrogen, carbon capture, gigafactories and green steel.
Stephen Gethins (Arbroath and Broughty Ferry) (SNP)
I also congratulate the hon. Member on securing this debate. On offshore renewables, which I know he will be mentioning, Scottish communities will obviously have a huge amount to contribute. Does he agree that we need to look for inclusion in the European energy markets for those greatly expanded offshore renewables? Does he also agree that we need to look into the issue of transmission charging? I know he will be aware of that as well.
Graeme Downie
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Given the additional co-operation we are seeing between the UK and Scottish Governments, with the UK Labour Government in power and resetting that relationship, there will absolutely be opportunities to work together for the benefit of all parts of the United Kingdom on energy.
In 2022, passenger and freight water transport was worth £250 million to the Scottish economy and supported 1,600 jobs. The port of Rosyth in my constituency currently handles 600,000 tonnes of bulk cargo, ranging across a variety of incomes, including road salt, which has been much needed in the past week. It was definitely required in Fife, as I found out on my trip to the airport earlier this week. In addition, the port of Rosyth works with oil and gas companies for the import and export of vital industrial components, and when I was near the port recently, I could also see turbine blades and other components for renewable energy sitting on the dockside—a sign of the future, hopefully, for my constituency.
The Rosyth waterfront, currently being cleaned up by the Scarborough Muir Group, was once home to a 250,000-tonne capacity concrete tank and 5,000-tonne steel tanks, all used to fuel the fleet during world war two. The development of the site offers a further exciting glimpse into the possible future of the Fife coast, given the required sustained investment. The green freeport offers exciting opportunities up and down the Forth estuary on both sides, with plans for Rosyth including additional freight and passenger transport and improved rail link options, all of which take freight off the roads while at the same time providing new jobs and helping us on the pathway to achieving net zero.
Over the longer-term trend, the Scottish marine economy contracted by 14% between 2013 and 2022, a shocking decline for which both the SNP and Tory Governments must carry the can. We must do more to support our coastal economy, and there is one specific measure on which I would like to focus in the remainder of my time. Between 2002 and 2018, there was a direct ferry line from Rosyth to Zeebrugge operating as a passenger and freight service, and latterly as a freight-only service. I believe, as many of my constituents do, that now is the time to bring this project back. To that end, I have held several discussions with those co-ordinating these efforts, as well as with DFDS Ferries, which has said that it would like to bring the service back as soon as spring 2025, but between Rosyth and Dunkirk instead.
Additional investment in the port of Dunkirk, including on facilities and additional upgrading of freight and rail, makes this an optimal moment to bring back this service from Scotland to Europe. The facilities at Dunkirk are ready and the national wealth fund would appear to be the ideal opportunity for this Government to take the lead on developing the facilities at Rosyth that are needed to make that happen. Never mind £5.8 billion, it could take as little as a £3 million investment in Rosyth to bring back a regular passenger and freight service between Scotland and mainland Europe, but time is of the essence if it is to be fully realised. With £3 million of funding, we could get a jump-start on all of this as soon as spring 2025.
This Government have said that they want to move quickly with investments that deliver. To my mind, there is no better example of that than getting a passenger and freight ferry back up and running between Scotland and mainland Europe, with Rosyth perfectly positioned for the service. The infrastructure needed is not extensive. All that is needed is improvement of some of the access roads, space for new security checks and the installation of power and associated works. It is estimated that a direct ferry link would carry 51,000 passengers per year, rising to 79,000, and bring an additional £11.5 million spend to the Scottish economy each year. On freight, it is estimated that the route would begin by carrying 22,000 freight units per year, taking 8.2 million km of freight traffic off UK roads, with a corresponding reduction in carbon emissions.
The kind of increased passenger and freight links that I want to see in Rosyth would revitalise the economy not only in my constituency but across Fife more broadly and would support the Government’s net zero ambitions while underpinning the Scotland Office’s plans for Brand Scotland, selling Scotland to the world. I have spoken to major employers in the constituency, including Amazon and Mowi, which have both said that they would welcome this ferry link as it would help their contribution to the local economy. Mowi plays a key part in the Scotland Office’s Brand Scotland efforts by promoting and selling Scottish salmon to the world.
There are other hurdles that would need to be overcome in order to finalise bringing the service back to Rosyth, including addressing the failure of the SNP Scottish Government to amend the necessary legislation that would allow border control at Grangemouth to be used for Rosyth for certain freight. There is also the matter of the delay by the Scottish Government in confirming Transport Scotland funding for the waterborne freight grant. While the SNP continues to delay and make excuses at its end, this Labour Government have the opportunity to jump-start this process.
Stephen Gethins
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point about the important Rosyth connection, and I pay tribute to him and his predecessor for their good work. He is always good natured about these things, but he will notice that neighbouring Ireland has opened up more than a dozen such routes. Why does he think that is? Does he think that membership of the single market would be enormously helpful in opening up some of these routes and further benefiting our coastal communities?
Graeme Downie
The hon. Gentleman is right that I should pay tribute to my predecessor, Douglas Chapman, who did much to champion this cause. My point is that we can do this in the current situation, and that is what we should be doing as quickly as possible.
This debate is about how to get investment back into our coastal communities, and what better opportunity than a passenger and freight link between Rosyth and central Europe? As I discussed with my hon. Friend on the Front Bench prior to this evening’s debate, I wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the start of October, but I received a reply only very recently, and I suspect only because this debate was on the Order Paper. This is disappointing, particularly given the small amount of money and the deadline to make this project a reality in 2025.
Of course, I do not expect my hon. Friend to be able to make any commitments this evening, and I certainly do not expect him to speak on behalf of the Treasury. However, it is critical that the Government deliver for Scotland in a visible and meaningful way as quickly as possible, by progressing projects that further Brand Scotland, which is a fantastic policy programme that sells Scotland to the world, benefiting people across my constituency and across Scotland. What actions are the Scotland Office taking to bring the correct partners around the table to make the Rosyth to Dunkirk ferry a possibility as quickly as possible, so that the option of bringing it back in 2025 can at least be seriously explored?
Whether it is restoring the Rosyth ferry, addressing infrastructure challenges or unlocking the potential of initiatives such as the green freeports, now is the time to act. By working together, we can ensure that our coastal communities thrive for generations to come.
Martin McCluskey (Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this debate. As others have said, this is his second Adjournment debate in a matter of weeks, so the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) might have some competition. I represent a coastal constituency, so I am pleased to respond on behalf of the Government.
I am sure the whole House will agree when I say that the UK is blessed with a wonderful coastline, and nowhere more so than in Scotland. As much as it might pain me as the MP for Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West to admit that there are some beautiful stretches of coastline that are not in reach of Wemyss bay, Inverkip, Greenock, Gourock or Port Glasgow, I will grudgingly admit to my hon. Friend that the Fife coastline is indeed beautiful and, as he has highlighted this evening, has the potential to contribute to the growth of our economy, particularly through our world-class ports. We have heard about his proposal for Rosyth, to which I will return later.
Ports will play a crucial role in the development and deployment of the offshore energy projects that are essential to meeting our clean energy mission, as well as facilitating the international trade that is vital to meeting our mission of turbocharging economic growth. It is therefore right that we support these communities with the infrastructure they need to thrive. That is why the UK Government have announced the creation of the national wealth fund, backed with £7.3 billion, including £5.8 billion of capital funding for five priority sectors, including port infrastructure. This will drive investment in ports across the country, delivering the change we need to achieve our mission of growing the economy.
The national wealth fund will build on the work of the UK Infrastructure Bank, which has a strong track record of investing in port infrastructure across the UK. Indeed, the national wealth fund is providing £50 million, which has been matched by the Scottish National Investment Bank, towards a £100 million joint credit facility for the Ardersier port. This project demonstrates the potential of our national wealth fund investments. The site is currently the largest brownfield port in the UK but, when complete, it will become a nationally significant infrastructure facility, spanning 450 acres. This game-changing investment will redevelop the port, developing its capacity to deploy offshore wind infrastructure at an industrial scale, driving forward our net zero ambitions. I make it clear to my hon. Friend and other Members that this project is just a start, and further details on securing national wealth fund funding will be set out in due course.
My hon. Friend set out his vision for the port of Rosyth. I would be delighted to assist him, alongside officials in the Scotland Office, in his engagement with the national wealth fund for projects in his constituency. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor has been crystal clear that if growth is the challenge, investment is the solution. That is why this Government will invest in the jobs, industries and infrastructure of the future through the national wealth fund and GB Energy.
Alongside that, our new industrial strategy, currently being developed by the UK Government in consultation with the Scottish Government, sets a credible 10-year plan to deliver the certainty and stability businesses need to invest in the high growth sectors that will drive our growth mission. The strategy will take advantage of the UK’s unique strengths and untapped potential, enabling our already world-leading sectors to adapt and grow, and seizing opportunities to lead in new and emerging areas.
Many of the priority sectors identified in the emerging strategy, such as clean energy and defence, will directly benefit and build on the strengths of our coastal communities. The strategy will take a place-based approach, driving growth in towns, cities and regions around Britain. We will work tirelessly to deliver growth through this strategy for communities across the UK.
We will also look internationally for opportunities. As my hon. Friend set out, increasing export markets for Scottish businesses are crucial for our success. That is why we are committed to promoting Brand Scotland around the world. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland is currently in south-east Asia meeting businesses and Government Ministers to encourage investment here at home.
However, we cannot go it alone. As others have said, we must work closely with the Scottish Government, combining our respective powers to deliver on these ambitions, which is why we are resetting the relationship with the Scottish Government. Across a range of areas, we are working together with them to deliver for communities and strengthen our economy. We are backing the Scottish Government to deliver, with a record block grant of £47.7 billion for 2025-26, with a further £3.4 billion via the Barnett formula. That is the largest settlement in real terms since devolution began.
As a result of the decisions that this Government have taken, we have been able to confirm the UK Government’s commitment to investing nearly £1.4 billion in important local projects across Scotland over the next 10 years. I am delighted to say that that includes £26 million for the Forth freeport, subject to full business case approval. The Forth green freeport is expected to support thousands of jobs and bring in millions of pounds of investment across its sites in Edinburgh, Fife and Falkirk. Local partners estimate that it could create up to 34,500 jobs and generate £7.9 billion of private and public investment over the next decade.
My hon. Friend mentioned that he has written to the Treasury regarding possible upgrades to the port of Rosyth. I am aware that the Chancellor has recently responded to his correspondence and, as I said earlier, I would be delighted to assist him in engaging with the national wealth fund. If he would like a further discussion with the Treasury on that subject, I would be happy to facilitate a meeting with my noble friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury for him to discuss the issue further.
As my hon. Friend said, decisions also need to be made by the Scottish Government. Engagement and support from the Scottish Government and Transport Scotland will be necessary to deliver the project he mentions. I encourage Scottish Government Ministers and officials to engage closely with my hon. Friend to discuss the proposals in more detail. I will do all I can to support him in fighting for opportunities for growth in his constituency, and I know that both the Secretary of State for Scotland and the Minister for Scotland share this desire.
May I once again pay tribute to my hon. Friend, and to Members who have intervened in the debate? I am sure they will join me in agreeing that this is a vital issue that we must get right to ensure Scottish coastal communities play their rightful role at the heart of this Government’s ambitious agenda.
Question put and agreed to.
Draft Medical Devices (Post-market Surveillance Requirements) (Amendment) (Great Britain) Regulations 2024
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Andrew Gwynne)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Medical Devices (Post-market Surveillance Requirements) (Amendment) (Great Britain) Regulations 2024.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I will begin by setting out the policy context for the regulations.
The 2020 independent medicines and medical devices safety review, led by Baroness Cumberlege, highlighted the consequences of inadequate post-market regulations for patients, especially women, who received pelvic mesh implants. The review found that the system often failed to listen to patients’ concerns and acted too slowly when issues were identified. Those women have suffered horrendously as a result. The review called for substantial changes to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the MHRA, to ensure patient safety, including improved regulation of medical devices to enhance the collection of adverse incident data to reduce patient safety risks and prevent a recurrence of harm.
This statutory instrument will deliver improved safety for patients. It will introduce clearer and more robust requirements on medical device post-market surveillance—PMS—so that manufacturers are required to collect and evaluate the safety and performance of medical devices in a thorough and consistent manner, once they are in real-world use.
What will this mean for patients in the UK? This instrument represents the first step in a series of amendments to reform the Medical Devices Regulations 2002. These changes are designed to enhance the safety of medical devices, to ensure availability and to support innovation.
This instrument will create a strong foundation for this medtech regulatory reform and deliver patient benefits in three key areas—first, by improving patient safety. This instrument will not only enable the MHRA, but the whole health system to better protect patients by more closely monitoring the safety and performance of medical devices. This includes medical devices within the NHS and in our local communities, thereby supporting the Government’s mission to shift focus from hospital to community. This will result in more rapid identification, investigation and resolution of safety issues, allowing the NHS to focus its resources more effectively. While doing so, these regulations will also strengthen the patient voice by requiring manufacturers to undertake patient and public engagement where appropriate during their post-market surveillance.
Secondly, this statutory instrument will provide stronger assurance that devices supplied to the market are safe and effective, supporting both the continuation of supply, and improved access for the NHS and patients to potentially transformative technologies. With stronger assurance of safety and efficacy, we are able to implement new routes to market. For example, this instrument will help support the introduction of an international reliance framework, taking into account, where it is safe to do so, decisions made by comparable regulators. We intend to lay that draft legislation in 2025 as part of future medical devices regulatory reform.
Finally, this instrument will support innovation and economic growth by providing regulatory certainty for manufacturers considering placing their medical devices on our market. The collection of real-world data can result in more user-friendly and more effective innovations by highlighting opportunities for improvement, ultimately achieving better outcomes for patients.
I will now take a moment to summarise the key provisions of this instrument. Once in force, this statutory instrument will ensure that any medical device placed on the Great Britain market is subject to rigorous post-market scrutiny. This will enhance patient safety across the board, thereby promoting a consistent approach to PMS throughout the UK, where of course Northern Ireland has its own arrangements. This statutory instrument will set out in greater detail what must be included as part of a PMS system and a PMS plan. Manufacturers will need to ensure that their PMS system includes analysis of relevant data throughout the medical device's lifetime.
This comprehensive approach allows for a more accurate assessment of device performance, ultimately leading to faster identification and resolution of safety issues. This statutory instrument will provide greater detail on when and how to report serious incidents. The timelines for notifying the MHRA will be standardised throughout the UK, benefiting manufacturers that supply medical devices to both Northern Ireland and Great Britain and ensuring that safety issues are identified and investigated promptly.
The introduction of new requirements to share summary reports at regular intervals means that medical devices will be continually monitored to ensure their performance, with higher-risk devices facing even more scrutiny. These measures encourage manufacturers to monitor both serious and non-serious incidents over time, which will aid recognition of adverse safety trends and signals, supporting the containment of potential safety issues before they escalate.
I commend these measures to the Committee.
Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I think we all understand the context of the IMMDS review. Having spoken on Sunday afternoon to a lady who is suffering having had a mesh put in—the skin has never healed over the top and she is facing difficulties—I fully understand the reasons for the regulations. We all want safety; we all want the equipment that doctors like me use to be safe. We also all want support for the science and technology sector, and we all want people in the UK to have early access to the very best new medical devices. As such, the importance of the regulations is not just that they are there and they are strong, but that they are proportionate and effective in their aims. I have a few questions in regard to that.
First, the MHRA will be sent lots of data—reports on 3 million medical devices at one, two and three-year intervals, depending on the type of device. Is the MHRA required to look at that data, or to check whether manufacturers are required to produce these reports, or even to check that manufacturers have produced these reports? If it does have such a requirement, does the MHRA have the resources to look at all this extra data and to review it? If it does not have such a requirement, what is the point?
The cost estimate in the impact assessment talked about £310 million over 10 years, but for 3 million devices that does not seem particularly high. Six months is being given for these regulations to become legally enforced. Is that long enough for businesses to prepare and for the MHRA to get ready to look at this?
How much of this cost will be passed to the NHS, and how much has the NHS budgeted for such costs? How will the NHS comply with the legal requirement to get patient experience data? The Minister talked about the importance of getting patient experience data where appropriate, so what will the exemptions be? If someone was having a Guedel Airway put in, they would probably be unconscious and might not be aware of how effective the device was—if they woke up it would probably be more effective than if they did not, I suppose, but it is quite difficult.
Confidentiality is also an issue. If a medical device like a new hip is being put into somebody, will the Government provide information to manufacturers on who has got their hips, or is the manufacturer expected to guess? Or is the NHS expected to act as a go-between, and if so, how will that work in practice?
The regulations are also a bit of a burden on small businesses. I notice the Government have made the decision, as evidenced in the impact assessment, to include all small businesses—even micro-businesses—under these regulations. Has the Minister considered whether that will incentivise businesses to set up elsewhere, in Europe or overseas, reducing UK innovation and reducing the likelihood that manufacturers will apply for a UK Conformity Assessed mark because there is more regulation in the UK than elsewhere? Will that delay access to new devices for our patients in this country? In particular, the “similar devices outside of GB” requirement requires even the smallest businesses to find out similar devices’ safety, around the globe. That is possibly something that a large multinational corporation could do, but a micro-business in, perhaps, Oxford or elsewhere would find it difficult to find all that information. The cost proportional to the business will be extremely high, which will reduce the number of new people entering the market.
Overall, the Government have the right intention to provide for patient safety. However, the longer period that safety has to be viewed over and the additional regulation compared to the European Union mean that, once again, the Government have chosen to take an EU regulation and gold-plate it, to the detriment of Britain, and ultimately potentially that of patients.
Andrew Gwynne
I thank the hon. Lady for her valuable contribution. These regulations introduce clearer, more robust requirements for post-market surveillance of medical devices, to improve patient safety and to signal a crucial shift in the way in which we manage medical devices in Great Britain.
The hon. Lady raised some important points. First, on the MHRA and whether it is appropriately resourced to cope with the likely increase in incident reporting as a result of this regulatory change, let me reassure her that the measures introduced in this instrument should not have a significant impact on MHRA capacity. Its systems and processes to provide regulatory oversight for vigilance reporting are already in place. The measures within this statutory instrument are expected to increase the volume of safety data reported to the MHRA. However, the accompanying improvements to data quality will support automation and reduce burdens associated with data analysis. To ensure that the MHRA’s systems for vigilance reporting are fully equipped to handle the new reporting requirements for manufacturers, we will verify system-readiness through comprehensive testing and validation ahead of the date of application of these regulations.
As the regulator for the whole United Kingdom, the MHRA is committed to protecting patient safety while enabling a regulatory environment in which the life sciences sector is able to innovate and to launch new medical products in the interests of public health across the UK. Contrary to the hon. Lady’s assertion that the regulatory burden will be increased and will therefore squash innovation, the opposite is the intention of this Government. The intention is to ensure that there is a clear regulatory framework throughout the United Kingdom—without having the disparities that we have at the moment—and to ensure that better, smarter use of the data will be available. The closer scrutiny of the efficacy of these medical devices will encourage innovation in medtech and in life sciences.
Dr Caroline Johnson
The Minister is saying that more regulation will encourage innovation. I am not sure I agree with that premise, but does he accept that these new regulations will lead to a higher regulatory burden on people wanting to set up medtech companies in the UK than in the EU or elsewhere?
Andrew Gwynne
We could get into a theological debate about the benefits or otherwise of regulations, but this statutory instrument will provide certainty and clarity across all four nations of the United Kingdom. It will provide a known framework for medtech and life science companies operating, or wishing to operate, in the UK. I see this as a good piece of secondary legislation to bring about the certainty that we want to give companies wishing to operate, or which are operating, in the United Kingdom, and to set up a common framework across our four nations. I see that as good. Regulatory divergence with another part of the United Kingdom is not, in my mind, good for business—particularly where a company wants to operate on both sides of the Irish sea.
On patient confidentiality and the cost estimates for the NHS, I hope the hon. Lady will forgive my having to write to the Committee on that point because the tablets of stone have not yet reached me from Mount Sinai.
On the hon. Lady’s question on innovation being reversed and whether people have long enough to prepare, we believe that the measures in the statutory instrument do give people long enough to prepare—not least because many of those companies are already operating in the parts of the United Kingdom that the instrument will bring our regulation in line with. Therefore the extra capacity that is needed in the system will not be to the detriment of the measures in this statutory instrument.
Dr Johnson
Parts of the UK are working to EU regulations, but does the Minister recognise that the statutory instrument he is bringing forward will introduce into the whole of the UK market, regulations that are not currently present in either the UK or EU markets?
Andrew Gwynne
I recognise that we are not only bringing Great Britain in line with Northern Ireland but adding other patient safety measures. If the hon. Lady is saying—I hope she is not—that the result of the Cumberlege review is that we do nothing in this area to improve the issues highlighted by it, she is within her powers to oppose these measures. However, we think not only that ensuring regulatory consistency throughout the United Kingdom is the right thing to do, but that this statutory instrument gives us the opportunity to start to put right some of the shocking, appalling things that we know have happened, as highlighted by the Cumberlege review. That is what these measures seek to do.
This Government are committed to the delivery of a framework for medical device regulation that prioritises patient safety—that is the crucial thing that we are seeking to do—and that gives patients access to the medical devices they need, and ensures that the United Kingdom remains an attractive market for medical technology innovators. We have an obligation to patients and the public to maintain the highest standards of safety and efficacy for the medical devices they rely on. These regulations are an important first step to deliver this framework, and they place patient safety at the forefront. They will enable not only the MHRA but the whole health system to better protect patients.
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her contribution, and to Members across the Committee for considering these regulations today. I hope they will join me in supporting these regulations, so that we have consistency across the UK and put patient safety at the heart of medtech and life sciences.
Question put and agreed to.
Draft Persistent Organic Pollutants (Amendment) Regulations 2024
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Emma Hardy)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Persistent Organic Pollutants (Amendment) Regulations 2024.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. This statutory instrument, which was laid before the House on 8 October, adds three additional substances—UV-328, dechlorane plus and methoxychlor —to the assimilated persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, regulations in response to the adoption of those three substances as POPs under the United Nations Stockholm convention. The UK is a party to the convention and is therefore obliged to reflect in UK law the listing of POPs under the convention.
In addition, the instrument makes a number of other technical changes to the annexes of the POPs regulation. Those include changes to waste concentration limits, specific exemptions and unintentional trace contaminant levels, or UTCs, for some POPs. In brief, the amendments update and clarify how some articles, substances or mixtures containing some POPs can be used, manufactured, placed on the market or disposed of. This legislative change is permitted by use of the powers available within articles 7, 15 and 18 of the assimilated EU regulation on POPs. We have worked with the devolved Administrations on this instrument.
POPs are substances recognised as particularly dangerous to the health of humans, wildlife and the environment. This instrument preserves and adds to the current regime for managing, restricting or eliminating POPs in the UK. Some of the regulations in this amending instrument are needed to implement the UK’s commitments under the United Nations Stockholm convention on POPs. The majority of amendments are informed by updates to the Stockholm convention and, in some cases, have come about following updates to the Basel convention guidance on the management of POPs waste, and following consultation.
Let me turn to the details of the instrument. At the 11th meeting of the conference of the parties, held last year, a decision was adopted to add three new substances called UV-328, dechlorane plus and methoxychlor to the list of substances for global elimination under the convention; this decision was communicated to parties by the UN depository in February 2024. This instrument adds those new POPs to the list of substances prohibited by law from being manufactured, placed on the market or used in Great Britain.
Secondly, the instrument provides some exemptions from the prohibitions by allowing the unintentional presence of the three substances at trace levels. These limits define the concentrations at which UV-328, dechlorane plus and metho—methox—
Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
Will the Minister repeat that, please?
Emma Hardy
I will do my best—by the end of this, I’ll have nailed it.
These limits define the concentrations at which UV-328, dechlorane plus—I got that one—and methoxychlor can lawfully be found in a substance, article or mixture, where they are unintentionally present and found in minimal amounts. Dechlorane plus and UV-328 will also be listed alongside time-limited exemptions for their continued use in specific circumstances. These exemptions are available following agreement by the Stockholm convention’s conference of the parties.
This instrument will make a number of further changes to annex 1 of the POPs regulation, including the addition of a UTC level for two POPs already prohibited in Great Britain. It will also make amendments to the UTC limits and specific exemptions listed for the substance perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, including a provision to phase out or remove exemptions that are no longer required, and the tightening of the requirements regarding a specific exemption for use of PFOA in polytetra-fluoroethylene, or PTFE, micropowders.
Annexes 4 and 5 of the POPs regulation relate to the treatment of waste containing POPs. This instrument will add or update waste concentration limits for several POPs. In practice, those limits specify the concentration at which waste containing POPs must be diverted from landfill to high-temperature incineration or other appropriate disposals, to ensure that the POPs content is appropriately destroyed. Importantly, that includes the introduction of a limit specifically targeted at firefighting foam mixtures containing PFOA—a substance in the poly and perfluoroalkyl, or PFAS, group of chemicals—to ensure the environmentally sound disposal of any remaining stockpiles of these foams.
Finally, this instrument will update the maximum concentration limits for a number of POPs and add decabromodiphenyl ether, or decaBDE, a brominated flame retardant, to the list of polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, in annex 5 of the POPs regulation. Maximum concentration limits set the threshold at which waste handlers can apply to permanently store certain wastes in designated landfill for hazardous waste or salt mines, where it can be demonstrated that destruction is not the environmentally preferred option. The instrument will also add two new European waste catalogue codes to this provision: one for fly ash from peat and untreated wood, and one for soil and stones.
Policy development informing this instrument was subject to a public consultation in 2023. In that consultation, we also stated our intention to prohibit the three new substances once they were adopted for listing under the convention, to implement our international obligations. There have been various opportunities, at both domestic and convention level, for UK stakeholders to submit information regarding the potential prohibition of UV-328, dechlorane plus and methoxychlor, and their potential adoption for global elimination under the Stockholm convention. A de minimis impact assessment was carried out, which concluded that there is no indication that the amendments in the instrument are expected to have an impact on businesses beyond one-off familiarisation costs, and that this instrument is not expected to disproportionally burden small businesses.
The Environment Agency is the delivery body for the POPs regulation for England; Natural Resources Wales and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency are the delivery bodies for Wales and Scotland respectively. They have been involved in the development of this instrument and have no concerns about implementation or resources. The territorial extent and application of the instrument is Great Britain. Under the Windsor frame-work, the EU POPs regulation applies in Northern Ireland. The devolved Administrations in Wales and Scotland were engaged in the development of the instrument and have consented to its being made on a GB-wide basis.
In conclusion, I emphasise that the measures in this instrument are needed, in part, to implement the requirements of the Stockholm convention by adding new POPs UV-328, dechlorane plus and methoxychlor to the list of substances prohibited in Great Britain by law. Other amendments included in the instrument ensure that the POPs regulation is adapted to scientific and technical progress in our understanding and treatment of POPs. The draft regulations will allow the UK to continue to implement the Stockholm convention requirements to prohibit, eliminate or restrict the production and use of POPs. I commend the draft regulations to the House.
Dr Neil Hudson (Epping Forest) (Con)
It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and a pleasure to be opposite the Minister. This is a little like “Groundhog Day”; I think we are going to be up against each other quite a lot. I wonder whether I will be like the gopher to Bill Murray’s greenkeeper in “Caddyshack”, another Bill Murray film.
I am happy to put everyone’s mind at rest: His Majesty’s loyal Opposition will not oppose the regulations. We appreciate the Government’s effort to build on our strong Conservative track record in managing persistent pollutants. This instrument adds three substances—UV-328, dechlorane plus and methoxychlor—to the assimilated persistent organic pollutants regulations. It also updates and clarifies the terms under which articles, substances or mixtures containing certain persistent organic pollutants can be manufactured, sold, used and disposed of. The updates ensure that we remain aligned with our commitments under the United Nations Stockholm convention. I am also pleased to note that the development of these changes was subjected to a public consultation in 2023.
Importantly, there is no indication that the amendments in this instrument will negatively impact businesses or disproportionately burden small businesses; we must always keep that consideration in mind. Furthermore, I am extremely pleased that the instrument aligns with the Windsor framework and will be adopted nationwide.
Although we offer no objection to the instrument, I would like to briefly highlight some broader concerns for the Minister to address. First, although the amendments build on our strong track record in managing persistent pollutants, can the Minister confirm whether the Government have identified any areas within the regulatory regime around persistent organic pollutants that they intend to change? Secondly, will the Minister provide clarity on the current trace levels of the persistent pollutants discussed today and how they compare with the limits set in this instrument? Finally, will she clarify the steps the Government are currently taking to monitor the levels of so-called forever chemicals in our environment and to ensure that they fall within a safe range?
To conclude, we will be supporting these important measures and I am grateful that the regulations have been brought to the Committee. I will be happy to continue working with the Minister to ensure that we continue to do all we can to maintain environmental safety, protecting our precious environment, animals and human public health.
Emma Hardy
I thank the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Dr Hudson) for his contribution and look forward to seeing him in many debates in future. I commend him on having been able to pronounce the names of the chemicals first time around.
I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has raised the issue of forever chemicals, which concerns me; in time, I imagine that we will be discussing those in more detail. Obviously, we have outlined today all the details of what this particular statutory instrument relates to, but I definitely agree with his wider point on sharing concerns about POPs and forever chemicals. I hope that we can work together on that because the dangers and concerns about those chemicals are coming more to light as we move forward.
I will not detain the Committee for longer than necessary. As I have outlined, the instrument introduces changes to ensure that the UK can continue to implement its obligations under the Stockholm convention, which aims to protect the health of populations, wildlife and the environment from harmful persistent organic pollutants. I commend the draft regulations to the House.
Question put and agreed to.
Draft Scotland Act 1998 (Transfer of Functions to the Scottish Ministers etc.) Order 2025
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Martin McCluskey (Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the Draft Scotland Act 1998 (Transfer of Functions to the Scottish Ministers etc.) Order 2025.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I am grateful for the opportunity to debate this order today. It is the result of collaborative working between the UK and Scottish Governments. The order follows agreement by the previous Government to transfer to Scottish Ministers the function of making environmental outcomes report regulations—replacing environmental impact assessments—in respect of electricity works consenting in Scotland and the Scottish part of the renewable energy zone, so that the power will be held concurrently with the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. The transfer of functions reinstates powers lost by Scottish Ministers on repeal of the European Communities Act 1972.
The order before us will be made under section 63 of the Scotland Act 1998, which provides for any functions, so far as they are exercisable by a Minister of the Crown in or as regards Scotland, to be exercisable by the Scottish Ministers concurrently with the Minister of the Crown. This Scotland Act order is a demonstration of devolution in action.
By way of background, the UK operated a system of environmental impact assessment as a result of powers conferred by the European Communities Act 1972. The function of making environmental impact assessment regulations in respect of electricity works consenting in Scotland had been transferred to the Scottish Ministers, concurrently with the Secretary of State, in 1999. Following the designation of the Scottish part of the renewable energy zone, the extent of the Scottish Ministers electricity consent functions was extended to the Scottish part of the renewable energy zone. Subsequently, the Scottish Ministers’ associated EIA regulation-making powers were also extended to the Scottish part of the REZ.
The power to make environmental impact assessment regulations was lost on repeal of the European Communities Act 1972. The UK Government then took powers in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 to make environmental outcomes report regulations, intended to replace environmental impact assessment regulations. This instrument transfers functions to Scottish Ministers to make regulations under part 3, chapter 1 and part 6 of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, in relation to the assessment of the effects on the environment in connection with applications for consent, approval or variation of consent for electricity generating stations and associated overhead line infrastructure. Those functions will be exercisable concurrently with the Secretary of State. Before the Scottish Ministers seek to exercise functions by virtue of this order, they will be required to consult with the Secretary of State.
The order reflects a commitment made to the Scottish Government during the passage of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. I am pleased that the UK Government are working to address that matter.
Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I am not surprised in the least to see the level of attention this order has drawn from across the House—a full house to debate an incredibly important issue.
As the Minister set out in his speech, the nub of this particular draft order is a plan to enable the exercise of concurrent powers in relation to assessing the environmental impact of and granting consent, or otherwise, for generating stations and overhead lines in Scotland, essentially devolving powers to make environmental outcomes report regulations in these areas to the Scottish Government.
We will not oppose this measure on the basis that it is our longstanding position to support the giving of powers that existed prior to our departure from the EU, and we recognise that Scottish Ministers are not currently able to amend or replace the processes in the Electricity Works (Environmental Impact Assessment) (Scotland) Regulations 2017, which underpin the regime for environmental assessments for electricity works, and which are devolved to the Scottish Government.
The Minister rightly points out that this work was begun under the previous Government, but times change and it is with regret that we cannot actively support this draft order because we have real concerns about the direction of travel of the key underlying policy areas under the new Labour Government. First, on pylons and overhead lines, we are very concerned by the Energy Secretary’s approach to building pylons across the United Kingdom. I can certainly say that in my constituency and across rural Scotland there is anxiety that pylons will spoil the countryside, restrict agricultural land use and leave homeowners unable to move or secure a mortgage for houses beside planned infrastructure build. As we set out in our manifesto, our clear preference is for undergrounding, where it is cost competitive. We worry that this Government—and the Scottish Government—have an ingrained disposition against undergrounding.
Secondly, under the plan set out in the order, Scottish Ministers would have to consult the Secretary of State before exercising the powers. But there is no proper detail about what would happen in the case of a divergence of views, or if the Scottish Government pursue an approach that is out of step with that preferred by the Secretary of State. Thirdly, following on from that point, we are yet to see a convincing plan that demonstrates how this extra layer will avoid added complexity in an area of planning and consenting that is already incredibly complicated and diverges hugely across the nations of the United Kingdom.
For those reasons—and those reasons alone—and despite the overriding principle of devolving powers from the EU to the Scottish Government, we will abstain on this order.
Martin McCluskey
The speech from the shadow Minister goes to the heart of the issue with the current Conservative party in abandoning some of their previous work purely for political expediency. The shadow Minister mentioned divergence: devolution allows for divergence, but the order clearly demonstrates that Scottish Ministers seeking to exercise functions by virtue of this order will be required to consult with the Secretary of State.
Given that the shadow Minister has responsibility for Scotland and energy, I am very disappointed that he seems to be continuing the roadblocks that we saw from the previous Government to getting Britain building, restoring and renewing our energy system, which we need to do if we are to achieve the growth we require in this country. I welcome his lack of opposition, but I am disappointed that he cannot support work that the previous Government started. The instrument demonstrates the continued commitment of the UK Government to work with the Scottish Government to deliver for Scotland.
Question put and agreed to.
Draft Aviation Safety (Amendment) Regulations 2024
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mike Kane)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Aviation Safety (Amendment) Regulations 2024.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I will not burst into song, if that is okay. The draft regulations were laid before the House on 23 October.
As a member state of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, the UK has agreed to implement international standards and recommended practices—SARPs—in domestic law. SARPs are technical specifications for aviation safety contained in annexes to the convention on international civil aviation and adopted by ICAO. As a member state, we are obliged to implement any amendments made to SARPs in domestic law, unless it is impractical to comply or not relevant to our system. Where that is the case, member states must file a difference notifying the ICAO that there are discrepancies between SARPs and domestic law. The majority of differences are filed by the UK either because legislative changes are yet to be undertaken or are in progress, because they are legacy differences inherited from assimilated EU regulations that we will incorporate over time, or because they are not appropriate for the UK system.
The objective of this statutory instrument is broadly twofold. First, by updating UK law to comply with amendments to annexes 6 and 14 to the convention on international civil aviation, it will ensure that domestic aviation law meets an internationally agreed level of aviation safety. The updates pertain to enhancing fuel planning systems; to widening the scope of all-weather operations—that is, the ability of aircraft to take off and land in low-visibility conditions; and to improving flight crew training and checking. There are also updates to new and continuing airworthiness requirements relating to safety management systems.
Secondly, the statutory instrument corrects and supplements amendments to assimilated law made by the Aviation Safety (Amendment) Regulations 2023. It also reinstates two provisions that were erroneously removed by the Aviation Safety (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020.
Before I turn to my closing comments, I draw to the Committee’s attention some minor typographical errors that have been identified in the statutory instrument since it was laid before the House. A correction slip has been issued to amend the errors and the corrections have been incorporated into the draft regulations. At the request of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, a revised explanatory memorandum has also been laid, which now includes a link to the Civil Aviation Authority’s consultation response document on all-weather operations and fuel planning and management.
We must continue to ensure that aviation remains among the safest forms of travel, and that the safety of the travelling public is a key and No. 1 priority for everyone in this room. Some of the provisions in the draft regulations introduce new ways of using pre-existing technology, with the aim of increasing efficiency while maintaining safety standards. The provisions also correct errors to make it certain that regulations are clear. By upholding our commitments to implement international aviation safety law, we maintain both high aviation safety standards and our reputation as a world leader in aviation safety.
Before I finish, I put on the record—I am sure I speak for everybody in the room—our sadness at the crash in Vilnius yesterday and the death of the pilot of the DHL flight. Safety should, for many reasons, always be top of our priorities. I commend the draft regulations to the Committee.
Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
It is always a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Dr Huq. I join the Minister in his words about the poor pilot of the DHL plane that crashed in Vilnius. If we needed further reminding of the importance of aviation safety, that provides it.
The draft regulations are not contentious and I reassure Government Members that I do not intend to call a Division on them. They are eminently sensible. We could go through them regulation by regulation, but in essence the Civil Aviation Authority has got out of step with the International Civil Aviation Organisation and its SARPs, the consequence of which is that, without the regulations, UK-registered aircraft cannot use more sophisticated systems and equipment. That applies both on board the aircraft, for the management of fuel and other systems, particularly to deal with low-visibility landing, and in respect of the ability to take advantage of infrastructure on the ground at aerodromes to assist in those processes.
Chapter 1 of part 2 of the draft regulations deals with instruments used for flying in poor visibility; chapter 3 deals with improvements to mandatory crew training that are associated with the relevant activities; and chapter 4 includes regulations to require improved aerodrome facilities for low-visibility conditions. There is also provision relating specifically to the use of helicopters and related infrastructure. They are all good improvements and will they help to keep the UK up to date internationally and maintain our reputation as being at the forefront of aviation safety. For those reasons, the Opposition will support the draft regulations.
There are, though, inevitably a few questions on which I would like further information from the Minister, and I will be grateful for his response. First, will the Minister have a look at the rationale behind the impact assessment of the reduced fuel load required? One of the key rationales for the regulations is to allow for more efficient flight plans and, as a consequence, for the carrying of less fuel, as a safety factor, while maintaining the same or increased levels of safety. Because there is less fuel in the aircraft, it has less weight and therefore burns less fuel.
In the cost-benefit analysis that accompanies the draft regulations, it is assessed that, across all operators of UK-registered aircraft, only £12.3 million-worth of fuel is likely to be saved. I had a quick google to find the fuel cost just for British Airways in 2023, and that single operator spent £3.83 billion on fuel. If it is estimated that the entire sector is to save just £12.3 million, it appears that the regulations, while well meaning, are not going to have any significant effect at all in what we want, which is a reduction in carbon burn, a reduction in costs and an increase in efficiency. Will the Minister confirm whether it is his understanding that the benefits are de minimis? Or is there scope for further improvement that the impact assessment does not identify?
Secondly, on the same issue, does the Minister recognise that if it is true that only £12.3 million will be saved through incremental changes, a much greater saving of both carbon and fuel costs would be achieved by a reorganisation of air traffic control routeing? I think particularly of minimising, or ideally preventing, the issue of stacking around airports and the associated congestion.
Thirdly, I will come back to congestion around airports in a moment, but before that I turn to section 14(5) of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023. Paragraph 6.10 of the explanatory notes says that
“where changes are made to secondary assimilated EU law using section 14 of the REUL Act, the overall effect of the changes made by it under that section…should not increase the regulatory burden.”
The majority of the section 14 provisions relate to the imposition of criminal offences under the draft regulations, and the impact assessment confirms that they do not significantly increase the regulatory burden. But there is a lacuna in the impact assessment, because it identifies that there are some section 14 provisions that do not impose a criminal sanction, yet there is no assessment as to whether the rule requirement under section 14(5) is satisfied. Will the Minister confirm that there is no increased regulatory burden as a result of the non-criminal sanction provisions affected by clause 14(5)? That seems rather technical, but it would be useful to make sure that we are compliant with the existing legislation.
Finally, the Prime Minister has just returned from COP29, where he burnished his international credentials—in his view—by committing to an 81% reduction of greenhouse gases by 2035. Now, that is all very well, but in the sixth carbon budget the Climate Change Committee identified that if we are to reach that target, it can be done only by the restriction of passengers and airport capacity. Will the Minister say whether it is now Government policy to restrict any net increase in airport capacity? If it is, which airport that is currently in operation will be further restricted to allow for the increased capacity anticipated by the expansion of London City airport, which the Government have just allowed?
Mike Kane
I congratulate the hon. Member for Broadland and Fakenham on his elevation to his current position and look forward to working with him over the years to come. I had quite the turnaround in my three years of opposition, so I hope he stays longer than some of his his predecessors. It is great to welcome him. I recently spent some time with him in Northern Ireland, where we had an extraordinarily good fact-finding trip and did some relationship building with the Executive there. He should always be proud of the work his father did as Secretary of State to bring peace to our islands.
I thank Members for their consideration of the draft regulations. The hon. Member for Broadland and Fakenham asked me a number of questions, the first of which was about impact assessments. A full impact assessment was submitted with and published alongside the explanatory memorandum on the Government legislation website, so I direct him to that. It assesses the impact of amending the legislation to align with the latest ICAO SARPs concerning fuel planning and management.
The hon. Member asked about fuel. We do not think there will be significant carbon savings based on this SI, because only a few large operators will take advantage of the new fuel schemes, and only in some limited circumstances. However, I direct the hon. Member to our manifesto commitment on sustainable aviation fuel, for which we have already laid the mandate for 2%, starting on 1 January 2025, which I signed into law just the other week. That will start to grow a sustainable aviation fuel industry in the UK and begin to decarbonise our skies.
On the stacking issue that the hon. Member rightly talked about, our second key manifesto commitment was on airspace modernisation. If only we could get our planes to fly in a straight line and not in circles, we would immediately begin to decarbonise our skies. There is an easyJet plane that flies from Jersey to Luton and probably emits about 35% more carbon than it should because of the route it has to take, because we have an analogue system in a digital age. The Government are hugely committed to our two key manifesto commitments on decarbonising our skies.
On section 14 and the regulatory burden, we consider that the overall effects of the changes made under this IS will not increase the regulatory burden in this particular area. New Members should know that this is a “take back control” SI. We were a member of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency but we came out of it, and now we have to do the typos ourselves. That is the power we now possess. It would have been done elsewhere and on somebody else’s dime.
On the Prime Minister’s huge commitment on the 81%—I said at a conference the other day, “Where did he get the 1% from? Where’s that particular saving?”—the Government have embarked on an ambitious project with our missions, and we have to do it because the climate is changing. I run the lighthouses in this country, and our operatives could spend less time at sea. Storm Bert this week meant that my journey took four hours instead of two, because of flooding and damage. We have emitted trillions of tonnes of carbon. We cannot afford to begin to emit that much again. We have to change. I am sure Members from all parties agree that the international situation is getting more dire by the day. We have to become energy secure. The commitment to do that by 2030 is hugely key.
The safety of aviation and the travelling public is a priority for this Government, as it is for every Government—
Jerome Mayhew
I know the Minister was trying hard to answer all my questions, but he may have forgotten to clarify the Government’s position on airport capacity, so I will give a second opportunity.
Mike Kane
The hon. Member mentioned the Climate Change Committee’s recommendation that we should consider a demand-management system; we will formally respond to the CCC on that in the new year. My view is that Mr and Mrs Jones in my constituency should be able to take their annual holiday in Europe because they have worked hard all year.
We have never, on our side of the House, talked about demand management; I wonder whether it is a new policy of His Majesty’s official Opposition—[Interruption.] I hear the hon. Member saying from a sedentary position that it is not. It is hugely important that we decarbonise our airports, our maritime sector and our airlines, and we are doing that through our manifesto commitments on the sustainable aviation fuel mandate over the years ahead and on the airspace modernisation projects. Airports themselves are the easier bit to decarbonise, and most of them have a strategy to decarbonise themselves over the next few years. The hard part of the equation will always be the things that take off and land at our airports. There will be no demand management on this side of the aisle.
The safety of aviation and the travelling public is a priority for the Government. The Department for Transport is committed to ensuring that aviation remains safe. As part of that work, the draft regulations form part of an important legislative programme that implements international aviation safety standards in domestic law. Furthermore, the implementation of international law ensures that the UK remains a world leader in maintaining aviation safety standards and meeting our obligations. With that, I commend the draft regulations to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Employment Rights Bill (First sitting)
Tuesday 26th November 2024
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Employment Rights Bill 2024-26 View all Employment Rights Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 26 November 2024 - (26 Nov 2024)
The Chair
We are now sitting in public and the proceedings are being broadcast. Before we begin, I remind Members to please switch electronic devices to silent. Tea and coffee are not allowed during sittings. Date Time Witness Tuesday 26 November 2024 Until no later than 10.10 am The Confederation of British Industry; The British Chambers of Commerce; The Institute of Directors Tuesday 26 November 2024 Until no later than 10.40 am The Federation of Small Businesses; Startup Coalition Tuesday 26 November 2024 Until no later than 11.25 am The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; The Chartered Management Institute; The Happy Business School Tuesday 26 November 2024 Until no later than 2.30 pm UKHospitality; The Recruitment and Employment Confederation Tuesday 26 November 2024 Until no later than 3.00 pm Make UK; The Food and Drink Federation Tuesday 26 November 2024 Until no later than 3.40 pm DFDS; Nautilus International; The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Tuesday 26 November 2024 Until no later than 4.30 pm The Trades Union Congress; The Scottish Trades Union Congress; UNISON; Unite the Union Tuesday 26 November 2024 Until no later than 5.00 pm The Fawcett Society; Pregnant Then Screwed Tuesday 26 November 2024 Until no later than 5.15 pm The Civil Engineering Contractors Association Thursday 28 November 2024 Until no later than 12.10 pm Co-op; The British Retail Consortium; The Association of Convenience Stores Thursday 28 November 2024 Until no later than 12.40 pm The Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers; Community Thursday 28 November 2024 Until no later than 1.00 pm The Resolution Foundation Thursday 28 November 2024 Until no later than 2.30 pm GMB; Prospect Thursday 28 November 2024 Until no later than 3.10 pm Professor Alan Bogg (Professor in Law, University of Bristol); Professor Melanie Simms (Professor of Work and Employment, University of Glasgow); Professor Simon F Deakin (Professor of Law, University of Cambridge) Thursday 28 November 2024 Until no later than 3.40 pm GAIL’s Bakery; DCS Group Thursday 28 November 2024 Until no later than 4.10 pm The Equality and Human Rights Commission; Margaret Beels OBE (Director of Labour Market Enforcement) Thursday 28 November 2024 Until no later than 4.40 pm Female Founder Finance; The Women’s Budget Group Thursday 28 November 2024 Until no later than 5.00 pm The Department for Business and Trade
We will first consider the programme motion on the amendment paper. We will then consider a motion to enable the reporting of written evidence for publication. Unless there are any objections, we will not sit in private to discuss how to go ahead with the questions; it is a waste of time. In view of the time available, I hope that we can take these matters formally.
Ordered,
That—
1. the Committee shall (in addition to its first meeting at 9.25 am on Tuesday 26 November 2024) meet—
(a) at 2.00 pm on Tuesday 26 November 2024;
(b) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 28 November 2024;
(c) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 3 December 2024;
(d) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 5 December 2024;
(e) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 10 December 2024;
(f) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 12 December 2024;
(g) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 17 December 2024;
(h) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 7 January 2025;
(i) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 9 January 2025;
(j) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 14 January 2025;
(k) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 16 January 2025;
(l) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 21 January 2025;
2. the Committee shall hear oral evidence in accordance with the following Table:
3. proceedings on consideration of the Bill in Committee shall be taken in the following order: Clauses 1 to 4; Schedule 1; Clauses 5 to 19; Schedule 2; Clauses 20 to 28; Schedule 3; Clauses 29 to 72; Schedule 4; Clauses 73 to 98; Schedule 5; Clauses 99 to 110; Schedules 6 and 7; Clauses 111 and 112; new Clauses; new Schedules; Clauses 113 to 119; remaining proceedings on the Bill;
4. the proceedings shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at 5.00 pm on Thursday 21 January 2025.—(Justin Madders.)
Resolved,
That, subject to the discretion of the Chair, any written evidence received by the Committee shall be reported to the House for publication.—(Justin Madders.)
The Chair
Copies of the written evidence received by the Committee will be made available in the Committee Room.
We now come to the motion to sit in private. We have agreed not to, effectively, but I will give people the chance to object to the motion.
Resolved,
That, at this and any subsequent meeting at which oral evidence is to be heard, the Committee shall sit in private until the witnesses are admitted.—(Justin Madders.)
The Chair
If nobody objects, we will not sit in private before we start hearing from witnesses. Do any Members wish to make a declaration of interests in connection with the Bill?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Justin Madders)
I refer to my declaration in Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a trade union member.
Michael Wheeler (Worsley and Eccles) (Lab)
I also refer to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and my membership of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers and GMB.
Anneliese Midgley (Knowsley) (Lab)
I also refer to my declaration of interests. I am member of Unite and GMB.
Alison Hume (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab)
I also refer to my declaration of interests and my membership of Unison and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
Jon Pearce (High Peak) (Lab)
I also refer to my declaration of interests. I am a member of GMB.
Laurence Turner (Birmingham Northfield) (Lab)
I draw people’s attention to my declarations in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am also a member of the Unite and GMB trade unions.
Alex McIntyre (Gloucester) (Lab)
I refer to my membership of the GMB and Community unions, and my previous membership of the Employment Lawyers Association.
Dr Marie Tidball (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
I also refer to my declaration of interests. I am a member of the Community union, Unison and GMB.
The Minister for Equalities (Dame Nia Griffith)
I also refer to my declaration of interests. I am a member of the USDAW trade union.
Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)
I also refer to my declaration of interests. I am a member of the Unison and Community trade unions.
Justin Madders
Mr Stringer, I do not think that I actually mentioned my trade union memberships. For the record, the individual unions are Unite and GMB.
The Chair
Thank you, Minister. If any interests are particularly relevant to a Member’s questioning or speech, they should declare them again at the appropriate time.
Examination of Witnesses
Matthew Percival, Jane Gratton and Alex Hall-Chen gave evidence.
The Chair
Thank you. I turn to Greg Smith to ask the first question on behalf of the official Opposition.
Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)
Q
Jane Gratton: Let me just say that there is a lot in the Bill that represents what good businesses are doing already, but there are five areas where we have received concerns from members. First, on trade union access and ballot thresholds, increasing access and making it easier and quicker for unions to call strike action does not mean that the union is representative of the workforce, and does not improve the relationship with employers. From our members’ point of view, it simply makes it easier to reach an end point that nobody wants. They can see nothing in the Bill to reassure businesses that the relationship will be better, so we do not think that there should be any change to union access or ballot thresholds.
Matthew Percival: Our members support the idea of thoughtfully designed and appropriately enforced employment laws—a strong floor of rights that supports fair competition in the labour market. It is not as simple as saying that employment laws are bad for business; lots of them are very good. That is why we have supported a number in the past, as well as a number of the measures in the Bill, very much as Jane said for her members.
Your question encourages me to give a quick checklist of the top issues, in the order that they come up in the Bill. There are a number of areas of concern around the regulation of zero-hours contracts, which has less to do with zero-hours contracts and more to do with the issue of guaranteed hours within contracts—it is low-hours contracts as well.
We get a number of concerns about the removal of waiting days from statutory sick pay. We get concerns around the landing of probation periods during the initial period of employment, which are more about the tribunal risk than the sorts of processes that employers might put in place. It is the cost of demonstrating compliance, rather than having a good process, that is more of a concern.
In the redundancy space, we are quite concerned about the increase in the frequency with which people will be put at risk of redundancy and the greater uncertainty for people in that environment, and that there might be an unintended kickback for workers. In the fire and rehire proposals, there is a risk that we might be making it easier to make people redundant than to change contracts, so we might go too far and not find that landing zone where it is a last resort short of redundancy.
In the industrial relations space, there are a number of concerns similar to those that Jane outlined. A big one is that there has been a lot of focus on the trigger threshold for whether a ballot for recognition should take place. Between 10% and 2% is what the Bill outlines, but the far more significant change from employers’ perspective is the removal of a requirement for a sufficient level of support in the result of the ballot. There is a risk that it could, in the extreme, become a simple majority vote in which hardly anyone votes in a large workforce but it leads to recognition.
Alex Hall-Chen: I completely agree with what has been said so far. I would add that a key fear for us is the cumulative impact of all the 28 reforms in the Bill coupled with everything else that is happening in the employment space. Taken as a whole, the measures make hiring someone riskier and more expensive for businesses. Our research shows that businesses will hire fewer people as a result.
We polled over 700 business leaders on this topic in August and 57% said that the reforms would make them less likely to hire. I would say that the situation has actually worsened since then, given recent announcements around employers’ national insurance contributions, so the cumulative impact cannot be overstated. For the first time since October 2020 our data is now showing that more business leaders expect to reduce their headcount in the coming year than increase it. The Bill is a key reason for that change.
Greg Smith
Q
Matthew Percival: It is very difficult to put a number to it, because there are so many unanswered questions in areas where details are intended to be put into the Bill at a later stage. That leads to a wide range of potential estimates about the impact of a number of the measures. Work we are doing at the moment will give us updated figures on sentiment around a number of measures. We are looking to publish that soon, and I will make sure that we include those numbers in our written evidence.
Jane Gratton: The feedback we have had from members has been concern about increased cost, complexity and lack of flexibility to manage the workforce in the way that a business needs to. Members say that there would be a reduced hiring appetite were this legislation to come in, and that they would be less likely to recruit new employees due to the risk and difficulty, particularly under the day one rights, unless there were at least a nine-month probation period with a light-touch approach. There would be a preference for contractors and temporary staff, again to reduce the risk and avoid legal complications. To give some figures, 38% said that there would be a hiring freeze, 25% said that the Bill would result in less pay, and 30% spoke of less investment in their business. There would be significant risks and costs, particularly to small and medium-sized enterprises.
Alex Hall-Chen: In addition to considering recruitment levels at the higher level, we are also getting feedback about types of recruitment and the impact that the policies will have on that. We have had a lot of feedback, particularly with respect to day one protection against unfair dismissal, that essentially boils down to the fact that, under the current system, employers are very likely to take a risk on hiring a borderline candidate who may not have quite the right experience or qualifications, but they will now be much less likely to take that risk because the cost of getting it wrong will be considerably higher. I think there are really important questions about what that means for people on the fringes of the labour market, especially as those are precisely the people the Government need to get back into work to meet their 80% employment rate target.
Justin Madders
Q
On a more general point, Jane in particular said that a lot of the businesses you represent do a lot of the things in the Bill already. Do you think it is important that we have a level playing field so that good businesses are encouraged to treat their staff properly?
Jane Gratton: Yes. There has been a cautious welcome for some of the measures in the Bill—lots of businesses agree with the sentiment that it is about fair pay, security and non-discriminatory workplaces—but the question is around the proportionality of the changes that are being introduced in relation to the problem that the Government think needs to be addressed. From a business point of view, it is about the additional complexity and, in respect of some of the detail of the measures, the restrictions that the Bill will impose.
For example, on changing the “one establishment” rule, the feedback from members has been, “For every change, will we have to consult all our employees across all of our businesses, even if they are doing completely different things at different ends of the country, with different levels of skill and job role? It is disruptive for the business and unsettling for every employee.” It is about the detail. In principle we all want these things, but the detail of some of the measures and the impact they are likely to have is causing a lot of concern.
Matthew Percival: You are right to say there is a live consultation on a number of measures, and the consultations on a number of things are promised to come but have not started yet. That is why I resisted putting a figure on what it would currently cost, because there is a wide variance in what that could end up being. We are committed to trying to find a landing zone for the Bill that means that the Government can deliver their ambitions, which include the Bill not having a negative impact on the ambitions around growth or the focus today, outside this room, on the “Get Britain Working” agenda and an 80% employment rate. We want to stitch all those things together and find that landing zone.
It is a credit to you and to colleagues that the engagement we have had up until now has led to things like some movement on the recognition of the importance of a probation period. There is so much in the Bill and we have only really scratched the surface in terms of what we have been able to get into the detail of so far. We are hoping that through this process, and as the Bill progresses through Parliament, we are able to give the same amount of attention to the rest of the Bill.
Justin Madders
I can assure you of that, do not worry.
Alex Hall-Chen: I echo Jane’s point about there being quite significant support in the business community for parts of the Bill. A good example is fire and rehire: two thirds of IOD members agreed with the principle of outlawing fire and rehire. Where we have concerns is, as others have said, around not only proportionality but the detail. On fire and rehire, for instance, there is concern that it will make any changes to contracts, whether or not they are actually net positive for both the employee and the employer, much more difficult to achieve.
Justin Madders
Q
Jane Gratton: Employers know that a happy and engaged workforce is more productive. It is in their interest to make sure that they look after their workforces, and most businesses are good, caring employers. The worry with the legislation is that in trying to address bad behaviour by a tiny minority of businesses—of bad actors—the cumulative impact and cost of all this will have a negative impact on the majority of very good businesses. Again, it comes down to the proportionality. These are huge changes, and one concern is that they have been brought in at such pace—although we are very grateful to the Minister and the Department for the time they have been able to give us in terms of consultation—that there are things written into the Bill that our members do not feel they have had sufficient time to be consulted on, because of the pace of change.
I think we need further engagement on some of these key aspects, including the reference period for offering guaranteed hours and extending those things to agency workers. There is a lot of disquiet around how that would work, particularly for companies that offer seasonal work, such as Christmas and holiday periods. How does a 12-week reference period equate to that? It does not seem to work. It would be better to have a 26-week period, for example. There are a lot of things.
The other thing that has come up often is a real nervousness around removing all the waiting days for statutory sick pay. Again, employers are really on board with supporting people who have a long period of illness, but some of the feedback from members has been that it is the single day of sickness absenteeism that causes the most disruption and impact. Rather than its being day one, a lot of employers have said, “Could it be from day two? Can we pay from day two, so the Government meets us halfway?” The overwhelming response from businesses has been, “Can Government please minimise the additional cost of these regulations on all businesses, but particularly on small and medium-sized companies?”
Matthew Percival: Yes, there is a lot of confidence in the idea that employee engagement helps to boost productivity; that is why businesses make it a priority. I am not sure they believe that much in this Bill is going to increase productivity, though, because they are not convinced that much in this Bill is going to improve employee engagement.
To take a couple of practical examples, I already mentioned in the industrial relations space the importance of the recognition process, where there is a great deal of concern that, if you recognise a trade union that does not speak for much more than a tiny proportion of your workforce, and you elevate that voice ahead of the voice of the actual workforce, that is not going to boost employee engagement. Employers are happy to work with trade unions who are the representatives of their workforces, and it is right that they should do that, and it is right that, if there are any employers who will not do that voluntarily, there is a statutory process that can force them and bring them to the table. But in the same way that we have employment law not because every employer has negative intentions, but because there are a small minority who have the potential to abuse their power, it is also appropriate to regulate the actions of trade unions in the industrial relations space.
Another quick practical example within the zero-hours contract aspect of this regulation is that crafting the requirement for accessing guaranteed hours as something that employers need to be constantly calculating for all employees whenever they work beyond their fixed hours, and then making offers to people, some of whom would want to receive those offers and some of whom would not, seems to us the most administratively complex and costly way of delivering on the proposal. We think there could be two other constructions worthy of consideration.
One of those constructions could be a right to request framework, where there are good tests on when an employer needs to accept a request versus not, just as we have around flexible working currently. Or you could call it a right to have, if you like, but at the moment I have not seen a difference between a right to request that an employer has to accept other than in limited circumstances, and a right to have that you do not have the right to have if an employer meets the same test for limited circumstances. What really matters is not whether you call it a right to request or a right to have, but what the test is for when an employer accepts the request. That would minimise significantly the administrative burden, rather than calculating lots of offers for people who will not want to accept them.
A number of individual businesses have told us that, if the Bill is to go with the grain of the good practice that already exists within industry, they will monitor people’s hours where they already have mechanisms to do so, and there will be a trigger for a conversation between the individual and their line manager in the event that their hours regularly exceed the hours guaranteed in their contract. Those who have that policy in place tell us that, most often, that leads to no change in contract. The hours are picked up as extra hours, and the individual does not want to guarantee them in their contract. There will be occasions when the individual does change contract, but those businesses say that the majority of people in that situation do not want to change their contractual arrangements, so we are hoping to minimise the admin burden.
Alex Hall-Chen: I just want to emphasise that employers absolutely recognise the link between the two. That is why, in many cases, they are ahead of the legislation. A good example of that is flexible working: 90% of IOD members’ organisations already offer at least one form of flexible working to their employees.
The concern is about the scale of the changes and the costs associated with them. We know from the Government’s impact assessment that that may be as high as £5 billion a year, with the cost disproportionately falling on small and medium-sized enterprises. A frequent piece of feedback that we get from members is that they feel that the Government do not understand how difficult it is to run an SME at the moment and just how tight profit margins are. That is primarily where we are coming from. These changes are huge—to an extent, they are unprecedented—and will impact on those already very fine profit margins.
Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)
Q
Jane Gratton: It is really important that there is a probationary period, and it should be at least nine months. Businesses ideally want a 12-month probationary period, not least because some individuals are required to undertake mandatory training, which takes 12 months or more. We could live with a nine-month probationary period.
The key thing is that there should be a light-touch approach during that period so that businesses are not discouraged from taking a risk on employees. Employers should not have to introduce very stringent performance monitoring from day one, which helps neither the employee nor the business. Having structure during the probation period is good, but businesses need to be able to end the relationship on the basis of ability or performance, as we do now. There should be no greater risk to an employer of an employment tribunal than there is currently during the probation period.
Matthew Percival: Typically, a business’s standard probation period is no longer than six months. However, that does not mean that it is appropriate to set in regulation a limit on probation periods of six months. That is important for us, because a common response of an employer who sees that an individual is not performing quite to the level that they would want to be able to confirm them in post is to say, “Okay, we have gone through our standard probationary period, but we are willing to continue to invest in you, offer you more support and training, and extend that probation period, rather than rush to a firm yes or no decision for confirming employment.”
It is important that the regulations do not prevent the employer good practice of being willing to extend someone’s probation and give them more time to adapt to work, particularly if we are thinking about the challenge of getting people back into work who have had a period out of work. That is a big public policy and economic priority at the moment. We are in the same camp: certainly no less than nine months, so that there is that extra time before an employer is forced to make a firm yes or no decision on confirming employment, but preferably 12 months.
Alex Hall-Chen: Similarly, the feedback we have had from members is that their probation periods tend to be between three and six months, but as the other panellists have said, given exemptions around training and the potential to extend probation periods, nine months would be the minimum and 12 months would be preferable. As to the specific process, the lighter-touch dismissal process is better. We have done research that suggests that even a light-touch dismissal process, as defined by Government at the moment, would not solve the issue. A third of our members said that it would not mitigate their concerns around this policy at all, and half said that it would only partially mitigate their concerns, so we remain worried about the impact that this policy will have.
Steve Darling
Q
Matthew Percival: If we were talking about staggering things, the way I would do it would be to start with areas where there is already cross-industry support and where workers, trade unions and businesses can already agree that there are areas where the Bill can be a helpful step in the right direction. To give a few examples, we have previously supported the idea that it is wrong that you should turn up for work expecting an eight-hour shift, be sent home after two hours and only be paid for two hours. There should be a right for compensation there. We have supported fixing that through legislation for years now. A Bill to bring that forward would be something we welcome and support.
We have previously supported removing the lower earnings limit within the statutory sick pay system. It feels like a hangover from when it was a publicly funded benefit rather than an employment right in a relationship between an employer and their employee. We have supported the extension around third-party harassment. We have supported what the previous Government were calling a single enforcement body and in this Bill is a fair work agency. Outside the Bill but within the wider “Make Work Pay” package, we have supported the introduction of mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting and action plans to go alongside reports on gender pay gap reporting.
There are a number of areas where you can bring forward things in a way that can achieve consensus across social partners. But if we were staggering things, in a number of the other areas I would take more time to think how it actually will land. Beyond just staggering things, there are some aspects in the Bill—we have each touched on a number of them already so I will not repeat them—that feel like they are just a step in the wrong direction, and when the step in the wrong direction is made is less important than the direction of the step.
Jane Gratton: As I said earlier, there is lots in the Bill that we support, and there is lots that good employers are doing already. As Matthew said on the compensation of shifts, we certainly support that, and we would be very happy about the fair work agency to create a level playing field and measures around workplace equity. For us, it is about the difficulty that the SMEs will have in getting to grips with this. If you think about it, most will not have access to HR and legal support. They are going to need a lot of time to get to grips with this and to understand what is required of them. To get those processes in place, they are going to need a lot of guidance and support. We think ACAS and the tribunals system would need to be significantly boosted in their resources to cope with what we anticipate will be a lot of additional demands on them. On that very much phased approach, I would agree with Matthew about starting with the things we agree on and looking at the detail of some of the things in the Bill where we think more consultation is required.
Alex Hall-Chen: I would emphasise two factors for consideration in staggering, the first being cost. As we are all well aware, the additional costs that are coming up very shortly, particularly related to employers’ national insurance contributions, are substantial, so the more that increases to employment-related costs can be staggered, the better, such as around statutory sick pay. The other, to support what Jane said, would be around tribunal capacity. There is a particular concern that these changes, particularly around protection against unfair dismissal from day one of employment, will be introduced before the tribunal system has been sufficiently reformed to be able to deal with the influx of cases that will come with them.
Chris Law (Dundee Central) (SNP)
Q
Matthew Percival: No; it is that I think there is so much in the Bill that it is not a question of where we could do more. What is already on the table is far too much for businesses to be able to engage with in its entirety. And bearing in mind that the Bill is only one aspect of the Government’s agenda, I am already finding that it is very hard for our members to engage on the breadth of topics at the pace at which the Government hope to get engagement. To squeeze anything more in at this time would just mean another issue that cannot be properly considered before we would get to legislation.
That is not say that there cannot be other conversations about other topics at other times. There are aspects of “Make Work Pay” that are not in the Bill because they are being developed; a number of them are being discussed and consulted on outside of this Bill process to support the development of those issues. But I would not be suggesting there is a lack of urgency in any way for any of these things.
The best legislation will come from having a process that stakeholders have the capacity and engagement to contribute to, rather than feeling that they have to choose one or two things to engage with and ignore the rest, which then does not get proper attention.
Jane Gratton: I would agree. The reflection from members is that they are overwhelmed with all the changes that are being put in front of them through the Bill and the wider plan to make work pay. We have said from the outset, “Please take your time with this, consult carefully and make sure we get it right.”
The biggest concern we have with all this is the cost and complexity for SMEs. They are very much behind the Government in wanting to get 80% employment. They want to help tackle economic inactivity and bring people back into work. It is good for all of us to be able to utilise those skills and resources that are under-utilised at the moment, and to help people, and to go further to support people who may be on the margins of the workforce and need additional help. But SMEs cannot do that if they are faced with additional complexity and more restrictions on what they can do, and more risk of getting it wrong. It is the risk of getting it wrong that is the problem. Someone said to me, in respect of the harassment and the inclusion of the word “or” in terms of the reasonable steps that employers have to take, “I want to comply, but as drafted, I don’t know how I could guarantee that I am compliant.” It is that complexity that is the problem. I would say, “Let’s not go further right now; let’s do this at the right pace and bring employers with us.”
Alex Hall-Chen: I would agree with what others have said. I would add that if there are areas where more ambition is needed, it is around how we can make sure that the policies that will be implemented via the Bill are sustainable and can actually be implemented on the ground in business. That partly returns to the point I made earlier around the already creaking tribunal system, but also a recognition of the costs that this will have, particularly for SMEs. That is why, for instance, we have been calling for the reinstatement of the statutory sick pay rebate scheme for SMEs. That is where we would like to see more ambition.
Alex McIntyre
Q
The Chair
If the witnesses can be brief with their answers, we will fit one more question in.
Jane Gratton: A lot of our members do not use zero-hours contracts; they tend to be used in industries where they need that flexibility, and the feedback is that a lot of the workers who want zero-hours contracts want them to fit in with their own studying or caring responsibilities, or whatever it might be. Where the flexibility is mutually beneficial, that is fine and zero-hours contracts should be able to continue, but I agree with you that, if somebody wants a permanent contract, over a suitable reference period they should be allowed to have one.
Matthew Percival: This is one of those issues where we are looking for that landing zone I was describing. It is equally fair to recognise that there are some people who work on zero-hours contracts and do not want to, and others who do and want to continue to work on that basis because it suits them. How do we find a landing zone that supports both? The challenge is that, if our intervention is too blunt and makes it risky to allow people to work more hours than their minimum contract guarantees, it also increases the cost premium for employers of offering it to people who want it, as well as those who do not. Our challenge is how to find that middle ground that achieves both objectives, rather than being forced into a trade-off that potentially means making the experience of work worse for some people at the same time as better for some others. We are interested in more winners and fewer losers, rather than just different winners and different losers.
Alex Hall-Chen: Our research found that the majority of business leaders think zero-hours contracts have an important role to play but should be reformed. Our concern is about the detail rather than the principle.
Mr Peter Bedford (Mid Leicestershire) (Con)
Q
Matthew Percival: This is a question of broader context as well. We have already mentioned the changes at the Budget and how the impact of the threshold element of the national insurance changes in particular is concentrated in sectors that currently employ a large number of young people. The Bill also ends up focusing on the same area, and those businesses often speak about a triple whammy, because they are the same businesses that are affected by national living wage increases. In all three aspects, you end up with a similar group of businesses that face particular costs, and therefore, where there are unintended consequences, they are disproportionately likely to be faced by young people.
Jane Gratton: I think it might just influence an employer’s choice at the recruitment stage. If they have someone who comes along who has no experience but who they could take a chance on, or someone who is more experienced, and then there is the cost and the risk through the day one rights, it might just influence that decision. That is a worry, because that is not going to help us to tackle NEETs—people not in employment, education or training.
Alex Hall-Chen: I agree with that. I spoke to an SME just yesterday who said, essentially, that they will have to change their current recruitment process of taking on younger people and training them up, because it is too risky, given the reforms happening in the space, so they will focus on more experienced employees who can demonstrate previous competence.
The Chair
That brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask these witnesses questions. On behalf of the Committee, may I thank the three witnesses for giving us full and very clear answers? Thank you very much.
Examination of Witnesses
David Hale and Dom Hallas gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from David Hale, head of public affairs at the Federation of Small Businesses, and Dom Hallas, executive director of Startup Coalition UK.
We must stick to the timings in the programme order that the Committee has agreed. For this session, we have until 10.40 am. Would the witnesses briefly introduce themselves for the record?
David Hale: I am David Hale, from the Federation of Small Businesses.
Dom Hallas: I am Dom Hallas, executive director of the Startup Coalition, which is a lobby group for tech start-ups and scale-ups in the UK.
Greg Smith
Q
David Hale: The impact assessment was quite clear that the bill would be more than £5 billion a year. For example, it did not include any of the consequential impacts on businesses from the changes to unfair dismissal. It merely counted the ability of the Government to change. Changes to unfair dismissal are one of the things that businesses flagged, so £5 billion is very much at the low end of that estimate. You may well have seen the Regulatory Policy Committee say yesterday that the impact assessment as a whole is not fit for purpose.
The only question about the £5 billion, or the £5 billion-plus, is where that cost is borne. Obviously, businesses can bear the cost. People who are not in work can bear the cost, or people who are in work can bear the cost through wages or through lower hours. The £5 billion is a very low estimate, but where that cost falls is the more complex question.
Dom Hallas: The starting point from our perspective is that tech start-ups and scale-ups are unusual businesses—unusual small businesses, frankly. They scale rapidly—they can be growing at 50% or 100% a year. They pay unusually well—disproportionately well. The average salary is in the range of £50,000 to £60,000. They change really fast, because they are scaling and doing things really quickly. They treat staff like royalty—they treat them incredibly well—because it is a highly competitive labour market for technology talent, and they need to be able to hire in it.
That means they really value flexibility. I cannot speak to the £5 billion figure, and the reports out today throw some scepticism on that. What I will not do is sit here today and tell you that this piece of legislation would be disastrous for our ecosystem—clearly not—but what it would do is present a series of speed bumps, a series of bumps in the road, for these kinds of businesses, the cumulative effect of which is to chip away at some of the flexibility that our companies prize.
Greg Smith
Q
Do you think the lack of flexibility, or making the rules more rigid, as this Bill does, and some of the factors that previous witnesses talked about—dissuading people to take on new hires and making the risk of new hires that much greater—will dissuade more people from choosing to leave payroll and start up on their own, whether through self-employment or registering a business?
Dom Hallas: I leave self-employment to one side, but from the perspective of an entrepreneur trying to build one of our tech businesses, the truth is that any number of things the Government may or not do in policy are not necessarily what persuades or dissuades someone from starting a business. The reality is that they are probably going to do it anyway. The question is, are we going to make it harder or easier for them? In truth, what we consistently see—and I think this is where you have the conversations around taxation and the Budget layered on top—is the risk of a number of pebbles in the stream for entrepreneurs that will not prevent them from trying to build their business, because they will crack on and try to do it. One of the things we consistently talk to entrepreneurs about when we ask them about policy is, “What are the challenges you face?” The answer they give far too frequently is, “There are loads of things, but we just have to get on with it.”
I put to the Committee that the question is ultimately how we prevent our policy environment from being seen as a barrier to overcome by the entrepreneur community and the founders who are building these kinds of businesses and creating these kinds of jobs. How do we create a situation that is as open and flexible as possible for them to operate and, therefore, a competitive jobs market that will ensure that the workers are treated really well?
Greg Smith
Mr Hale, do you have a view on that perspective?
David Hale: If the Government had a good process for the Bill, which I do not think they do, we would be exploring what the participation harm is. Part of that is not just whether firms choose to recruit, but who they choose to recruit. On the whether, from a small-business perspective, you might get a contract, you might choose to scale to meet it, or you might not. It is not the case that all small businesses will choose to scale regardless. There is a risk there, and if you increase risk, you lessen the chance that somebody will do that. Part of the importance of participation harm is not just whether, but which people are employed.
We know we have a CV culture in this country. We know that managers at all levels—I am talking not only small employers, but managers in small and large businesses—look down CVs and look for gaps. If people find gaps in CVs, we know that in the UK, they are less likely to feel that that is a risk they can bear. If you add risk to employment, part of the problem is not just whether they take that risk, but who they take that risk with.
Small businesses are currently most likely to take that risk. Small businesses currently recruit most from outside the labour market. If they do not do that—and we know that small businesses are responsive to risk—it is not just small businesses that lose out, but the businesses that in turn recruit from them. Larger businesses might well be more likely to recruit someone who has two years at a small business on their CV or experience doing bar work when they were a student, and they might benefit from the introduction to work they have had. But the whether and who is currently missing from the conversation, and I think that is because we have had such a quick process. That is the main thing. Does the Bill help somebody take that leap? The Government should be making that case. I have not seen a case for how the Bill would help somebody want to recruit more.
Greg Smith
Q
David Hale: There seems to be a big question about whether the Bill should be split up. It is a very large Bill. Overwhelm is the primary response. The second response is, to put it politely, bemusement about what the Government are trying to achieve and how these measures are intended to achieve it. We know the very high level, but the high level does not match the measures. If you are talking about security at work, the Bill does not appear to give extra security at work. There is bemusement about that.
Like most of us, small businesses are scared of getting sued, so there is fear about that. The Bill increases the risk of litigation against small businesses. The next question is about the possible harms of the response to that fear, which are things like the participation harm, harm to the work environment, and harm to individuals and the whole economy from the knock-on effects. I am not sure whether there are 28 or 70 measures—maybe some of you could list them all, but I do not think anyone else could. I do not think a small business would be able to tell you what they are or implement them all at once, so there is a question about whether the Bill should be split up.
Dom Hallas: I agree on the scale point. The Bill has a big impact. The top practical concern from a start-up ecosystem perspective is day one rights and exactly what that means. Obviously, there is an open discussion about the probationary period and exactly how that is going to work. From a start-up ecosystem perspective, the core point is ultimately that you have fast-moving businesses whose needs change, and the experiences of employees change.
The practical impact of the Bill in that area will be that people are less likely to continue to take a risk on someone, even when they have hired them after a probation period, because of the changes the Government are looking at. What we will get is a situation where employees who might be doing well, but not as well as you might hope, are more likely to see their employment terminated at that stage, as opposed to over a longer timeframe, with the business saying, “Well, we can’t take the risk.” So there seems to be a perverse incentive that ends up being created.
Justin Madders
Q
David Hale: To go back to the previous question, what I hope you will support is the introduction of a statutory sick pay rebate in the Bill. We have always been very clear that a rebate is important with any changes that increase SSP costs, because if you do not have a rebate, you systematically disadvantage the firms that take on people who are sick or likely to get sick, and those firms are already not supported enough by Government policy.
If you want to make changes to statutory sick pay, as the Bill proposes, you should put in a statutory sick pay rebate to cater for the risk to small firms. Say a firm has six staff members and two are off at the same time, that is 33% of the workforce. It would be very useful if the Government stepped up and actually supported firms that are taking on the people they are talking about. So it is a question more for you than for me: will the Bill include a rebate or not?
Justin Madders
Q
David Hale: It is a good question. It partly goes back to the overwhelm. We can talk to only so many small businesses at a time, and we can talk to them about only so many things. We can say, “If the changes to unfair dismissal come in, how will that change your recruitment?” We can have that conversation, or we can say, “If there are changes to zero-hours contracts, will that mean you have to ban swapping shifts in your business, just to cater for your regulatory risks?” We can explore those things, but only one at a time. We have 40 minutes today. We will spend less than a minute talking about each of the measures in the Bill. That overwhelm has a time consequence for good engagement and good exploration.
I do not want the officials who have engaged with us about the Bill to feel that that is not appreciated, but I do think there are process problems. This Committee is taking evidence from different groups in turn to explore the Bill over a two-day period, I think, but that is not the approach that the Department has taken, and that is a problem. At the Department level, each measure would have to be explored in turn, with different groups coming together. At the moment, the way in which the process has worked has created more division than is necessary. It has set up two sides—worker representatives and business representatives—and set them in opposition, without providing a voice for those at the biggest potential risk, which is the people who are out of work.
That is on the broad scale, but there are a lot of practical things, too: can we have regular meetings, organised at the same time each week, rather than them coming in and out of diaries, and that sort of thing? That is a practical issue, but those issues are important.
The Chair
Dom, do you have anything to add?
Dom Hallas: Just on the process point. People sit here on our side of the table and say, “Things aren’t being communicated well,” when the problem—let us be honest—is with the policy.
One of the broad challenges here, especially for small businesses, which David and I work with, is that, with an impactful piece of legislation, even communicating to them what is going on is difficult. They are a disparate group; we certainly cannot sit here and claim to represent the entirety of the tech start-up community, even if we work with a big community of businesses.
I am mindful of two things: the length of the implementation period is absolutely important, but the way the Government go about it and choose to operate in that period is also important. What does it mean, frankly, to explain to employers what their obligations are? How are we going to go through that process? We need to think about that coherently now, so that we do not get to that period later and, suddenly, it is panic stations. That will be really important.
Steve Darling
Q
David Hale: That is a slightly difficult question. You could think of Torbay and pick out hospitality, which might well have particular issues with the proposal. But you could also pick out larger businesses that recruit people when they are young and allow them to gain worthwhile skills in hospitality; they will miss out from the proposal. So it is a difficult question.
It is easier to identify the workers, or potential workers, who are most likely to miss out—that is, people who will present as a risk in a recruitment scenario. Certain businesses are more likely to recruit people who will present as a risk in a recruitment scenario. Such businesses tend to be smaller and will probably—more than usual, if not overwhelmingly—include sectors like hospitality.
The other businesses that will struggle are those that are mainly paid by the Government—the Government set their prices, in effect—such as social care and childcare. Those businesses will struggle because other businesses can put up costs, but they can only put up costs if the Government and Parliament agree to put up how much they pay and, in particular, the way they pay it—the way in which social care tariffs work very much encourages a zero-hours model. As a consequence, that would probably have to be changed to make the proposal work. But this is across the board for recruiters—there are different impacts for different businesses.
Dom Hallas: Speaking as a tech start-up and scale-up ecosystem organisation, in practice this proposal does not disproportionately affect any individual part of the ecosystem. Broadly speaking, it has the same impact.
Michael Wheeler
Q
Dom Hallas: I think that cuts to the question that Steve asked, which was about the different sectors and impacts. I can only speak for the tech start-ups and scale-ups that we work with. In practice, as I said, you have a very highly paid and mostly highly skilled sector, where the benefits and rights afforded to employees way outweigh any current statutory requirements. It is a highly competitive labour market, but that comes with the trade-off of flexibility. These businesses scale and they fail very frequently; that is part of the nature of the business. I think that, in truth, both employers and employees go into that relationship in our particular space with their eyes pretty open to that. So in our particular part of the world, I would challenge that assertion a little bit.
What I would say more broadly though—I think this is important and cuts to an area where we think the Bill could be improved for our space from both an employer perspective and an employee perspective—is that one area where we see potential further progress is banning non-compete agreements. In California, where really successful technology ecosystems have been built in silicon valley, one of the cornerstones of that has been that there are no non-compete agreements allowed in law. That offers more flexibility from a labour market perspective in many cases, but it also benefits employees significantly, because that flexibility comes to their benefit as well.
From our point of view, employers are, frankly, scrambling like hell to try and find the employees to fill these tech jobs, and the employees are very highly paid. If those businesses fail, or their needs change, that is, in our view, part of the trade-off with those kinds of businesses. I appreciate that that might not be the case across every sector, but providing that flexibility is a core part of that trade-off.
David Hale: Typically, flexibility is a demand from employees rather than a demand from employers. Most employers would love the same people to turn up each week for the same shift; most employees would like to be able to work their shifts around their day-to-day lives. Most workplaces come to an accommodation on that, with things like shift-swapping.
What I am not clear on is where there is gain. Take zero hours and the scenario where this Bill ends up meaning that somebody who has worked the same hours for 12 weeks in a row is offered a contract. Somebody who an employer has employed for the same hours for 12 weeks in a row is likely to be either somebody they would like to give a contract to or somebody who has worked in a seasonal role. Those are the two scenarios. That employee is unlikely to be the employee who wants more hours or regular hours, because the employer is already giving them that. So there is not really a gain that is very obvious. What there is, is a lack of flexibility, because the response to the legal risk will be for employers to say to employees, “Actually, I need to keep an eye on precisely how many hours you are working each week for a reference period. So, no, you are not allowed to swap shifts.” That is a damage to flexibility, with no obvious gain for people who have been working 12 weeks in a row, who, frankly, the employer probably wants to agree a permanent contract for, but does not.
Laurence Turner
Q
Dom Hallas: When I talked about employment law in that context, it was as part of a broader range of work we do with what we call platform businesses. They might be traditionally known as gig economy platforms, sharing economy platforms or online marketplaces that have two sides—someone who wants to sell something and someone wants to buy something, whether that is services or goods. The gaps in law that exist there are an increasing problem, because many of these platforms want to be able to offer support to the people who leverage them, but they are not able to do so because of the restrictive nature of employment law.
The challenge at the moment is that the Bill does not necessarily address that. There is clearly a way of potentially having further conversations on that. Obviously, some of that is being discussed down the line, including whether there is a single status for workers. We are not sure whether that is exactly the right approach, but there is a conversation to be had with Government about what is the right approach.
In the meantime, what we have is a structure built by court case, which I do not think is helpful for anyone concerned. It is frustrating for a number of unions and workers’ rights organisations that have been campaigning on this issue, but also for a wide variety of platforms—they are not the very biggest ones that are taking things all the way to court. They would prefer some clarity so that they could potentially offer additional benefits to people who leverage their platforms. That is the first thing to say.
A significant portion of the Bill is made up of things that we either have no view on or that, broadly speaking, would be fine. The reality is that I am not going to sit here and say that it is going to be catastrophic for the tech start-up community. In truth, it is not going to be.
David Hale: There are steps in the Bill on strengthening paternity and maternity protection, and that is one of the reasons why I talk about splitting the Bill up. Those seem like good things that probably have a positive impact on the workforce as a whole. As I said, because of the overwhelm, we are still going through the detail, but those seem like good measures. Would it not be better to focus on good measures, and things where the risks, costs and trade-offs are understood, and to make a decision to proceed positively with those?
Compared to the last speakers, we are less likely to have a particular view on the trade union aspects of the legislation. On the trade union aspects, it is fairly well understood what the measures are and what their impact will be—that is decision-ready. The bits that are not decision-ready are the proposals around unfair dismissal and zero-hours contracts. The bit that could be decision-ready but is not is probably around SSP and the question of a rebate.
The Chair
Anneliese Midgley is next. If we are brief with the question and answers, we will have time for one more question after this.
Anneliese Midgley
Q
David Hale: No, it is the opposite. FSB provides services to members, and one of the biggest services it provides is legal advice. One of the biggest things it provides legal advice for is employment relationships. Obviously, it is in the narrow interest of FSB as an organisation for employment law to be more complicated and less usable. However, we do not come here to argue for things that make FSB a more valuable product; we come here to argue for reasons why we do not have to exist—because the Government have made life easy enough for small businesses. We are owned and run by our members, and we are constitutionally required to act in the interests of small businesses.
Obviously, the more complicated employment law is made, the more likely we are to have people join and call an employment line. It would be irresponsible of us to try and change the law to make it more complicated and to make a bigger use case for joining FSB. We would never do that and we do not do that. It would be in the narrow interests of FSB for employment law to be complicated, but that is not what we are here to do.
Uma Kumaran (Stratford and Bow) (Lab)
Q
The Chair
It will have to be a one-sentence answer.
David Hale: I do not particularly mean to express strong views. I am trying to highlight the things that we need to have a better idea of before the legislation is in place. As you say, we have large-scale surveys out to try and work out what the possible impact of the Bill will be. We will run focus groups with businesses to try and work through what the consequences of the Bill will be. To do that, it would be useful to have a better understanding of what exactly the Bill will look like. But I am very happy to talk whenever about any specific measures in the Bill, and to ensure that how small businesses will react is linked to how decision makers will decide what is in the Bill.
Dom Hallas: I would just add that your experience is probably correct, Uma, but the reason for that is slightly different: no businesses will even know at this stage that the Bill will have any impact on them. The reality is that they are completely ignorant about what is happening in Parliament, when it comes to the way in which their businesses are changing. You see that on Budget day: even though there are weeks of conversations about what may or may not be coming, a number of businesses are suddenly surprised that things have changed for them. That is a practical concern, and that is precisely why you should engage with business both through this process and after it, not just by talking to people like me and David—although we are obviously always happy to be here—but more generally by doing as much outreach as possible with businesses on the ground that are trying to build stuff every day.
The Chair
Order. I am sorry to interrupt you, but we have come to the end of the time allotted. On behalf of the Committee, I thank both witnesses for the evidence they have given this morning. Thank you very much.
Examination of Witnesses
Ben Willmott, Cathryn Moses-Stone and Carly Cannings gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from Ben Willmott, head of public policy for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; Cathryn Moses-Stone, head of policy at the Chartered Management Institute; and Carly Cannings, founder of The Happy Business School. Once again, we must stick to the timings on the programme motion, so this session will have to end at 11.25 am. Will the witnesses briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Ben Willmott: I am Ben Willmott, and I am head of public policy at the CIPD, which is the professional institute for human resources and people development in the UK. We have 160,000 members, who are mainly HR directors, HR managers and HR advisers working as practitioners in organisations across all sizes and sectors of business. We also have about 15,000 self-employed HR consultants among our membership, who work with tens of thousands of small firms to help build their HR and people management capability.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: My name is Cathryn Moses-Stone, and I am head of policy at the Chartered Management Institute. We are the leading professional body dedicated to raising the standards of management and leadership excellence across the UK. We have more than 220,000 members, and more than 150,000 people are currently studying on one of our management and leadership programmes. Our royal charter defines our charitable mission as increasing the number and standard of professionally qualified managers across the UK.
Carly Cannings: I am Carly Cannings, founder of The Happy Business School. I am a workplace culture consultant, and I help organisations to create happy, thriving, people-centric cultures.
Greg Smith
Q
Ben Willmott: There is no doubt that the cumulative impact of the proposed regulatory changes will be significant. Our members are responsible for making changes to employment contracts and workplace policies to ensure they align with any changes in employment legislation. They communicate any changes to staff and, crucially, ensure that managers have information, advice and, where necessary, training so that they meet any new legal obligations in the workplace.
Of course, we know that there will be a likely increase in the number of tribunal applications, which our members will have to respond to. That has not just potential compensation costs; there are HR and management costs to responding to tribunal claims, even those that do not actually make it to tribunal in the end and those that do not have any merit. Without a doubt, there will be a significant impact on workload.
The other point I want to make is that the time resources spent on those activities mean that employers will not have the time to invest in addressing the skills gap, upskilling staff and supporting technology adoption. That is the other challenge, which may undermine the other productive activities that you want HR and people management specialists to engage in.
So, yes, phasing these measures and really thinking about how they will be implementable is really important.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: Echoing Ben’s last point, which moves the discussion on quite nicely, we know that broadly there is quite strong support for the Bill among British managers. We have polled our managers over the past year and the last month, and in the last month over 75% were supportive of improved workers’ rights as a means to boosting productivity and 65% felt that it should be a top national priority. But obviously these are just changes. We know that they are meant to be the catalyst for implementing better working practices and more improved working cultures; the extent to which they can do that will very much depend on the implementation, which depends on the time and the process that we give to the managers who have to deliver it day to day, on the ground, to get it right.
Our data shows that over 82% of people are accidental managers, which means they go into a management position without any formal management training. If you are expecting them to deliver a whole suite of really complicated reforms, we need to ensure that the consultation period is long enough and that they are consulted in the right ways. Also, things like the fair work agency really have to take into consideration what the legislation means for allowing managers and leaders to upskill to deliver things in the right way, and the agency should not assume ill intent as a first port of call but work with people to understand what it might look like for them in practice, when they deliver it in their organisations.
Carly Cannings: I would probably echo the comments of the other panel members. It is not necessarily a case of splitting the Bill up; it is about giving enough time, and enough time with the detail. On reading the Bill initially, it is quite obvious that there are intentionally large gaps, because they are to be filled by secondary legislation for the most part. It is a case of ensuring that employers have enough time to get used to the changes introduced by the broad brush of the Bill, which should then be followed up with further consultation and enough notice on those changes.
Greg Smith
Q
Ben Willmott: We understand that the changes to the unfair dismissal regime in any new initial or statutory probation period will not come in until autumn 2026 at the earliest—that is the sort of timeframe you need to be thinking about. The other thing is that, because of all the other measures, it would help if you could push that out, as that is possibly the most substantive change that will affect all workplaces. If you could phase in some of the other changes over a longer period of time—say three years in total—that would certainly help.
The other point I have been echoing is that ACAS absolutely needs more resources to support the implementation process. We have called for ACAS’s budget to be doubled to £120 million a year. It is really crucial to support compliance, particularly among those small and medium-sized businesses that we know are more likely to fall foul through accidental non-compliance. They are less likely to know what their employment regulation obligations are and have less resources to adapt to the changes.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: Similarly, we would like to see consultation throughout the whole of 2025, which would be a really nice long period to try to understand exactly what the legislation means for managers. When we are looking at training courses and development for managers and leaders, that does not happen overnight. If there is an understanding that there will be a management gap in some particular area of the Bill, you then have adequate time to try to find the ways to support the people delivering it to upskill, so that they can do it in the right way. Although we cannot give specifics, I think 2026 echoes a decent period of time with implementation.
Greg Smith
Q
Cathryn Moses-Stone: I cannot talk to the specifics of the Bill’s initial cost implications, but I can talk to the cost implications of having really highly trained managers in the workplace. When thinking about general management training, we know that chartered managers, on average, boost a business’s revenue by £59,000. We know that the average pay rise of a chartered manager is £13,000. We see in a lot of our data that there is a direct productivity impact on an organisation from having highly skilled, highly trained managers who are able to implement policies that increase retention, retain talent, boost morale and create a more positive workplace culture, which prevents turnover, which saves a business from losing money.
It probably also comes back to the point that managers need time to get it right and to understand it, so that the burden on their business in the long run is not huge because they have the right amount of time to understand how they will work with their employees so that they do not have to escalate everything to tribunal. The early training period is crucial for the wider cost savings, because we know that there are lots of concerns from businesses on these issues, as well as the broader sentiment of being in support of the Bill.
Ben Willmott: One of the challenges for a business looking to upskill its managers is that that will incur a cost. If we look at the proposed increases in employment costs overall, we see those from the different measures in the Bill and those from the changes in the Budget, which also need to be taken into account. Businesses will have to find the money to upskill and train their managers. That is one reason why we are saying that ACAS needs to be resourced, particularly to help those smaller businesses that are more resource-challenged and have less knowledge and capability around the HR and people-management side of the business, which is so important to this.
Carly Cannings: Ben made a really important point about making sure that small businesses are adequately resourced to deal with the changes. I am, as many employers are—as the statistics bear out—very supportive of raising the standards of employment, and the Bill certainly takes a step in the right direction towards raising standards. The balance that needs to be struck is about making sure that employers, and particularly small employers, are able to cope with the changes.
There are lots of businesses out there already doing really good things, and some of the things in the Bill will be measures, practices and policies that lots of employers already have in place. That is not the case for everyone and, in particular, that might not be the case for small businesses. Echoing Ben’s point, small businesses are more likely to fall foul of the legislation accidentally, rather than intentionally, because they do not have the right access to support and advice in the same way. That is an important point that must not be missed.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: Would it be all right if I added a point? It is true, obviously, that there is a cost to training managers, but that is why we are also really concerned about the proposed defunding of the level 7 apprenticeships, because there will be a huge knock-on impact. Potentially, a huge skills gap could open up in highly trained management across the UK, at a time when businesses are going to be required to know their staff and to implement the legislation in the right way. We are concerned about how that aligns with the development and delivery of the Bill.
Justin Madders
Q
I have a more general question about what you see as the current weaknesses in the employment rights sphere. What do we need to do to give people more protection and security at work? Do you think the Bill addresses that?
Ben Willmott: The introduction of the fair work agency—a single enforcement body—is a positive step forward, but there needs to be further thought about how to improve the labour market enforcement system. We need a long-term strategy to improve labour market enforcement that includes not just a fair work agency but the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Health and Safety Executive, not in a single enforcement body but as part of the strategy. We need measures to improve the efficiency of the employment tribunal system, which we know is swamped, and we need to increase the overall number of labour market inspectors—by international standards the UK is under-resourced on the number of inspectors.
As I have said before, we also need to significantly increase ACAS’s budget so that it can help small firms to comply. If labour market enforcement is about getting the carrot and stick balance right, that is why it is so crucial that ACAS can play that role in helping to raise employment standards. Businesses that are not bad employers—those that are poorly resourced, or might be knowledge-poor or time-poor, particularly micro and small firms—tend to fall foul of legislation because of those issues, not because of any malicious intent.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: I will start with the latter part of the question. We have a lot of data showing the impact of good management practice on both productivity and an improved workplace culture. Much of the Bill falls into that camp. For example, we know that one third of employees have cited negative work culture as a driver for leaving their organisation. That is obviously driven by ineffective management. We know that when managers in organisations have mutual trust and respect with their direct reports, they find that productivity rises. Poorly managed teams have lower motivation, satisfaction and retention. We believe a lot of the elements of the Bill are tied up in driving much of that in a positive way.
The things we are worried about, which echo what I have said before and what Ben has said, come down to implementation—that is, what the fair work agency looks like, how it behaves, how it supports, and how it gives space for managers to upskill. We know that 40% of our managers have expressed some concern about the detail of some of the policy, such as the right to disconnect. For example, what defines business-critical comms, versus just maintaining team comms?
We know that with high-quality management training—helping people to understand how to have difficult conversations, prioritise and have emotional intelligence—people can navigate those things much more effectively in the workplace. Our worry is about what the implementation will look like and about how managers and leaders will be supported in respect of the fair work agency.
Carly Cannings: I think the Bill is about raising minimum standards. As I said previously, a lot of employers are doing a lot of good things. Let us be realistic about the impact of the Bill: it is about raising minimum standards. Cathryn alluded to the bigger picture of creating happy, thriving workplace cultures, and it goes far further than that. This is not a call for further legislation; for me, legislation is about raising minimum standards. There is so much more outside and beyond legislation that makes a real difference to whether somebody has a happy, thriving workplace culture, and the benefits of that culture.
Thank you, Cathryn. You have done a very good job of outlining the things that I see in reality and when working with my clients—the factors that play a part in creating a workplace culture. Like I said, for me the Bill is about raising minimum standards.
Justin Madders
Q
Cathryn, you spoke about surveys with your managers and about the strong support for the Bill, and you said that there is nothing in the proposals that should alarm a responsible business. Given what you also said about the pace of implementation and the need to continue dialogue, if we get that right, would you still say there is nothing in the proposals that should alarm a responsible employer?
Cathryn Moses-Stone: First, the right to disconnect was just a useful example of the sort of concerns we hear.
We are not saying there is nothing for businesses to be alarmed about. One of the challenges that managers and leaders face is implementing and managing change across their organisations, and that is a complex thing. That comes back to our point that we have a whole suite of data on the impact that highly skilled managers have on managing change in their organisations, and the knock-on impact that has on recruitment, retention, productivity and the success of a business. It does not mean it is easy and straightforward; I do not think many things that managers and leaders do are easy and straightforward. Again, it comes back to the core principle of having the right amount of time and being able to support managers to skill up. That at least gives them the tools to be able to tackle these complicated things head on, because they will be complicated.
Ben Willmott: I absolutely agree that there is a significant role for well-designed, effectively enforced employment regulation to support overall improvement in employment standards and to support efforts to improve employee engagement and productivity. The key is that it has to be well-designed regulation. If it is excessive or too complex to implement on the ground, it will lead to increased costs, and that will undermine the ability of businesses to improve job quality, invest in recruitment and skills, and support technology adoption and things that will drive productivity. That is why, as we move forward, the consultation is so important.
An example of a measure in the Bill is around the reference period for workers to have the right to guaranteed hours. It is not set out in the Bill, but in “Next Steps” it is set at 12 weeks. In our view it is crucial that there should be consultation on the 12-week reference period. The Government have set out their principles for a modern industrial relations framework: accountability, proportionality, collaboration and balancing the interests of business and workers. Those principles need to apply as we roll out and implement the proposals, so 12 weeks is a test that should be subject to consultation, because it is so important to the functioning of that right. That is the sort of thing where we want to see consultation—where it would help to decide that the ultimate regulation is effectively designed and can work.
Steve Darling
Q
Ben Willmott: The Bill is focusing businesses’ minds on how they recruit, manage and develop their people. I will refer to comments I made earlier. If the measures in the Bill are designed the right way, they can support improvements in overall employment standards. But if consultation is not effective and measures are introduced that are not workable, it will have the opposite effect. It is about finding the right balance.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: Similarly, we have a lot of data that shows that policies like flexible working, enhanced family-friendly rights and day one rights make employees feel valued and supported, which in turn drives better performance.
We did a study last year looking at the impact of trained managers in effectively delivering hybrid working. By way of example, 68% of our managers said that hybrid working made it easier to increase their work productivity, and that was a result of managers being trained to manage teams that work in a hybrid way. We know that where managers trust their direct reports—this is what our evidence shows—they find that productivity rises. As I have already said, poorly managed teams face lower motivation, satisfaction and retention, and ultimately impact on business delivery. So really good management in designing work that allows employees to thrive is important.
We must remember that managers are employees themselves. Managers want it to work for themselves as much as they want it to work for employees. That in turn will boost productivity at the higher levels of the organisation as well. We have lots of data that backs that up. Again, it is all about how the legislation is implemented and all about the time and space that is given to support managers to do that.
Ben Willmott: The other thing I would add is that our members are certainly supportive of the ambition behind the Bill. Our member survey shows that there is significant support for changes to improve statutory sick pay and to improve parental leave.
There are definitely areas of the Bill that have support, but I will give an example of an issue. When talking to members in sectors that might bear more cost from changes to statutory sick pay, we found they were much more sanguine in September than they were after the Budget, because they are now thinking about it in the context of broader changes. The cumulative effect of changes and increases in employment costs needs to be taken into account when we think about individual measures.
Carly Cannings: On the point about productivity, if you look at what makes a workforce productive, there are lots of things that go in the mix, such as feeling engaged in the work you are doing and valued by your managers, as well as having an environment around you that offers things such as flexibility. The factors that lead to productivity are broad. We need to be realistic about the measures in this Bill and how far they will go to support productivity, given that lots of employers are probably already meeting lots of these minimum thresholds.
It is a step in the right direction. It raises the profile of things such as flexible working, so hopefully more businesses will adopt it—it is now a day one right anyway. It definitely moves in the right direction in terms of creating that happy, engaged workforce who feel valued and able to work in a way that works for them and their employer. Again, it is back to that point about raising minimum standards. There is more to this element about workplace culture and productivity than just minimum standards of employment legislation.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: Echoing that, it is important to acknowledge that lots of forward-thinking employers are already doing a lot of this stuff anyway. They are doing it for a reason, because they are seeing the impact on their business. That must not be forgotten.
Chris Law
Q
Carly Cannings: It was not a criticism when I said that it was about minimum standards. As I said, creating a happy, thriving, engaged workforce is more than just legislation. It is not to be misunderstood as a criticism of those minimum levels, but equally, you do not want to tie the hands of good employers by making them jump through too many hoops around legislation.
For me, this Bill is about raising the standards of those employers who are not necessarily doing, and need a bit of encouragement to do, the right things. We need to be mindful of the balance. The previous panel mentioned the impact on small businesses and the importance of not going too far the other way in over-legislating that ties the hands of small businesses. It is very much not a criticism; it is a realistic statement of the Bill being part of the package.
Ben Willmott: We have done a lot of research over the last few years looking at the level of HR capability and people management capability in small firms, and what sort of support they need. The research has involved more than 500 small firms, and shows the very low level of HR knowledge and capability within them. They do not have in-house access to professional HR practitioners; most of them do not use any sort of external professional HR consultancy support either.
There are a lot of issues that you probably would not imagine. A lot of small firms may not even have written employment contracts or written terms and conditions of employment. There is a lot of informality still in that part of the economy. That is the point I was making earlier. We really do need to find ways of providing better quality, more accessible advice and support to help these small firms meet their obligations and improve the overall level of employment standards in the economy.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: From our perspective, we would hope that this is a broader catalyst and a driver to see better-led and managed organisations across the board. We want to see more investment in management and leadership in general. We have lots of evidence looking at the impact of better-trained managers in the public sector and how that can support public service reform. We have evidence for what that looks like in healthcare education settings. We have evidence for what that looks like for delivering green skills and AI, and for how that is a driver of more investment in management and leadership across the board, given the evidence we have and what it does for workplace growth, productivity, our economy and people’s happiness.
Again, I emphasise the point that 82% of people are accidental managers. We have all heard—I am sure everyone in this room has, in their time—about a bad manager and the impact that that can have on an organisation. We see this, hopefully, as a bit of a catalyst for further investment and the thought given to M&L in general.
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
Q
May we explore the trade-offs a little? With this kind of legal framework, to what extent will managers be able to focus properly on the core purpose of their businesses, as opposed to compliance with the law? To what extent will managers be able to invest properly in training and new technologies to aid productivity, rather than have the costs set out in the impact assessment?
Ben Willmott: That is a really important point. I alluded to it earlier. We know that one of the things that will drive productivity will be looking at how businesses can identify and address skills gaps, which will require thinking about how we train and develop our staff and managers. We know that responsible technology adoption will, to a large degree, depend on the people element—things like job design, or making sure that people are trained and have the right skills to use technology, and that we are consulting employees in advance so that their views help shape how the technology is implemented.
Businesses only have so much bandwidth, so I think that there is a real challenge there, particularly for our members, who are on the frontline of trying to ensure compliance. At the same time, the business will be asking them to help improve workplace productivity through those other activities. That needs to be thought about when we think about how regulation interacts with other factors that might support workplace productivity.
Carly Cannings: You are right—there is an inevitable trade-off. Even employers who are now broadly compliant or doing good things will have some costs associated with bringing in changes to policies that reflect the actual detail of the Bill, for example. They might be broadly doing something good in that space, but it might not quite align with the provisions of the Bill. It is important to make the point that it is going to have an impact on employers, even those that are doing good things in that space already. But the way to offset that is by phasing the changes through—not dumping them all on employers all in one go, but helping them to navigate the changes. This has already been alluded to, but it is making sure that they have that support through the implementation phase.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: I am pretty much in agreement with Carly. Obviously, there will be an initial trade-off, and investment will be required, but I guess our point is that it is for longer-term gain. Once we have got those happier and more supported managers, and therefore workplaces, these things will become elements that save the business money in the long run. Understanding that broader piece is important, and making sure that the process is there in order to upskill and train people in the right ways. It will be about a clear understanding of, “Will this agency be there to support them in the right ways?”, rather than just being a place to go as a last resort, assuming a slap on the wrist and ill intent. What is the support package alongside this to manage some of those trade-offs?
Michael Wheeler
Q
“on a mission to help organisations build people-centric workplace cultures, where happy people can thrive.”
Which measures in the Bill will be most transformative and help you in that mission?
Carly Cannings: Not to labour the point further, but this is about setting minimum standards, and creating happy, thriving workplace cultures is far broader than employment legislation. On the stuff around flexibility, some of which has already come in through previous legislation, a common theme with organisations I work with is that having good, flexible working policies generally goes down very well with employers. As with everything, there is a balance to be struck, but some of the firming up of the flexibility rights is good. But as I said, lots of the businesses I work with are already doing good things in that space. It is more about bringing up the standards for the others. This is just a small part in that bigger picture, but a move in the right direction. I suppose it is raising the profile of those rights and broadening them.
Alison Hume
Q
Carly Cannings: That is a good point. Arguably, from my reading of the Bill, there is not a lot of specific focus on those rights. It is about standards across the board. There are already some protections, particularly unfair dismissal rules. Even though the qualifying period is likely to change, there are still the protected characteristic rights—the day one rights that already exist.
I have to say that, from my reading, the Bill does not scream out that there is lots in there that will help specifically those with disabilities and long-term health conditions. Flexible working is definitely part of that picture, but the big change was making it a day one right, which has already been done. The legislation is just tightening that up further. Being able to have flexibility is a big issue for people in terms of accessing work, so that is probably the biggest one. But as I say, a lot of that work has been done in making it a day one right.
Uma Kumaran
Q
Carly Cannings: I have reached out to businesses to try to get a sense of what is going on. At the moment, because there are lots of gaps in the detail, employers probably are not focusing their minds so much on the detail of the Bill. I suppose it comes off the back of the Budget and the NI changes. There is probably a lot for employers to get their heads around at the moment.
The consultation and engagement should be kept going so that businesses understand what is coming. Back to Cathryn’s point about seeing the greater good of this, if you get through what might be some initial pain in making some changes to your policy and implementing those changes, it is for the greater good. I suppose a lot of what I talk about is joining the dots between having happy, thriving workplaces and having more productive, successful businesses. It is about understanding that raising these standards and making working environments better for people is better for not just the people in them but the businesses themselves.
Ben Willmott: I think we need to look at how the system as a whole will work, particularly on that point about labour market enforcement. We have to look at not only national enforcement efforts but how efforts to support small firms work at a regional level, such as with combined authority areas, and the interface and being joined up at that level is really important.
One of the things that we are doing currently is the Government-funded HR support pilots through which we provide a limited amount of pump-priming HR consultancy support. We are working with Angus council in Scotland, as well as the Tees Valley combined authority and the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council. They have a number of our CIPD-qualified HR consultants who provide up to two days of pump-priming HR consultancy support to small firms. That is being evaluated by the behavioural insights team to understand what good-quality business support on the people side looks like, and what a cost-effective system of providing that would look like as well. Some of those areas also need to be thought about if we are looking at creating a system where there can be a step change in people management capability and employment standards.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: Just to add one more thing, we need to streamline the enforcement processes and provide really clear guidance and support. It is all about those comms coming from Government, not just the scaremongering legal side. A small business should be able to log on and ask, “What support can I get? Can I get short modular courses on management training to help me figure out the legalities of this?” What resources will be available to support and not just regulate? You cannot regulate positive workplace culture into existence.
Dr Tidball
Q
Carly Cannings: How much time have we got?
The Chair
Not very long, actually.
Carly Cannings: There are a number of factors there. It is definitely about creating the right ecosystem and asking: do people feel connected to the work that they do? Do they feel purpose and meaning behind their work? Are their efforts recognised and valued? What is the dialogue and relationship like between leader and employee? Do people feel autonomous in their role? Do they feel that they are being micromanaged, or do they feel that they have autonomy and flexibility to do their work in the way that they want to? Do they feel that they are listened to? Do they feel that there is a sense of trust and respect? Is there transparency within the organisation? I could go on and on, but I am conscious that Cathryn might want to chip in.
Cathryn Moses-Stone: Unsurprisingly, I will say that skilled managers do that really well.
The Chair
I am going to move on to Anneliese Midgley for the last question very briefly, and with a brief answer.
Anneliese Midgley
Q
Cathryn Moses-Stone: I think it leads on from what Carly was saying. They see the direct benefits of creating happy, supported, trusting and inclusive workplaces. We have a lot of research that shows that really highly-trained managers and leaders create more inclusive workplaces, which has a really positive knock-on effect on both the business and people’s happiness. I think that everything I have said probably builds towards that same argument. It is better for the business as well as people.
The Chair
Thank you—that is a good point on which to finish. That brings us to the end of time allotted for the Committee to ask questions of the three witnesses before us in this sitting. I thank those witnesses for giving clear answers to the questions. The Committee will meet again this afternoon in the Boothroyd room.
Employment Rights Bill (Second sitting)
Tuesday 26th November 2024
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Employment Rights Bill 2024-26 View all Employment Rights Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 26 November 2024 - (26 Nov 2024)
The Chair
I remind Members that questions are not limited to what is in the brief, but your questions must be within the scope of the Bill. In line with this morning’s session, for each panel of witnesses I propose to call the shadow Minister to ask the first question, then the Minister, and then the Liberal Democrat spokesperson. I will then go back and forth between the Government and Opposition sides. Anyone who wants to ask a question should catch my eye. We must stick to the cut-off times specified in the programme order, so I will interrupt questioning if necessary. I remind Members that they must declare any relevant interests both when speaking in Committee and when asking questions. We are being broadcast.
Before we start hearing from witnesses, do any Members wish to make a declaration of interests in connection with the Bill?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Justin Madders)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Vaz. I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and to my membership of Unite and the GMB.
The Minister for Equalities (Dame Nia Griffith)
I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and my membership of USDAW, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers.
Michael Wheeler (Worsley and Eccles) (Lab)
I refer to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and my membership of the GMB and USDAW.
Anneliese Midgley (Knowsley) (Lab)
I refer to my declaration of interests and my membership of Unite and the GMB.
Alison Hume (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab)
I refer to my declaration of interests and my membership of Unison and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
Jon Pearce (High Peak) (Lab)
I refer to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a member of the GMB.
Laurence Turner (Birmingham Northfield) (Lab)
I again refer to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and my membership of the GMB and Unite trade unions.
Alex McIntyre (Gloucester) (Lab)
I am a member of the GMB and Community unions, and until the general election was a member of the Employment Lawyers Association.
Dr Marie Tidball (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
I refer again to my declaration of interests and to my membership of the Community union, Unison and the GMB.
Uma Kumaran (Stratford and Bow) (Lab)
I refer Members to my declaration of interests and my membership of the GMB union.
Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)
I refer Members to my declaration of interests and to my membership of Unison and Community trade unions.
Examination of Witnesses
Allen Simpson and Neil Carberry gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from Allen Simpson, the deputy CEO of UKHospitality, and from Neil Carberry, chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation. We have until 2.30 pm for this panel. Would the witnesses introduce themselves briefly?
Neil Carberry: I am Neil Carberry. I am the chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, which is the sector body for the UK’s talent, recruitment and staffing businesses. We represent about 3,200, mostly family-owned, businesses across the UK.
Allen Simpson: Hello everyone. I am Allen Simpson. I am the deputy CEO of UKHospitality which, as the name suggests, represents the hospitality sector in the UK—about 3.5 million people in total.
Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)
Q
Good afternoon. May I start with Mr Simpson? UKHospitality has been quite critical of this Bill in the media and in a wider setting. You have just said you represent a very large number of people. Do you think after this Bill is passed and becomes an Act—I think we can safely assume it will, with the parliamentary arithmetic at the moment—there will be more, or fewer, people employed in hospitality in the United Kingdom?
Allen Simpson: I would slightly reject your characterisation. I think in general we agree with the principles behind the reforms, and many of the substantial reforms themselves. There are areas where we will have to nuance the detail of things like reference periods and zero-hours contracts—we will get into that, I am sure. My bigger concern, however, is the aggregate costs of what we saw in the Budget with the regressive impact on lower earners in particular. Will this create more or fewer jobs? I think the Government’s analysis suggests that it is fewer, but let us balance that against making sure that workers’ rights are protected.
Greg Smith
Q
Allen Simpson: I have a red, amber and green list in front of me, so I can tell you what is on the red if that is useful. First, it is the aggregate cost: the cost of this, alongside the employer national insurance and national living wage increases, is going to be a barrier to employment. You can take the 50,000 job losses that the Government’s impact assessment describes or the 100,000 that Deutsche Bank have, but there is an aggregate cost question.
More specifically, there is a question around the variation of contracts—we can talk about that in more detail—and making sure that that protects against what we can probably call a P&O event. Equally, we need to allow for like a restaurant moving from one high-street premises to another so that contracts are not accidentally novated. There are questions around how we manage union thresholds, which we need to think through in detail. Those would be my reds, but equally, I have ambers and greens as well.
Greg Smith
Q
Allen Simpson: There is something around statutory sick pay, which is worth considering. There is a tendency, when we look at what a good job means, to build around the paradigm of an office, when working in hospitality—not unlike my wife, who is a nurse, working in a medical setting—is a different way of working. We need to think about whether or not sick pay kicking in from day two might be more appropriate than day one. Equally, I have an amber around the notice of shifts and how we manage things like major events at Ascot, Wembley or anywhere else. You did not ask, but I will say that for green, I am very supportive of changes in general to zero-hours contracts.
Greg Smith
Q
Allen Simpson: It is about 17% in total. If you look at who those people are, they are largely who you would think—students and people with caring responsibilities. I think about my mum, who worked on what we would now call a zero-hours contract while raising me and my brothers. That 17% is going to skew younger and largely skew female. There is a really interesting question around making sure you have a legal structure that allows people who want to work flexibly to do it, but also making sure that the people who want to work in a more settled, structured way—maybe because they have more responsibilities financially—to be able to do that as well. I broadly think the proposals in the Bill are the right ones.
I have a question about the reference period. I know Ireland has a 52-week reference period for estimating what your set of regular hours is, which possibly feels too long. I have always held 26 weeks in mind as a number which allows you to cope with things like seasonal working, but equally allows the worker the right to choose whether they want to work flexibly or in a more fixed way.
Greg Smith
Q
Allen Simpson: I come back to the point that you need the right legal structure. I think it is legitimate for someone who in practice is working 30 hours a week regularly and has been doing so for the last year to ask for that to be reflected in a different form of contract. That is absolutely right. It is worth saying that the data shows—and it does not matter how you look at this—that most people on zero-hours contracts are happy with that. In fact, if you advertise a zero-hours contract, you will get more applicants. To a degree, as long as it is in the gift of the employee to say, “Well, I am working these regular hours and I want that reflected in a permanent contract”, that is the right balance. However, it is important that the Government move their thinking, as they have, to recognise that zero-hours contracts are a really important social fairness point because they allow access to work for people who cannot necessarily offer their employer set hours every week—again, I come back to my mum when I was a kid. Having that distinction in law is really important.
Greg Smith
Q
Neil Carberry: I will not repeat what Allen said about the aggregate cost of the Bill, but clearly it is an enormous piece of legislation, coming at a time when businesses—particularly consumer-facing businesses—have been through the pandemic, are carrying more debt and are struggling to drive the growth that the Government want. Among my members, as with many business organisations, the tone of the debate about the Bill was changed by the Budget. That was particularly around the shift on the threshold, which directly pushes up the costs of all of the people for whom an employer’s decision to hire is maybe more marginal. I associate myself with Allen’s comments on that.
More specifically, for those who are not familiar with it, our sector places 1 million people into new permanent jobs every year, but it placed 1 million people as temporary workers into workplaces today. So I come at this from the point of view of what do those people need to have good, positive, healthy working lives. Colleagues may remember the attempt to change the conduct regulations to allow agency workers to replace striking workers, which we opposed, because at the REC we believe in protecting temps and putting them in the right space.
The most important thing for our sector is the proposal to apply the same tests and rules on zero-hours contracts to agency workers as to directly employed workers. I will be really frank about that: there is a power in the Bill, we have been through the consultation, and we cannot see how any of the approaches in the consultation work. For some of the reasons that Allen has set out, agency workers are well protected. They benefit from the Employment Agencies Act 1973, from their own set of conduct regulations—the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003, passed by the last Labour Government—and from the Agency Workers Regulations 2010.
There is a lot we can do to deliver the Government’s commitment to more certainty for agency workers—it is just not by applying the powers in the Bill. We fear that the Government are trying to avoid direct employers moving to agency to avoid the powers in the Bill. A few direct employers doing that is not worth damaging the employment prospects of 1 million people. For instance, if a supply teacher in a school has worked the autumn term to cover a sickness absence, and then the absent teacher comes back, we cannot see how giving that supply teacher a right to a contract from that school is good for the school or the supply teacher. Ultimately, we think that we will just see a move to using more overtime and lengthening the working hours of existing staff. That will be net negative for the workforce.
I think there are things that we can do on the zero-hours rules to protect agency workers, but it is not applying the proposals in the Bill. More generally, I think our members would say that the Bill feels a little undercooked in its thinking. I think it is a very quick Bill, and that there is quite a lot in it that employment lawyers and our members are looking at and thinking, “How would that work?” A classic example would be the collective consultation sections of the Bill. I do not think it is in anyone’s interests for large companies employing thousands of people to be stuck in perpetual collective consultation when they are shutting down one site with 20 people in it. That is just an example of one of the things that maybe need to be worked out through regulation—lots of this is in regulation—but we need to ensure that we are not putting up barriers to employment with the Bill.
Justin Madders
Q
Allen Simpson: It is more about the unknown. Again, reasonable notice is an important principle and there should be protections. I think that the challenge will be—I notice, by the way, from what I understand from having read what is, again, a complex and lengthy piece of work, that the Government are intending to leave it to case law and employment tribunal systems to figure out what “reasonable notice” means. In general, with different sorts of work, it is reasonable to say that there are different versions of what “reasonable notice” means. If I were going to go and work on an oil rig for three months, I would want more notice of a change of shifts than if I was going to work in the local pub. Therefore, I think it is partly about figuring out what the right starting position for notice is. It is partly about reflecting differences in things, such as whether it comes with a residential element; there are questions around that.
Then there are some practical things that I think will come out in the wash, but do need considering, such as shift swapping. What if two chefs say, “Do you mind covering Saturday, because I want to go out with my friends?” “Yes, of course; that’s fine.” Is that allowed, or can that decision only be taken outwith that notice period? There are also questions around other things. What if you put out a message saying, “There is a shift available; does anybody want it?” Have you made an offer of employment to everybody you have put that message out to? Is there a time after which you are not allowed to do that? One last thing: what if somebody agrees to move their shifts around—so you say on the Friday, “Do you mind coming in this Saturday and you can have next Saturday off?” “Yes, absolutely. Fine.” Is that acceptable?
Therefore, there are there are some practical questions about, first of all, the principle of different suitable notices of shifts depending on different forms of work, and about some practicalities, which I am sure are solvable, around the management of it.
Justin Madders
Q
Neil Carberry: I think it is reasonably well noted that we were disappointed that an employment Bill was not brought forward in the last Parliament. It is time to raise enforcement standards. One of the most common worries that I hear about this Bill, for which I will not hold you accountable, Minister, is the experience that businesses have had of being the ones who comply and take on the on-costs—there are quite significant costs associated with this Bill—and then watching people flout the law and not face enforcement, so a fair work agency is a good idea.
If I may, I have a couple of guide points that we have heard from our members. One is that we are great fans of the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate. We think it does excellent work as our regulator. It sometimes annoys the hell out of me, but that is what it is for. The team there are deeply expert, and, in the creation of the fair work agency, I would be—if you would forgive a Scottishism—scunnered if we lost that expertise. Maintaining expertise as we move into the FWA is really important, and that goes with properly resourcing the FWA and giving it the capacity to maybe draw down some of the claims that currently take two years to go to employment tribunal.
The other thing, which is maybe a bit more challenging, is that, when we have done this in the past, success has been delivered by making these bodies of the labour market, not of the Government. If you go back to the 1970s, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 was guided into existence for its first two decades by the Health and Safety Commission.
As a former low pay commissioner, I will say that we hear a lot about businesses’ views of the minimum wage in the ’90s; they were against the minimum wage at £7.20 an hour in 1999, and that is why it was not introduced. They were in favour of one at the introductory rate, which was developed by the Low Pay Commission. I would really like to see the FWA have that kind of tripartite guiding force to make sure that it is as much of us and our union colleagues as it is of the Government.
Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)
Q
Allen Simpson: Yes, I think so, but fundamentally—because of the dispersed nature of hospitality, which is one of very few sectors that employ people everywhere, versus other sectors, which are much more clustered—I would make the broader point that we have a tendency to think of economics in terms of raw productivity, when actually there is the need to think about it in terms of social productivity and access to growth.
My sector is one of a relatively limited number of sectors that provide a substantive route into careers training and management for non-graduates around the country. Anything that has an asymmetric impact on my sector is going to have an asymmetric impact on the people my sector provides employment for. Again, we saw this with the Budget; increases in national insurance contributions are going to take away nearly half the pay rises expected to lower earners, and maybe 20% or 25% of the pay rises expected for higher earners. That will of course have the same geographic footprint as you would expect.
Steve Darling
Q
Neil Carberry: I regret that we are not at the end of the session, because it would have been lovely to meet Jennie.
Let me reflect on the REC’s experience. Over the past two years, we have placed 3,200 people into work from long-term unemployment through the Government’s restart scheme, and many of those people have faced barriers associated with disability. Allen reflected earlier on the flexibility offered by hospitality. Agency work also gives us a chance to do things a bit differently; it is not nine-to-five in the office. Access to Work is obviously an excellent scheme, but it only goes so far.
I will give you an example from Birmingham, where we have placed a single father into work. His challenge was not his own disability; he has a severely disabled child. The school to which one child goes is on one side of the city and the mainstream school the other child goes to is on the other side of the city, so he cannot do a nine-to-five. We have been able to place him into work on a flexible contract—when he can work, on a zero-hours contract. That is creating some opportunity.
What is really important in the whole Bill is to meet the workforce where they are, and they are somewhere different from where they were 10 or 15 years ago. This need for flexibility is how people manage. Let me round off with my favourite example. We have a member which fills Christmas shifts for John Lewis up at Magna Park in Milton Keynes. That is 3,000 jobs every day between August and Christmas, making sure that you get your Christmas presents. Ten years ago, they needed 3,500 candidates to fill those jobs because people got sick, had a week off, and obviously did not work seven days a week. Now they need 12,000 candidates, because people have greater choice: they are sitting at home, signed up to five or six of my members, and they are taking the shifts they want. For instance—this is an example that we have used in our own “temp work works” campaign—we have a temp worker who is managing a chronic illness, and they are working in the ways that they can work. If we think about the Government’s agenda today, I think embracing flexible work and agency work on that front, as an enabler for people, is really important.
Michael Wheeler
Q
Allen Simpson: Turnover is higher in hospitality than in many other sectors. Part of that is what you might call non-regretted turnover—that is, people who are in hospitality for a period and move on to their wider career, people who were students, or people with caring responsibilities. There are also people who move on for other reasons.
For people who want to be on a fixed-hours contract and are currently on a flexible contract, I absolutely agree that the ability to move from one to the other should help with retention—that seems absolutely true, yes. Equally, there are other elements of the Bill that provide a really suitable balance towards the worker and that will have exactly the same effect. The question is balancing that real value, which is absolutely there, against the unintended consequences of, as Neil has indicated, creating a hurdle rate, which means that it is hard to bring people into the workforce.
We saw, I think today, that there are 2.8 million people in the UK who are unemployed for health reasons. This is a sector able to bring those people in, and we need to make sure that we are both retaining and giving opportunities to people already in the sector and providing access to the sector for those 2.8 million people.
The Chair
Before I call Nick Timothy, we do not have long left now, and other Members are indicating that they want to speak. Could questions be quick and answers be slightly shorter, too?
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
Q
Allen Simpson: I think that is right, but the bigger impact was the Budget. Whether you take the Government’s number of 50,000 or Deutsche Bank’s number of 100,000— I have no way to tell between those two things, so let’s split the difference—there will certainly be job losses as a result. We should expect that those job losses will heavily weigh on people on minimum wage, because you can adjust the demand curve when you get to set the prices, but you cannot if the prices are set. Hospitality will bear a disproportionately large number of those losses, for sure.
If you want some qual, I was speaking to a publican who runs a series of pubs across the south-east, and his net profits at the moment are about £300,000 across the set of pubs. He estimates that next year, running the same numbers with next year’s costs, he will lose about £60,000. Clearly, his judgment is about exactly how much of that bears on raising prices, on him reducing his profits and on reduced salaries for the workers.
Alison Hume
Q
Neil Carberry: I am happy to say that from our point of view, it does not. Allen mentioned earlier the reference period, and that is how you would allow for seasonal work to be properly reflected. That balance to be struck is between protecting the interests of workers in the east coast’s hospitality industry while also protecting hospitality businesses who we know are often, as Allen said, hard-pressed. The reference period is absolutely key.
Allen Simpson: I recognise that. I said 26 weeks as a sensible reference period. Ireland’s 52-week reference period is probably longer than we need. The clarity on exclusions around fixed-term contracts and genuine casual work is material. And then, there is something in the Bill around where there is no work available after that period. It does need to be no work or limited work, because you could have a business that is still open, but the number of people staying in the hotel, say, is materially down. It needs to be possible to reflect that, and I do not think the Bill does at the moment. But that is a practical matter that does not affect the principles of what the Bill is trying to achieve.
The Chair
Order. That brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank both our witnesses for their evidence.
Examination of Witnesses
Jamie Cater and Jim Bligh gave evidence.
The Chair
Good afternoon. We will now hear oral evidence from Jamie Cater, the senior policy manager for employment at Make UK, and Jim Bligh, the director of corporate affairs for the Food and Drink Federation. We have until 3 pm for this panel. Could the witnesses please briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Jamie Cater: I am Jamie Cater, the senior policy manager for employment at Make UK.
Jim Bligh: I am Jim Bligh, the director of corporate affairs at the Food and Drink Federation. We represent thousands of businesses around the UK in the food and drink manufacturing industry in every constituency in the country.
Greg Smith
Q
Jamie Cater: It is worth starting by saying that we welcome the underpinning principles of the Bill. UK manufacturers are committed to providing good, well-paid work. We think that genuine exploitation and bad practice in the labour market should be addressed, so we are supportive of a lot of what the Government are trying to achieve through this legislation.
There are specific measures that reflect policy recommendations that Make UK has made previously on behalf of manufacturers—for example, the extension of eligibility for statutory sick pay, making it an entitlement from day one of sickness and removing the lower earnings limit. We think that is the right thing to do, although we would like to see additional financial support for the smallest employers to help with the cost burden of that—a rebate scheme, as there was during the covid-19 pandemic. Our members also support some of the measures on things such as equal pay, parental leave and family-friendly rights.
I would list four areas of concern for us: two on individual rights and two on collective rights. On individual rights, we have some concerns around the detail of the implementation of the right to guaranteed hours. Some of that detail around the definition of regular working hours and the scope and structure of the 12-week reference period for that right to guaranteed hours will come forward in the secondary legislation. Secondly, we have concerns about the structure of the statutory probation period that will accompany the day one protection from unfair dismissal.
On collective rights, the first area of concern is around consultation requirements for collective redundancy and the impact that that will have on businesses, particularly large businesses, in our sector. We have concerns about the extent to which they will be required to consult and the potential disruption associated with that. The second area is dismissal and re-engagement, or fire and rehire, where there is a very high bar set. We think it is right that there is a robust approach to that practice and we have supported previous measures, such as the existing code of practice. But we are concerned that the approach taken in this legislation might restrict the ability of employers to take the action they need to take and that the way the measure is worded in the Bill is currently too restrictive.
Jim Bligh: We pride ourselves on being good employers of the half a million people around the country who are sector employees. We simply would not be able to feed our population of 70 million people without their commitment, hard work and dedication.
We know that a flexible labour market is the hallmark of a growing economy, and we are keen to protect that. We are very receptive to a lot of the ideas in the Bill, thinking about maternity and paternity provision, the pregnancy improvements, the lower earnings limit for the statutory sick pay rules—which is a sensible thing now we have moved away from that being a state benefit —and the recognition of the importance of flexible working, which our sector offers, too. We are strongly supportive of a single enforcement agency.
There are some areas we would like Government to look at in a bit more detail, and to consult fully with businesses in a way that follows best practice, through 12-week consultations in particular. We note with interest the concerns that the Regulatory Policy Committee expressed yesterday in its analysis.
For us, there are five areas where we think Government could work with businesses and unions to come up with a pragmatic solution that will help meet the objectives of both. For us, those are around unfair dismissal and probation periods; collective redundancies and similar concerns to those other witnesses have expressed today; some technicalities around zero-hours contracts and, specifically, definitions; flexible working and the admin burden that that poses for smaller businesses, now the burden of proof is shifting; and some concerns about the secondary powers of Ministers, which are quite wide-ranging, particularly on ballot thresholds. Broadly, however, we are receptive to the ideas in the Bill, and we look forward to working with Government to implement them.
Greg Smith
Q
Jim Bligh: Unfair dismissal and the probation periods are a concern for us. Most of our sector uses three or six-month probation periods now. About 85% of our members have told us that that is what they will use. About 6% use 12 months. There would be, I think, a concern about a nine-month period—the reduction from two years. It is critical that performance management from day one does not put a significant burden on SMEs in particular, and it is important that we keep the flexibility. If something is not right for the employee and not right for the employer—that performance is not there, that quality standards or whatever are not met—there should be flexibility in ending that employment relationship, on both sides.
What concerns us about the Bill’s proposals is that young people or people re-entering the workforce—which rightly is a priority for Government as well, and I note that Liz Kendall is speaking about this in the House at the moment—could be shut out under the changes that are coming through in the Bill. Our proposal would be to revert to a 12-month probation period. Obviously, people automatically qualify for unfair dismissal on some elements. It is right that those elements are retained, but it is important to us that you keep that flexibility from 12 months, that you have a light-touch approach and a process there as well, but also that we have enough time to implement.
What concerns us is that we are talking now about changes that will come in, I think, in two years’ time—that is a commitment from Government. That period is welcome, but we are not certain what the final provisions of the Bill will be. There is a long commitment to consultation, which we also welcome. Our proposal would be to implement two years after Royal Assent, to make sure that that concrete security and guarantee is there and that the goalposts are not shifted for employees and employers as they start.
Jamie Cater: I would echo that and agree with those comments. Stepping back slightly to look at the bigger picture, it has become difficult for us, with members, to separate out the impact of the legislation and the impact of the autumn Budget—the increase in employer NICs in particular, but in general the tax burden on businesses. That, taken together with the measures in the Bill, increases the cost and the admin associated with taking on people. There is a risk that that disproportionately impacts people on the edges of the labour market, I suppose.
It is very welcome that the Work and Pensions Secretary is today talking about how to reduce economic inactivity, particularly focusing on skills and health. We really support that focus, but there is a danger that the measures in the Bill, combined with the total cost impact, will make employers less likely to take that risk on someone.
On the protection for unfair dismissal in the statutory probation period, we typically hear from members that the usual approach would be to have a six-month probation period in an employment contract. They might then have a bit of additional flexibility for someone who is a borderline candidate if they need to be kept on probation for a bit longer, perhaps if they need a bit more skills training, experience or additional guidance in something before a firm decision is made about permanent recruitment.
Members often talk to us about effectively a six plus three model, where there is a contractual six-month probation period with the flexibility for an additional three months’ probation if there is a bit of uncertainty. The Government’s stated preference for a nine-month statutory probation period feels about right. That is probably the minimum; we would not want to see it go any lower than that. I think our preference would be 12 months, just to give that additional leeway, but nine months is probably about right for what we see reflected in standard practice from our members.
Justin Madders
Q
Jamie Cater: To come back to the impact of things like statutory sick pay, I think that will help with productivity and retention. We see a huge amount of feedback from member companies about their own investment in health and wellbeing, and the positive impact of that in keeping people in work, helping with productivity and reducing presenteeism. I think the measures on statutory sick pay will help with all those things, including reducing long-term sickness absence, reducing presenteeism and improving people’s productivity. I think all those measures are really positive.
However, what we need to be careful of, and what we are concerned about—going back again to the impact of the Bill alongside the autumn Budget—is that it does not reduce or restrict employers’ ability to continue to invest in all those other things that also improve productivity. We have heard concerns about impacts on training budgets, internal budgets for things like occupational health and wellbeing, and investment in technology and new machinery that can help workers to become more productive and efficient. There is a risk that some of the costs associated with the Bill and the autumn Budget mean that those internal investment budgets will be squeezed. There is an opportunity, through some of the measures in the Bill, to improve productivity and improve security for people in the labour market, but we need to ensure that some of those other measures are not undermining those benefits.
Jim Bligh: I agree with that as well, and I endorse everything that Jamie just said. I think that the statutory sick pay clarifications are particularly helpful, and the clarity on parental leave should be helpful too. Flexibility is also important, and we need to ensure that the flexible working practices that are already widespread in our sector, as I know they are in other sectors as well, are protected and clear. I think there are concerns that potentially outweigh some of those benefits, which we are very keen to explore with the Government through the consultation periods.
Justin Madders
Q
Jim Bligh: I think we would accept that your manifesto had a pledge to remove it from two years and take it back down. We are aware, and we are grateful for the fact, that Government have moved it from day one up to nine months—I think that is really important. Pragmatically, we should look at a 12-month window instead, which worked well before and we think could work well again in future.
Jamie Cater: This depends on the detail of what comes in secondary legislation and on further consultation about exactly how that statutory probation period works, particularly the light-touch process for fair dismissal during the nine-month period.
From our perspective, the lighter touch the better. Businesses will want to know that they will have what they need in terms of following the correct process. I am thinking about ACAS having the capacity to update things like their disciplinary and grievance procedures. If and when there are claims going to an employment tribunal around unfair dismissal, the tribunal system must have the resources to deal with the potential uptick in the number of claims going through that system. So it is about how that fair dismissal process works following the consultation process, and then ACAS and the employment tribunal having the right resources to cope with that.
Steve Darling
Q
Jim Bligh: I want to speak specifically on that to flexible working. Most of our sector, as I said, offers flexible working. I think most employers do generally, and they really see the benefits of that for employee engagement. There are eight reasons at the moment why you might reject a flexible working request, most of which are based on business need, quality, performance and so on. The concern with the proposal in the Bill is that the burden has shifted to the employer to prove business need. It could be a real challenge for smaller businesses to have to evidence that point.
If you are a small business, as many of you will know from your constituents, you may well be running the business, the finances, the sales and the HR. This adds yet more process into what should be a fairly simple system—a system that we know works, through the stats. People will request flexible working and very often that will be accommodated. The concern for us is that small businesses will be unfairly penalised on that front in particular.
Jamie Cater: I agree. Coming back to the question of timing, it is helpful, as has already been mentioned, that there is a period where not only is there further consultation for organisations like ours to feed into the details and feed in the views of small businesses who make up around 90% of manufacturing, but a period for businesses to be able to see what is coming, plan for it and make preparations. That period between now and 2026 is really important.
Generally, there is a role for Government and organisations like ours, who represent those businesses but also provide support and advice to them, to work together around the communications and make sure that people are aware of the changes—what they mean for them in practice and for SMEs who might not have HR directors, HR departments and access to lots of specialist support. We can do what we can with Government to make sure that businesses really understand what is coming, how they can comply and how they can look at things like best practice to make sure they are ahead of the curve, if maybe they need to be.
Laurence Turner
Q
Jim Bligh: I would be happy to write to you with more details. We have not had direct feedback from members. Very often, the businesses that we work with in the UK, whether large or small, are the UK arm—they will operate their HR and legal policies and all the rest of it in and from the UK for the UK market.
To go back to something I said earlier, flexible labour markets are the hallmark of growing economies and of growing productive food and drink manufacturing sectors around the world. Global businesses would say that the UK has done really well on that front in recent years, so would not want to go any further backwards. I am happy to write to the Committee after this with more information about international examples.
Jamie Cater: Anecdotally, some concern has been expressed by our members about the competitiveness of the UK when it comes to manufacturing and the measures in the Bill. There is a concern from member companies that might be headquartered elsewhere or have significant operations in countries outside the UK that it is becoming harder, more expensive and more challenging to employ people in the UK.
The Government have done a lot of very welcome stuff in developing an industrial strategy that gives a lot more certainty and confidence for lots of businesses to invest generally in operations in the UK, but when we think about the total cost of the Bill and its administrative and regulatory impacts, there is a bit of concern that it is becoming less attractive to employ people in the UK versus elsewhere. We are increasingly having conversations with members about that.
Nick Timothy
Q
Jamie Cater: A lot of those up-front costs will have to go into training, in particular for HR managers, people managers and line managers, not just to ensure regulatory compliance but for employers that want to think about how their broader culture and organisational culture reflects the principles of the Bill. Lots will go into ensuring compliance and wider training of staff.
I mentioned earlier that there was concern that the Budget announcements on NICs—you mentioned the living wage and minimum wage as well—may make it more difficult to take the risk of employing people who might require additional training and, more broadly, that training budgets might get squeezed. It is already difficult and has been made challenging over recent years for our members to recruit the apprentices that they need; I am thinking about the apprenticeship levy and wider skills policy.
The challenge, I suppose, is that given that training budgets are getting squeezed the money effectively goes increasingly into training managers rather than necessarily into the young people who need the trade and technical skills to work on shop floors and production lines. The risk is that that could further weaken manufacturers’ already unfavourable position when it comes to investing in the technically skilled workforces of the future. That is where we see the real risk.
Jim Bligh: I agree with Jamie on all that and would add two more specific examples. I have mentioned the administration burden, which falls particularly on small businesses but really falls on them all. There are two examples of where that might come in. One is on the collective redundancy proposals for consultation, which remove the single establishment. If you are a large business with, say, four or five different sites and you are making more than 20 people redundant at one of those sites, the expectation will be, according to how we read the Bill, that you consult across all those sites.
Previous witnesses have called this a perpetual consultation, and that is a concern that we have as well —that it would be quite hard to manage. It is administratively really difficult to manage something like that across five different sites in a business. It could also lead to uncertainty and confusion among employees, who are being constantly consulted on restructuring and changes to other parts of the business in other local areas that have no impacts on them.
The other point on zero-hours contracts is that there is a risk that with a short reference period of 12 weeks, you end up not aligning with seasonal spikes in demand, so you end up paying people substantially more to do contracts that actually are not required, given that that does not reflect a full season. So our proposal, like others’, is for something more reflective and closer to the Ireland model. We would suggest a 26-week reference period; that covers most elements of seasonality in a business.
Chris Murray
Q
I think, Mr Cater, you said that a lot of your organisations already go beyond the provisions that are based in this law. Do you think that the legislation could lead to more of a level playing field, where the organisations that are already treating their staff well are unaffected, but others would have to change and improve—a kind of levelling up in how people’s staff are treated?
Jamie Cater: The important thing for levelling the playing field is the fair work agency, and making sure that we have an approach to enforcement of labour market policy and regulation that is properly resourced and does have that level playing field. I said right at the start that we support efforts to remove and address genuine exploitation and bad practice in the labour market. We have confidence that the fair work agency can begin to do that.
On our concerns about the Bill, we have talked a lot about statutory probation periods, but on guaranteed hours and so on, I think there is the potential to create a level playing field as long as we have the caveats that allow that genuine two-sided flexibility where it works in the interests of both the employee and the employer—retaining, for example, zero-hours contracts where they work for both parties, as in many instances they do, so that employers and employees can still benefit from those arrangements.
Some of our concerns around the right to guaranteed hours are in things like the definition of regular working hours, and the scope, which Jim has alluded to, of the reference period, where we think there is a risk of an unintended consequence because it captures a much broader range of flexible contracts than just literal zero-hours contracts or low-hours contracts. The example that we use in manufacturing is annualised hours contracts, where employees are guaranteed a minimum number of hours over a 12-month period. They have much more financial security in terms of pay, but those hours can still vary on a week-by-week or month-by-month basis. We would not consider that to be an example of, to use the words of the plan to make work pay, “exploitative zero-hours contracts”, but depending on where that 12-week reference period falls, and depending on how you define regular working hours and what the number of those hours might be, a form of flexible employment like that could end up being in scope when maybe it is not appropriate for it to be.
We want to ensure that there are no unintended consequences where arrangements like that, which provide financial security, stable employment plus flexibility for both parties—which should be retained—unintentionally fall within scope of the measures in the Bill, because that would mean that the Bill is not a level playing field; we would be in a situation where good options for both parties had effectively been taken off the table.
The Chair
We have a few seconds left.
Jim Bligh: For me, it is about enforcement and having a really strong, well-resourced enforcement agency. That means making sure that people are aware and can be supported to comply, and then that the enforcement, fines and so on come after that. That is about having a really well-enforced system. It is also about making sure that, on the other side, the employment tribunal system can cope. That is a really important part of enforcement. At the moment, at best, we have six-month employment tribunal delays; at worst, the delay is two years. That is an area of the system that we need to look at.
The Chair
Order. That brings us to the end of the allotted time for questions. I thank the two witnesses very much for their evidence.
Examination of Witnesses
Gemma Griffin MBE, Martyn Gray and Mick Lynch gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from Gemma Griffin, vice-president of global crewing for DFDS, Martyn Gray, director of organising for Nautilus International, and Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT. We have until 3.40 pm for this panel. Could the witnesses briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Gemma Griffin: Good afternoon. My name is Gemma Griffin. I am the vice-president and head of global crewing for DFDS, which is a pan-European, Mediterranean and African ferry and logistics organisation. I am based in Dover, where we operate a number of vessels between the UK and France.
Martyn Gray: I am Martyn Gray, the director of organising at Nautilus International. We are an international trade union and professional association representing 20,000 maritime professionals, primarily in the UK, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Mick Lynch: Hello, I am Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT. We are a majority railway union, but the M is for the maritime sector. We organise the ratings, as opposed to Martyn’s officers—that is the way the world works. They are seafarers around the world, although they are less around the world these days, mainly in the ferries sector and in offshore energy, where we have crew service vessels too.
Greg Smith
Q
Gemma Griffin: Just to make it clear, we are talking about seafarers, so I am not here to represent the shore-based colleagues in our organisation. As it stands, I do not believe—my learned colleagues beside me have more experience with shore-based stuff—that our seafarers are currently covered by the Bill. My understanding is that there is an opportunity today to talk to your good selves about ways or mechanisms by which we may be able to enshrine something for seafarers, so that they can be afforded similar rights and opportunities as shore-based workers.
The key point in the Bill currently relates to fire and rehire. That is the sort of stuff that we as DFDS are very pleased that you will be banning, and I hope that it does actually refer to seafarers as well. For us, that is the biggest concern among the many others that we have, as an operator that is simply looking for a fair and level playing field. That is particularly the case when we talk about the straits of Dover, where we move from UK territorial waters straight into French territorial waters, with no international waters where one might use the normal ways of international seafaring legislation. We are really hoping that we can capture some of the things that we believe our seafarers are at risk of losing if we do not extend the legislation to them in whatever way we can.
Greg Smith
Q
Gemma Griffin: Our land-based staff are already covered.
Greg Smith
But on the question about the unintended consequences of elements of the Bill—
Gemma Griffin: Do I see any unintended consequences for our land-based employees?
Greg Smith
Yes.
Gemma Griffin: No, is the answer, because we are very much trying to create a situation in which our colleagues have rights and are treated fairly. The most important thing is that there is a level playing field and that whoever operates in the same space as us, the law applies to them. If we are all UK-based and have UK contracts, I imagine that would be the case.
To make it clear, my area of expertise is seafarers. I am not really involved on the UK side, so I do not want to overreach and maybe show my absolute ignorance in that respect. I apologise.
Greg Smith
Mr Gray?
Martyn Gray: To clarify, I am a director of organising for a trade union, so I will answer from the perspective of whether the legislation goes far enough, if that is okay.
Greg Smith
Sure.
Martyn Gray: No, is the very short answer to that. It needs to go further in terms of protections for those who work at sea. There are still monumental gaps in the protections that are afforded to seafarers compared with the protections afforded to land-based workers, even under existing employment legislation, and those gaps still need to be closed up.
This legislation comes some of the way to addressing some of the challenges we saw in the wake of the decision by P&O Ferries to terminate, without notice and without consideration, 786 people in March 2022, but it still does not go far enough to place the rights and protections of those who work at sea on parity with the rights and protections of those who work in shore-based roles and with shore-based employment contracts. More still needs to be done, and more can still be done, that will allow for greater protections to be delivered for those who work at sea. That is fully within the remit of this Parliament to legislate for.
Mick Lynch: From my point of view, I do not think there will be unintended consequences. I hope the intended consequences go far enough, but maybe we will have to have more legislation. We had lots of legislation against the unions under previous Governments, so hopefully we can get more legislation in favour of workers and their organisations.
The Bill does not go far enough, but we can improve it during this process. One of the things we would like to see is the power for trade unions to get redress—injunctive power—against people like P&O, which was never considered. We were told that if we took action against P&O—and there was a slim possibility of it—we could be liable for all its revenue loss for every day of trading, which could have been up to £15 million or £20 million a day. That is impossible for workers and their organisations to take forward.
You have to remember that P&O deliberately broke the law to get rid of its workforce and to undermine good shipping companies. We have employers such as P&O and Irish Ferries working out of our ports that undermine good businesses. I just caught the end of the previous session, when the witnesses hoped that there would be a lifting of all boats—to use that pun—to create a playing field that is fairer. It will never be completely level, but it would be fairer on all the good businesses in Britain—British businesses and those working in Britain—to make the pirates, which is what we consider P&O to be, come up to the standards of everyone else doing business here. Businesses should treat their workers well, treat the environment well and treat their passengers well. If you do all those things, you will run a successful business despite a marginal increase in overhead.
Let us not forget that people like P&O are dramatically resourced by the richest people on the globe. P&O deliberately took that step to exploit our laws—as poor as they were, left to us by previous Governments—because it knew it would get away with it. What P&O has got to be aware of in the future is that it will not get away with it without consequences for its business and reputation. Unfortunately, the previous Government allowed P&O to shed its skin and leave it behind, along with all those people it made unemployed, and carry on as if nothing had happened. That is a shame on all those people who allowed P&O to do that.
Greg Smith
Q
Mick Lynch: Not particularly. We make arrangements with our employers—we have private sector employers and public sector employers—through collective agreements. I imagine that we will always create decent arrangements with all our employers, whether they are road transport, rail or maritime, about appropriate release for our people, so that is not a thing that concerns us overly at this time.
Martyn Gray: I have no particular concerns about the way facility time seems to be structured. I think overall it will prove to be beneficial. I know there are some in the trade union movement who would like to see more on that, but again, I think that, with the maritime aspect and the practicalities of working around that, what is proposed in the Bill is helpful.
Gemma Griffin: There is not a problem from our perspective. We see both RMT and Nautilus as partners in our endeavours to do the right thing for our people, so we are fully supportive.
Justin Madders
Q
Mick Lynch: I am hoping it will be, Minister. I am hoping that bad employers will have to think twice about being badder again, in P&O’s terms. I have to emphasise that we were on good terms with P&O. We— both unions—were negotiating their new vessels. They deceived us deliberately. They took legal advice that, rather than negotiate with us the new-technology vessels that were coming in, they would rather sack all their people and break the law, and use security guards to get our people out.
We need good enforcement, a powerful agency that knows what it is doing and has a clear remit, and the right deterrents. I think that goes into company law in some ways. I do not think any of those people were worried about being disbarred as directors, as fit and proper persons and all the rest of it, and I do not think they were worried about their profits being affected by any fine they would get. As it happens, I do not think anything has happened to them at all. As a director, you have got to think about whether you are going to pay your VAT, whether you are going to pass on the national insurance, and whether you are going to pay the rates and all the bills from your suppliers. You should be thinking very seriously about the consequences for you in employment law, and other laws related to employment.
But as trade unions—as representatives of the workers —we have got to have the power to intervene where we know employers are breaking the law. That is a real shortcoming. The power is all with the employers. They can injunct me personally. They can injunct my trade union. They can close us down for making clerical errors on ballots—just misnaming or misbranding the grades in a dispute—and they will do it if they get any chance. We have no power to injunct them on behalf of our members, it seems. I think that needs to be considered. The fair work agency and its enforcement powers should be at the level of injunction to stop these rogues getting away with it in the future.
Martyn Gray: I agree with that. I would add that what is quite helpful is the Bill’s removal of vessels being treated as individual establishments. That is particularly helpful when it comes to redundancy consultations, and what we saw with previous case law under previous legislation. In the case of Seahorse Maritime v. Nautilus International it was determined that each individual vessel had to be treated as a single establishment. That removed the right for operators with significant GB links anyway—in those particular circumstances—to circumvent the need to consult with recognised trade unions on what amounted to mass redundancies. There were more than 20 people being made redundant from that particular employer, but they were able to circumvent that, because each individual vessel was treated as a single establishment. That is a really helpful feature of the Bill, and something that I think should be celebrated and praised. It is going to be very helpful in our being able to defend our members’ rights and hold companies to account for their responsibilities when going through a redundancy process or collective consultation on business restructuring in organisations.
Linking that point to P&O Ferries, it would not have made a difference there; each of the P&O Ferries establishments was more than 20, so there would have been a requirement for the collective consultation anyway. Indeed, two of the P&O Ferries operations would have been more than 100 people, so they would have required slightly lengthier consultation periods under the legislation. However, this Bill will be helpful in a wider maritime context, where there are smaller numbers of seafarers engaged, in being able to defend their rights and interests and really hold a company to account over the need to make those redundancies. The change to fire and rehire is quite helpful as well, with businesses needing to demonstrate a clear and identifiable need instead of seemingly being able to operate on a whim.
Gemma Griffin: I do not disagree with any of that. Talking about significant ties to the UK, this is something that you have to keep in your mind. Often in shipping there are myriad different employers based outside the UK—the flag of the vessel can be EU, in many cases, or UK or whatever. When you look at the Dover straits, yes, DFDS has both UK and French flagged vessels, but our vessels are doing 42 sailings a day in and out of Dover port, and up to 54 in the summertime. Other operators are doing more or less the same. If that is not a clear link to the UK, I would like to know what is. It is not the same as one sailing every day out of a port in the North sea.
As an operator that holds our seafarers in good stead as the absolute backbone of our organisation, I would like to be able to see a way of capturing that in UK law, so that we will not find yet another loophole, with the flag state being responsible but doing nothing and the port state, in this case the UK, wanting to do something but not capable of doing it. That sounded like a bit of a riddle—I do apologise.
Justin Madders
Q
Let me pick up on something you said earlier, Mick, though others can answer as well if they want. You talked about injunctive relief as a potential solution to the threat of fire and rehire. We are consulting at the moment on measures including interim relief as a potential action that unions can take on behalf of their members. Can you say a little bit about why you would prefer injunctive relief, rather than interim relief?
Mick Lynch: Interim relief can take time, and I am not convinced that tribunals will have the power and the kudos to achieve it. I am not a lawyer, as you know, Minister, but I want the ability for unions to make an intervention on behalf of workers. It would have to be based on law and something that the company has done wrong, but it seems to me that injunctions are immediate and carry the weight of a higher court. When we get injuncted under the anti-trade union laws, it is at the High Court and it is immediate, and there is no doubt about the effect of that injunction. If you want to defy it, it is on your organisation’s head, whether that is a trade union or a multinational company.
If it is not called injunctive relief, I do not mind—I do not mind whatever way the Bill comes out—as long as it has the power of immediacy and enforceability through proper channels. That is what we want to see. We do not just want a slap on the wrist that the company factors in; if you have added another £10,000 to the fine, but they are sacking 2,000 people, they do not really care. What we want is for them to be forced to stop the activity, subject to the full force of the law, not just a minor blip on their spreadsheet. Whether it is called an injunction or interim relief, I do not mind. If the tribunals are beefed up so that they can do that, that is fine, because that can be a good channel as well. I am open to suggestions on that, but I hope we get the power to do it.
Justin Madders
Does anyone else want to respond?
Martyn Gray: We have spoken about unintended consequences, but an intended consequence of this Bill is addressing an imbalance between the rights of employers and of employees and workers in the UK. As a trade union, we are subject to much higher bars and thresholds when it comes to being prevented from enforcing the rights of our members or the rights of workers, and from standing up for what is right, what is appropriate and what is fair. It would be good to have a mechanism where an employer can be held to the same scrutiny, can be held to account in the same way and with the same preventive immediacy, without the consequences that we would have to face—because employers do not face the consequences if that injunction is granted and it then turns out not to be fair or appropriate, or if it is done on appeal; that is just dealt with.
This measure is about fairness and being appropriate. It is right that unions can make interventions on behalf of the members they represent, and can do so without needing to worry about having to put significant amounts of members’ money at risk. Should that then turn out to be something that needs to be resolved at a later date, unions tend not to pick those particular fights and arguments without having first looked very carefully at what is within the realms of the law and what is not. It would be extremely unusual that that mechanism would be abused, should it be granted. It is really important to ensure that the intended consequences of placing the rights of workers and of employers, and of trying to increase the rights of workers to a point at which they can address some of the imbalance, are supportive here. That would be a big help in being able to defend the rights of workers.
Gemma Griffin: I agree. The very nature of the thing is that employers and organisations are larger than employees. If employees are not able to collect themselves to a sum total where their voices can be heard, then they have no chance. There is something fundamentally wrong in this day and age that a union agreement can just be put to one side and actions taken—just completely and utterly taking the voice away from employees. When we look at how the United Kingdom operates on an international level, we are quite happy to sit with the unions and employers to negotiate at International Labour Organisation level and International Maritime Organisation level and so on—but when we come home into our own shores, those rules do not apply. The unions are not the enemy of our organisations.
It is a really poor message that we are sending out: that organisations that do the right thing and, like DFDS, recognise employees’ rights are disadvantaged, because before we sell a single ticket to a passenger, we are already hugely more costly than our operators in the same field. But we make the choice to start a race to the top instead of joining that race to the bottom.
Steve Darling
Q
Mick Lynch: If it makes us come to the table and some employers—employer groups, even—feel that they are not exempted from collective arrangements, that will be better. Some people will not like this, but in the ’70s, 82% of the workforce were covered by collective bargaining; it is now 20%. There are arguments about that and I do not want to relive the last 40 or 50 years, but that figure is clearly too low. The ILO, the International Monetary Fund and all sorts of bodies are saying that the lack of collective arrangements is forcing this race to the bottom.
But it is not just workers who get pushed to the bottom; these businesses get pushed to the bottom as well. People are now bidding on contractual margins that are completely unrealistic. I hear it from some of the clients I go into; when I am talking about contract cleaners or contract caterers—all sorts of people—they know that the people bidding for the business cannot make even a reasonable margin of maybe 2%. In a business, you would be hoping to get 5%, 10% or maybe even better, but people know that they are underbidding other people, because that is the poor state of employment law. But it is also because we have not got sectoral collective bargaining. You have had previous speakers here from the Engineering Employers’ Federation, as it used to be called—it used to run a massive collectively bargained sector in this industry. If we had that, we would have better arrangements all round and people would not be allowed to go rogue. I am hoping that there will be some provision for that in the law, so that all employers will know—whether I am working on a construction site, or the high seas, or running a window cleaning business—I cannot go below a certain level, and there will be no sweatshops or mass exploitation in the future. The trade unions must have a say in that. They must have a say even in non-union sites. That is what we used to get: the big firms used to set the trends and the perspective of where an industry should be, and many smaller businesses voluntarily followed the union agreement. They were not just union agreements but industry agreements. We have to get back to some idea of that, that the industry stands for this. But many of those employers’ federations have broken up now, and they do not even feel they need to talk to the trade unions.
I hope this Bill brings a lot of voluntary recognition, so that in the future many workers—certainly more than 50%—are covered by collective arrangements in one form or another. By the way, the EU wants 80%, for those of you still hankering after that. That is the new measure.
Martyn Gray: I believe it was in the early ’90s that the National Maritime Board last met, which used to undertake sectoral collective bargaining between the shipping industry, maritime trade unions—which then would have been both of our predecessor organisations—and the UK Chamber of Shipping, which would establish the rates of pay for both unions to then take away to individual employers and build upon. The situation exists elsewhere in the world. In the Netherlands, my colleagues are negotiating an agreement with the merchant navy equivalent in the Netherlands for commercial shipping. They are negotiating that as we speak with shipowner representatives and seafarer representatives, and they are setting what that standard looks like in the Netherlands for the minimum increase, and then we work with other employers to build on that with what we can do. It sets the minimum standard.
Envisioning what sits within this, sectoral collective bargaining will be key. We see the start of that with the fair pay agreements as they have been coming through, but sectoral collective bargaining will really help deliver the biggest gains and the biggest partnership between unions and between employers, as it should work—and does in many instances—in the maritime context. It will be crucial for solving one of the biggest challenges the UK faces at the moment—the productivity crisis. Actually working together to solve that will be done not only through sectoral collective bargaining, but by talking about how industry works. Unions, the workforce and experts in each industry should be setting the standard of what that looks like and working together to improve it and generate those productivity gains. Everybody benefits when productivity increases: workers have better pay and conditions, and employers make a profit, and have better operations and better certainty. It is win-win.
Gemma Griffin: We operate in a number of countries with sectoral agreements like this—France, Denmark, and the Netherlands—and it does make a level playing field for all competitors. You know there is a rate of pay that is fair, and that everybody else is paying, and you can focus on just doing business.
Anneliese Midgley
Q
“In the fire and rehire proposals, there is a risk that we might be making it easier to make people redundant than to change contracts”.
Do you agree?
Mick Lynch: No, I do not agree with that at all. Defending fire and rehire, or fire and replace as P&O were doing, is defending the immoral. Maybe the CBI knows a thing or two about immoral behaviour—I do not know why they would be standing up against that. We negotiate contract changes all the time, and the great problem with P&O is that they deceived us. They told us that they were going to negotiate change for new technology, new vessels and new ways of working. There probably would have been some job losses, and we would have dealt with that through normal processes. They decided to sabotage that because it was quicker, and they wanted to get imported foreign labour on those vessels at £4 and £5 an hour, rather than a collective agreement. I do not see good employers struggling with that. I do not see decent businesses struggling with negotiating contract changes, staffing level changes or new technology agreements, which we will all need right across business. We will talk to DFDS about that, hopefully in the near future, as well as Stena and all the other good shipping companies.
We are talking about it on the railway. Every trade unionist who comes in front of any of you will say that we are constantly negotiating change. At the end of the second world war, my union had half a million members, while the railway employed 1.2 million people—that has obviously changed. We had sectoral collective bargaining all through that, and most employers had never heard of fire and rehire. You can retool an economy inside collective arrangements, and our European partners have shown us that. If you refit your economy based on consensus, change and looking after people who have to leave, you will have a more successful business. If you just guillotine the whole process, your reputation will be in ruins. I do not accept the CBI’s position. It was probably against the health and safety at work Act and the sex equality Act. All those Acts brought impacts on business, and there is no doubt that the Factories Act was a bit burdensome for the mill owners and mining companies of this country. Everything is difficult for a business, but you have to live inside the regulations in a democracy, and that is what it should be about.
Martyn Gray: I suppose to some extent it is the difference between doing what is easy and what is right. It is disappointing that there is an attitude among some elements of business in this country to opt for what is easy, as opposed to doing what is right.
Negotiating with trade unions is fairly straightforward. To use the example of P&O Ferries in 2020, at the height of the covid pandemic, we negotiated redundancies as it reduced its operations and went through that process. Mr Hebblethwaite did not want to get back around the table with us because we held P&O Ferries to account over its business proposals in 2020, and we ensured that the redundancies it made were absolutely necessary and were to rightsize the business. We fed back on all its proposals and we engaged very heavily in that process in 2020, when we went through two rounds of redundancies with that particular employer. P&O Ferries then said that we could not engage with what it was proposing, because it knew the proposals were wrong and morally reprehensible. It wiped out a long-standing, collectively bargained workforce that offered quality jobs, as well as employment and training opportunities, across many deprived coastal communities. The loss of those jobs is still being felt in Kingston upon Hull, Birkenhead, Liverpool and Dover. P&O Ferries was able to say, “Actually, because what we are suggesting is so wrong, we have just decided to push ahead and do it anyway, knowing that there will be limited repercussions,” and that is to some extent why we are here talking about it.
That highlighted just how easy it was for businesses to make the wrong decisions. It is shocking and abysmal, but unfortunately not surprising, that the CBI did not recognise that those easy options are what are putting us in this position, where regulation needs to be developed. I disagree with what the CBI said, and I disagree that this Bill would make it the preferred option to go through a redundancy, or fire and rehire, rather than to engage with trade unions. When negotiating with trade unions, we understand the business operations and we can help, and we have helped.
I have been engaged in countless redundancy conversations with employers in the maritime industry where we have been able to look at things differently. We have been able to support what those businesses are going through by talking about the number of redundancies that potentially need to be made, and we have supported them in building jobs back in, in their plans for growth and in their changes to terms and conditions. That has protected jobs, and we have negotiated our way through that for the betterment of the business and the people that it employs. For the CBI and some business elements to take the approach that it is easier to fire and rehire, instead of negotiating, is really short-sighted and problematic for the future.
The Chair
I am going to try to get in three more Members in five minutes, but would you like to respond to that, Gemma?
Gemma Griffin: Just to say that jobs either exist or they do not. It is very black and white for me. Fire and rehire is always a bit of a horror story, particularly when you look long term at the skills and intelligence that the people have on your operation on how to work. For me there is always another solution. That is my point of view.
Chris Law (Dundee Central) (SNP)
Q
Mick Lynch: I think we have to be very careful, because companies are very good at creating entities that are subsidiaries of subsidiaries that are based in other jurisdictions, with all sorts of measures that are far too complicated for a simple soul like me. I would like the reporting of a business to be very straightforward. Everyone will know whether a business is failing, and fire and rehire for a failing business is not going to work in many instances. Certainly on the onshore side, it is likely that the business will fold before such measures can be brought. And of course it is very difficult to do what P&O did because it relies on bringing people from overseas to replace people.
Grant Shapps, last year, or the year before, said at one stage that he was going to replace all the railway workers in Britain, so there was actually a Government Minister promoting fire and rehire during our dispute. So I think we have to be very careful not to allow loopholes. I know that accountants and auditors are very good at creating loopholes, but as far as possible it has got to be plain for the layperson to see whether a business is struggling and has genuine business needs to get any hint of an exemption, and they should be very rare indeed if they are to exist.
Martyn Gray: Quite simply, if directors can sign off the business as still remaining as a going concern, fire and rehire should not be an option. If we are looking at a scenario where directors are happy to say under companies legislation that it is a going concern but they need to do a complete restructure, strip away the employment rights, strip away the benefits, strip away working conditions—things that have been long fought over for many years of negotiation or long thought over for many years of discussions: all the benefits that sit within employment contracts—and strip them back to a minimum, that business is not in a position where it can consider itself a going concern. So I would set a really high threshold and then allow for scrutiny from the relevant bodies. If it turns out that that could have been avoided—fire and rehire in those scenarios—it is clear that those directors should not have gone through that and there must be consequences. So there is probably room for improvement, some tweaks and changes, but I would put it quite simply.
Gemma Griffin: A classic example is that during covid, overnight 80% of our business was gone and we had vessels that were worth a lot of money and a lot of crew. There were the inevitable discussions on redundancies or just stopping and what was going to happen. We made a deal with Nautilus and RMT that we would work on this together, because we were hoping things would come back. It was only in year two that we really had some sense that things would come back. But one of the things that we did was collectively go out to our workforce and say, “It is these jobs versus how about if we work together and we do a pay freeze for the two years and we just take that pain together so that we can have the jobs at the end of it.” And we did that together. If something is going to go bust, it is going to go bust. But if there was a way of keeping the money in a better way—suspending the training and non-essential stuff—we made operational changes. It is too easy to leave it in as a loophole. That loophole is like you are just taking the profits out of the pockets of your people. So I think we need to be careful there.
Mr Peter Bedford (Mid Leicestershire) (Con)
Q
Mick Lynch: Well, we would like it very straightforward that there is going to be provision—an amendment—for sectoral collective bargaining. If there is proper sectoral collective bargaining across the economy, many of the issues that people are dealing with as individuals—individual rights, which they have to enforce for themselves, in many cases—will be dealt with. There is a lot of discussion about probation. We have probation agreements with every employer that we deal with, and we do not defend people who are incompetent or incapable. We have a process, and if we have sectoral collective bargaining, all those things will be covered.
The Chair
Order. I am sorry, but that brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank all our witnesses for their evidence.
Examination of Witnesses
Paul Nowak, Maggi Ferncombe, Dave Moxham and Hannah Reed gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from Paul Nowak, general secretary of the TUC; Maggi Ferncombe, director of political strategy and transformation for Unison; Dave Moxham, deputy general secretary of the STUC; and Hannah Reed, co-ordinator of constitutional affairs for Unite. We have until 4.30 pm for this panel. I ask the witnesses to introduce themselves briefly for the record.
Paul Nowak: My name is Paul Nowak, and I am the general secretary of the TUC. We represent 48 unions and 5.3 million workers right across the economy in the UK.
Maggi Ferncombe: I am Maggi Ferncombe, director of political strategy and transformation for Unison. Unison is a public sector union representing 1.3 million members.
Dave Moxham: My name is Dave Moxham, and I am deputy general secretary at the STUC, which is the independent but sister organisation to the TUC in Scotland.
Hannah Reed: I am Hannah Reed, and I am co-ordinator of constitutional affairs at Unite. Unite has a membership of well over 1 million members. We represent members across a wide range of sectors, including manufacturing, food and transport, and services including health, local authorities and hospitality.
Greg Smith
Q
Paul Nowak: I think this will be the biggest upgrade to workers’ and trade union rights in a generation. It is very likely that we will see increased unionisation as a result of the Bill, and I think that would be a good thing. Bodies as disparate as the International Monetary Fund and the OECD have talked about the benefits of unions and collective bargaining in modern economies—benefits in terms of improved productivity and business performance, but also benefits for workers in terms of increased pay, better access to things like skills and more equal and fair workplaces. I do not think there is a direct link; you do not pass a piece of legislation and trade union membership and collective bargaining go up, but the repeal of the Trade Union Act 2016 and the repeal of the minimum service level legislation—the strikes Act—and other measures in the Bill will help unions to organise. That will be good for employees and good for workers, but good for employers and good for the UK economy as well.
Greg Smith
Q
Paul Nowak: It is important to put that £5 billion into a figure; that is something like 0.4% of the overall wage bill. The TUC has published research today, again involving very moderate estimates. In the impact assessment, the Government talked about potential benefits to the economy from this Bill, in terms of things like improved staff retention, improved productivity and bringing back into work people who are currently outside the labour market—there are now 900,000 or so less people in the labour market than there were before the pandemic. At a very moderate estimate, we believe that that will generate £13 billion for the UK economy.
For a small number of employers, there will undoubtedly be increased costs. If you do not pay sick pay from day one at the moment, or if you use zero-hours contracts, it may well cost you more. Those benefits will transfer directly to low-paid insecure workers. I think it is really important to make the point that most employers do not use zero-hours contracts. Most workers in this country are entitled to sick pay from day one. This Bill levels the playing field for those good employers who, at the moment, are in danger of being undercut by those who play more fast and loose with the livelihoods of their workforces.
Maggi Ferncombe: From Unison’s perspective, the Bill means that in certain sectors, workers will no longer be dispensable. There are some really perilous conditions out there for some of our workers, and we all know that valued workers who are paid a good salary and have better security at work are more productive. In our sector, we find that the public service is then better for service users, it is better for society and it will be better for the economy.
Dave Moxham: I will be brief. We have a productivity problem in Scotland and across the UK, and that is largely because workers are not, either collectively or individually, being sufficiently engaged or consulted, and they are not being sufficiently used to drive productivity and success within their own workplaces. Trade unionism, in my experience, helps with that. We are day and daily inundated with problems in workplaces that are not unionised, which have to be dealt with in other ways. The employment tribunal is full of these situations. Our experience, and it is long held, is that trade-unionised workplaces actually avoid those problems. I would say that we are fortunate in Scotland—it is not perfect—to already have a Government who recognise that collective bargaining and fair work are drivers for success, and I very much hope that this Bill will add strength to that for us and see that approach reflected across the whole of the UK.
Hannah Reed: Thank you very much for the question. We represent working people—that is what trade unions are. Overall, we represent nearly 7 million working people within this country. Being part of a trade union brings clear benefits for working people. It provides them with better legal representation and representation in the workplace to resolve issues at work. It will often provide them with better access to training, and it will provide them with better career opportunities.
We very much hope that this Bill will encourage and enable more people to make the positive choice of joining a trade union, and that could be done by providing a right of access to millions of workers. Regrettably, the majority of workers in this country do not have the option at the moment to meet with a trade union in the workplace. We hope that the Bill, through measures on the fair pay agreement, the new negotiating arrangements on school support staff and the changes to statutory recognition, will enable more workers to have a say over their pay terms and conditions. We also hope that, through the introduction of statutory equality rights, the Bill will ensure that issues such as harassment, bullying, sex discrimination and unequal pay in the workplace can be properly addressed in this country to ensure that all companies meet those standards. We know there are good companies that meet good standards in the workplace, but we would like to see more companies and organisations meeting those standards, and we very much hope that this Bill is a starting point for ensuring that everyone has a decent working life.
Greg Smith
Q
Hannah Reed: There are already statutory definitions in legislation of who is a worker. It will generally be workers—in some instances, it will be employees—who will benefit from the range of rights in this legislation. Our trade unions are also looking forward to working with the Government on their forthcoming review of employment status, the purpose of which may well be to look at extending protections for self-employed workers, such as freelancers and others.
Unite represents a lot of self-employed workers in the construction industry who are not self-employed by choice, and they have fewer rights as a result. We would like workers who face a higher risk of injury in the workplace and who often lose out on pay and conditions, as well as freelancers and others, to have full employment rights. We are working initially from the definitions of “worker” and “employee” that are set out in law, but we very much look forward to the Government bringing forward measures to extend protections to all working people.
Greg Smith
Q
Paul Nowak: Can I make a point first about the symbiotic nature of the relationship between Labour and the unions? We certainly have a shared history and shared values, and in some cases we have unions that are affiliated to the Labour party. The TUC represents those 5.3 million workers regardless of who is in government, and it does not have a formal relationship with the Labour party. Our job as trade unionists is always to want more and better for working people. I think it is important to recognise that this will be the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in decades—I was going to say in a generation, but it is more than that. It will directly benefit millions of working people.
I came in at the end of the last panel, and Mick was talking about sectoral collective bargaining. The Government have indicated that the first fair pay agreement will be in social care. We would love to see that approach—those fair pay agreements—rolled out to other sectors of the economy. That is a point that we will make going forward.
It would be churlish not to accept that the Bill is a big upgrade to workers’ rights and to union rights. This will be the first time that a Government have repealed anti-union legislation in my 35 years as a union activist, and I think it is really important that they do. If we take the minimum service levels legislation as an example, we always warned that it would be unworkable. It was red-flagged by the Regulatory Policy Committee and by the Government’s own impact assessment when it was introduced, and not a single employer has ever used the legislation. We will be positive; there will always be more that we would like any Government to do on behalf of working people, but this is a really important piece of legislation.
Maggi Ferncombe: I agree. To be frank, as the largest trade union in the country, the political stripe of the Government does not matter to us; we will obviously do what we can to improve public services and the terms and conditions and salaries of workers in those public services. You asked what more we would want, but, to be honest with you, we want an extension of what is already in the Bill: the opportunity to have some sort of legal mechanism for collective claims. Individual workers, unions when they are involved, employers and employment tribunals spend hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to deal with individual claims from individual workers. An unintended consequence would be the savings to employers from not having to deal with individual claims that take years to go through tribunals. If there was an opportunity to have a mechanism to deal with it collectively, it would save everyone time and money, including employers.
Dave Moxham: We have a disproportionate number of zero-hours contracts in Scotland, probably because we have proportionally more small businesses as part of the UK economy. We welcome the moves in the Bill to address that. I heard the evidence given by the last panel, and from our perspective the majority of employers do not use them but they have an intensive impact. For the last 10 years, the STUC has run a campaign called BetterThanZero, which goes out daily and talks to these workers, who are predominantly, but far from all, young workers. The impact on their lives—ergo the impact on the economy because of their lack of stability, certainty and security—has a far wider effect than on just the individual and cannot be overestimated. When we look at the provisions currently in the Bill, we certainly believe that what defines a short-hours contract and some of the other things that have yet to be decided need to be quite strong. If you go on to the internet, you can already see discussions among employers about how they will circumvent the proposals, so that will be one area where we will be looking for strength.
Hannah Reed: There is an awful lot to welcome in the Bill, and I will not take up the Committee’s time by listing it. We can submit evidence to you on equality rights, trade union rights and so on.
Like all Committee members, I am sure, we are keen to ensure that the Bill comes out as watertight legislation that makes a real difference to people’s rights. There are some elements of the Bill where we would want to continue working with you as a Committee and with the Government to tighten up what we consider to be potential loopholes, and I will briefly name three areas.
The first is the provisions on fire and rehire. Unite’s concerns are that some of the uses of heavy-handed tactics by employers that we saw during the pandemic and since could still be lawful under this Bill. We are concerned that employers may be able to justify fire and rehire in certain circumstances, and our view is that there needs to be a total ban. We are not confident that the employment tribunals will look behind the corporate veil or question an employer’s arguments for why they needed to use fire and rehire tactics, so we do not think it goes far enough. Importantly, there is nothing in the Bill at the present time that stops the employer from sacking the workforce. While we welcome the Government’s consultation on interim relief, we, like previous participants. would like to see some measures before that that stop the employer and require them to open their books to demonstrate to forensic accountants that changes are needed, and to provide a genuine opportunity for negotiation with trade unions. We are very equipped; we know what needs to be done if changes are needed.
Secondly, we would like to see further measures in the Bill to extend collective bargaining. Very briefly, we recognise that there are important measures on statutory recognition in the Bill, but we would like the Government to consider going further, particularly to ensure that laws prevent the abusive practices seen in the recent Amazon campaign. We would also like faster routes to recognition. Workers often have to wait for six months and are repeatedly asked, “Do you want statutory recognition?” They repeatedly say, “Yes, we want statutory recognition,” but employers are given time to fight against the workers’ will. We think there should be a faster route to automatic recognition.
The last point I would raise is on access. I have already talked about the benefits of working people having the opportunity to meet with trade unions in the workplace, to tackle discrimination and press for better pay and conditions through negotiation. We would like to ask the Government to look at the access measures, to see if there are ways of having a default or free-standing right of access so working people have a genuine right to democracy and representation at work.
Justin Madders
Q
Paul Nowak: The research was based on a very modest estimate, taken from the Government’s own suggestions that there would be improvements on things like productivity, reducing absenteeism and bringing back into the workforce people who currently find it difficult to access the workforce, for example because they have caring responsibilities or a need to balance work and family life. We assumed a 1% uptick across those measures —as I say, a very modest assessment—which meant £13 billion-worth of positive impact on the UK economy.
In many ways, this just reflects what already happens in unionised workplaces. One of the things I do as the general secretary of the TUC is to visit places up and down the country, large and small. Some of the most successful and most productive employers in this country —whether it is Airbus, Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls-Royce or, indeed, our largest private sector retailer—are employers who have close working relationships with trade unions and treat their staff with respect.
This legislation is really important, Minister, because it does what it says on the tin. It is about making work pay, and for far too many people in this country, work does not pay at the moment. We have a problem with low-paid, insecure employment, with over a million people on zero-hours contracts. Overwhelmingly, when you ask those individuals if they would like the right to guaranteed hours, poll after poll shows that 80%-plus say they would. When you play that out in practice—I know that the Work Foundation did some work with Wetherspoons. When Wetherspoons offered their staff a choice between zero hours and guaranteed hours, 99% of their staff took the guaranteed hours. That is good for those workers, but it is also good for employers, because workers who are securely employed, who feel good about their work and who are supported at work are more productive, and employers are more likely to invest in them. I genuinely believe that this legislation is win-win—it is a win for employees and workers but a win for employers as well, and it is good for the UK economy overall.
Justin Madders
Q
Maggi Ferncombe: Let us take a sector within Unison such as the care sector, where you have low-paid workers who, some of whom are on zero-hours contracts or working away from home, potentially for 10 or 12 hours a day, but only getting paid for five of those. The amount of money they put into their local economy will be a lot smaller than if you had a fair pay agreement with proper regulation, where people were paid adequate salaries and had better opportunities to train.
We must bear in mind that the care sector has one of the largest vacancy rates, with 130,000 vacancies at the moment. That is simply because care workers are either taking on additional part-time jobs in the evening or morning—I do not know when they have time—or taking on jobs in supermarkets or call centres because they can get paid far more. If they were paid a better salary, they would put more money into their local economy and would pay more tax. Ultimately, that would be the benefit for the economy from that particular sector. Those 130,000 vacancies are a growing problem; we are an ageing population, and having a properly remunerated workforce in social care will bring nothing but benefits. It is very hard to quantify how much that will be; it all depends on what the fair pay agreement comes out with.
Dave Moxham: I will just quote a number of different quantifications. I know that small businesses, particularly in hospitality, have been a large focus for this Bill and more generally. The estimates made by hospitality businesses of the cost of staff turnover are anything from £5,000 an employee to £15,000 an employee, although none of those are my estimates. Then consider that it is an industry with incredibly high turnover—we are talking a 30%-plus turnover. I have not done the sums, because there are various estimates, but you can work out how a relative improvement in retention would impact the hospitality sector. Some of the measures here that we believe would encourage lower-paid hospitality members to stay in the workplace would have an incredible impact.
Hannah Reed: We do hope that the Bill will lead to an expansion in collective bargaining, because it is the tried and tested method and internationally recognised as the best way of improving pay and conditions and reducing staff turnover. We know that there is a skills shortage in this country; reducing turnover and investing in skills, which is what trade unions work with employers to do, will have significant economic benefits, including improved productivity.
I must confess that today I quickly read the Regulatory Policy Committee report, which raised questions about whether the measures in the Bill are justified. Speaking as a trade unionist who speaks on a daily basis to working people, there is not a single measure in the Bill that is not needed. One of the risks with impact assessments carried out by the Government—we hope that the Government will look at this—is that often they capture quantitative data but do not look at the qualitative data. What is the actual experience of working people in the workplace? Where is the harm and what needs to be addressed? We know that in hospitality, for example, one of the big issues our members face is a lack of security or certainty over hours. The costs of childcare for hospitality workers are huge, and the inability to pay rents or even dream of saving for a mortgage is a very significant problem.
There are also real problems of sexual harassment. One of the things that really surprised me was that the RPC said that it could not see a justification for further regulation of third-party harassment. To give some statistics, the NHS staff survey this year showed that 8.67% of NHS staff experience some form of harassment by either the public or patients every year. We know that there are major staff shortages in the NHS. Exposing our workforce to harassment by third parties is a major problem.
In hospitality, it is far more rife. Unite did our own survey that showed that 89% of our members reported being subject to some form of sexual harassment in the last year. Many of them—56%—said that that was from customers, and at least half our members said that they were considering leaving the workplace because of the sexual harassment they have experienced. There are many rights in the Bill that we believe will help to deliver better employment and support businesses to become more productive and more profitable.
Justin Madders
Q
Paul Nowak: I think it is a misplaced concern. Union recognition ballots are the only democratic test that we have where we would expect not only to get simple majorities, but to have 40% of those who are eligible to vote voting in favour. I think it puts a barrier in place towards unionisation. We would not use that democratic test in a parliamentary election, a local council election or the election of a leader of a political party, and it seems perverse to put that obligation on unions and workplaces.
Unions derive their credibility and their ability to represent people from being genuinely representative of the workforce, and it is in nobody’s interest to have a union that only represents a minority of the workforce. Unions are always striving to represent the majority of the workforce in workplaces, and I think we do that and prove that very effectively in workplace after workplace.
At the moment, the system is effectively gamed towards hostile employers to frustrate the will of people to join a union. We effectively count abstentions as no votes. Again, that is not a democratic test that we would put up anywhere else. Taken alongside the other provisions in the Bill, including the union right to access the workplace, the simplification of the recognition procedure is really important in representing the democratic view of the workforce.
Going back to a previous point, I think it is important to say this, Minister. No piece of legislation requires people to join a union or requires a workforce to vote for union recognition. All those decisions rest with the workers themselves. That is a really important underpinning point for the way we do trade unionism in this country. With this change in legislation, we get a level playing field for unions.
Justin Madders
Does anyone else want to come back on that one?
Maggi Ferncombe: Can I just make a point? It is almost like unions are the enemy, when you hear certain businesses talk. Unions have a common goal with every employer where we organise, and that is for the organisation to do well, because that means that the staff and the workers will do well as well. Especially in the sectors that I represent, we have an absolute common goal with all the public sector bodies. We want good-quality public services. Working with trade unions is the best way to achieve that, and good employers know that. Good employers know that working with us will save them time, money and energy. They will have a workforce that are much happier in what they are doing, and they will be more productive, with less sick days. The statistics are all around. Putting additional barriers in place where workers cannot undertake the fundamental right of joining a trade union—I think it is a false barrier, to be perfectly honest with you, because if workers really want to join, they will.
Dave Moxham: Very briefly on the access issue, individual workers should have the right to say yes or no, but in order to exercise their right, they need to know the possibility. The possibility comes from very simple, but hopefully very straightforward and not bureaucratic, arrangements that expect an employer once in a while to provide access for a union to speak to those workers. It should be really simple. You do not get to exercise the right to say yes or no if you do not know in the first place.
Hannah Reed: I have one quick comment. I totally agree with the points on access. Trying to think about it from an employer’s perspective, if a substantial number of workers within your workplace are saying, “We want trade union recognition,” ignoring that—saying no to those requests—must have an impact on staff morale.
Another point we would add is that our concern is that the statutory recognition provisions are not balanced. All the provisions at present tend to be weighted too much towards the employer, because the employer can delay the process, providing them with more and more time during statutory recognition to invest resources and put pressure on workers not to vote for recognition.
We welcome the consultation from the Government, and we want to work with them to strengthen the provisions to provide much earlier access, so that it becomes the norm in the workplace that the trade union is present and that workers can ask questions, but also that there are stronger unfair practice provisions. I know that we look at international practices, and I noticed in the States just last week that the National Labour Relations Board actually made it unlawful for employers to hold meetings with staff for the purpose of trying to convince them not to support recognition.
Could you imagine a law within the UK—we hope we could get to this point—where there is actually a level playing field, and where employers cannot create a hostile environment and say to workers, “You cannot have a democratic right. You cannot have your choice to have a say”? That is what collective bargaining is: giving workers a say over their own pay and their own terms and conditions. That is not something that is foreign; it is just about empowering workers to have their voices heard by their employers.
The Chair
Thank you. I would just say to the panel that we have lots of Members who want to ask questions, so please be brief, and do not necessarily repeat what everyone else has said. If you want to put in written evidence, you can do that too. I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, Steve Darling.
Steve Darling
Q
Paul Nowak: Absolutely, Mr Darling. I think the evidence is clear from research undertaken by, for example, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that employers tend to invest less in staff who are insecure and low paid. What we want to do is create a situation where employers are investing in staff. We have a problem in the UK: if you look at employer investment in skills, it is about half the EU average, so I think we want to move away from a low-skill, high-turnover situation.
Somebody talked before about the impact of staff churn. I was at an employer at the end of last week where they had 46% staff turnover each and every year. As the trade union representatives pointed out to me, every new person being recruited by that business works out at around £4,500 per person. I think that the Bill actually incentivises employers to invest in their staff, and to invest in the way that they use staff, and that certainly will have a positive impact on productivity.
There is also the fact that, when you give workers a collective voice, they are more likely to work with employers on things such as the introduction of new technology. How are we going to get to net zero in a way that secures good-quality employment? What does that mean for training? It really does open up the potential for much more productive working relationships.
Uma Kumaran
Q
Paul, 136 years ago, Sarah Chapman was first elected as the TUC rep from the then-formed Matchmakers’ Union. She fought ardently for women’s rights, and she made great representations at the TUC for women’s rights, but it has been 136 years and there is still much more to do for women in the workplace. I am really pleased to see that the TUC has said that
“Labour’s Employment Rights Bill is so vital for women’s pay and equality.”
I am keen to hear your thoughts on why you think that is, and other reflections from the panel.
Paul Nowak: It would be good to hear from colleagues from Unison and Unite, who directly represent hundreds of thousands of women at work. We know, for example, that women are more likely to be employed on zero-hours contracts, and are more likely to be in low-paid occupations. I think things like the fair pay agreement in social care could have a transformative impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of women who go out to work.
That is alongside all the other provisions in the Bill—for example, the presumption around flexible working, which will allow people to balance work and family life but also, crucially, allow us to bring people back into the labour market who are struggling at the moment to find work that suits their caring and other responsibilities. There is a whole range of provisions in the Bill that will have a direct, positive impact on women at work, and a direct impact on those sectors in which we know that low-paid, insecure employment is most concentrated—retail, social care and hospitality.
Maggi Ferncombe: I represent Unison. We are 80% women. I talked at the very beginning about the significant difference this Bill will make, but I will give you some examples. Paul touched on flexible working. You could sum up this Bill in lots of different ways, but it is going to make such a difference to carers who care as a profession but also to carers who have caring responsibilities outside work, most of whom are women.
I will not touch on the fair pay agreement, because Paul already has, but the other area is the reinstatement of the school support staff negotiating body. These workers are again majority women and majority working part time. It will be transformative for those workers to have a set of standard terms and conditions, opportunities for training and salary, and not to have to take part-time jobs outside of their school work to be able to make ends meet. That will be the transformation for women.
Dave Moxham: We have been fortunate in Scotland—not completely fortunate—to get a bit of a head start on some of this discussion, particularly about low-paid care workers. We have a strong developing consensus that care workers’ voices are women’s voices in the collective bargaining arena, and that is something that we want to develop in Scotland. It is something that I think the Bill may just have to address for Scotland, because this is one of those situations where, because of the devolved nature of the delivery of care, we may need to invest powers in the Scottish Government rather than the Secretary of State. That is something we would intend to submit to the Committee on.
But I think we have really good early indications that a living wage for care workers, and the full involvement of unionised care workers in the delivery and shaping of their services, can pay enormous dividends. We are a long way from getting it right in Scotland, but I think we have got a good start there, which I hope some of the legislation here will reflect.
Hannah Reed: Very briefly, I fully endorse what colleagues have said. I am not going to repeat it, so as not to take the Committee’s time. Many women are part of trade unions because they want their voices heard and they want to be able to address issues such as inequality, bullying and pay discrimination in the workplace. The introduction of equality reps’ rights will provide an important focus to say that equality must be at the heart of the negotiating agenda within workplaces.
Alongside that, I recognise that there are improvements to parental rights that will help to ensure that there is a fairer share of parental responsibilities in the home. We have already talked about a lot of zero-hours contract workers being women. One of the things we are very aware of in hospitality is that, too often, employers bring in too many workers for shifts and say: “Sorry, we do not need you any more. Go home.” They then cancel a shift without any compensation for the workers for their travel time, costs or childcare. We hope the Bill will help to address some of those concerns.
Chris Law
Q
Dave Moxham: There is a growing consensus in favour of the devolution of employment law to Scotland, but I think we all know that the Bill cannot achieve all of that, whether this Committee was in agreement with it or not. What is of interest to us is the interface between employment law at a UK level and the responsibilities of the Scottish Government, who obviously employ the vast majority of the public sector in Scotland. In a sense, that is what I am referring to here. Through procurement and other regulations, the Scottish Government are working with us to deliver collective bargaining arrangements in Scotland, which interface and have a potential complication—if not conflict—with what is in this Bill. We would like that to be looked at.
It is important to recognise that not all employment law is reserved to Westminster. In Scotland, there are the Agricultural Wages Board and the employment tribunals already, and a range of other things are devolved. Partly with respect to Wales, which I will not try to speak for, but definitely with respect to Scotland, which I will, there may be aspects of this Bill that might need to be looked at, particularly the relative responsibilities of the two Parliaments.
Dr Tidball
Q
Paul Nowak: Why is it so important at the moment? We have 8 million people who are reliant on statutory sick pay, which does not kick in until day three of illness. That means that you literally have people, often disabled workers but not exclusively, dragging themselves into work despite the fact that they are ill, and they are often then spreading ill health. I will give you a practical example, Dr Tidball. I was at a mental health hospital in Blackpool last year where a group of women workers had needed to take strike action, while working in an NHS mental health hospital, because they did not have access to day one sick pay. They are people who were going into an NHS setting when they were clearly unwell, because they could not afford to take time off.
We also have an issue where we have over a million very low-paid workers, mainly women, who do not get any sick pay at all because they do not meet the lower earnings threshold. I think that the Bill will be transformative, and we will get to a situation where people are not afraid to take time off if they are ill because they are worried about whether they will be able to pay the rent, mortgage or bills. I think it is absolutely essential, and a really important part of those basic day one rights that every worker should be entitled to.
Maggi Ferncombe: I concur with everything Paul said. I would only add that we end up with different workers working in the same workplace under different terms and conditions. One group of workers who cannot afford to take a day sick, because they do not get paid, potentially bring in an illness and infect other people. In the public sector, such as in health settings, they are infecting not only the workforce but the public. It will be significantly different for all of those people.
Hannah Reed: As we saw from the pandemic, it is really horrendous when people feel pressured to go into work and put themselves and their colleagues at risk. Therefore, day one rights to SSP are obviously really critical. Moving forward, we would like to see an uplift in SSP because we still have one of the lowest rates in Europe, but the Bill represents a significant step forward, as does the recognition that there will be more collective bargaining. We as trade unions will negotiate for day one rights, often at full pay and not simply at the level of statutory rights.
We are also looking forward, not just with the Bill but moving forward with the wider “Make Work Pay” measures, to working with the Government on the health and safety review. It is regrettable that there is nothing in the Bill on health and safety. We hope that the Government will continue to prioritise that, addressing not only issues about mental health in the workplace but the impact of long covid, which disadvantages some people. We recognise that not everything can be done with this Bill, but we look forward to that ongoing programme of work.
Nick Timothy
Q
Paul Nowak: Perhaps I could have a quick go at those questions. I would not describe it as a fundamental rebalancing; I would describe it, as I said, as the biggest upgrade in workers’ rights in decades, and one that has been desperately needed for years. I hesitate to say this, but I think there has been a political consensus that this rebalancing, if you want to describe it as such, needs to take place. If you cast your mind back to 2016-17, Theresa May commissioned Matthew Taylor to undertake his review of modern employment practices. I think there were between 50 and 60 recommendations in his piece of work. The then Government promised 20 times or more in Parliament that they would bring forward an employment Bill and they did not. There was actually a recognition under successive Conservative Governments that the labour market was not working, that it was letting down far too many workers and that it was not working on its own terms, with low productivity and so on.
I hope that there is a political consensus that we do need to shift the balance. On the relationship with the Departments, I have been at the roundtables with union colleagues and also with representatives from the CBI and the other business organisations, and I think it genuinely has been a collaborative effort. What has been said to trade unions and what has been said to business has been exactly the same. The message has been consistent, and I think that is a good way of working.
I do not think you can draw a line between this legislation and an increase in industrial action. Indeed, I would flip that point. Previous Governments introduced the Trade Union Act 2016, which was designed to make it harder, effectively, for workers to take industrial action, and then last year they presided over the biggest strike wave in our recent history. I stood—not because I am some trade union anorak on these issues—on more picket lines last year than I have in the previous 20 years combined, despite the fact that it was made harder for workers to take industrial action. Actually, I think the focus of the previous Government, and I think the focus of this Government, is not on trying to legislate industrial problems out of existence, but on trying to resolve disputes and on finding ways of working together.
I was on the council of ACAS for 11 years. There will always be individual and collective disputes in workplaces; that is a fact of life in modern workplaces. How you manage those disputes and how you put in place the right, proper framework of law to give workers an effective voice is really important, and I think this legislation helps to do that.
Maggi Ferncombe: Good industrial relations will mean fewer strikes; it is as simple as that. If workers feel that they have been listened to through their trade union, and that we have been able to find a solution—hopefully—to any of the issues, the likelihood of workers feeling that they have no option but to take strike action will lessen.
Dave Moxham: I fully concur.
Hannah Reed: From Unite’s perspective, we would say that this is a step towards rebalancing power relations in the workplace. We think that at the moment there are too many gaps in the Bill and we have to include in that zero-hours contracts. We think it is too easy for the employer to game the measures, but we look forward to working with the Committee on tightening those provisions up.
I want to pay absolute tribute to the Department—the civil servants as well as the Ministers—for the work that it has done in recent weeks and months, and for genuinely engaging. I have been in employment rights policy work for generations, and I have never seen anything like this level of engagement in terms of civil servants and also Ministers giving their time to both sides of industry.
I want to reiterate the point that I think has been made by Unison: collaborative working relationships are dependent on both sides. Too often—we have experienced this in recent years—employers have resorted to hard strong-arm tactics such as fire and rehire, sacking workforces and driving up casualisation in the workplace. That increases insecurity and damages morale in the workplace. We would like to be in workplaces where employers come to the table, have genuine negotiations and recognise the importance of investing in the workforce, building security and offering a genuinely fair share of the outcomes from what workers do, not simply increasing the profit margin.
Alex McIntyre
Q
Paul Nowak: It has a massive uncertainty in terms of people not being able to plan their lives and not knowing whether they are going to be working enough hours to pay the bills and to meet their rent or mortgage at the end of the month. Overwhelmingly, those on zero-hours contracts want guaranteed hours. The vast majority of the British public, regardless of who they voted for at the last election, want to see an end to zero-hours contracts. We polled 1,000 large, medium and small employers, and 70% of them believe that getting rid of zero-hours contracts will drive improvements in productivity.
I will make one final point. We hear a lot about the potential cost to employers, the potential impact on recruitment and so on, but some of those points were made during the introduction of the minimum wage.
The Chair
Order. That brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank you all for your evidence. We now move to the next panel.
Examination of Witnesses
Jemima Olchawski and Joeli Brearley gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from Jemima Olchawski, chief executive officer of the Fawcett Society, and Joeli Brearley, founder and CEO of Pregnant Then Screwed. We have until 5 pm for this panel. Could the witnesses briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Jemima Olchawski: Hi, I am Jemima Olchawski, chief executive of the Fawcett Society. We are the UK’s only member-powered organisation dedicated to ending sexism and misogyny for all women.
Joeli Brearley: Hello, I am Joeli Brearley. I am the CEO and founder of Pregnant Then Screwed. We exist to end the motherhood penalty. We run support services for women who experience issues at work and we campaign on issues that we think cause the motherhood penalty.
Greg Smith
Q
Jemima Olchawski: At Fawcett, we really welcome the Bill. Overall, we still have an economy and workplaces that consistently disadvantage and exclude women. That means that they are much more likely to be on zero-hours contracts, to be in low-paid work and to be held back by a lack of access to quality flexible part-time work. Each of those issues is intensified for most black and minoritised women, and for disabled women. The situation results in serious consequences for individual women. We have a gender pay gap of just under 14%. On average, women take home just over £630 a month less than men. It also has a detrimental impact on our economy, because it is a marker of the ways in which women are not fully participating or contributing to the economy at their full potential. Estimates indicate that that means we are missing out on tens of billions of pounds of GDP.
We strongly support the measures as an important step towards redressing that balance. In particular, we are pleased to see the inclusion of equalities action plans as an important way to get employers to drive forward progress on the gender pay gap. We are glad to see the emphasis on the importance of flexible working and the day one right to statutory sick pay, which will have a disproportionate beneficial impact on women, as well as further protection from sexual harassment in the workplace. Some 40% of women experience sexual harassment at some point during their career.
There are areas where we would like to see additional inclusions or things going further. Flexible working is incredibly important for women who have caring responsibilities and continue to do the majority of unpaid care, and having access to flexible work is vital to enable them to progress and earn to their full potential. We would like to see a duty on employers to advertise jobs as flexible, rather than a situation where women have to wait until they are in a job before they can begin that conversation. You cannot move into a new job if you are not sure whether you will be able to replicate the flexibility that you have in an existing role. That leads to women being under-employed and their skills underused.
The day one rights to maternity, paternity and parental leave are important, but they have to be remunerated. There has to be a day one right to pay if we actually want people to take it. Particularly if we want men to take on more caring roles, we need to make sure we have a refocus on remunerated leave, and that includes parental leave. We welcome the fact that there will be a review, but we need to think about this as part of those measures.
I would like to see more around equal pay in the Bill. Measures could be taken that would support women to access fair pay, such as pay transparency and ending salary history questions. The last thing I would like to see more on is making sure that there is proper enforcement of those rights—that the enforcement bodies are properly resourced and have the teeth to ensure that the rights really hold.
Joeli Brearley: It is a big question that you have asked. I support everything that Jemima has just said. We are very supportive of the Bill, but I think there is a lack of clarity on some of the areas that we are particularly interested in. On flexible working, we are really pleased to see that the Government want to make it the default way of working. That is really important, but we need to know exactly how, and what mechanisms will be in place to do that. The current law on flexible working isn’t working. We want to see an advertising duty as well, which I am sure we can explore in a bit more detail later.
We are also very supportive of parental leave being moved to a day one right. It is kind of amazing that that is not in place already. But without it being remunerated, take-up will be very low. We would have liked to see more on parental leave. We have a shockingly low rate of pay for maternity. We have the worst paternity benefit in Europe. This is causing huge problems for families, particularly new families that have just had a baby. They are getting themselves into terrible amounts of debt. Also the way that our parental leave system is structured means that women are responsible for the care of a baby. They tend to take long periods of time out of work, whereas men tend to go back to work very quickly. They fall into the role of breadwinner, and the woman falls into the role of caregiver, and that continues for the rest of their lives—which is why there is such a large gender pay gap.
The redundancy protections are great. Again, we are very pleased to see that, but we need specifics about what it means. We would like to see that pregnant women and new parents can only be made redundant in exceptional circumstances. By that we mean when a business is closing or perhaps when a service has stopped being delivered. It is very difficult, if you are made redundant when you are pregnant or have just had a baby, to get another job. Often you are made redundant and then cannot access statutory maternity pay. These are very particular circumstances. We know that many women are still being made redundant when they are pregnant or when they are new mums; 17% of calls we get to Pregnant Then Screwed are related to redundancy, so it is a big problem.
What we do not have at the moment, but really need, is data that shows us what is happening on the ground. A report was done by the Equality and Human Rights Commission under the coalition Government that found that 54,000 women a year are pushed out of their jobs for getting pregnant or for taking maternity leave, and 77% of new mums experience some form of discrimination. That report was done in 2016, and there was a guarantee at that point that the report would be done again five years later. It is now nine years later and we still do not have any new data to show us exactly what is happening on the ground. Without it we are making decisions in the dark, so we would really push for that report to be done again.
We would have liked to see something in the Bill on non-disclosure agreements. Our research found that 435,293 mothers had been gagged by non-disclosure agreements when experiencing some form of discrimination. It is a serious problem. Again, we do not know what is happening in companies across the country. Women tend to experience this form of discrimination and are then forced to sign these agreements and are given a low amount of compensation. They suffer mental health consequences because of that. We want to see the UK follow what Ireland has recently done, so that non-disclosure agreements cannot be enforced unless the claimant wants them to be. We would also have liked to see something in the Bill on miscarriage leave, because at the moment there is no right to any leave or pay if you miscarry before 24 weeks. We would have liked to see something on fertility treatment. As many of you will know, we have a baby crisis in the UK—we are not having enough babies. We want to encourage people to have fertility treatment, so we need a legal right to time off.
We would like to see something on reasonable adjustments. There are currently reasonable adjustments if someone has a disability, but not if they have a dependant with a disability. Many mothers of disabled children are struggling in the workplace because they need time off for appointments, or whatever it may be. We would like to see a requirement for all employers to publish parental leave policies.
Justin Madders
Q
Jemima Olchawski: There is strong evidence that the majority of sexual harassment experienced in the workplace comes from third parties. This is where someone experiences harassment from a client, customer or patient. Some of those who are most vulnerable would include those working in retail and hospitality. It is essential that anyone working in those environments is as safe as they can be and respected in their workplace. We would consider it essential that employers’ responsibility to take reasonable steps to prevent harassment includes third parties, because as a victim, it is not relevant that the person was not a direct co-employee. What matters is the harm experienced. It is absolutely within the bounds of good practice and reasonable steps for employers to address that.
Joeli Brearley: Nothing from me. It is not my area.
Steve Darling
Q
Jemima Olchawski: It could be strengthened by having clear guidance and expectations around the reasonable steps that will prevent. That should include multiple reporting routes, which might be anonymous if that feels more appropriate, and training for managers. Our research shows that managers want to respond appropriately, but often when those conversations come up, they do not know what the right thing to do is. Consequently, lots of those conversations end up going badly, and young people or employees do not get the support they need.
It is also important that enforcement agencies have the resource to investigate whether policies and procedures are in place, so that we can embed a culture of prevention rather than just respond decently when incidents happen. That is in the interests of employers too, because cultures where there is bullying or harassment are bad for productivity and staff turnover. It is in everyone’s interest to ensure we address this and cut it off at the pass.
Joeli Brearley: The only thing I would add is that when women experience sexual harassment or any form of discrimination and want to access justice, the justice system is currently failing them—it is not working. We know, certainly in cases of pregnancy and maternity discrimination, that fewer than 1% of women who have that experience even raise a tribunal claim. Part of what we need to do is extend that time limit to raise a claim. It is currently three months. It needs to be at least six months, so that women have the opportunity to recover from their experience before they start to go through that onerous, difficult process of raising a tribunal claim.
Alison Hume
Q
Joeli Brearley: I started Pregnant Then Screwed 10 years ago, because of my own experience with pregnancy discrimination. I was pushed out of my job the day after I informed my employer that I was pregnant, and it was the tribunal time limit that prevented me from taking action against my employer. When I started campaigning on these various issues and talking to people within Government about them, I honestly felt like nobody was listening. It really felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall. Nobody really had any interest in what we were talking about. Certainly over the last 10 years, the dial has not moved very much at all. I mean, we have seen changes in flexible working law and changes in redundancy protections, but they are minor tweaks.
This Bill takes a significant step forward, but of course I am always going to say that there is a lot more that we can do. I was particularly excited to see the flexible working part of the Bill, but if we do not get this right—cross the t’s and dot the i’s—then it will make very little difference whatsoever.
Thank you for your comments; they were very kind.
Dr Tidball
Q
Jemima Olchawski: We know that women are currently more likely to miss out on statutory sick pay because they do not earn enough to meet the threshold or have not been in their roles as long; you heard evidence earlier about the impact on people who have to try to work when they are not well enough, and the impact on incomes through people not being able to work. Women are more likely to be juggling work and care, so they are more likely to need the flexibility and protections in this Bill. That is why getting the piece around flexibility is so important, whether it is because you are caring for children, for disabled children or for elderly relatives. We also know that one in 10 women we surveyed in our research who had been experiencing the menopause had left their workplace as a result of their symptoms, and flexible work and support in the workplace is really important to enable them to continue to participate when they are at the peak of their careers and skill levels. They should be allowed to thrive and be in their prime.
We know that the majority of households in poverty have at least one adult in work, but at the moment we do not have a system that properly supports either lone parent families, which are predominantly women, or households where both parents want to work. We also know that 40% of women who are not working would work more hours, or would work paid hours, if they had access to flexible working, so these measures are also really important as a part of overall efforts to address poverty and prevent child poverty.
Joeli Brearley: Adding to what Jemima has said, particularly on flexible working, the current law is that you have a day one right to request flexible working, and that has obviously moved from having had six months in a job. A right to request is still a right to decline, and we strongly feel that it does not go far enough in changing the dial on flexible working.
I know that the RPC opinion on flexible working has said that there is no evidence that we need to change the law on this. There will never be enough official evidence because those who want flexible working tend either to ask for what they think that they can get—or, if they know that it will not be granted, they do not ask for it at all. TUC research found that a third of people who want flexible working do not ask for it, despite needing it, because they think it will be rejected, and a further third ask for what they think that they can get, rather than what they actually need to manage their personal and professional obligations.
To really change the dial on flexible working, you have got to switch this on its head, and an advertising duty would do that. It is a hugely ambitious change; it is not a slight tweak to the current legislation, which is a much easier thing to do. An advertising duty would ensure that employers design jobs as flexible from the outset. It would mean that, in a job advert, employers would have to stipulate the types of flexible working available, and the candidate they chose would have a legal right to take up employment on whatever arrangement was stipulated in that job advert. The pushback on this has been, “Well, not all jobs can be flexible.” That is of course true, so if you do not believe that a job can be done flexibly, you could stipulate that and set out the reasons why.
The duty would particularly impact the women we work with. They would not be in a situation where they are having to move job. At the moment, they need to go to a new job and then ask for the flexibility they need to fulfil their personal and professional obligations. If at that point they find out that that is not possible, they have to leave that job—and both employer and employee lose out. We are currently trying to shoehorn flexibility into a very rigid structure, and we need to really change the culture. We believe that an advertising duty is the way in which you do that.
If we are not going to be that ambitious, and an advertising duty is off the table, we really need to reduce the number of reasons that you can decline a flexible working request—we believe that it can be reduced to three. We need to make it a legal right to be able to request flexible working from the point at which a job is offered rather than the first day of employment. That makes complete sense for everybody. Finally, we need to have the ability to appeal decisions to a third body, perhaps the single enforcement body. We also want employers to have to publish their flexible working policies online so that employees can see them. It would be a game changer and would really shift the way in which our employment market works, and it certainly would be a game changer for women.
The other thing in the Bill that I would really like to talk about is parental leave—the fact that it is not remunerated and that you are moving it to the first day of employment. We know that the take-up will be very low. We did some research with the Centre for Progressive Policy that found that if you increase paternity leave to six weeks and pay it at 90% of salary, you reduce the gender pay gap by 4% and you increase labour force participation, particularly by women. We really need to keep up with our European counterparts and increase paternity leave. Two weeks at £182 a week is not good enough, and we know that one in four dads are not even taking their two weeks because they cannot afford to do so. Families are losing out as a result. It is really bad for kids if dads and second parents are not enabled to spend time with their children. It is really bad for women, and it is a big cause of the gender pay gap, so we would really like to see the parental leave review happen as quickly as possible, and paternity leave increased, ringfenced and paid properly.
Jemima Olchawski: To come back on flexible working, Fawcett has been campaigning for that advertising duty and agrees that it is really important to make these measures meaningful. It is also important to recognise that this is good for employers because it increases the pool of talent that they have access to, rather than being able to get applications only from people who meet a rigid but not relevant set of criteria. It broadens it out to everyone who genuinely can do the job, which benefits everyone and is hugely important for enabling women to succeed at work.
Chris Law
Q
Joeli Brearley: Sure. Non-disclosure agreements are a real problem. We do not know how many exist, or how many women who experience discrimination—I am saying women because I work with women; of course, men sign them as well—sign them, because of course they are non-disclosure agreements, so nobody can talk about them. We run a mentor programme where we pair up women who are taking legal action against an employer with somebody who has been through that process, and in 90% of the cases that we work with, they end up signing a non-disclosure agreement.
Chris Law
Ninety per cent?
Joeli Brearley: Ninety per cent; it is a significant proportion. Often, these are for quite measly sums of money. They are pushed on women when they are feeling very vulnerable. Women are told that, if they sign this non-disclosure agreement, they will get a really good reference and it will all go away—“You get this lump sum of money, off you go.” But what they mean is that you cannot talk about what has happened to anybody. Legally, you can talk about it to your spouse and your lawyer, but that is about it. That really damages the mental health of women who sign them, because they cannot say what has happened to them. They sort of harbour this dirty secret, and that really is very damaging to them.
It also means that we do not know what is happening behind companies’ closed doors. I can tell you now that there are companies that win awards for being brilliant employers for women, but behind closed doors they are pushing women out when they are pregnant and forcing them to sign non-disclosure agreements so they cannot talk about it publicly.
Along with Zelda Perkins, who runs Can’t Buy My Silence, we would like to see that non-disclosure agreements are unenforceable unless the claimant—the person signing it—wants them to be enforced. That is a piece of legislation that Ireland has just pushed through: making NDAs unenforceable unless the claimant would like them enforced, and unless the documents are written in very clear language—often non-disclosure agreements are really complicated to read and nobody can fully understand them—and there is still the opportunity to report what happened to a trade union and to the ombudsman. Again, at the moment nobody knows what is happening because, by their very nature, non-disclosure agreements stop you talking to anybody, so we would like to see a similar change here.
Uma Kumaran
Q
You have both talked about maternity provisions and what they could mean for the country. More broadly, what is the benefit to the economy and to businesses of having stronger maternity provisions as set out in the Bill?
Joeli Brearley: By maternity provisions, do you mean maternity leave and pay?
Uma Kumaran
Yes, maternity rights.
Joeli Brearley: As I mentioned before, we know that 54,000 women a year are pushed out of their jobs from the point that they get pregnant, while pregnant, while taking maternity leave or just after they return. That is one in nine; it is a woman every 10 minutes.
What tends to happen is that it takes those women a very long time to recover. Sometimes it is a slow drip feed of bullying and harassment, because people know that just pushing them out is unlawful and they could go to tribunal. This is severely damaging to women’s careers, and to their first year with their new baby—it really damages their mental health—and it is a big contributor to the gender pay gap. We do not know exactly how much it contributes to the gender pay gap, but it obviously is a big contributor.
What we need to see—and what we have been campaigning for—to change this is, first, ringfenced, properly paid paternity leave, because until an employer sees any employee as somebody who could go off when they have a child, they will always have a bias against women. At the moment, men do not take time off—a maximum of two weeks, often—once they have become a father, so they are not seen as a risk, whereas women are seen as a risk, so that bias starts in the recruitment process. We know that if we ringfence paternity leave and pay it properly, men will take time out, which also reduces the unpaid labour gap; we know that men tend to do less of the unpaid labour, so taking these steps would mean that women could excel more in their careers.
Secondly—I know it is not within this Committee’s scope but I have to mention it—our childcare system is a chaotic mess. It needs to be affordable and it needs to be accessible. Until that happens, women will take a step back from their careers. We also need enhanced redundancy protections, like what is in this Bill, but we need them to be very specific and to be about, “If the business fails—”
The Chair
Order. That brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank you both for your evidence. We now move to the next panel.
Examination of Witness
Alasdair Reisner gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear evidence from Alasdair Reisner, CEO of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association. We have until 5.15 pm for this witness. Could you set out for the record who you are and your background?
Alasdair Reisner: Certainly. First, thank you very much for inviting me to give evidence today. I am Alasdair Reisner, chief executive of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association, but I also come here wearing a couple of other hats. I am a member of the Construction Industry Joint Council, which is the largest collective agreement for the construction industry, representing about 250,000 employees. I am also a member of the Construction Leadership Council, which is the umbrella body for the industry. I lead its culture-of-workplace activities to try to improve the workplaces of construction businesses.
Greg Smith
Q
Alasdair Reisner: One of the benefits of being tail-end Charlie is that I have been able to watch some of the earlier evidence, so I was primed for this question. From an industry perspective, the first reaction is that it is a very big Bill, and that does create challenges. We have about 360,000 employers in our industry, more than half of which employ fewer than four people, so even raising awareness of the existence of the Bill is a particular challenge. In terms of how we take things forward, whatever happens during the rest of this process, a big engagement process is required to raise awareness of the outcome.
That said, generally speaking, based on the feedback that we have had, I think there is a lot of positivity about some elements of the Bill, particularly on tackling sexual harassment and looking at improving equality in the industry. I think our members would say that this is stuff that they do as custom and practice already, so it is almost raising the level of the wider industry and trying to cut out poor behaviour among not bad actors in industry, but those that are less developed.
There are a couple of points where we do have particular concerns. One is the redundancy piece. I suspect that, as MPs, you are all sick and tired of people special pleading and saying that their industry is different, but I am afraid that I am going to say that our industry is different. We deliver on a geographical basis, and when a project comes to an end, understandably, there will be cases where redundancy is the only option. To enforce upon the whole business the requirement for consultation feels like it was not the intent of this policy. It seems that we should spend some time trying to find a way through that works and results in productive outcomes. I have seen personally the impact of people being on multiple rounds of redundancy. It is miserable for the individual, and that is what I think we should seek to avoid.
The other area we have some concerns about—we have heard this a number of times today—is day one unfair dismissal claims. In construction, it takes a lot of time to get people ready to work. Coming down from two years to day one feels like a big step for an industry that, as I articulated, may not even be aware that this is coming towards them. We would want to look at how that might work. I am sure you may have questions on that, so I do not want to spend the time garbling on—I would rather give you the chance to ask questions.
Greg Smith
Q
Alasdair Reisner: It is an interesting question. There is the notification element and the consultation element. I suppose we have to ask what the policy is trying to achieve. If it were trying to avoid people almost hiding redundancies by doing them in small units, I do not think we would have any complaints about ensuring that notification was still required. It is where you are forcing people into consultation who are never going to be made redundant, yet they find themselves under the scope of that. Splitting those two things apart—so you would still have the notification, but you would not necessarily have the consultation for those who are unaffected—is something we are exploring. I do not want to say that that is the silver bullet that will solve things. We have not even discussed that collectively as an industry; we are just trying to consider what options might be on the table.
Justin Madders
Q
Alasdair Reisner: It is a cliché, but we rely on the people we work with, and they must be represented. Having good, positive relationships with the employees’ representatives is crucial. The CIJC has for decades provided us with that vehicle—I should say that it is not the largest overall; it is just the largest in the construction sector. I think back to covid, when we needed a relationship with the workforce that provided us with the independence —I have to say that Unite was brilliant at that time—to engage with the rest of the industry to say, “We’re all working collectively towards a common good.”
From discussing the Bill with members over the past few days, I know that one of the potential concerns is that it might in some way undermine existing collective agreements. I do not think that is written in the Bill; it is more in the discussion that has happened prior to the Bill. That is something we would like to protect. I am not going to pretend it is all sunshine and roses—sometimes it can be quite challenging—but I think we would want to ensure that whatever the outcome of the Bill, there is a strong, positive partnership between the employers’ representatives and the employees’ representatives.
Steve Darling
Q
Alasdair Reisner: As an employer representative body, it is very easy to say, “Here are all the problems associated with the Bill.” I think we should be nervous about that, because there is a democratic mandate for what is going forward. Equally, I think we should be honest and say that we do see that it will create an additional burden for industry, although I am going to be very honest and say that we do not have good research at industry level to know what the nature of that is. However, it seems palpable that there will be impacts, as there are with some of the other policy changes we have seen, and which you would expect with the change between two Governments.
At the risk of looking like I am trying to duck the question, there are both pros and cons with the Bill—it is as simple as that. The particular concerns we have are around redundancy and day one unfair dismissal. Those are the things we want to focus on specifically, as those are the policies that are likely to have the unintended consequences.
Laurence Turner
Q
Alasdair Reisner: That is very kind. I was not expecting that at all. It is something that we are extraordinarily passionate about. We have done a lot of work on mental wellbeing, which I think is also incredibly relevant to this Committee, because we are looking at a culture in the workplace that drives mental health. Unfortunately, as an industry, we have really poor mental wellbeing issues, particularly for those at the very bottom end of the skills levels. That is our problem, and we need to do more on that. Sorry, I cannot remember the specifics of your first question.
Laurence Turner
Do you see opportunities for marrying the levelling up of employment standards with productivity gains in construction?
Alasdair Reisner: In terms of industry productivity, there is a lot to do, but one of the biggest drivers will be people being happy and healthy at work, and being provided with appropriate training that drives their competence to deliver. So yes, I think there is something there. Ultimately, there are big challenges that sit outside the employment space. At the minute, we are not even measuring productivity properly. Knowing whether we are improving starts with having the first clue about what we are supposed to be measuring. I should say that there is good work going on in that space at the moment.
Chris Murray
Q
Alasdair Reisner: There is a characterisation that construction sought migrant labour as a way of undermining the cost of the existing workforce, but—I hold my hands up; I am a lobbyist for the industry—that is just not true. A lot of people do not understand that we are a relatively high-paying industry. We used migrant labour where there was a lack of capacity in the industry, and it was almost a balancing item to meet that capacity; it was not about undermining costs. I am confident that, whatever we do on employment rights, we will still have a challenge around meeting our future skills needs. I do not think migration is the answer; I think there is a long-term piece around us recruiting more effectively domestically.
Chris Murray
Q
Alasdair Reisner: It cannot hurt to have measures that make the world of work in the construction industry more attractive to try to defeat that perception, but there are much bigger factors driving it.
Jon Pearce
Q
Alasdair Reisner: I should first clarify that I am not an expert in redundancy. However, based on the conversations we have had, you have to look at how individual employers would respond to the new environment. I do not think this would ever be the case, but it is almost as though people feel that the only way out of this will be to have a permanent rolling redundancy consultation within their business to try to address the fact that there are people on geographical sites who are coming off and going on all the time. Under a new approach, there is no other easy route that would help to address that issue.
The Chair
On behalf of the Committee, let me say thank you very much for your evidence. You are definitely not a tail-end Charlie.
Alasdair Reisner: Thank you very much.
The Chair
That brings us to the end of today’s session. The Committee will meet again at 11.30 am on Thursday 28 November to continue hearing oral evidence on the Bill.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Anna McMorrin.)
Westminster Hall
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Electricity Grid Upgrades
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the delivery of electricity grid upgrades.
It is wonderful to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I am grateful to have the opportunity of this debate.
I chair a cross-party group of MPs from Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. We are working to promote the Clean Power 2030 objective, but we want to deliver it more cheaply and quickly, because it is becoming increasingly clear that undergrounding high voltage direct current cables is the way forward for the great national grid upgrade. Undergrounding will carry public consent and will avoid delays, and will therefore be cheaper as well as better for the countryside. Relying on new lines of pylons for the entire upgrade, as proposed, will delay decarbonising the national grid, because they arouse such hostility and will end up costing more because of the delays.
This debate is therefore not just local. Decarbonisation is one of the great national challenges that the United Kingdom faces. How it is achieved, how quickly and at what cost is an issue of national importance. The National Energy System Operator’s “Clean Power 2030” report is welcome, but it highlights the scale of the challenge. NESO is clear that public support is critical to achieving those ambitions, but its response to the Secretary of State in that document warns that losing public consent is a significant threat to delivering projects on time and within budget.
Fintan Slye, the executive director of NESO, made the importance of engaging community support clear on Radio 4 when the report was launched on 5 November:
“I am acutely conscious that building infrastructure, pylons, does impose on people and their locality.”
He also emphasised that
“it is really important…that we bring people and communities with us on this journey”,
and that the transition to net zero only works
“if we can bring society with us”.
He is clearly saying that infrastructure solutions must align with community priorities.
The challenge to install new capacity is enormous. The UK has around 14 GW of offshore wind capacity but, to meet future energy demands, that capacity will need to grow nearly threefold by 2030 and continue expanding so it can handle 125 GW of wind by 2050. That is a much faster rate of investment than we have seen so far, but projects for 2030 are already falling behind. Given the strength of public opposition to overhead pylons, it is highly unlikely that any pylon proposals will be delivered on time.
The “Clean Power 2030” report sets out how delays are already affecting key projects such as the one from Norwich to Tilbury, which is 184 km of pylons across Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. NESO says that it will now be delayed by a year to 2031, and that delay is very costly. NESO estimates that the cost of delay is £4 billion a year—far higher than previous estimates—mainly because of the constraint payments that have to be paid to wind power generators.
Given the public opposition to the Norwich to Tilbury project, the funds being amassed for legal challenges, and the opportunity for judicial review at least twice during the process, it is likely to be delayed for far longer than just one year. That risk is likely to apply to the other 17 pylon schemes proposed in the great grid upgrade. Nevertheless, National Grid plans to use overhead pylons as the primary infrastructure for the massive reinforcement of the national grid. I put it to the Minister that the current concept is not deliverable.
The implication is clear. The way to secure public consent is by pursuing strategies that respect and protect local communities and what they value—their property, their livelihoods and the countryside.
Sir John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
My hon. Friend has done a fantastic job in this area. He has been very persuasive in setting out the damage done to his constituency. Does he agree that the strength of the OffSET group—the offshore electricity grid taskforce—demonstrates that the issue is going to affect communities right across East Anglia, including Margaretting village in my constituency, and that therefore the opposition he talks about is likely to be very strong across the whole region?
Sir Bernard Jenkin
My right hon. Friend is completely right. It affects other colleagues, including some present here today representing, for example, Lincolnshire. We know that there are concerns in north Wales, and on the east coast of Scotland in the area represented by my hon. Friend the Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie), who is representing the Opposition Front Bench. This is a very widespread problem.
Undergrounding HVDC cables is not only technically viable, but the most sensible and sustainable solution for the future of our energy network—that is, if we cannot have it offshore. I acknowledge that quite a lot is going offshore, but it rubs salt in the wound that other areas, from Scotland to north-east England, have the luxury of offshore schemes, but we in East Anglia do not. Our countryside is not worth the investment.
Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Lab)
It is interesting to hear the hon. Member talk about delays and the issues with floating offshore wind. Does he agree that we should look at why we have such delays? After 14 years of Conservative Government, one might have thought that many of the challenges would already have been dealt with. Does he acknowledge that many of the current issues are because of a lack of action over the last 14 years?
Sir Bernard Jenkin
I accept that the present Government have inherited a planning system and a philosophy of upgrading the national grid that is out of date.
When we were in Government, we were very slow to recognise that such a big, strategic upgrade needed a proper strategy. We started moving towards holistic network design. We commissioned a report from Charles Banner KC to look at streamlining the planning process—I will come on to putting that streamlining in place—and I very much welcome that the Government have commissioned a spatial review of the entire network, which should have been done years ago. I think we were blind to the failings of the structure inherited from the Electricity Act 1989; we should have moved much sooner.
That report should make it easier for the Government to change the out-of-date policy of a presumption in favour of pylons, which we said in our manifesto that we would review. I am very happy for the Minister to blame the previous Government for the difficulties he is facing and to change the policy accordingly, but it will be very odd if he comes to the Dispatch Box to defend what the previous Government were doing, after what the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon) just said—but I suspect that that is what he will do.
I put this issue forward in a bipartisan manner. We should all be able to agree that the great grid upgrade is not going fast enough, and that we need to streamline the planning process and speed up delivery. However, we also need to mend our ideas about how we deliver it, because as I have said, undergrounding high voltage direct current cables is not only technically viable, but the most sensible and sustainable solution for the future of our entire energy network.
Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)
I would like to return to the hon. Member’s point about international comparisons and other countries nearby perhaps having a presumption in favour of overgrounding. I draw the House’s attention to the fact that Germany’s Opposition recently said that using overhead lines instead of digging underground could save the country €35 billion, and that the German political parties that previously, as part of Angela Merkel’s coalition, backed underground cables have now called for overhead lines to be given priority. Does the hon. Member agree that the picture is not quite so clearcut in mainland Europe?
Sir Bernard Jenkin
What is interesting about Germany is that its presumption was in favour of undergrounding, so the idea that that is a great big experiment and we do not know what it means is incorrect. There is plenty of expertise in Europe. When we look at cost comparisons between undergrounding and pylons, it also depends on the territory we are dealing with.
Our problem is lack of community consent, as Fintan Slye, the executive director of the National Energy System Operator, rightly says. It is a question of swings and roundabouts, but in the case of Norwich to Tilbury, the consequence of delays from trying to run roughshod over the very widespread and well-funded public opposition will be to put up the cost, which makes the cost of undergrounding advantageous over pylons. That is my point.
I am not necessarily disagreeing with the principle of what the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) says, but undergrounding DC cables has great advantages. The latest estimated cost of just one year’s delay for Norwich to Tilbury is four times more than the additional £1 billion cost of undergrounding HVDC— I hope the hon. Gentleman was listening to that: £4 billion a year for delay against £1 billion extra for DC undergrounding. I think that puts this into the field of a no-brainer. Why would we spend all that money fighting through the courts for a very unpopular scheme when we could save time and legal expense by going for a different method?
In the National Energy System Operator’s East Anglia network study, which was published earlier this year, undergrounding HVDC was set out as alternative option 8. The great advantage of undergrounding HVDC is that there will be far less public resistance. Moreover, as I have said, the planning procedures could be streamlined— as recommended to the Government recently by Charles Banner—to conform to the regime for installing new major water pipes. If we had the same planning regime for underground cables as we did for water pipes, we could speed up the process for undergrounding cables.
Underground HVDC offers a scalable, future-proof solution that can be delivered with far less environmental impact, with public support and much more quickly. Schemes without pylons that are already planned by National Grid—for example, in north-east England—are being delivered without public opposition or long delays, which seems to be an enormous advantage for the Government’s objective of decarbonising the grid. There is no comparable resistance from campaign groups, which is clear evidence that underground HVDC gets public support, making it a far more practical and feasible solution.
Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)
I pay tribute to the hard work that the hon. Member has done cross-party on this issue for many years, and I am grateful to be joining that as another east of England MP. The issue of public consent is important, because the proposals could have such a huge impact on local communities. Developers suggest that they could provide community benefits, but with all due respect, the idea of having a community hall 5 miles down the road does not mitigate having massive pylons going past someone’s back garden. Does the hon. Member agree that the problem with regard to public consent is that people who are very well organised will understandably continue to kick up a fuss, which will delay the creation of the renewable energy that we absolutely need and certainly support?
Sir Bernard Jenkin
I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s intervention. As the new Liberal Democrat MP for Chelmsford, she demonstrates that this is a cross-party campaign, supported by people who are as committed to decarbonisation as anything else.
As has been said, there is no comparable resistance from campaign groups in the north-east of England. That is clear evidence that underground HVDC receives public support, making it a far more practical and feasible solution.
In East Anglia, the opposition to overhead pylons is not subsiding; it is growing and becoming more intense. Campaign groups are united in their resistance to this outdated approach to infrastructure. The Government, including the Minister, have made it clear that local campaigners will not be able to block their nationally important mission to build clean energy infrastructure across the UK. We are not blocking; we are trying to help. In my constituency, one local group wrote to National Grid, in response to a consultation, saying:
“By all means, build closer to our houses and shorten the route, just put it underground.”
That demonstrates that communities are not opposed to infrastructure or the objectives behind it. They are just against bad decisions to achieve it.
I mentioned streamlining the planning system to bring it into line with what is required of water companies laying major water pipes. There is a massive underground Anglian water pipe being installed from Bury St Edmunds, across my constituency to Abberton reservoir in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel). That includes digging a trench through the sensitive landscape of Dedham vale across the Stour valley, almost exactly where the pylons or alternating current undergrounding will go. Nobody is objecting to that underground scheme. I have not had a whimper of complaint about that pipe going in.
Why stick to pylons when that method is slower and delays will make it far more expensive? The Government may argue, as the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) mentioned, that community benefits will compensate for the disruption to affected areas caused by pylons, but those ideas will not buy off the hostility to pylons and other unwanted infrastructure. Solutions that respect communities and their interests, as well as deliver for our energy network, are the future.
For Norwich to Tilbury, the onshore undergrounding HVDC proposal will cause significantly less environmental damage than overhead cables and AC undergrounding. Let me expand on that. For a start, the entire route would be underground, not just through the sensitive landscapes. The cable trenches required for undergrounding HVDC cables are far narrower than for AC cables.
AC undergrounding is proposed for the area of outstanding natural beauty, the special landscape area that I share with my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge). That requires a 120-metre-wide trench, because AC cables need to be spaced out. That means a very wide swathe of destruction, as that vast trench is dug and refilled, and everything in its path is destroyed.
It is extremely expensive to avoid going through archaeological sites. The Stour valley is an archaeological site of the same importance as Stonehenge. If there had been stones in the Stour valley, we would have a Stonehenge, because there is evidence of a wooden henge. Ancient tribes lived there in prehistoric times and it was a significant area throughout Roman times and the middle ages.
All of that is at risk, in addition to the massive destruction of trees, ancient woodland and hedges, in order to install AC underground cables. I am all for mitigating the effect of pylons by undergrounding, but let us not kid ourselves that it is a solution for the most sensitive areas of landscape. It is also much more expensive to underground AC cables than DC cables. I would very much like the proposal to underground cables to be extended to other areas, such as the Roman River valley, which is technically not in the special landscape area but is just as special. The Government have an obligation to respect sensitive countryside, so that could be another cause for a judicial review. A much better solution would be to underground DC, not AC, cables through that sensitive landscape.
Another reason why this proposal is so advantageous is that offshore DC to onshore AC requires huge DC-to-AC converters at the cable end points. When DC current generated by a wind farm lands somewhere such as Friston in the constituency of Suffolk Coastal, there has to be a massive DC-to-AC converter for it to go into the AC grid network. If we started building a DC grid network—for example, if energy ran all the way from Norwich to Tilbury on a DC line—all those connections could go straight into the DC network, avoiding the need for extra infrastructure. Incidentally, that would apply to the interconnectors for energy coming from the continent. Electricity arriving from the proposed Tarchon Energy interconnector would be DC, so we would not need a massive DC-to-AC converter at Ardley in my constituency; we could have just one DC-to-AC converter at the point at which the electricity needs to be converted to AC much nearer London—at Tilbury or even the Isle of Grain.
It is clear that HVDC is right for many parts of the United Kingdom, not just East Anglia. Wind power stations are increasingly located along the coast or just off our coastline, and a DC transmission network would reflect that. Converting power to AC at landfall is inefficient and duplicative. A properly designed onshore and offshore HVDC network would reduce the infrastructure needed, cut down on converter stations and enable us to focus on building for real demand, rather than just peak production.
Globally, HVDC is becoming the standard for modern energy networks. By investing in HVDC now, the UK can maintain its leadership in renewable energy, create jobs and develop skills that will keep us competitive. The alternative is clinging to outdated, mid-20th century technology that will leave us falling behind other countries. Germany will not give up HVDC undergrounding altogether, but that is the presumption in our planning system, which I suggest the Government need to revise.
The Government must show decisive leadership and embrace an HVDC future. This is about more than just reducing costs and avoiding delays; it is about ensuring we meet our renewable energy goals in a way that works for communities, the environment, the economy and the planet.
Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. This debate is an opportunity to discuss how to upgrade the grid in the best way possible, because currently, as the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) said, the rules do not work. Despite the fact that we are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and the most depleted in the G7, our planning system does not take nature into account.
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s acknowledgment that the previous Government did not adequately reform the energy system. I am also struck by the fact that he mentioned the 1989 Act. He has been in the House since 1992, when all the Government Members in the Chamber, with the exception of myself, were in school. I have been an ardent monitor of this House and energy policy more widely, and I have not seen him quite so enthusiastic about energy market reform until now, so I am somewhat sceptical about his conversion to the idea that we need to change our planning system. I am here to change the rules, and I am glad that he is, but we need to agree on exactly how to do that. We need to preserve our nature, while increasing our efforts to restore it.
Sir Bernard Jenkin
Does the hon. Lady acknowledge it was the previous Government who commissioned the Banner report on streamlining the system? Let us approach this on a bipartisan basis—we are all on the same side, trying to achieve the great upgrade of our electricity grid—and stop scoring party political points, shall we?
Ms Billington
I am perfectly happy to acknowledge when the Opposition are right and I am afraid to say that on this one they are not. We need to preserve the nature we have, while increasing efforts to restore nature. To restore nature by 2030 by 30% is one of our manifesto commitments, and that has to be taken into account with planning and national infrastructure projects. We will not reach our ambitious climate targets without it. I am disappointed there was no reference to the impact of this kind of infrastructure on nature by the hon. Gentleman. Reaching our targets will require a strong land use framework that intersects with an energy special plan, to which we have committed, and an updated national planning policy framework. I am delighted that the Government are currently working on all three of these documents and I look forward to seeing more detail on them.
It was interesting to hear the hon. Gentleman refer to the importance of public consent and support. For anyone who is aware of my work before I came to Parliament, public consent and support are absolutely vital for us to be able to undertake the transformation that we are discussing. That also involves benefit for communities, and ownership and accountability for those communities, in the form of local energy projects to help us build a more resilient grid.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
As a former Energy Minister and therefore someone who has been involved in strategic energy policy, including introducing, through the Energy Act 2013, the capacity market—still a critical part of what is used to determine from where we get our energy—and through my long experience in this House, although not as long as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), I say that public support for these things, linked to public benefit, is often an illusion. I have seen many developers, not just on energy projects, who have promised great public benefits and then they disappear like dandelion seeds on the wind.
Ms Billington
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. It is unusual that we agree—it is certainly the first time, although perhaps not the last—that developers end up having far too much say in these things and that the community does not have enough. I agree that we need to talk about how we change that.
An important part of the assessment by NESO and by the Government is that 8 GW of energy could be generated by local and community projects, reducing the need for further strengthening of the grid and enabling smart, local, flexible energy. That would increase our resilience and, if we stop the idea of developers simply trying to buy off local communities with either compensation or spurious benefits, instead having proper, locally owned energy projects, would build public consent and support. Putting energy closer to where it is used will alleviate stress on the grid and help to handle bottlenecks. It is crucial to point out that that needs to be done as well as grid upgrades.
The idea that grid upgrades will not happen is wrong. GB Energy is crucial in helping to develop those projects across the country. I note that Opposition Members voted against GB Energy. I would be interested to know how they think we are going to be able to achieve our goals without it, especially when the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) mentions the vagaries of private developers and their ability to bulldoze local communities.
Locally led energy is going to be crucial, and GB Energy will be able to do that, embracing a locally led approach to building grid infrastructure. By integrating a focus on local place-based energy projects, we can build the grid we need by working with local authorities and communities across the country.
A locally led approach is crucial for building consent among communities, whose members want to see infrastructure built—the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex mentioned that—but want to be included in how it is built. That is why the rules need to be changed. I am pleased to see that there is at least consensus on that. If we are talking about the risks of damage to the environment as well as public consent and support, we need to be aware that a significant amount of undergrounding is more damaging for our climate goals and for protecting nature than some of the proposals on pylons.
This is not a debate about if we upgrade the grid; it is a debate about how we build it. I am assured that the Government will hear my representations on combining our ambitions on a clean energy superpower with restoring nature by 2030.
Patrick Spencer (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I and many Conservatives hope and aspire for a clean energy future, but I wish to make three points that the Government and the House should consider when contemplating the upgrade of our electricity grid.
First, similar to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), are we basing our decisions on the expedient technology of today or on the ideal technology of the future? High voltage direct current is increasingly used around the world. It means only six cables instead of 18, and there are no heat issues, which means they can be closely spaced. Many other countries favour this approach over pylons and, here in the UK, National Grid itself has favoured it in Lincolnshire, concluding that it is cheaper, quicker and less risky than overhead lines. Relying on old-fashioned technology is increasingly a fool’s errand. We see it in defence, social policy and now in energy.
Secondly, can we allow for a moment the notion that preserving our national heritage is a fundamental part of meeting our net zero commitments? After all, we do that in other parts of policy. We demand—sorry, I have lost my place. Can I take a moment?
Emma Foody (Cramlington and Killingworth) (Lab/Co-op)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) on securing this important debate, which matters a great deal in his constituency and mine. Although there may be disagreements on how we make the improvements, it is great to hear commitment from all sides. As we pursue ambitious goals to decarbonise our economy and expand green industries, we must confront an undeniable reality: the delivery of secure and cost-effective grid connections is not merely important, but essential.
The clean energy needs of green and decarbonising industrial clusters, particularly in regions such as the north-east, depend on reliable grid connectivity, and the problems that many face in being unable to get connections, or only with significant delays, are holding back growth. Without timely connections, we will struggle to meet the demand for renewable energy, deter inward investment and miss opportunities to utilise fully key industrial sites that could be central to our future prosperity. Grid connectivity is essential, particularly in areas poised to lead the way in offshore renewables. Power supply to port and quayside sites, which are critical for the infrastructure underpinning the growth of offshore wind energy, is essential.
The north-east has the capacity to lead the way in green, clean industry, but we are being held back due to grid connectivity and delays in projects and investment. As outlined in the Mayor of the North East’s response to the national industrial strategy Green Paper, national grid connections are central to offshore wind developers. They provide much-needed certainty to private investors, manufacturers and supply chains, creating thousands of clean energy jobs. For many industries, particularly in the north-east, the costs and long waiting times for grid connections are simply too high. The current capacity is insufficient to support the renewable energy generation that we require, and the delays in securing grid connections hold back business growth and leave sites underutilised when they should be driving forward our regional economies.
Let us take Newcastle international airport as an example. With a solar farm that already supplies 100% of its terminal’s electricity on sunny days, the airport generates more power than it needs. It wants to export its surplus electricity to the grid, yet it has been told that it cannot do so until next year at the earliest. It has been informed that, even then, a full connection may not be possible until 2035, which would mean a full 10 years to wait. It is an unacceptable situation. Like many businesses across the region, the airport has been forced to delay millions of pounds-worth of investment in sustainability schemes simply because it is uncertain as to when it will be able to connect to the grid. With a target of becoming carbon neutral by 2035, Newcastle international airport cannot reach that goal without access to the grid.
It is not just businesses such as the airport that are facing difficulties. Throughout the region, the barriers to grid connection are stalling industrial growth, limiting renewable energy delivery and even restricting economic activity in rural areas, where grid vulnerability remains a persistent issue. What is the solution? First, the Government’s upcoming planning reforms need to be fully implemented to improve the ability to approve critical infrastructure. This is essential to accelerate the decarbonisation process and secure long-term energy stability. It is also crucial that the approval processes for grid connections are streamlined, cutting the time it takes to link key industrial sites to the grid. Secondly, we must have better co-ordination between the national grid, the Crown Estate, distribution network operators and the offshore wind supply chain. Co-operative working is key to ensuring that delivery is timely and effective.
In the north-east, the strategic energy board, established through the deeper devolution deal, is already addressing grid challenges at pressure points. By aligning businesses’ future grid-connection needs with regional planning, we can ensure that grid reinforcement happens in the areas we need it the most, particularly at key industrial sites and renewable energy projects. Grid infrastructure must not only be viewed as a utility; it must be seen as a strategic tool for economic development. The north-east can lead the way in clean, green energy production, but we need the grid infrastructure in place to support it.
The Government can act now to ensure that our grid can support both our industrial ambitions and our green objectives, driving the growth that is rightly at the heart of the Government’s agenda. This is not just about providing power: it is about jobs, investment and the future prosperity of our regions. By working together and prioritising the needs of the grid, we can accelerate the transition to a cleaner, more sustainable energy system, boost growth, unlock the potential of our industries and provide the jobs of the future.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher, and to speak in this debate. I am going to speak about five things: the environment, efficiency, energy, economics and ergonomics.
I will start by talking about the environment, because this debate is clearly couched in a critical and shared understanding that the environment matters. But what is the environment? At a philosophical level the environment is, in a sense, our connection with reality. It is our link to the natural world through the experience and character of the places we live, and the places we live matter because they inspire us or disappoint us; they encourage us or leave us wanting.
Everyone deserves their chance to experience beauty. I make no apology for making the case for beauty; I have done so many times as a Minister, shadow Minister and Back Bencher. Everyone deserves their chance to experience beauty because, as Keats understood, beauty and goodness are inseparable. Beauty and truth are indelibly imprinted one upon the other. So when we speak about the pylons, let us speak about the effect they have on the places in which people live.
In Lincolnshire, particularly in my constituency, a row of huge pylons as big as Nelson’s column in a flat landscape will have a devastating effect on the vistas and views of not just the people who live in their immediate proximity but people from miles away. We will see those structures across the flat fens for 5, 10 or perhaps even 15 miles, which is unacceptable. It is an imposition on a flat landscape that historically has never enjoyed tall structures, with the exception of the churches, and they were built to the glory of God. The pylons certainly are not that, and I do not think even the Minister would defend them on that basis—their holiness, that is. So when we think of this immense row of pylons stretching down the east coast, let us understand their connection to the day-to-day environment and the things that affect people’s local sense of wellbeing. I hope the Minister will recognise that, for that reason, the more we can mitigate their effect, the better.
Patrick Spencer
May I put on the record my apologies for fluffing my speech a moment ago? One of the points I wanted to make is that we take into account our natural environment when we look at housing and planning policy. The reality is that when we want to build a development on the side of a village, put an extension on a house or expand our housing stock, planning authorities demand that we take into account the natural environment. That importantly includes the aesthetic, which we talk about a lot, as well as the preservation of our landscapes.
Sir Christopher Chope (in the Chair)
Order. This is an intervention, not another speech.
Patrick Spencer
If the Government choose to solve the housing crisis by taking into account our environment, why can we not do that with energy policy as well?
Sir John Hayes
We can and do. Contrary to what was said earlier, the existing planning policy does take into account the effect on the environment. That is why, for example, we do not build unsuitable things in areas of outstanding natural beauty. That is also why sites of special scientific interest matter in the planning system, as we mitigate what we can do by them, in them and near them. By the way, these pylons will run alongside one of the most precious natural environments in our country: the salt marshes that run along my constituency. They are a site of outstanding importance because of the bird life they sustain, which makes them a unique environment.
Let us be clear about the need to mitigate all else in the pursuit of maintaining those things that are already embedded in our planning system as highly significant, such as those of the kind suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer) in his pithy and powerful intervention.
Ms Billington
Salt marshes are very much a unique environment. Does the right hon. Gentleman have concerns about the possibility of trenching through salt marshes as opposed to using pylons, which actually have less impact on the environment, particularly given the climate sink value of salt marshes? Would he concede that there might be a need for us to reconsider the way in which we tackle fragile environments such as salt marshes, rather than simply trenching them, which has done long-term damage?
Sir John Hayes
That is a good point, and it is why Lincolnshire county council’s submission to National Grid specifically takes into account the trenching problem that the hon. Lady raised. It suggests an offshore grid, but obviously one that avoids the damage she mentioned. I recommend that she studies that submission—it is in the public domain—to see how we can offshore that grid without damaging the salt marshes in the way she suggests.
Sir Bernard Jenkin
The hon. Member for East Thanet (Ms Billington) made the relevant point that there are balancing factors. First, once cables are undergrounded, they are maintenance free, but pylons require constant maintenance, which therefore adds to their carbon footprint. Everybody has seen that. Secondly, salt marshes are very often Ramsar sites and migration bird sites, and we do not want overhead power lines interfering with the migration of birds. We often see that scores of swans have been killed on power lines because they are not very good at navigating around these things.
Sir John Hayes
With the insight for which he is known, my hon. Friend has anticipated two of the points that I was going to make. The problem with pylons being so close to SSSIs is that the birds do not know boundaries. Of course, the salt marsh in Lincolnshire matters because, exactly as my hon. Friend said, it is important as a site for geese and duck in particular. To run the pylons so close to that is at best highly contentious and at worse wholly destructive. The offshore grid that my hon. Friend describes can be run further out to sea, which is what we do with cables routinely. If we were able to see the ocean bed around our islands, we would see any number of trunked cables that run through them, which provide vital power and communications infrastructure.
Luke Murphy (Basingstoke) (Lab)
There is an interesting discussion about the balance of trade-offs. One of the other considerations is cost, and the cost of undergrounding is multiple times the amount of overhead pylons. The previous Government were not able to demonstrate that they could do it at the same cost, so how does the right hon. Gentleman balance that factor? Does he not think that his constituents, and constituents throughout the country, might consider the loading of those costs on to them unacceptable?
Sir John Hayes
There is a big argument to be had about costs because we are planning a project that will last decades—perhaps even longer. When I was the Energy Minister, I was very conscious of the fact that we might be making 100-year decisions. It is very hard to gauge costs over time because of two things. First, there are the ongoing maintenance costs associated with any line that runs above ground, and given the changing climate, it is likely that extreme weather events will become more frequent, and extreme weather events will have an effect on anything above ground. Secondly, the relative costs of underground and overhead cables vary according to the kind of cable laid, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) said; and indeed some of the evidence from other places in Europe and elsewhere suggests that the cost of trunking cables underground is falling, whereas there is no similar reduction in the cost of overhead cables, which, on pylons, have been at the same cost for a very long time indeed.
The final point is about consent. The longer these things take, the more they cost. Certainly in Lincolnshire—and I imagine this is true in Essex, Suffolk and other places—there will be protracted legal challenges to the pylons, whereas, with local support and the support of local authorities like Lincolnshire county council, undergrounding would be a much more straightforward affair. Factoring in those costs is complex, but it needs to happen.
Sir Bernard Jenkin
Very briefly, the ESO review of the east of England network demonstrated that there is a higher up-front cost for undergrounding of an extra £1 billion from Norwich to Tilbury, but in the longer term it saves money. It is just not correct to say that undergrounding is automatically much more expensive. That is a departmental mantra that is now discredited—just read the ESO and NESO documents.
Sir Christopher Chope (in the Chair)
Order. Before the right hon. Gentleman responds to that intervention—he is being very generous in giving way—can I just say that we have to move on to the Front-Bench speakers at 10.30 am and there are many people who wish to participate? I have not imposed time limits; all I am saying is that there are 13 minutes left and probably seven people who want to speak.
Sir John Hayes
On that basis, Sir Christopher, I will not give way again, for as you have noted, I have been immensely generous. I will abbreviate my remarks without missing out any of the other four subjects that I promised to speak about. Let me deal with them very rapidly. Efficiency is critically important in delivering energy policy. As I have already said, if we want to get that policy pursued and delivered quickly, we need an approach that avoids the protracted debates and disputes I have described.
Let us speak more strategically about energy policy, on which the hon. Member for East Thanet (Ms Billington) made a powerful point; we need to understand that bringing supply closer to demand is vital at a strategic level. Successive Governments have failed at this. A lot of people have made comments about the previous Government—the previous Government would have done a lot better if they had listened to me more often. I hope this one will; then they will not go wrong. It is important to reconsider the relationship between supply and demand. No Government have done that with sufficient vigour, and I hope this one will.
On economics, putting in the pylons will also have a displacement effect, because Lincolnshire is perhaps the most important county of all in respect of food production. I understand that about 30% of the fresh produce we consume goes through my constituency. South Lincolnshire produces 20% of the vegetables we consume, 20% of the sugar beet, and so on. The displacement effect of energy infrastructure, including pylons and solar, will have a devastating effect on food production and therefore food security. I simply say to the Minister that energy security must not be made the enemy of food security, and vice versa. That is why the economics are more complex than they perhaps first appear.
Finally, on the cognitive ergonomics of Government, it is really important that in winding up, the Minister assures this Chamber that the Departments across Government are working closely together. We have talked about land use studies, and that is a good thing, but given the commitments that the Planning Minister has made to beauty and the commitments that the Environment Secretary has made to food production and security, it is important that we do not simply pursue a policy that is invidious because it contradicts the other priorities of Government. In my long experience as a Minister in a variety of Departments, I have found that lateral thinking in Government is a rare and precious thing; I simply recommend to the Minister a more lateral approach in combining those critical priorities.
Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex is right: we need to approach this in a bolder than partisan way, because we are speaking about fundamental decisions in the interest of our country. This is a matter of national interest, but it does not have to be a matter of national interest that compromises the common good.
Jack Abbott (Ipswich) (Lab/Co-op)
I will speak briefly because I know that many of my colleagues also wish to speak.
I echo the comments made by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin). This does not have to be a partisan issue, but equally we have to acknowledge the situation as we find it, not the fantasy that we wish it to be. The reality is that we have had 14 years in which decisions could have been made.
Jack Abbott
The hon. Gentleman says, “Here we go”, but it is absolutely relevant to this debate. Yes, the Conservative Government passed the Banner report—well done. That is the big achievement of the last 14 years. There was a fundamental opportunity over the last decade to recognise where we were going as a country, and what we needed to do. Those decisions were consistently kicked down the line, and now we are here.
The window in which we have to operate is incredibly narrow. We essentially have five years to meet the transition, which we have to do. Yes, underground cabling will cost more, but also there is a significant time delay, too. It is not a 2030 timeframe; it is a 2034 one. Let us get over the fantasy of a magical offshore grid connection that will solve everything way more cheaply and quickly. It just does not exist. We have to be honest with people.
There will always be opposition to any development. I grew up in Suffolk; I know that there will be opposition to the grid upgrades. There is also opposition to solar farms in the west of the county. Obviously, there is opposition to Sizewell C and things like it, but that cannot get in the way of progress. There is also the Green party bingo card—opposing all the projects; well, we definitely cannot go down that route either.
This is about opportunity. There is an opportunity to say that we will be transitioning to renewable energy to fulfil our mission and the guarantee that we made to working people at the election. It is our chance to seize the opportunity for greater energy independence, and for us—including my home county of Suffolk—to seize the opportunity to be world leaders in the energy transition. We cannot keep going around the houses, dithering, delaying and pretending that this stuff will not happen. It might sound good to constituents back home, but I grew up in that area—
Jack Abbott
I will finish my point because it is directly related to the hon. Gentleman’s constituency of Central Suffolk. We already have pylons running through that part of the world. We have Mendlesham mast, which can be seen from miles around. We also have Eye airfield, big business parks, warehouses and farm buildings. We already have infrastructure in place.
Jack Abbott
It is not horror at all; it is infrastructure that people desperately rely on. The right hon. Gentleman might want to live in a fantasy in which costs do not matter and there are no trade-offs. Well, that is not the case.
I also say to the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex: East Anglia and the fenlands, which he mentioned, are critical, because if we do not build the energy transition infrastructure that we need, guess what? There is no landscape. We will be surveying everything from a boat. That is the reality.
Patrick Spencer
The hon. Gentleman talks about speed and the need to do the transition quickly. May I draw his attention to the work of Bent Flyvbjerg? He wrote a book last year called “How Big Things Get Done”, in which he noted, having looked at infrastructure projects across the world, that less than one in 10 are delivered on time and on budget. Part of the problem is making bad decisions in the planning process and not making the right decisions. If we want to get things done, we should take our time now and get the planning right.
Jack Abbott
The hon. Gentleman has just made a case for why we must crack on, and stop dithering and delaying. There is a history of doing bad things slowly, and that should never be repeated. It is not an excuse to do nothing now. We cannot afford to keep kicking the can down the road. We cannot keep relying on our constituents to foot the bill for an inefficient, unstable energy system—which is exactly what we have inherited. We can be as bipartisan as we like, but we have to accept the reality. We cannot keep heaping costs on to our constituents and businesses for our failure to invest properly in the system, which we now have five years to do.
To conclude—I am conscious that I want to bring my colleagues in—this debate has illustrated the choice we face between two competing visions for the future. We can choose whether or not we are prepared to stand up for Britain’s energy security; we can choose whether or not we are prepared to throw away billions of pounds in taxpayers’ money on fantasies that will never come to pass, or act now to slash bills; and we must choose whether or not we are prepared to destroy vast swathes of land, which underground cabling would do, and commit lasting ecological damage. I know which I would prefer, and which my constituents prefer, and I am unapologetic about choosing opportunity over wasteful fantasy projects.
Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) (Green)
I welcome the chance to discuss matters like this in Westminster Hall—where, in my experience, there is an opportunity to look at the issues and options calmly and without party political point scoring. We must deliver the energy transition at speed, and with community inclusion. The upgrades to the electricity grid are vital for net zero, but how this is done will shape public trust. We can, and must, achieve rapid progress and meaningful community engagement.
My constituents in Waveney Valley—like much of East Anglia—face floods, droughts, and farmland at risk of submersion: they understand the urgency, and voted for action in the election. The grid upgrade is essential to connect renewable energy capacity and end reliance on fossil fuels. Indeed, I have spent the last 10 years leading national environmental charities advocating for and advancing renewable energy, speeding up the transition, and advocating for strengthening the grid. The question is how we can best do that.
There are significant concerns over this proposed pylon route, as we have heard—concerns about the impact on sensitive nature and heritage sites, including the rural landscape, about the impact on farming, and about the implications for local traffic. This is not just about convenience. We need to make decisions that are right for the long term and resilient to the future climate changes that we face.
I want to zoom out, as other speakers have done, and talk about the overall climate emergency and climate breakdown that we are grappling with and working to address. We have seen in Parliament over recent decades a broad consensus on the need for action to be taken: the Climate Change Act 2008 was passed with cross-party support, and the 2050 net zero target was embedded by a later Government, with broad support across the House. We have not had the kind of polarisation that we have seen in the US, and we need to maintain that strong support and to avoid the issue being weaponised so that it becomes divisive and is used for political point scoring, but we risk that happening if we do not take people with us and if people are not heard.
The energy transition must be done with communities, not to them—communities need to feel engaged and heard to maintain their support. People want to see action taken. Speed and proper community consultation can go hand in hand; indeed, they must. The best way to accelerate the energy transition is for communities to feel consulted and involved from the outset. If people believe projects are imposed on them without proper engagement, there is a risk of slowing progress and undermining trust in the renewable energy revolution—a revolution that must happen.
That is why I want to see us use the time that we have right now. The National Grid consultation closed in July and we face a long delay until a planning application is expected at some point next year—we are not sure when. During this time, other options can be properly considered, and that is all I am calling for: a proper consideration of all the options. National Grid has acknowledged that undergrounding is possible—it is doing it in two small sections of the route—but there remain significant concerns.
Adrian Ramsay
As the hon. Member knows, we are about to move on to the Front-Bench spokespeople, so I would like to finish my points. These issues need to be properly considered and the alternatives must be properly examined, including undergrounding more or all of the route, as we have heard, or an offshore grid. Such things are being done in other countries. Indeed, a 2020 National Grid study indicated that an integrated offshore approach could be more cost-effective than piecemeal alternatives. That is why all the options need to be properly considered, and why constituents need to be listened to. People are saying that they feel let down. One of my constituents said:
“So far, we have been subjected to a series of lies, called NIMBYs, and told our rural area is unimportant.”
Another said that there is a failure
“to engage with the local community and…to prove the pylons are better than other more sensible alternatives”.
They want the Government to start listening.
The rapid deployment of renewables must happen. The principle is clear: decisions about infrastructure must be made with communities, and we must maintain and build public trust. All connectivity options must be properly assessed. My constituents are keen to support the energy transition, but they need respect and consultation, and to be shown that the impacts are being properly considered and any compensation packages are clearly set out. The energy transition is not a choice between speed and community support. With thoughtful planning and meaningful engagement, we can, and must, achieve both.
Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I commend the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) for securing this debate, and I thank all of those attending—it is good to see representation from most parties.
Let me start with the good news that there is considerable consensus in the room, despite a couple of testy exchanges. Members from across the House have agreed that decarbonising our electricity generation is critical to meeting the UK’s contribution to tackling global climate change. A less centralised and more distributed electricity network is also essential for economic growth, and to ensure that our various businesses and homes continue to have power.
The hon. Members for East Thanet (Ms Billington), for Ipswich (Jack Abbott), for Cramlington and Killingworth (Emma Foody), and for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay), as well as the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex, have all articulated the decarbonisation challenge very well. Members have also agreed on the need for a planning system that strikes the right balance between national needs and local voices. That recurring challenge comes up in so many debates in the House, and I will say more about it shortly.
It is welcome that the new Labour Government have committed to delivering
“the largest upgrade to our national clean energy infrastructure in a generation.”
It is in all our interests that they succeed, particularly, as the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex conceded, in the context of the previous Conservative Government not acting with anything close to the speed or ambition that the challenge demands. But as we have seen with past goals, such as the previous Government’s original goal to end the sale of full combustion engine cars by 2030, aspirations will remain lofty ideas without a solid plan to achieve them. In that context, around 40% of projects face a connection wait of at least a year, according to National Grid’s figures. Indeed, according to Electrical Review, 75% of energy sector experts identified timely grid connections as the principal obstacle impeding the growth of renewable energy in the UK.
It is therefore essential that the Government show the leadership that is needed not just to upgrade our electricity grid, enabling its decarbonisation and providing greater value for money for consumers, but to tackle in a sensitive and inclusive way the recurring challenge regarding the balance between listening to the voices of local communities and achieving national objectives. The hon. Member articulately highlighted the role of community consent and engagement in delivering the infrastructure that we need, although I would assert that his figures on the cost of buried versus overhead cables are somewhat disputed by a number of sources.
The Liberal Democrats also want to see the electricity grid network reformed to support businesses’ transition to renewable energy sources and to permit local energy grids to supply power to communities who need it most. We support the expansion of the grid network through a strategic land and sea use framework to facilitate an optimum balance between electricity generation, food production and nature recovery. The right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) and the hon. Member for Waveney Valley have articulated the challenge of ensuring that we balance the demands on our land and use it appropriately.
The Liberal Democrats would like to see more done on a rooftop solar revolution by expanding incentives for households to install solar panels, including a guaranteed fair price for electricity sold back into the grid. We believe that upgrades to the national grid are essential to ensure that electric vehicles are cheap to charge and are an accessible step in making everyday lives more sustainable.
Making schemes for community benefit from new infrastructure compulsory will be essential for local buy-in, and we have tabled an amendment to the Great British Energy Bill to that effect. Keeping energy bills affordable, at a time when many are struggling to pay their energy costs, is important, particularly in the context of Government cuts to the winter fuel payment and the forthcoming 1.2% increase to the energy price cap. The Labour Government need to take more radical action to ensure that consumer energy bills remain affordable.
As several Members have said, consent and dialogue are essential. I particularly applaud the observation from the hon. Member for Waveney Valley that consultation needs to be more than just a technical process. It is important to build trust and dialogue so that people believe in the process.
I face some of these challenges in my Didcot and Wantage constituency in Oxfordshire, where Thames Water proposes to build the second largest reservoir, claiming that studies suggest that it is needed to meet long-term water demand. A key challenge is that my constituents simply do not trust Thames Water’s motives and its ability to deliver such a large scheme. That is a strong illustration of the challenge of balancing national goals and local concerns.
I do not have the answer to how we strike the right balance, but it is something that we all need to think about, and particularly the new Government. I call on them not to think that their unassailable majority in terms of seats in this place gives them the power to override those concerns. Perhaps they should think more in terms of vote share, and they should recognise that many people did not buy into this Government. It is therefore important to have dialogue and to find the right balance in the planning process between national and local goals.
My constituency has seen huge population growth in recent years, with more than 4,000 further homes planned for Valley Park near Didcot. The science and technology sector has a major presence at Milton Park, Culham and Harwell campus. Harwell campus has a major current and future demand for electricity to power globally important synchrotron and neutron beam equipment and spin-off businesses. In that context, confidence is needed that future affordable energy supply will happen.
If the electricity grid is upgraded, local and community energy projects can provide even more help. Community-owned projects can help with the challenge of getting local buy-in, and may have a return on investment and businesses in local areas. Flexibility in local energy systems can allow local energy trading, meaning energy pricing at lower than market rates, allowing more money in bill payers’ pockets and reduced overheads for businesses.
I am pleased to see many examples of solar panel roof schemes in my constituency, but would like more, particularly on new houses. Thames Travel, Didcot Girls’ school, Chiltern primary school, Hagbourne school, Fir Tree junior school in Wallingford and Malcolm Building at Ashurst Court in Sandford have all invested in solar panel roof schemes. Just outside my constituency, in Oxford West and Abingdon, the Sandford lock hydroelectric plant uses Archimedes screws to generate electricity from the flow of the river, generating clean renewable power for local community benefit. We need more such projects. I call on the Government to create the electricity grid and wider regulatory framework to empower our local communities to benefit.
The key challenge we face is a national one—the balance between national goals and hearing local concerns and getting local buy-in. Dialogue, and ensuring that things are done with, not to, communities, is essential. I hope that the Government will not let their majority go to their head, but will engage in the challenge of getting an effective, consenting planning process.
Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Sir Christopher. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) on bringing this important debate to Westminster Hall. It has been a pleasure, as a shadow energy Minister and a constituency MP with similar issues, to have discussed these issues to try to find a way through. It has also been a pleasure to share notes on the experiences of the communities that we both represent—indeed, there are many such communities represented by Members in this room and beyond.
It is good to see so many people attending this debate. It shows the groundswell of feeling outside this Chamber on what we need to do, whether that is on upgrading the grid and making our way to our net zero, cleaner future—everybody in this room acknowledges that we need to upgrade the grid in order to do that—or in representing communities who are concerned about the pace and direction of travel, and the inability, or refusal, of those in positions of power to consider alternative technologies.
Jim Shannon
I thank the hon. Member. He said that all parts of the United Kingdom are keen to achieve and be part of this goal. Renewable energy in Northern Ireland makes up 50% of the electricity generated, but it has to reach 80% by 2030, as I know he is aware. That is six years away. When it comes to scale, pace and complexity, does he agree that there is a need for the whole of the UK to have additional support and funding to reach these goals? That means Northern Ireland needs to be part of this process as well.
Andrew Bowie
The hon. Gentleman knows well, I hope, that my commitment to our entire United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is just as firm as his, and when I speak about the UK, I reference Strangford and Northern Ireland more widely. The situation in Northern Ireland is unique in that the number of homes that are off-grid far outweighs the number of off-grid homes in mainland GB. That brings its own complexities with regard to decarbonisation, moving away from gas or oil, and boilers for heating and other such purposes. I completely understand the unique complexities of decarbonising in a Northern Irish environment, and he is absolutely right that when the Government take decisions on UK-wide infrastructure projects, they should be cognisant of Northern Ireland’s unique situation, being in an all-Ireland grid and having so many off-grid properties. That should never be far from our minds.
I thank the hon. Member for East Thanet (Ms Billington), my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer), the hon. Member for Cramlington and Killingworth (Emma Foody), my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), as ever, and the hon. Members for Ipswich (Jack Abbott) and for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) for their contributions. I did not agree with all of them, but they were all very thought through. I know that everybody in this room, whatever their perspective on how we achieve a cleaner future, agrees that upgrading the grid is important. How we go about that is the issue concerning us today.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex eloquently highlighted the strength of feeling among communities across the country being asked to take on the burden of what is being proposed. I mentioned that we shared notes, and that is because my constituency, like that of my hon. Friend, faces the threat of huge energy infrastructure bills over the next few years. Communities fear the genuine threat of industrialisation sweeping rural landscapes and the impact on communities as a result.
In my West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine constituency, the energy industry is omnipresent. It is home to the subsea capital of Europe and on the edge of the oil and gas capital of Europe. Many of my constituents work, or have worked, in the energy industry. Many are involved in the design, construction or installation of underground or offshore pipelines for oil, gas or electric cables. If someone digs deep enough in my constituency, they will find national gas pipelines buried underground. The only indication of them being there are the little yellow marker signs on the surface warning people to beware and not to dig anywhere close.
I say that because I stress that my constituents and so many others around the country who are raising this issue are not doing so because they are being needlessly obstructive. They are not doing it because they are being anti-net zero, or because they do not agree the grid needs to be upgraded. They just know, due to their experience working in the industry, that there are other ways forward. It is for this reason, and the overwhelming desire on the Conservative side of the House to exhaust all the options in our pursuit to find the best technology at the best cost that would deliver our decarbonised grid—and not, as the National Energy System Operator report suggested, that we favour pace over perfection—and to do so in a way that does not blight so many communities and our great British countryside, that we committed in our manifesto to take a different approach.
Tom Hayes
We have heard in this debate about the importance of expediency. Does he agree that, uniquely, we live in a world in turmoil? We see growing international threats, and one of the surest ways in which Britain can protect ourselves against them is by being energy independent. As a consequence, we need not just to move quickly to meet our climate crisis—our energy defences are down, and it is important that we can protect ourselves in the future.
Andrew Bowie
I could not agree more. Indeed, I long for a day when we are much more energy independent. That is why I take such issue with Labour’s position on the North sea and the wilful destruction of our oil and gas industry, leaving us open to further outside influence and reliant on hostile states. That is one of the reasons why I think that we need to increase our energy security, and why I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we need to improve it.
This is not about whether we do that; it is about how we go about it and about taking decisions now in the best long-term interests of people and of the energy security of this country. I do not believe that the way that the Government are proceeding at the minute is in the best long-term interests of the communities of this country. If we get this right, work together, get to a solution where communities feel they have a stake in the energy transition, deliver the clean future and become energy independent, as I used to say when I was the Minister, that is a win, win, win—but we are a long way from that just yet.
I mentioned community benefits briefly. In June 2023, I visited East Anglia to begin the consultation process on the community benefits package. On 7 December 2023, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer outlined the framework of that package. I wonder whether the Minister present might be able to give us an update as to where the process is and where the Government have reached on community benefits—
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Michael Shanks)
That was almost a year ago.
Andrew Bowie
Quite. Regardless of the technologies that are selected, of whether the pylons and associated infrastructure are built and of any right hon. or hon. Member’s view, communities out there want to know what the community benefits package and the trade-offs will be, and what they will receive as a result of having to host infrastructure in the national interest. An update on that would be delightful.
Ms Billington
I am struck that we have heard a lot about community engagement and consultation, but what does not seem to be clear is exactly what is meant by it, despite the fact that all of us do a lot of community consultation and engagement through the process of democracy. In particular, given how people talk about it, we could quite well end up with a veto by a small number of people of a transformation of our country to increase resilience, reduce costs and tackle the climate crisis. Surely the hon. Gentleman would agree that that is not desirable. That is why we need to change the planning process, so that we can support the transformation we seek.
Andrew Bowie
I respect the hon. Lady’s position and welcome her intervention, but it would be reprehensible if hon. Members elected to this House to represent their communities did not do so. For her, it might just be a small number of people complaining about this, but for many Members of this House and representatives in other legislatures across the United Kingdom, huge numbers of people in communities that they represent are very concerned about the impacts that the plans will have on their landscape, their land, their house prices and so on. It is incumbent on us, as the elected representatives of those people, to bring those concerns to the House to debate and discuss, and for a decision then to be taken by the Government. Whether we like it or not, a decision will be taken by the Government about the best way forward, which is why I asked about community benefits.
The consultation that I mentioned a minute ago was focused specifically on the community benefits package, and I asked whether we might see more detail on it in the near future, and whether it might be statutory— I know that that was something being looked at by the Department, but it has been looking at it for some time.
Deirdre Costigan
The hon. Gentleman mentioned protecting landscapes. Does he agree that it is rather audacious for those in his party to refer to that, given that after 14 years they have left us with nature targets that they failed to achieve, still drilling for oil and gas, with backing for fracking for a significant amount of time, sewage in our rivers and seas, and plastic bottles across the country because they refused to implement environmental schemes on that front? Does he agree that he has a cheek to mention protecting the landscape? Furthermore, does he agree that many of his arguments today are a delaying tactic? We need that power in west London.
Andrew Bowie
No, I do not agree.
Before I conclude, I will say this. Noticeable today and in discussions on this subject in the recent past, is a certain tone that is being adopted by some Labour Members. While we might disagree about the ways to reach net zero and to best upgrade the grid, there are people out there who are genuinely worried about what these plans might mean for them and their communities. I urge all hon. and right hon. Members to please engage in this debate with an element of respect for the views expressed on behalf of those people and communities up and down the country.
I know that the Minister recognises this. Indeed, he has always engaged in this debate with due respect for those communities. There are people out there concerned about the way forward and the pace at which this change is coming. Please remember those people, consider other options, and listen to those communities. We can then bring the country together, and everybody can contribute to this transition, which we all agree needs to happen in the national interest.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Michael Shanks)
It is a pleasure, Sir Christopher, to serve under your chairmanship. I thank the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) for introducing the debate, for his approach, and for the engagement we have had on the topic in the short time that I have been in this job. While I suspect we might disagree politically on a great many things, his repeated commitment to the need for net zero is important, and separates him from some hon. Members who might make the issue of grid updates part of an excuse to avoid dealing with the climate issue. I welcome that, and I was pleased to meet him and his colleagues recently to discuss the matter.
I also thank all others who have contributed to the debate. I welcome the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) to his new role. He is not just a shadow Energy Minister now, but shadow Secretary of State for Scotland. Clearly, he did not have enough on his plate before. I do not know what it says about the Scottish group of Conservative MPs that he has two jobs, but I will leave that to one side. The debate this morning has been wide-ranging, although I confess I did not anticipate an existential question from the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) about the nature of beauty and the environment. I learned a lot from that, but I will leave the theological debate about pylons to others in the House.
I want to pick up on the general context first, and then some of the specific issues that have been raised. When it comes to the security of our energy future, few matters face us as a Government more important than the delivery of network infrastructure. It was the topic of the very first meeting I had as a Minister, and has been the topic of almost every other meeting I have had in this job, with a range of different people looking at it. Our network infrastructure is in dire need of upgrading.
I will start with the point that the shadow Minister finished on. I recognise that the impact of delivering these upgrades, while important to our national infrastructure, will be felt in individual communities; that is the nature of this. I recognise that there will be communities across Great Britain and Northern Ireland that will have to host energy infrastructure. We thank them for doing so and, while recognising the importance of upgrading infrastructure for the whole country, also recognise the need to get the balance right.
Jim Shannon
The Minister is always incredibly helpful with questions that I or anybody asks, which I appreciate and thank him for. For Northern Ireland to be successful, it needs support from Government here. The shadow Minister reiterated that. I ask the Minister to say something perhaps similar for the record, so that it is in Hansard. We in Northern Ireland need to be very much part of the strategy for the future. As others have said, it is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We are always better together, but there are advantages—let us see some of those advantages.
Michael Shanks
While I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, me repeating “better together” is sometimes tricky in my political party. I do, however, reiterate my commitment to the whole of the United Kingdom. He will know that I take that very seriously, and I have had a number of meetings on the topic with the Economy Minister in Northern Ireland, who is responsible for energy. Clearly, the role I have is different in Northern Ireland, given the transferred nature of energy policy and the whole island grid, but I take the issues very seriously and commit to that today.
The delivery of a reinforced modern electricity network is critical for every home and business across the country. It is a critical enabler for our Clean Power 2030 mission, which is designed to deliver not just energy security but economic growth, skilled jobs and cheaper energy, which the country so desperately needs. In short, transforming the network underpins our shared commitment to energy security, prosperity and the low-carbon future that the country needs. It is fair to say that this transformation is extremely long overdue. The last significant modernisation of the grid took place in the 1960s. New investment into industries of the future, such as data centres, will play such an important part in the economy of the next few decades. We need to deliver jobs around that, unlocking growth, but electricity demands will increase by an expected 60% by 2035 and double by 2050.
Deirdre Costigan
I want to bring the Minister’s attention to issues being faced in west London. He mentioned data centres; we recently had confirmation of a great investment from CyrusOne, but it has to get power from Enfield because there are huge constraints on the energy system in west London. Does the Minister agree that we need to ramp up the work on connecting these new investments to the grid? We must not allow the tactics of the Opposition, which are about delay and going back 14 years to decisions they should have made but never did. Now is the time to take action; people should not be required to pay higher energy fees than they should, which is another aspect of this issue.
Michael Shanks
I agree with my hon. Friend on that important point. Connection dates on both the generation and demand sides are much too far in the future. We need to build more of the network structure across the country and reform the way we deal with connections, which is ongoing.
I am conscious of time and want to give the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex time to respond. We have heard from a number of hon. Members about the impact of grid expansions on their communities. I want to make three key points. First, I do not accept that grid expansion is riding roughshod over communities. Communities will have a say in these projects. Secondly, I take a less dismissive view than some hon. Members about the importance of genuine community benefits. If communities host infrastructure and generation, they should benefit. The shadow Minister referred to work under way, which he said the previous Government spent a year on and we have moved on in five months. We are moving quickly to work out what effective community benefit looks like. We are developing guidance on that, particularly for hosting transmission network infrastructure, which will be published in due course.
On the point about modern technology, delivery of the network is underpinned by the latest technology, tailoring it to locations that urgently need reinforcement. It relies on upgrading existing power lines first, and uses innovative strategic design and options to find solutions that balance ecological impacts and, crucially, cost. That is important, given that the cost is borne by billpayers across the country.
Hon. Members will be under no illusion that we have to expand the network considerably, rewiring and connecting to new areas of demand in future. That is why we have outlined our mission of clean power by 2030. We will publish our response to NESO’s report soon. The mission will be achieved by investment in renewable generation, including onshore and offshore wind, solar and storage. There can be no transition to that clean power future without the grid upgrade. That work will take us to 2030 but, given the increase in demand to 2050, it will have to continue far beyond that.
I want to pick up a point about NESO’s advice on cost. NESO’s advice on the project in East Anglia concerns whether it will be cheaper or more expensive. A number of hon. Members should review that advice more carefully. I would have gone into more detail but I have only 40 seconds to wrap up. It is worth clarifying that delays in delivering the undergrounding part were not factored into some of the points that the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex made.
To conclude a wide-ranging debate, we are on the edge of an industrial and energy revolution. We want to reduce bills and deliver energy security. To do that we need to upgrade the grid infrastructure, which must be hosted in some communities. We want to bring them with us but that work has to be done, and that is the commitment of this Government.
Sir Bernard Jenkin
I thank the Minister for his engagement and for the meeting he had with MPs. It would be very kind if he could write to me with the further detail that he has not been able to put on the record today. I would also point out that the only orange flag against ultrahigh voltage direct current undergrounding in the ESO review in the spring was about cable availability. It was not a red flag but an orange flag. With streamlining of the planning process, this could be sped up. It is a possibility, and I hope the Minister will continue dialogue on this issue, because I think he will need this as a solution to the problems he will run into.
Motion lapsed (Standing Order. No. 10(6)).
Fly-tipping
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Tristan Osborne (Chatham and Aylesford) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Government support for local councils to tackle fly-tipping.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. We have only 30 minutes for this debate, and I am keen to take as many interventions as possible, so I am looking forward to hearing many contributions from across different sides of this Chamber.
Fly-tipping is a major scourge in the local areas of many constituents, not only in my constituency, but across the country. It is the illegal dumping of waste in public or private spaces, often in areas that are designated for waste disposal. As people will be aware through the news and other online sources, fly-tipping has become a significant environmental issue, with millions of pounds being spent annually on cleaning up waste and countless communities affected by the unsightly and hazardous consequences. This problem not only affects the aesthetics of the environment, but poses serious health and safety risks.
In today’s debate, I hope to explore the nature of fly-tipping, its causes and consequences, and where we need further Government action. There have been regular debates on this topic in Westminster Hall over the last number of years, including recently in September. I acknowledge that all Governments have struggled with this issue and that solutions have been piecemeal, with successes but also concerns. I welcome the announcement this week of respect orders and this Government’s focus on antisocial behaviour; I hope that, alongside those, this Government will focus on and challenge those who persistently fly-tip in the future.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this debate forward and for giving me permission to intervene when I asked him before. There is pressure on councils everywhere; is he aware that the tightening of restrictions on general waste, in order to meet recycling targets for councils, has made them more difficult to follow? In some instances, it has led to greater examples of fly-tipping. Does he agree that the Government must support local councils and streamline the process to find and deal with this issue effectively in every postcode throughout the United Kingdom?
Tristan Osborne
I absolutely agree with the hon. Member. We are having this debate not only to discuss how we can better support local councils, but to acknowledge some of the successes of local authorities around the country where they have been challenging this issue, and hopefully to share that expertise. I agree that fines need to increase for those caught, and councils need to be given support from central Government to pursue that. One reason I am bringing forward this debate is that farmers and communities in rural areas in in my constituency have seen significant increases in fly-tipping, specifically around the villages of Wouldham, Burham and Capstone. We have had a long legacy of urban fly-tipping, but this is not just an urban blight; it also affects rural areas.
Alex Ballinger (Halesowen) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for organising this debate on such an important subject. In my constituency, Foxcote Lane is regularly used by fly-tippers to dump fridges, building waste and all sorts of other detritus. We think that is appalling—absolutely awful—and I welcome the Home Secretary’s move on respect orders to tackle some of those issues. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is right that the people involved in fly-tipping should be asked to clean up their own waste?
Tristan Osborne
I agree with my hon. Friend. Around the country, we see community payback initiatives whereby individuals who commit the crime are then sanctioned to go and clear up the mess either in that location or in parks and other green spaces. I think that restorative justice approach is absolutely a solution to this issue. Of course, this problem remains one of the biggest challenges for council enforcement departments, and the causes are multifaceted.
First, there are the economic factors. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned, a key reason people engage in such behaviour is the expense of private waste management companies. People try to avoid disposal fees, and fly-tipping is a convenient alternative. Secondly, we have seen a reduction in waste disposal services; in some areas, councils have had to close household waste recycling services and/or introduce charges. Thirdly, there is a lack of enforcement. Enforcement numbers have been reduced in many council areas due to local government budget cuts and the non-statutory nature of enforcement in councils. In my view there is a correlation between the enforcement potential, the reduction of staff and the increase in fly-tipping.
Rachel Taylor (North Warwickshire and Bedworth) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for bringing this matter to Westminster’s attention. It is something I have already raised on a number of occasions. The frequency of fly-tipping is going up in every location, but in many cases the number of prosecutions is static. In my local authority area, there were nearly 1,000 incidences of fly-tipping last year, but only one prosecution. We have to accept that much of it is carried out by organised criminals, not people trying to dispose of their domestic waste because the tip is closed or it is too difficult to book an appointment. Is it time for the Government to provide more support for local councils so that they can increase their rate of prosecutions and deal with the problem once and for all, rather than leaving residents, farmers and others to clear up the mess?
Tristan Osborne
I agree with my hon. Friend. In my local council in Medway there were seven prosecutions in 2022-23, which is extremely high and shows the success in that area, but she is right that it is not the same across the country. Environmental waste carrier licences need to be scrutinised, and where we see illegal activity on a commercial level, the Environment Agency and others need support to engage.
Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)
This issue was brought into sharp focus in my constituency following a high-profile case. A large pile of debris, comprising furniture, rubble and wooden panels, was disgracefully left in place for over a year. Local residents reported the issue. It attracted vermin and posed health risks to nearby children in the schools. I am concerned that fly-tipping statistics, which are already alarming, do not reflect the severity of fly-tipping on private land, which can fall through the cracks despite the best efforts of local authorities. I raised the issue previously and was told that the Minister had concerns that the carrier, broker and dealer regime that the last Government put in place was not fit for purpose. I was glad to hear that the Government are actively thinking of measures to tighten up controls, so I join my hon. Friend in thanking the Government for the action they are taking in this space.
Tristan Osborne
I thank my hon. Friend for that contribution. An element that is not mentioned is untidy land in private space, an issue that is very difficult for councils to enforce. Again, that is a non-statutory service. Some councils deal with untidy land in gardens and other private spaces, but many councils do not because of local Government cuts and reductions in funding over the last 14 years.
The statistical basis for fly-tipping is complicated. Different Governments over the last 14 years have measured it in different ways. Between 2010 and 2017 we saw a significant increase, according to BBC statistics, of around 40% in fly-tipping across the country, and that has remained static in recent years. The ways of calculating these things vary, so one question I have for the Minister is whether we should have a standardised, data-driven approach to recording fly-tipping incidences.
Afzal Khan (Manchester Rusholme) (Lab)
Fly-tipping in Greater Manchester is on the rise, costing local authorities more than £6 million in 2022. Although the practice is frustrating for my constituents, it is often caused by lack of awareness of the implications of fly-tipping and how to properly dispose of waste. Does my hon. Friend agree that we must improve environmental education and recognise that we all have a responsibility to safely and legally dispose of waste?
Tristan Osborne
I thank my hon. Friend for that point. The Labour council in Ilford has very successfully led an enforcement and education campaign, with community hubs and enforcement hubs. Love Medway Hate Litter, in my area, and Love Essex are successful campaigns that challenge litter and fly-tipping, so education is critical. As a former secondary school teacher, I know it is important to get into schools early to raise awareness about the challenges of fly-tipping.
The lack of enforcement is concerning. My hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire and Bedworth (Rachel Taylor) mentioned the reduction in court fines issued. Their value fell in 2022-23 to £785,000 in total, which just touches the tip of the iceberg. To be fair, although there are no Conservative Members here for this debate, the previous Government did act, increasing fines from £400 to £1,000 under the antisocial behaviour plan, increasing court fines by £526 and abolishing local authority charges—so they were aware of the issue.
Jim Dickson (Dartford) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend and near neighbour on securing this important debate. Fly-tipping clearly affects all parts of our country, rural and urban, and certainly my residents in Dartford. In the second quarter of 2024, there were 476 fly-tipping incidents—an increase of 21% on the first quarter—including in Leonard Avenue in Swanscombe, which has been the scene of no fewer than 26 incidents in the past 12 months. He talks about fines to be levied, and we recently discovered that Dartford borough council has chosen not to levy the maximum £1,000 fines that have been legally allowed since August 2023, unlike the neighbouring councils of Gravesham and Medway. Will he join me in calling on Dartford borough council to get serious on fly-tipping and impose the maximum possible fines on perpetrators?
Tristan Osborne
I agree with my hon. Friend that there is a postcode lottery across the country on how councils are managing this issue. I want to celebrate the example of Medway council, my local authority, which has done outstanding work. We have introduced free bulky waste collection for residential waste, working with our contractor, to reduce the quantity of mattresses and other residential waste left on streets across the town. The Love Medway Hate Litter scheme, which followed the Love Essex programme, has raised awareness among the public. We have increased fines to the top level, and it is important that councils send a message by using Government powers to increase fines. It is right that he challenges his council leader on this matter.
We also work across boroughs. Local authorities are not islands unto themselves, so it is important that Medway works with Gravesham, Swale and other local councils on cross-boundary issues. I note that my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) is sitting behind me.
We also have a wall of shame in Medway, to publicise people who are conducting this environmental crime by naming and shaming those who are caught and fined. We work very closely with our probation and community payback service to ensure that those who commit the crime clear up their mess. We have increasingly used CCTV technologies in hotspot locations to catch perpetrators. Those schemes in Medway have resulted in successes in challenging fly-tipping but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Jim Dickson) said, that is not the same across all Kent areas.
I have a series of questions for the Minister. The new respect orders that the Government are introducing are extremely welcome. I entirely endorse the approach undertaken by the Home Office and others to curb antisocial behaviour, including nuisance biking and other persistent behaviours. Will the respect orders include those who engage in persistent environmental crimes, or will the Minister look at other enforcement approaches?
Courts can give different fines for fly-tipping, depending on the size, but many councils have a standard fine approach. Will that be reviewed to take into account the size and nature of the fly-tip to dissuade people from commercial fly-tipping? Will the Government monitor the number of fixed penalty notices and court enforcements occurring in each council area, because there is a postcode lottery in this country?
Deirdre Costigan (Ealing Southall) (Lab)
I very much appreciate the opportunity to have this debate. I completely agree with my hon. Friend about raising fines and reviewing magistrates court decisions in this matter, but does he agree with me that the simplest, easiest and cheapest way to deal with fly-tipping is to take the waste out of the system in the first place, and therefore looking at mandatory take-back schemes, whereby people bring back their goods when they are finished with them and get money back, and at genuinely recyclable products, is the way forward? Therefore, does he welcome the Government’s steps to bring forward the “polluter pays” principle in the extended producer responsibility regulations that are currently being laid, and also the deposit return scheme for glass and plastic bottles, which will help to reduce fly-tips that are in black sacks?
Tristan Osborne
I thank my hon. Friend for raising the principle of the circular economy, which I entirely endorse. The linear economy that we have, which relies on waste disposal, should be challenged. I am very encouraged that, finally, the EPR guidelines that the Government are pursuing are being enacted. We should be encouraging councils to recycle, and that needs to be looked at in relation to the variations of postcode lotteries that we get. In one of the two local authorities in my area, recycling is done on a two-weekly basis, and in the other it is done weekly. Education is also needed on what can be placed in the bins as well. The producers need to be responsible for their packaging and making it recyclable, so I agree that there needs to be some work in relation to corporate interests on that.
Kevin McKenna (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Lab)
Massive congratulations to my hon. Friend and near neighbour on securing this debate. I am very supportive of everything that has been said so far. One thing that I think has not been picked up yet is just how long it takes to investigate these sites. Many of them are organised crime and many are on private land. The investigations are complicated and often cross lots of boundaries, including institutional boundaries. Frankly, it just takes too long to investigate them to the right level to be able to implement a lot of the enforcement actions, so I would be very keen to hear what my hon. Friend and then the Minister have to say about that.
Tristan Osborne
Absolutely. Much commercial fly-tipping is associated with organised crime. I know from the outstanding work of Ian Gilmore and his team at Medway council that they are regularly having to challenge those quite complicated cases. They are multifaceted, involving other elements of organised crime as well. I will not talk about specific locations, because sub judice rules apply. However, we know that in Kent specifically, there are a number of sites where some of this is alleged to involve organised efforts at disposal. As well as local authorities, national enforcement agencies need to be engaged on that to target the gangs that are pursuing that commercial agenda.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 allows councils to use camera technologies, but sometimes there have been restrictions on the use of camera technologies, specifically in areas of hotspots. Can we look at that again, to allow local authorities to use camera technologies in a way associated with challenging this issue?
In relation to public awareness and celebrating the “wall of shame” approach, can the Government use Medway and other councils as a template example of how we can use “wall of shame” approaches to annunciate to the public that we are challenging this issue, and those who commit this crime, robustly? Many councils already announce those whom they are fining for litter dropping and other types of environmental crime, yet there is an inconsistency in relation to fly-tipping.
With regard to waste disposal options, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan) on the idea of the circular economy and providing more recycling options, but I also think we need to support the Environment Agency, which saw budget reductions under the previous Government, and allow it to prosecute more illegal waste carriers. We also need to promote further collaboration among land managers, local authorities, police and the Environment Agency to establish ownership of the issue. Many farmers in my area are struggling, and the National Farmers Union has raised with me the concerns among its members that they do not necessarily know who to go to when fly-tipping occurs. They believe that the local authority approach of simply sending them a web link in relation to a fly-tip is not the best solution and is not giving them a solution, and therefore they are having to seek private sector options.
I thank the Library for providing me with the datasets for today’s debate and I thank all those Members who have contributed. I look forward to the ministerial response.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mary Creagh)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tristan Osborne) for tabling this debate, the second on fly-tipping in just three months. How extraordinary it is that not a single Opposition Member has turned up to listen and contribute; that tells us something about the party of the countryside, and the party that is on the side of people who want to do the right thing and keep their areas clean and tidy.
I thank all colleagues for their thoughtful contributions—fly-tipping is a serious crime, and we know it blights local communities. I have been reading about the horrendous case of the front garden on Peach Avenue in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Leigh Ingham), and we appreciate the difficulty it poses to all landowners. Local councils reported over a million fly-tipping incidents in 2022-23—that is a significant burden on the UK economy, and was an increase of 10% on the three previous years. During that time, we had covid, where we were not allowed out for several months at a time, so I think we can say it is increasing year on year. What we are here to say is enough is enough. Things have to change. As my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford has said, there have been years of Conservative failure on this, and we have a plague of rubbish on parks, streets, front gardens, farms, rural estates, and industrial estates. I was in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Jas Athwal) yesterday and was sending him texts on the way home because I could see some illegal burning going on as I drove back from the beautiful Hainault forest.
We want to end our throwaway society: stop this avalanche, increase recycling rates, reduce waste, and crack down on waste crime. To the point about the circular economy made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan), yesterday we laid the deposit return scheme regulations in Parliament, and we have a statutory instrument on extended producer responsibility tomorrow. There are colleagues in the room who will participate in that debate to show the three legs of the stool—simpler recycling, EPR, and DRS, all of which are going to drive up our recycling rates, with the intention of getting to 65% by 2035.
I looked back at some news items from 2002, when the last Labour Government was trying to get the recycling rate up to 50% by 2015. That tells you something about the progress that has stalled over the last 14 years, that we are still hovering around a 43% to 44% recycling rate, and actually going backwards in some areas.
We have committed to forcing fly-tippers and vandals to clean up the mess that they have created as part of a crackdown on antisocial behaviour, and I look forward to providing further details on that commitment in due course. I met the Prisons Minister, Lord Timpson, to discuss how we can equip prisoners for their release and rehabilitation through some of the environmental work in this area.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
One of the initiatives in Hull is “bring out your rubbish” days, which clearly reduce fly-tipping. It is an initiative from Labour councillors, using the ward budgets. Is that something the Minister might consider encouraging other councils to take up across the board?
Mary Creagh
I think there is a really interesting philosophical reflection there, because one person’s rubbish is another person’s treasure. I remember leaving a beautiful Italian leather bag outside my house—it had a hole in it, and had come to the end of its life with me—and I thought I would put it on the doorstep and see what happens. Someone knocked on my door and asked if that bag was to go, and I said yes, and she was so pleased. Maybe she was going to take it away and sew it. There was also a tradition when I lived in Belgium of the braderie, where people put their stuff out—got rid of things from their granny’s attic, got rid of different things, like a massive car boot sale, because people like to get a bargain—and I do think there is a role for people to do that. We do not want to stop people putting things out for other people that might be useful, but I encourage people to ask, “Is it going to rain? Is the item going to be destroyed?” It needs to be done in a sensible way. On the council clearing things up, one often finds that other people come along and clear it up before the council even gets there.
Councils have enforcement powers to punish those who harm our communities and to deter other would-be offenders, and I encourage them to make good use of those powers, including their power to prosecute. I pay tribute to the council in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford for their actions. Fly-tipping can lead to a fine, community service or even imprisonment.
Sentencing is a matter for the courts, but the national fly-tipping prevention group, which is chaired by officials from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has produced guidance to support councils to present robust cases to court. I urge colleagues to encourage their councils to join that group, because there is no monopoly on wisdom in this area and it is good to share initiatives such as the wall of shame.
Instead of prosecuting, local authorities can issue fixed penalty notices of up to £1,000 to those who fly-tip or of up to £600 to those who pass their household waste to someone who does not have the proper licence. They also have powers to stop, seize and search the vehicles of those suspected of fly-tipping. They have the powers; whether they have the finances and resources after losing almost two thirds of their budgets after years of cuts to local authorities is a different question. Ahead of the previous fly-tipping debate, I wrote to those councils that reported no enforcement actions in 2022-23, and I will consider what further action is needed to encourage more councils to increase their efforts to bring them all up to the level of the good.
We are under no illusions about the scale of the funding pressures that local authorities face, and I know that many colleagues have served on local councils. We are committed to resetting the relationship between local and central Government, and we will get councils back on their feet by providing multi-year funding settlements, ending the competitive bidding for pots of money and reforming the local audit system.
My hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford raised the issue of rural fly-tipping, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger). Some 80% of farmers have been affected by fly-tipping on their land. We will continue to work with the National Farmers Union and others to promote and disseminate good practice on how to prevent fly-tipping on rural land.
The public have a vital role to play in tackling this, because 60% of fly-tips involve household waste. Householders must check the register of waste carriers to avoid giving their waste to rogue operators who promise quick, cheap waste collection.
Adam Jogee (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)
The Minister will not be surprised to see me in a debate on waste, which I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tristan Osborne) for securing. Will the Minister join me in paying tribute to constituents of mine like Norma in Red Street and Jane in Bradwell for their commitment to safe and clean streets and for their consistent reporting of fly-tips to both me and the council? I assure the Minister of my complete commitment and support for her zero-tolerance approach in tackling fly-tipping and waste crime in our communities.
Mary Creagh
It is good to see my hon. Friend. I have been travelling in Azerbaijan where I could not get his texts and phone calls, so I have had a week off, but I am glad to see that he is back, as an almost permanent shadow. I have not had my latest Walleys Quarry update, but I am sure that will come shortly after the debate. I pay tribute to the persistence of his constituents, Jane and Norma; from their Member of Parliament, I see that the Newcastle-under-Lyme persistence is contagious, and I pay tribute to him for everything he has done on behalf of his constituents in this area.
It is important that we educate householders about their duty of care in this area. I am considering reform to the waste carrier, broker and dealer regime to make it easier to identify rogue operators. I have met representatives of the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management to talk about how we can introduce qualifications around licensing. I am keen to do as much as we can in that area.
Whether they live in the countryside, a town or a city, people should walk through their community feeling proud of a clean environment that is free of rubbish and litter. That is why, with councils, communities and local authorities, we will work together with regulators to force offenders to clean up their mess, put a stop to the waste criminals and keep our communities clean.
Sir Christopher Chope (in the Chair)
Order. Before we finish this debate, I remind the Minister and Members of paragraph 19.45 of “Erskine May”, in which it says:
“A half-hour adjournment debate is a personal debate between the Member who has secured the debate and the Minister who is to reply…Interventions from the Opposition frontbench are not allowed. Opposition spokespersons may participate, from the backbenches, on matters which do not relate to their portfolio. Equally, because the debate is personal to the Member and the Minister, no reference should be made to the absence of other Members (for example, an Opposition frontbench spokesperson).”
References in this debate to the absence of anybody from the Opposition Front-Bench team were out of order, and I apologise for not having raised that at the time. I think it is important that we remind ourselves of the rules of procedure and the fact that, in half-hour debates, there is no opportunity for Opposition parties to participate.
Mary Creagh
Thank you for that clarification, Sir Christopher. I am happy to withdraw my remarks. We are all learning in our new jobs, and we are grateful to you for your wisdom, advice and guidance on these areas.
Sir Christopher Chope (in the Chair)
I thank the Minister for that courtesy.
Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).
Online Safety: Children and Young People
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Lola McEvoy (Darlington) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered online safety for children and young people.
Just give me one second to get my notes in order, Mr Dowd.
Dame Caroline Dinenage
The hon. Lady has called a debate on a really important issue. Could she set out why she thinks that now is a really important time to discuss this vital topic?
Lola McEvoy
I will—and I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. It is my great honour to open this debate on online safety for our children. I welcome the Minister answering for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer), answering for the official Opposition. I tabled this as my first debate in Westminster Hall, because I believe this issue is one of the most defining of our time. I promised parents and children in my constituency of Darlington that I would tackle it head-on, so here I am to fulfil that promise.
I would like to put on the record that I have long been inspired by the strength of the parents of Bereaved Families for Online Safety—a group of parents united by the unbearable loss of their children and by their steadfast commitment to get stronger online protections to prevent more children’s deaths. I say to Ellen, who is here with us this afternoon: thank you for your courage—you have experienced unimaginable pain, and I will do everything I can to prevent more parents from going through the same.
The consensus for action on this issue has been built, in no small part due to the incredible drive of parents to campaign for justice. It is felt in every corner of the country, and it is our job as a Government to step in and protect our children from online harm. In my constituency of Darlington, at door after door right across the town and regardless of background, income or voting intention, parents agreed with me that it is time to act to protect our children. I am taking this issue to the Government to fight for them.
I am standing up to amplify the voice of the girl who sends a picture of herself that she thought was private but arrives at school to find that it has been shared with all her peers; she is not only mortified but blamed, and the message cannot be unsent. I am standing up to amplify the voice of the boy who gets bombarded with violent, disturbing images that he does not want to see and never asked for, and who cannot sleep for thinking about them. I am standing up for the mother whose son comes home bruised and will not tell her what has happened, but who gets sent a video of him being beaten up and finds out that it was organised online. I am standing up for the father whose daughter refuses to eat anything because she has seen video after video after video criticising girls who look like her. I say to all those who have raised the alarm, to all the children who know something is wrong but do not know what to do, and to all those who have seen content that makes them feel bad about themselves, have been bullied online, have seen images they did not want to see or have been approached by strangers: we are standing up for you.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate on online safety for children and young people. I have a keen personal interest, as a father of two young children. Earlier this year, Ofcom published 40 recommendations about how to improve children’s safety online, including through safer algorithms, and the Government rightly pointed to the role that technology companies can play in that. Does my hon. Friend agree that these companies must take their responsibilities much more seriously?
Lola McEvoy
I absolutely agree that the companies must take those responsibilities seriously, because that will be the law. I am keen that we, as legislators, make sure that the law is as tight as it possibly can be to protect as many children as possible. We will never be able to eradicate everything online, and this is not about innovation. It is about making sure that we get this absolutely right for the next generation and for those using platforms now, so I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention.
The first meeting I called when I was elected the MP for Darlington was with the headteachers of every school and college in my town. I asked them to join together to create a town-wide forum to hear the voices of children and young people on what needs to change about online safety. The first online safety forum took place a couple of weeks ago, and the situation facing young people—year 10s, specifically—is much worse than I had anticipated.
The young people said that online bullying is rife. They said it is common for their peers to send and doctor images and videos of each other without consent, to spread rumours through apps, to track the locations of people in order to bully them through apps, to organise and film fights through apps, to be blackmailed on apps, to speak on games and apps to people they do not know, and to see disturbing or explicit images unprompted and without searching for them. They also said it is common to see content that makes them feel bad about themselves. This has to stop.
The last Government’s Online Safety Act 2023 comes into force in April 2025. The regulator, Ofcom, will publish the children’s access assessments guidance in January 2025. This will give online services that host user-generated content, search services and pornography services in the UK three months to assess whether their services are likely to be accessed by children. From April 2025, when the children’s codes of practice are to be published, those platforms and apps will have a further three months to complete a children’s risk assessment. From 31 July 2025, specific services will have to disclose their risk assessments to Ofcom. Once the codes are approved by Parliament, providers will have to take steps to protect users. There is to be a consultation on the codes in spring 2025, and I urge everybody interested in the topic—no matter their area of expertise or feelings on it—to feed into that consultation. The mechanism for change is in front of us, but my concern is that the children’s codes are not strong enough.
Dan Norris (North East Somerset and Hanham) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Could she comment on the use of artificial intelligence to create child sexual abuse materials? That is a key issue now. Many years ago, I trained with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as a child protection officer, and what I learned back then is that we have to get ahead of all the technologies in order to deal with the challenges effectively. Does she have any thoughts on that point? She may be coming to it in her own remarks.
Lola McEvoy
I thank my hon. Friend for raising that great threat. My area of expertise on the issue is children’s and service users’ voices. There is definitely space for Ofcom and the Government to try to regulate the illegal manufacturing of images through AI. When I asked children in my constituency whether they had ever seen something that they knew was made by AI, they said yes—they had seen images of people that they knew were not real—but the notifications and warnings to tell them that it was AI were not as explicit as they could be. In other words, they could tell for themselves, but the notifications were not comprehensive enough for other children, who may not have noticed. This is a real danger.
There will always be content created online that we cannot police. We have to accept—as we do with any other piece of legislation—that there will be criminal actors, but I have called this debate because there are ways to protect children from harmful content, including by using the right age verification model. I am keen to focus my contribution on trying to protect children from content, in the round, that is harmful to them.
As I said before, the mechanism for change is in front of us, but my concern is that the children’s codes are not strong enough. The children in my town have told me—and I am sure everybody here knows it—that the current age verification requirements are easily passed through, and that content on some sites is deeply disturbing and sent to them without them asking for it. That means that the sites are hosting content that is deeply disturbing for children, and that the age verification is not fit for purpose. We need to talk either about stopping those sites from hosting that content, which is very difficult, or about changing the age verification process.
Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)
I want to talk about the scale of the problem that the hon. Lady touches on. The Children’s Commissioner for England reveals that 79% of children under 18 have encountered violent pornography before the age of 18, with the average age of first exposure being 13. Everything the hon. Lady is saying is very important, but this is not a niche problem; it is something that parents in Winchester have spoken to me about repeatedly in the four months since I was elected.
Lola McEvoy
It is indeed prolific, for all our children—the whole generation. It is interesting that, among the different experts I have spoken to, there is consensus; the argument has been won that children are unsafe online and that is affecting them deeply, across the country. It is our job—it falls to legislators—to rectify the issue. I do not wish to defend online platforms, but they will do what the law tells them to do. They want to operate in this country. They want to make money. There is nothing wrong with that; they just have to adhere to the law. It is our job to make sure that the law is tight to protect our children. That is the crux of the issue.
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is powerfully illustrating the responsibility on all of us to step up to the needs of this moment. Parents in my constituency—at schools including William Ransom and Samuel Lucas—have been leading the way in taking further proactive action, signing up to a smartphone-free pledge to delay the age at which their young people have access to smartphones. Hundreds across the constituency have already signed up to the pledge. Does my hon. Friend agree that that underlines the strength of parental feeling on online safety and some of the wider associated issues, and that it highlights our responsibility to legislate—not just to celebrate the benefits of technology, but to do all we can to protect young people from the very real dangers it presents, too?
Lola McEvoy
A smartphone-free pledge is a great idea, and I will take it to Darlington. Parents are further down the line than we are on this; children are further down the line than we are; campaign groups are further down the line than we are. We are lagging behind. We have taken action—the last Government passed the Online Safety Act. I think it is time for us to make sure that there is nothing missing from that Act. In my view, there are some areas where we could go further.
Children in Darlington have said to me that they are getting these unsolicited images—from the algorithms. These images are being fed to them. They are not from strangers, or bogeymen from another country, although that might happen. The most common complaint is that the algorithm is feeding them content that they did not ask for, and it is deeply disturbing, whether it is violent, explicit or harmful. Once they have seen it, they cannot unsee it.
That is why I am arguing to strengthen the codes. I am not sure that we should be retrofitting harmful apps with a code that may or may not work, and having to tweak a few bits of the algorithm to check whether it will actually protect our children. I think we can take stronger action than that.
Dan Aldridge (Weston-super-Mare) (Lab)
Numerous mental health charities and a number of civil society experts have raised with me that there are powers within the Online Safety Act that must be used by the regulator. Indeed, the Secretary of State for DSIT made it very clear last week that he backed the Act and those powers. Does my hon. Friend agree that the regulator could and should act with more powers than it has?
Lola McEvoy
I am loath to tell Ofcom that it does not have enough power. As I understand it, the powers are there, but we need to be explicit, and they need to be strengthened. How do we do that? The reason I outlined the timelines is that the time to act is now. We have to explicitly strengthen the children’s codes.
There are many ways to skin a cat, as they say, but one of the simpler ways to do this would be to outline the audience that the apps want to market to. Who is the base audience that the apps and platforms are trying to make money from? If that is explicitly outlined, the codes could be applied accordingly, and strengthened. If children are the target audience, we can question some of the things on those apps and whether the apps are safe for children to use in and of themselves.
Mr Dhesi
With children able to access online content a lot more easily nowadays, many of my Slough constituents feel that it is critical that the content itself is appropriate and safe. Does my hon. Friend share my concerns about the rise of extreme misogynistic content and its impact on young people, especially considering that research has shown that it is actually amplified to teens?
Lola McEvoy
I thank my hon. Friend for raising the really important—indeed, deeply concerning—issue of the rise of anti-women hate, with the perpetrators marketing themselves as successful men.
What we are seeing is that boys look at such videos and do not agree with everything that is said, but little nuggets make sense to them. For me, it is about the relentless bombardment: if someone sees one video like that, they might think, “Oh right,” and not look at it properly, but they are relentlessly targeted by the same messaging over and over again.
That is true not just for misogynistic hate speech, but for body image material. Girls and boys are seeing unrealistic expectations of body image, which are often completely fake and contain fake messaging, but which make them reflect on their own bodies in a negative way, when they may not have had those thoughts before.
I want to drive home that being 14 years old is tough. I am really old now compared with being 14, but I can truly say to anybody who is aged 14 watching this: “It gets better!” It is hard to be a 14-year-old: they are exploring their body and exploring new challenges. Their hormones are going wild and their peers are going through exactly the same thing. It is tough, and school is tough. It is natural for children and young people to question their identity, their role in the world, their sexuality, or whatever it is they might be exploring—that is normal—but I am concerned that that bombardment of unhealthy, unregulated and toxic messaging at a crucial time, when teenagers’ brains are developing, is frankly leading to a crisis.
I return to an earlier point about whether the parts of apps or platforms that children are using are actually safe for them to use. There are different parts of apps that we all use—we may not all be tech-savvy, but we do use them—but when we drill into them and take a minute to ask, “Is this safe for children?”, the answer for me is, “No.”
There are features such as the live location functionality, which comes up a lot on apps, such as when someone is using a maps app and it asks for their live location so they can see how to get from A to B. That is totally fine, but there are certain social media apps that children use that have their live location on permanently. They can toggle it to turn it off, but when I asked children in Darlington why they did not turn it off, they said there is a peer pressure to keep it on—it is seen as really uncool to turn it off. It is also about being able to see whether someone has read a message or not.
I then said to those children, “Okay, but those apps are safe because you only accept people you know,” and they said, “Oh no, I’ve got thousands and thousands of people on that app, and it takes me ages to remove each person, because I can’t remember if I know them, so I don’t do it.” They just leave their location on for thousands of people, many of whom may be void accounts, and they do not even know if they are active any more. The point is that we would not allow our children to go into a space where their location was shown to lots of strangers all the time. Those children who I spoke to also said that the live location feature on some of these apps is leading to in-person bullying and attacks. That is absolutely horrifying.
Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)
On that point, is the hon. Member aware that if someone toggles their location off on Snapchat, for example, it constantly—in fact, every time the app is opened—says, “You’re on ghost mode. Do you want to turn your location back on?” So every single time someone opens the app, it tries to convince them to turn their location back on.
Lola McEvoy
I thank the hon. Member for raising that issue, because there are lots of different nudge notifications. We can understand why, because it is an unregulated space and the app is trying to get as much data as possible—if we are not paying for the service, we are the service. We all know that as adults, but the young people and children who we are talking about today do not know that their data is what makes them attractive to that app.
Dan Aldridge
I thank my hon. Friend for allowing me to intervene again. In my previous role as head of public policy at the British Computer Society, the one thing that my colleagues and I talked about a lot was the lack of focus on education in the Online Safety Act. I commend the previous Government for passing that legislation, which was very brave. The Act has tried to do some wonderful things, but what is missing is that we have failed to empower a generation of young people to act safely online, to be able to take back the power and say, “No, I am not going to do that.” We have failed in that so far. How do we build that in for the future?
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
Order. I would like to bring to the attention of Members that we have had a huge number of interventions and we are 20 minutes into the debate. The Minister and Opposition spokesperson will get up at just after half past 3. It is a matter for the speaker whether she takes more interventions, but that does mean that the amount of time for those who have asked to speak will be significantly more restricted than I originally planned. That is just a housekeeping matter to be aware of. There is also an issue about the length of interventions: they are getting a bit long. On a matter of this importance, I do not want to restrict interventions and contributions, but I ask Members to please bear that in mind.
Lola McEvoy
Okay, I will make progress. On the live location element, which I have discussed, I am not sure that there is any advantage in children using that, unless it is a specifically regulated live location app where the parents have given consent for their child.
I do not know whether chatting to strangers on games is suitable for children. Adding peers to a group and enjoying playing with them on games is fine, but there could be strangers from other countries, with no indication of their age. One child told me that he had found out, after about three weeks, that the person he had been playing with was a 50-year-old man on another continent. That man was probably mortified, as was the child, and they stopped playing together. Why are we leaving it up to them? That is such a high-risk strategy for those apps; we need to think about that.
It is down to Parliament to decide what is safe for our children, and to enforce it. Asking platforms to mark their own homework and police themselves will undoubtedly lead to more children seeing inappropriate, harmful content and sharing it with others. I would like the Government to strengthen the children’s codes, and consider changing the onus from reactive safety measures that make apps safe for children, when we suspect they are children, to proactively making apps or platforms safe for all children in the first place, and creating adult-only apps that require strong age verification, because adults can consent to giving their data.
A number of ways to protect children online are being debated, as I am sure we will hear this afternoon. I feel strongly that retrofitting apps once children have been exposed to harmful content or strangers, or have shared things they should not, is not the safest or most effective way to do this. A number of options around age verification are on the table, but I would like the Government to consider that being a child is tough and that children have a right to make mistakes. The issue is that those mistakes involve mass communications to peers and a permanent digital footprint, because someone has consented, aged 13, to give away their data.
We need to see whether any child can consent to give away their data, and therefore whether apps that identify their audience as children should be allowed to keep data at all. Should children be in chatrooms with strangers across the world? Should children be allowed to share their live location with strangers or people they have accepted as contacts? Should children be allowed to view unregulated livestreams or addictive-by-design content? Those questions have been raised not only by children themselves but by parents and national advocacy charities and leaders in this space. There is a consensus that we have to take action on this issue, so let us make the most of it.
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
Order. I remind Members that they should bob if they wish to be called in the debate.
Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)
I could talk for hours on this subject, Mr Dowd, but, do not worry, I will not. There are a number of things that I would like to say. Not many Members present sat through the majority of the Online Safety Bill Committee as it went through Parliament, but I was in every one of those meetings, listening to various views and debating online safety.
I will touch on one issue that the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) raised in her excellent and important speech. I agree with almost everything she said. Not many people in Parliament have her level of passion or knowledge about the subject, so I appreciate her bringing forward the debate.
On the issue of features, I totally agree with the hon. Member and I moved an amendment to that effect during the Bill’s progress. There should be restrictions on the features that children should be able to access. She was talking about safety by design, so that children do not have to see content that they cannot unsee, do not have to experience the issues that they cannot un-experience, cannot be contacted by external people who they do not know, and cannot livestream. We have seen an increase in the amount of self-generated child sexual abuse material and livestreaming is a massive proportion of that.
Yesterday, a local organisation in Aberdeen called CyberSafe Scotland launched a report on its work in 10 of our primary schools with 1,300 children aged between 10 and 12—primary school children, not secondary school children. Some 300 of those children wrote what is called a “name it”, where they named a problem that they had seen online. Last night, we were able to read some of the issues that they had raised. Pervasive misogyny is everywhere online, and it is normalised. It is not just in some of the videos that they see and it is not just about the Andrew Tates of this world—it is absolutely everywhere. A couple of years ago there was a trend in online videos of young men asking girls to behave like slaves, and that was all over the place.
Children are seeing a different online world from the one that we experience because they have different algorithms and have different things pushed at them. They are playing Roblox and Fortnite, but most of us are not playing those games. I am still concerned that the Online Safety Act does not adequately cover all of the online gaming world, which is where children are spending a significant proportion of their time online.
A huge amount more needs to be done to ensure that children are safe online. There is not enough in place about reviewing the online safety legislation, which Members on both sides of the House pushed for to ensure that the legislation is kept as up to date as possible. The online world changes very rapidly: the scams that were happening nine months ago are totally different from those happening today. I am still concerned that the Act focuses too much on the regulation of Facebook, for example, rather than the regulation of the online world that our children actually experience. CyberSafe Scotland intentionally centred the views and rights of young people in its work, which meant that the programmes that it delivered in schools were much more appropriate and children were much better able to listen and react to them.
The last thing that I will mention is Girlguiding and its girls’ attitude survey. It is published on an annual basis and shows a huge increase in the number of girls who feel unsafe. That is because of the online world they are experiencing. We have a huge amount of responsibility here, and I appreciate the hon. Member for Darlington bringing the debate forward today.
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
I will keep this to an informal four-minute limit. Regrettably, if Members speak beyond that, I will have to introduce a formal figure.
Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. Some 20 years ago, I started a new job with an as yet unbranded mobile network operator. At the time, the network had no masts, no handsets and no customers. Text messaging was just catching on, the BlackBerry was in its infancy and wireless application protocol was the new kid on the block. For those who do not know what WAP was, it was a bit like having Ceefax on a handset; for those who do not know what Ceefax was, I cannot really help.
My counterparts and I at the four mobile networks were acutely aware that the introduction of 3G would change how we used our phones. I will, however, confess that understanding what that change would look like—all while using dial-up at home—was something of a stab in the dark. Nevertheless, no matter how challenging, we knew that the advent of 3G required the mobile industry to take greater responsibility to protect the safety of our customers, in particular those under the age of 18. The networks moved from walled garden internet, where access was controlled by age verification and personal identification number, to a world where internet was freely available.
The mobile networks published the first self-regulatory code of content on mobile. It was a world first, and something that UK mobile operators were rightly proud of, but the pace of change was rapid; within months, we networks published a further self-regulatory code to govern location-based services, which, as we have heard already, present a clear danger to young people. We knew then that location tracking could be used in grooming and other predatory behaviour. We published the code, but the pace of change over the past 20 years has been unrelenting, and we now arrive at a point at which almost everything we do happens online.
The role of the mobile network is no longer as a gatekeeper to services, but rather as a pipe to over-the-top services such as YouTube, WhatsApp and TikTok. Those services can be more readily controlled by both the service provider and the handset manufacturer. That is not to absolve the networks of responsibility, but to acknowledge that they operate in a mobile value chain. I might pay £25 a month to my mobile network, but if I renew my handset every two years at a cost of £800, I am paying far more to the handset manufacturer than to the mobile network operator. I believe there is a strong argument that those who derive the greatest financial value from that value chain bear far greater responsibility for keeping children and young people safe online than is currently the case.
I turn now to one specific aspect of online harm. Having worked closely with the Internet Watch Foundation during my time in industry, I am fully aware of—and I thank it for—its important work in assessing child sexual abuse image material and removing it from the internet. I have visited and met the IWF teams who have to view and assess some of the most upsetting content. Their work is harrowing and distressing, but, sadly, it is essential.
Last year, the IWF assessed more than 390,000 reports and confirmed more than 275,000 web pages containing images or videos of children suffering sexual abuse. Each page contained hundreds, if not thousands, of indecent images of children. The IWF reported that 2023 was the most extreme year on record, with more category A sexual abuse imagery discovered than ever before, 92% of it self-generated child abuse. That means that the children have been targeted, groomed and coerced into sexual activities via webcams and devices with cameras.
For the first time, the IWF also encountered and analysed more than 2,400 images of sexual abuse involving children aged three to six. Some 91% of those images were of girls, mainly in domestic settings such as their own bedrooms or bathrooms. Each image or video is not just a single act; every time it is viewed or downloaded is another time that that child is sexually abused.
That is why I conclude my remarks with a clear ask to both the online and offline media and broadcast channels of our country: please stop describing these images as “kiddie porn” and “child pornography”. I did a search of some online news channels before I came to this debate; that language is still prevalent, and it has to stop. These images are not pornography. They are evidence of a crime and evidence of abuse. They are not pictures or videos. They are depictions of gross assault, sadism and bestiality against children. They are obscene images involving penetrative sexual activity with teenagers, children and babies. If there is one thing we can agree on in this debate, it is that the media in this country must start describing child sexual abuse material for what it is. Language matters, and it is time the seriousness of the offence was reflected in the language that describes it.
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
I am going to have to introduce a formal time limit of three and a half minutes.
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) on bringing forward this important debate. The internet has undeniably introduced a valuable resource for learning that has transformed society, but technology has also brought with it significant risks that I believe we in this House have an urgent duty to address. Nobody knows that more acutely than all those parents who have tragically lost their children after online abuse, who are bravely represented today here in the Public Gallery by Ellen.
The statistics are sobering. Recent figures from Ofcom reveal that one in five children in the UK has experienced some form of online harm, including cyber-bullying, exposure to inappropriate content and exploitation. The NSPCC reports that more than 60% of young people have encountered online bullying, but I think the risk goes much further than that. We know that the average age at which a child first views pornography is estimated to be 12, with some evidence now suggesting it is as young as eight years old. Free and widely available pornography is often violent, degrading and extreme, and it has become the de facto sex education for young people.
The pornography crisis is radically undermining the healthy development of children and young people, and contributing to increasing levels of sexual inequality, dysfunction and violence. That reality represents how children’s lives are affected by those dangers, and as parliamentarians we have a duty to keep our children safe and free from harm—online as well as offline. Nine in 10 children are now on a mobile phone by the age of 11, and around a quarter of three-year-olds now have their own smartphone. I do not know about you, Mr Dowd, but I find that statistic particularly troubling.
I believe it is crucial to differentiate smartphone use from the broader digital environment. Smartphones, as we know, are engineered to be addictive, with notifications that stimulate the release of dopamine, the same chemical that is linked to pleasure. It is too easy for children to become trapped in a cycle of dependency and peer pressure, addicted to feeds and competing for likes on social media. Addiction is exactly what the tech companies want. Research from the Royal Society for Public Health shows that social media harms mental health—we all know that—particularly among young users. Around 70% of young people now report that social media increases their feelings of anxiety and depression.
The Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, believes that Ofcom’s children’s codes, which the hon. Member for Darlington talked about, are not strong enough and are written for the tech companies rather than for the children. She says that we need a code that protects our children from the “wild west” of social media. In South Devon I often hear from parents overwhelmed by the digital environment their children are navigating. They want to protect their children, but they feel ill equipped to manage those complexities. Hundreds of them have signed up to the smartphone-free pledge, and are pressuring schools to take part as well. We need to give them support, by backing what they want to do with legislation.
I believe we need a legislative framework that will restrict the addictive nature of smartphones, tighten age restrictions and restrict access to social media platforms for all children under 16. We have to protect them. Those measures are crucial for online child safety, and I believe there is a broad consensus in the House that big tech must be held accountable for the harm it perpetuates. We must abide—
Jess Asato (Lowestoft) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I welcome this debate, brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy). Prior to being elected as an MP, I spent almost a decade working in organisations supporting vulnerable women and children. My experience in that area over those years was very much a case of one step forward, two steps back.
Efforts to make our children’s increasingly online lives safer have been constantly outpaced by technological change. The law, the police and the courts have been unable to keep up with that change, and in its wake children have been the unwitting guinea pigs in a huge social experiment. The Online Safety Act has the potential to reset the relationship between children and the internet if the principles of safety by design are truly followed by tech companies and our regulator Ofcom. Of course we welcome age verification, which will finally come into force next year and will prevent children from accessing violent and harmful pornography.
There remains much more that we need to do in this space. That is why I am pleased to co-sponsor the safer phones Bill—Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill—sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister). Smartphones, and social media in particular, are clearly negatively impacting on the mental health of our children, as well as their sleep and learning. Only last week, in an evidence session hosted by my hon. Friend, we heard that smartphones are contributing to a significant increase in short-sightedness among children, who are glued to their phones and seeing a decline in outdoors activity. We risk creating a generation suffering from myopia, and yet—perhaps because as adults we are also glued to our phones—we have not yet acted in the best interests of our young people. We regulate the toys we give to children so that they do not contain harmful lead and are age appropriate, yet no such regulation applies to smartphones. What international board of child psychologists was consulted? What paediatricians? What parents? What children?
A particularly worrying new trend that is outpacing our ability to counter it is the rise of nude deepfakes, or AI-generated sexually explicit images. They are becoming an increasingly worrying issue in schools and more than half a million children already have experience of them, according to new data from Internet Matters. Despite the fact that creating and sharing nude deepfakes of children or non-consenting adults is illegal, the programs that make them are still readily accessible. We would not ban the possession of zombie knives without banning their sale; that is why last week I called on the Government to ban nudifying tools and apps.
We seem to be setting up our children to fail, to be harmed and to be criminalised. Some 99% of the images created are of women and girls—indeed, the apps often do not work on boys. The Government have an ambitious target to halve violence against women and girls within a decade, a target that can only be achieved if we tackle the root cause by looking online. I would be grateful if the Minister could look at how nudifying apps could be banned as part of this Government’s commitment to keep women and children safe.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) on setting the scene so very well and on her insightful knowledge of the subject. I am very much a supporter of the Online Safety Act, and I have spoken about it on many occasions in the past. I believe we need strong protections for our children and young people; there is just so much danger out there, and it only seems to be getting worse. I have heard some horror stories of the dangers online, so it is great to discuss such matters and try to get answers from the Minister, who I wish well in the position she now holds.
Many will be aware—my staff are certainly fully aware—that my knowledge of the world of social media is somewhat limited; I am just about using text messages on the phone. However, social media and AI have brought tremendous advantages. The Office for National Statistics revealed that 83% of 12 to 15-year-olds now own a smartphone with full internet access. It is rare to see a young person who does not have one. My grandchildren, young as they are, seem to have all the knowledge that this old boy does not.
Cyber-bullying, grooming and online exploitation are, however, at the forefront of the dangers. The Police Service of Northern Ireland revealed that, in 2023, crimes involving children being contacted online by sexual predators rose by nearly a third. Officers working with the specialist unit say that they had the busiest year since its establishment in 2010. How worrying is that trend? Grooming can happen anywhere.
Another issue of importance that I want to focus on is self-harm and suicide among younger generations. Suicides in Northern Ireland are up by 8% from what they were last year for those people in the younger category—and last year they were horrendous. More than three quarters of people saw self-harm content online for the first time at the age of 14 or younger, and individuals with a history of self-harm report being 10 years old or younger when they first viewed it. Such things are incredibly worrying. We need to see safeguards against those as young as 10 seeing that damaging content, including on self-harm.
I am aware that issues regarding content on eating disorders are also prevalent. My office has been contacted about them by countless parents; it is a massive issue for my office. There is a clear danger to life from some of this content, which has led to hundreds of young girls and boys being referred to specialist clinics and counselling to help them through it. For any parent or family, that is just heartbreaking.
The online safety strategy and action plan was brought to the Executive in Northern Ireland by the Department of Health in 2020 to last until and be reviewed in 2025. Thankfully the Online Safety Act 2023, led from Westminster, applies to Northern Ireland, and with 40% of young people using social media there is a clear need for that legislation. Again, I hope that it can be strong enough to combat the dangers that are out there.
Ever mindful of your timescale, Mr Dowd, and to give others the opportunity to speak, I will conclude. The online world and its advancements are truly a wonderful thing—even for someone like me, who does not know how it works—but there are clear problems with some of the aspects surrounding it. I hope that we can work together, alongside Ministers and large social media companies, to do our best for our young people, to use the online world to their advantage and to give them the best start in life. We want them to have that best start, but we want them to be safe—that is what we are asking for. I look to the Minister for her input and her reassurance that the things we have asked for can actually happen.
Jake Richards (Rother Valley) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) on securing this debate. Her daughter was born just a few months before mine, when we were both mere parliamentary candidates trying to juggle our election campaigns and family life, and failing. Just last night in the voting Lobby, we swapped notes on how it is going now that we are Members of Parliament, and I think we are both failing on that as well, but we are trying our hardest. Having spoken to her in depth about this issue, I know that she is keen to champion it and that she will be successful in doing so.
My daughter is just 15 months old, and when I look at the online world around us, I have deep concern and worries for her and children growing up across the country. The issue of online safety must be grasped urgently, and I hope that this Parliament will finally seize the initiative. Many of the hundreds of new MPs come to this issue afresh. It is great to see new colleagues and friends here today. This is a generation who have, to some extent, grown up online, are aware of the huge benefits that technology and social media have offered and are adept, to some extent at least, at using those networks—I am still not wholly sure how TikTok works—but who have also seen the increasingly toxic results for young people as technology has developed, and that has been exacerbated by the pandemic.
I have been in numerous schools across my constituency of Rother Valley to speak with students, teachers and teaching staff, and the pupils I meet are impeccably behaved and interesting and interested in my role as their MP, but when I have a cup of tea with the teachers afterwards, they so often tell me about the negative effect of smartphone apps, online bullying and the frankly shocking content that youngsters are exposed to. I speak to parents across Rother Valley who are deeply concerned about the content available to children, whether it be sexual or of an addictive or exploitative nature. Many feel that they are losing parental control, to some extent at least, to the magnet of online activity. I have run an online survey for constituents about the issue of smartphones and online safety for children over the last few months and have been inundated with these worries. This is an epidemic, which is why this debate and this subject are so important.
There is good work happening to combat the worries. Recently I met a group in my constituency that is run by Sara Cunningham and works in schools across the country in combating misogyny, online violence and pornography. That incredible organisation is doing brilliant work, but it cannot be left to the third sector to regulate this issue or pick up the mess. It is surely time for Government and regulation to take a greater role. I hope that that can be done on a cross-party basis, because this issue crosses the political divide. I would like personally to praise former Prime Minister Theresa May for at least beginning to champion the issue. I hope that, now, this Government and the Minister who is present today can take the issue forward.
Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)
I start by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy), who made really powerful and impactful comments, as have all those who have spoken today. I join her tribute to the bereaved families who have done such incredible work to campaign on this vital issue. I should, before anything else, direct everybody to the work of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who was the architect—the genesis—behind the Online Safety Act. I was one of the many Ministers who took over that baton for a couple of years and pulled the Act together.
As the hon. Member for Darlington said, only when we meet families who have been deeply impacted by online dangers and online harms does the impact of this really land with us. For me, meeting Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life in 2017 as a result of the content that she had seen online, underlined how incredibly disastrous for young and vulnerable people the harms of the internet can be.
As the hon. Lady said, it is not just about the sites that are hosting inappropriate content; it is about the algorithms that take someone’s fears and anxieties and put them into an echo chamber where they are normalised and reinforced, which is the most dangerous part of this. Unfortunately, it is the algorithms that social media companies prize above everything else; they are the most jealously guarded parts of their organisations. Molly was one example resulting from that, but there are so many other examples of suicide, self-harm, anxiety, eating disorders and body image issues that come out of that world.
A year on from the Online Safety Act, it is interesting to see how it is fully implemented, particularly against the backdrop of the speed at which technology is evolving. It is frightening because, virtually every week in our constituencies, we see examples of the harms that are out there. In my constituency, just in the last couple of weeks, junior-age children were using the online world to bully and harass each other. That is something that used to stay within the school gates. Bullying still happened—I am so elderly, and it happened when I was at school—but it was something that was left behind at the school gates; it did not follow you home. Also, 27% of children have seen pornography by the age of 11, which brings a very toxic view of sex and relationships.
The Online Safety Act will hopefully encourage providers to do what they say they are doing when it comes to protecting children online, but the Minister has a huge responsibility to make sure that that happens, and to hold not just them but Ofcom to account to make sure that it is robustly implementing the guidelines that it is setting up. There are some amazing champions of that—Baroness Kidron has made incredible strides in the other place—but we need to make sure that Ofcom has not only the powers but the capacity. It has a huge amount under its jurisdiction and there is a huge amount of pressure. I know that the Minister will work very hard to ensure that it is held to account and equipped with what it needs.
Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)
Huge congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) for securing this debate, which I know is of grave concern not only for my constituents in Stafford, Eccleshall and the villages, but for parents and caregivers throughout the country.
I am concerned that there is a disproportionate impact on girls and young women regarding online harm. Take, for example, the report just mentioned regarding exposure to harmful content; that recent report stated that 60% of girls aged 11 to 16 said that they had received negative comments about their appearance online, so I am very concerned about that growing impact on young people, particularly girls and young women.
Even more troubling is the increase in severe online abuse, such as grooming. In cases where the victim’s gender was identified between 2023 and 24, an overwhelming 81% of the children targeted were girls. I believe the increase in online harm to be directly connected to the increase in violence against women and girls.
I therefore join calls for significantly enhanced rules on social media platforms to safeguard our young people. That must tackle both the blunt and sharp ends of online harm: the insidious exposure to harmful content and the more direct and egregious abuses, such as grooming.
Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) not just on securing this debate but on the way in which she made her case. I want to focus on a couple of the more technical aspects of the Online Safety Act, which are important in fulfilling the objectives that we all share this afternoon, which, as she rightly said, are to make sure that the vehicle that we now have in the OSA delivers the right outcomes for the safety of children online.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage); she is right that I had ministerial responsibility for the Act. I think, frankly, it is harder to find Conservative Ministers who did not have responsibility for it at some point or another, but what we all tried to do was make sure that the structure of the Act would support the objectives that, again, we all share.
I will mention two specific things, which I should be grateful if the Minister would consider. I do not expect her to respond to them this afternoon, but if she would consider them and write to me, I should be very grateful.
It seems to me that we need to make sure that as responsibility for implementing the Act moves from us as legislators to Ofcom as the regulator, Government and Parliament and the regulator are on the same page. There are two areas where I am concerned that that might not be the case. The first is the question whether harm to children is all about content. I do not think it is. We have heard this afternoon that many aspects of risk and harm to children online have nothing to do with the specific nature of an individual piece of content.
The Act is important, and I believe it does support Ofcom’s ability to act in relation to harms beyond specific matters of content. For the Minister’s benefit, I have in mind section 11 of the Act on risk assessment—as she will know, because she knows it off by heart. For everybody else here, section 11 deals with risk assessment, and on that a great deal hangs. If we do a risk assessment, the obligation is to do something about risks, and that hangs on what risks are identified in the assessment. So the risk assessment matters.
As I read the Act, section 11 says that, yes, we must risk-assess for individual harmful pieces of content, but under section 11(6)(f) we also must risk-assess for the different ways that the service is used, including functionalities or other features of the service that affect how much children use the service—which goes back to a point made earlier. Those are the sorts of things it is important to underline that we expect Ofcom to attend to.
I am grateful for the Government’s statement of strategic priorities, but the point made about this being a fast-moving landscape is fundamental. Again in the Act, the codes of practice are vital, because they set out the things that platforms ought to do to keep children safe. If the platforms do the things set out in the codes, they are broadly invulnerable from further regulatory intervention. We need to act urgently to ensure that the codes of practice say what we want them to say. At the moment my concern is that Ofcom may simply talk about current good practice and not urge advancements in good practice to be maintained by the platforms. Those are the two areas that I hope the Minister will think about in relation to the draft codes and the need for an ongoing relationship between us in Parliament and Government and Ofcom to ensure that the Act continues to deliver as we want it to.
Josh MacAlister (Whitehaven and Workington) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) on securing this important debate.
I would like to say a few words about the context of this debate and the parallels between it and some of the debates in the last century, specifically to do with road safety. Despite the car being a relatively common feature on our roads from about 1900, it was not until the 1930s, when there were already 1 million cars on the road, that we decided to introduce any age limit on driving. It was not until 1983 that wearing a seatbelt became compulsory. At that time, many people, including MPs here in Parliament, argued that the law would be impossible to police, was an overreach of the state and would not save any lives. In fact, when it was introduced, deaths dropped dramatically and we got the best out of the rise of the motor vehicle. There is a strong parallel between the introduction of seatbelt measures and what we now need to do as a Parliament on online safety.
The Online Safety Act was an incredibly welcome piece of legislation, but it was the very first measure and must be seen as a stepping-stone piece of legislation rather than a destination in its own right. Most people involved in the creation of the legislation and those at Ofcom themselves would probably recognise that description. Where we need to go next, I believe, is to address issues of excess screen time, social media use and the wider harms that come from the fact that the average 12-year-old is now spending 21 hours a week on their smartphone. There are obvious harms from that. My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington highlighted social anxiety and peer-to-peer comparison and the mental health impacts of that. There are very clear impacts on sleep and on the classroom, and the evidence behind that is growing. There is also an enormous impact in that those 21 hours a week used to be spent by children doing other stuff. Children used to do other things that they now do not do because they spend time on their devices. That presents a complete generational rewiring of childhood, which needs to be considered closely.
That is why it is really welcome that last week the Government announced that they will commission a study into this area. The evidence has moved on considerably since the chief medical officer last looked at this in 2019. With fresh eyes looking at the evidence now, I believe that the chief medical officer will give very different advice. That is why I have introduced the safer phones Bill—the Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill.
I would like three things to happen. First, the age of digital consent for data sharing should be raised from 13 to 16. That would put not just Ofcom, but the Information Commissioner’s Office in a position to regulate this, and I would like extra powers for parent groups to come together to ensure that that is enforced. Secondly, Ofcom needs additional powers to make sure that it can go beyond just the content, as my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington mentioned. Finally, we need to look at this as a public health issue, as well as a tech regulation issue.
Victoria Collins (Harpenden and Berkhamsted) (LD)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. It has also been a real honour to be part of this debate, and I have been scribbling away because so much genuine passion has been put into it. Do I have 10 minutes, Mr Dowd?
Victoria Collins
My cogs are turning—everyone in this debate wants to make a difference, and the time is now. That is the critical point. There is far too much illegal and harmful activity on social media and online, whether that is racist abuse, incitement to violence or the grooming of children—so much has been brought up.
Keeping children safe online is more difficult, but more important, than ever before. Several Members have mentioned that they spoke to their local parent groups and schools. I met children from The Grove school in Harpenden. One child said, “How old do you think I should be to have a smartphone?” And I said, “Well, how old would you like it to be?” He said, “Eleven.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because that is when my brother got his.” It was really interesting that the teachers said, “We are discussing this as a school right now because the kids are asking those questions.” What also came through was the importance of listening to young people, because they are the ones who are crying out for change and saying that something is not right.
We have heard from many Members, including the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy), who set up the debate in a way that that none of us could follow, speaking with passion about the people behind this—the parents and the families. That is what we are all here for. We heard from the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Jake Richards) about how covid exacerbated problems, which highlighted the importance of discussing this issue now. The hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) talked about Ian Russell and Molly; I think most of us are aware of that story. Ian has come to Parliament many times to talk about the impact, and we must never forget his family and so many more behind them. The hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) spoke of the parallels between this issue and road safety, reminding us that we have to act now because, if we do not, we will look back and realise that we were doing a disservice to so many. We have to keep up on safety.
So much of this debate has been about identifying the issues with online safety, such as what the algorithms are sending us, location and chat features, the content and so much more. The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) talked about self-generated explicit content and the pervasive misogyny that so many have mentioned. The hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) mentioned young pornography being a crime and that we need to get the language right. That is key. Sexual inequality and violence are pervasive because of that content.
The hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington spoke about the addictiveness of phones, and the hon. Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) highlighted the fact that mobile phone use is impacting short-sightedness. The hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington mentioned sleep and asked what we are doing about the 21 hours a week spent on phones. So much of this is about what I call “digital mental health”, which refers to what is happening as a whole, beyond the algorithm and the impact of the content. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned self-harm, and I will certainly keep in mind the term “generational rewiring”, which the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington used.
When it comes to legislation, we have not acted fast enough and we have not gone far enough. As has been said, we need to move towards safety by design, but we also need legislation that is reactive and agile enough to keep up with the change. As Liberal Democrats, we were proud to push for the Online Safety Act to go further, and we successfully called for it to include online fraud and scams, as well as to outlaw cyber-flashing.
The hon. Member for Aberdeen North talked about online games, and the fact that we need to stay up to date. The hon. Member for Gosport mentioned holding Ofcom to account. The hon. Member for Stafford (Leigh Ingham) talked about grooming laws, and how we need blunt and sharp elements in the instruments that we use. The right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) reminded us that behind all this, we must get the technicalities right in the Online Safety Act, highlighting that this is not just about the content, but about keeping up with the speed and agility of the change.
As a Liberal Democrat, I would like to highlight what we are calling for. The importance of being proactive has been mentioned many times, and that means calling for safety by design. We are also calling for an independent advocacy body for children’s safety online. We would like to create a new online crime agency to effectively tackle illegal content and online activity, such as revenge porn, threats and incitement to violence on social media. We would also like to include a digital Bill of Rights to protect everyone’s rights online. That includes balancing the rights to privacy, freedom of expression and participation. The regulation of social media must respect the rights and privacy of those who use it legally and responsibly, but should not have a laissez-faire approach.
Another important element is education. The hon. Member for Darlington said that we cannot tackle all of this content. We cannot get all of this right, but it is important that we also empower young people and parents to be able to say what is right and wrong, and to help them to feel empowered to make a change, whether that is by using tools, or by speaking up and saying, “Actually, this is not right.” We should make sure that they feel they have that voice.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) mentioned that big tech needs to be held accountable—absolutely. We have to make sure that those who are building the platforms are the ones who ensure their safety by design, and that they keep up with that.
I close with a reminder that keeping young people safe online is more difficult, but more important, than ever before. We must act sooner rather than later and use all the tools at our disposal, whether that is through Ofcom and regulatory changes, by incentivising companies or by educating parents and children. Frankly, from the debate I have heard today, I have hope that if we work together, we can make sure that those changes are enacted swiftly and are kept up to date.
Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I would like to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) for securing this debate. She spoke powerfully and knowledgeably on a wide range of issues, particularly on the children’s codes, and her requests for reform and improvements.
There were many contributions from hon. Members in this important debate, but one that really struck me, and which I would like to draw particular attention to, was the contribution from the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns). When hon. Members speak in debates, there are few times when all Members listen. She spoke rightly and powerfully about the awful statistics—I say “statistics”, but I really mean the number of horrendous acts of child sexual abuse that have been and are taking place, and the impact that that will have on those children and, indeed, all people who are exposed to it. All of us, as parliamentarians, need to be very mindful of that. Each and every one is an individual tragedy.
Protecting children from harmful or illegal content is something that all Members are committed to, and it is right that we work together to protect children. I welcome the Online Safety Act brought in by the last Conservative Government. That groundbreaking legislation had the protection of children at its heart, introducing effective, pragmatic laws and restrictions to combat some of the horrors we have heard about. It was great to have several of the architects of the Online Safety Act taking part in the debate and asking pertinent questions to the Minister, whose job it is to ensure that this piece of legislation works for us, our children and our families.
As a responsible Opposition, it is now our job to pose the questions and to support the Government in delivering protections for our children. I will make my speech in that spirit, particularly with a series of questions that I have for the Minister about the Act’s implementation.
I commend the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology for meeting bereaved parents who have lost children to harmful online content, and for publishing the draft statement of strategic priorities for online safety. I pay tribute to those in the Gallery whose families have been tragically affected by online harms.
The Secretary of State has stated that the Government will implement safety by design to stop more harm occurring in the first place. We support the Government’s aspiration to deliver safe online experiences for all users, as we did in the previous Government. It is important that we consider whether the expectation should fall on users to take precautionary steps to avoid severely harmful content, and particularly those who are most vulnerable. But when the Government talk of safety by design, it is crucial that they place the onus on social media companies to ensure the safety of their users. Given the role that algorithms play in pushing themed content to users, what plans do the Government have to empower users to exercise greater personal control over the algorithms?
The Government outlined the need to ensure that there are no safe havens online for illegal content and activity. Although we wholeheartedly support that aim, to what extent will removing the ease of mainstream access push such content further out of sight and possible regulation? We support the Government’s desire to improve transparency and accountability across the sector, but while there is a desire to increase algorithmic transparency, how do the Government intend to improve regulatory co-ordination in the pursuit of achieving that? In addition, the inculcation of a culture of candour via the transparency reporting regime will be challenging. How will that be facilitated?
In January 2024, Instagram and Facebook announced that they would block under-18s from seeing harmful content relating to eating disorders, self-harm and suicide, but it has been highlighted that the content is so prevalent that it can still be found easily online. What steps do the Government intend to take to ensure that the existing legislation is enforced?
We must ensure that children are protected from material that is not age-appropriate, such as pornography. That is why the last Government tightened up age restrictions by requiring social media companies to enforce age limits consistently and to protect their child users. It is right that services must assess any risk to children from using their platforms and set appropriate age restrictions, ensuring that child users have age-appropriate experiences and are shielded from harmful content. Again, this should be followed closely to ensure that platforms—or indeed, children—are not finding ways around restrictions. Currently, age checks are not strong across all platforms. I would welcome the Minister’s thoughts on how the Government plan to do that. Restrictions introduced by the last Government are a good start but, as was noted in the debate, as technology changes, we must keep up.
The Government talk of ensuring that age assurance technology to protect children is being effectively deployed. How do they intend to ensure that that happens and to ensure that companies are investing in the most up-to-date technology to facilitate it? Will the Government proactively stress-test that capability?
We must stand against the harms that come our children’s way. We must build on the success of the previous Conservative Government by ensuring that all restrictions and laws work. We must embrace technology and understand that the internet and social media, in general, are a force for good, embedded in our daily lives, while also understanding that checks and balances are essential if we are to ensure a safe online environment for all users.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Feryal Clark)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) on securing this debate. As hon. Members can see, debates in Westminster Hall take a whole different form from debates in the House; they are a lot more informative and collegiate, and Westminster Hall is a much nicer place to debate. I welcome the parents in the Public Gallery and thank them for their commitment and the work they continue to do to make sure that this issue stays on our agenda and continues to be debated. I know they have met my colleagues, and I look forward to meeting them as well.
I am grateful to all hon. Members for the incredibly powerful and informative contributions to today’s debate. As the mother of two young children, I always have online safety on my mind. Every time I am on my phone in front of my children or want to keep them distracted by putting on a YouTube video, it scares me, and the issue is always at the back of my mind. It is important that we as parents always have the safety of our children in mind. My hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Jake Richards) talked about being a parent to really young children while being an MP or candidate. As a mother who had two children in part during the last term, I can assure him that it does get easier. I am happy to exchange some tips.
The growth in the use of phones and social media has been a huge societal change, and one that we as parents and citizens are grappling with. I am grateful to all hon. Members here who are engaging in this debate. The Government are committed to keeping children safe online, and it is crucial that we continue to have conversations about how best to achieve that goal. We live in a digital age, and we know that being online can benefit children of all ages, giving them access to better connections, education, information and entertainment. However, we know that it can also accentuate vulnerabilities and expose children to harmful and age-inappropriate content. We believe that our children should be well-equipped to make the most of the digital opportunities of the future, but we must strike the right balance so that children can access the benefits of being online while we continue to put their safety first.
Last week, the Secretary of State visited NSPCC headquarters to speak to their voice of online youth group. That is just the latest meeting in a programme of engagement undertaken by the Secretary of State and my colleague in the other place, Baroness Maggie Jones. Getting this right has been and will continue to be a long process. Many hon. Members here will remember the battle to get the Online Safety Act passed. Despite the opposition—some Members in this place sought to weaken it—there was cross-party consensus and a lot of support, and so it was passed.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Ind)
On a number of occasions during the passage of the Online Safety Bill in this House, I raised the story of my constituent Joe Nihill from Leeds, who sadly took his own life after accessing very dangerous suicide-related content. I want to bring to the Minister’s attention that before Ofcom’s new powers are put into practice at some point next year, there is a window where there is a particular onus on internet service providers to take action. The website that my constituent accessed, which encouraged suicide, deterred people from seeking mental health support and livestreamed suicide, has been blocked for people of all ages by Sky and Three. Will the Minister congratulate those two companies for doing that at this stage and encourage all internet service providers to do the same before Ofcom’s new powers are implemented next year?
Feryal Clark
I thank the hon. Member for making that point and I absolutely welcome that intervention by internet providers. As I will go on to say, internet providers do not have to wait for the Act to be enacted; they can start making such changes now. I absolutely agree with him.
Many colleagues have raised the issue of the adequacy of the Online Safety Act. It is a landmark Act, but it is also imperfect. Ofcom’s need to consult means a long lead-in time; although it is important to get these matters right, that can often feel frustrating. None the less, we are clear that the Government’s priority is Ofcom’s effective implementation of the Act, so that those who use social media, especially children, can benefit from the Act’s wider reach and protections as soon as possible. To that end, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology became the first Secretary of State to set out a draft statement of strategic priorities to ensure that safety cannot be an afterthought but must be baked in from the start.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) raised the issue of suicide and self-harm. Ofcom is in the process of bringing the Online Safety Act’s provisions into effect. Earlier this year, it conducted a consultation on the draft illegal content, with one of the most harmful types being content about suicide. Child safety codes of practice were also consulted on. We expect the draft illegal content codes to be in effect by spring 2025, with child safety codes following in the summer.
Under the Act, user-to-user and search services will need to assess the risk that they might facilitate illegal content and must put in place measures to manage and mitigate any such risk. In addition, in-scope services likely to be accessed by children will need to protect children from content that is legal but none the less harmful to children, including pornography, bullying and violent content. The Act is clear that user-to-user services that allow the most harmful types of content must use highly effective age-assurance technology to prevent children from accessing it.
Ofcom will be able to use robust enforcement powers against companies that fail to fulfil their duties. Ofcom’s draft codes set out what steps services can take to meet those duties. The proposals mean that user-to-user services that do not ban harmful content should introduce highly effective age checks to prevent children from accessing the entire site or app, or age-restrict those parts of the service that host harmful content. The codes also tackle algorithms that amplify harm and feed harmful material to children, which have been discussed today. Under Ofcom’s proposal, services will have to configure their algorithms to filter out the most harmful types of content from children’s feeds, and reduce the visibility and prominence of other harmful content.
The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) and others discussed strengthening the codes. Ofcom has been very clear that it will look to strengthen the codes in future iterations. The Government will encourage it to do so as harmful online technology and the evidence base about such technology evolves.
Feryal Clark
I am short of time, so I will have to proceed.
For example, Ofcom recently announced plans to launch a further consultation on the illegal content duties once the first iteration of those duties is set out in spring next year. That iterative approach enables Ofcom to prioritise getting its initial codes in place as soon as possible while it builds on the foundations set out in that first set of codes.
My hon. Friends the Members for Slough (Mr Dhesi) and for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) and the hon. Member for Aberdeen North raised the issue of violence against girls and women. In line with our safer streets mission, platforms will have new duties to create safer spaces for women and girls. It is a priority of the Online Safety Act for platforms proactively to tackle the most harmful illegal content, which includes offences such as harassment, sexual exploitation, extreme pornography, internet image abuse, stalking and controlling or coercive behaviour, much of which disproportionately affects women and girls. All services in scope of the Act need to understand the risks facing women and girls from illegal content online and take action to mitigate that.
My hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) set out powerfully the issues around child sexual exploitation and abuse. Child sexual abuse is a vile crime that inflicts long-lasting trauma on victims. UK law is crystal clear: the creation, possession and distribution of child sexual abuse images is illegal. The strongest protections in the Online Safety Act are against child sexual abuse and exploitation. Ofcom will have strong powers to direct online platforms and messaging and search services to combat that kind of abuse. It will be able to require platforms to use accredited, proactive technology to tackle CSEA and will have powers to hold senior managers criminally liable if they fail to protect children.
I am running short of time, so I shall make some final remarks. While we remain resolute in our commitment to implementing the Online Safety Act as quickly and effectively as possible, we recognise the importance of these ongoing conversations, and I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to today’s debate. I am grateful to the brave parents who continue to fight for protections for children online and shine a light on these important issues. The Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer), asked a host of questions. I will respond to him in writing, because I do not have time to do so today, and I will place a copy in the Library.
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
I call Lola McEvoy to briefly respond to the debate.
Lola McEvoy
Thank you, Mr Dowd. I am grateful to the Minister for her response.
We have had an insightful and cohesive debate, and I thank all Members for their time and expertise. It is clear to me—and, I am sure, to all of us—that innovation has outstripped legislation, leaving our children and young people shouting for help. Crime is organised and exacerbated on these platforms, and the police cannot stop it without our help. Twenty-four-hour access means that content and bullying have caused school refusals, and our educators cannot teach our children without our help.
Children and young people never share everything with their parents, but the sheer quantity of material, along with the functions of content providers, means that parents cannot protect their children without our help. Children’s mental health services are drowning after huge surges in the number of those needing support. Many issues are caused or exacerbated by online platforms, and our NHS cannot get our children well without our help. Today has demonstrated cross-party agreement for action, as well as agreement that this is one of the great issues of our time. We have our consensus, so now let us use it.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered online safety for children and young people.
Suicide and Mental Health of Young People: Tatton
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
I will call Esther McVey to move the motion. I will then call the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.
Esther McVey (Tatton) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of suicide and mental health of young people in Tatton constituency.
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I would like to convey my appreciation to the Minister for replying to this extremely important and sensitive debate on the management of withdrawal from antidepressant medication, specifically selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and the profound impact that that process can have on the mental health and suicide risk of young people.
I would like to begin by conveying my sincere thanks to my constituent, Gina Russell, who met me and bravely shared the experience of her daughter, Olivia, who tragically took her life in September 2021, following withdrawal from SSRI medication. Olivia’s mum is unable to be with us in Westminster Hall today. However, I know that she and her family are watching this debate at home, as they are determined to help prevent others having to suffer the same fate as Olivia.
I would also like to place on record my thanks to the charities Mind, Rethink Mental Illness, PAPYRUS Prevention of Young Suicide, as well as to The Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition and the House of Commons Library for the information provided to me before this debate. While the information was insightful, it was deeply disturbing, as it revealed that Olivia’s experience of declining mental health as medication was withdrawn was far from unique and was a known risk, which made me determined to pursue this debate on behalf of her family and thus bring Olivia’s story and her family’s suffering to a wider audience.
Let me start by painting a picture of Olivia, who was an intelligent, creative and hard-working 25-year-old who had just left Tatton to live in London. Her parents remember her as wonderful and vibrant—a loving daughter and a loving younger sister to her brother, Luke; a cherished and adored granddaughter; and a loyal, kind and supportive friend. She lit up a room and was admired by all who knew and loved her.
In November 2020, during the pandemic, Olivia became anxious. She began taking an SSRI—citalopram—to manage her anxiety. Initially, Olivia responded well to treatment. However, when the time came to discontinue the medication in June 2021, she experienced a rapid decline in her mental health, which was far worse than what she had previously faced. She then resumed SSRI treatment in August 2021, finally taking her life in September 2021. When she first came off her medication it was without consulting her GP, because she was feeling better. She should have been warned about stopping taking the antidepressant. The family was later to discover that citalopram is one of the most difficult antidepressants to come off.
Tragically, the Royal College of Psychiatrists suggests that between a third and half of people who take antidepressant medications experience withdrawal symptoms to some extent. The severity and duration of these symptoms, and whom they affect, is not certain. In Olivia’s case, the withdrawal symptoms were severe and the resulting deterioration in her mental state ultimately led to her taking her own life. Members should bear in mind that suicide remains the leading cause of death among young people under 35 in the UK, and the mental health of young people has declined alarmingly in recent years.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the right hon. Lady for the very sensitive way in which she is delivering her speech. In Northern Ireland, the worrying thing about suicides is that we have had an 8% increase in the last year. It worries me greatly that people are unable to cope with life. Does the right hon. Lady not agree that the inability of GPs—I think she mentioned this—to refer patients to early intervention on mental health is something that must be tackled? Early support for young people, and easy access to it, is the only way to give a lifeline to those who are struggling at a very young age.
Esther McVey
I thank my colleague and friend for that pertinent intervention.
The pandemic lockdown exacerbated the mental health crisis, as it brought isolation, uncertainty and disrupted routines at home, in education and in the workplace, taking an immense toll on young people’s wellbeing. During that period, the use of antidepressants, including SSRIs, rose significantly. Meanwhile, access to in-person medical support was often severely limited, which may have worsened the challenges faced by patients navigating their mental health and medication.
Last year, the closure of England’s only dedicated antidepressant withdrawal helpline, the Bristol and district tranquilliser project, left a further gap in support services for patients, at a time when mental health services are under immense strain. Analysis from the children and young people’s mental health coalition shows that 1.5 million children and young people could need new or increased mental health support as a result of the pandemic.
Those factors combined to create a perfect storm for young people struggling with mental health challenges, with many prescribed SSRI medication as a solution by their medical practitioners. It is important to note the life-changing and positive impact that such medication has had on many people across the country, and I do not seek to contest that or the ability of those medications vastly to improve the mental health of many patients. However, we must also acknowledge that the process of withdrawing from SSRIs can be fraught with challenges that leave patients vulnerable.
In Olivia’s case, her family believed that she was left in the dark. Her mother recalls that the information provided by her GP was limited and did not adequately warn of the risks of sudden or poorly managed withdrawal. As a result, following her death, the exceptional decision was taken by the coroner to produce a prevention of future deaths report. It found no evidence that Olivia was explicitly warned about the risks of relapse or the potential signs of withdrawal, or told that she might feel worse before feeling better. The report concluded that while advice may have been given, it was not conclusive and concern was expressed regarding the inconsistency of advice that each GP might give patients. The report could not say with confidence that every GP within Olivia’s practice was discussing the key risks associated with SSRI medication withdrawal.
That requires our immediate attention, as the principle of informed consent, which underpins our healthcare system, requires that patients are fully aware of the benefits and risks of any medical procedure or treatment. The General Medical Council’s professional standards for decision making and consent stipulate that doctors’ discussions should recognise the effect of the patient’s individual clinical circumstances on the probability of benefit or harm occurring.
Guidance from the GMC acknowledges that the amount of information doctors provide to patients can vary due to time constraints. Where such time constraints exist, doctors are encouraged to involve other medical professionals, such as clinicians, or to refer patients to the patient information leaflet accompanying their medication. Patients are legally entitled to a patient information leaflet with their prescriptions, but the responsibility for providing it lies with pharmacies. That places the onus on patients, potentially in a vulnerable position, to navigate complex decisions alone. The leaflets are often lengthy and rely on a patient reading and understanding information provided.
The issue is compounded by outdated guidance. Until recently, guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence—NICE—suggested that withdrawal symptoms typically last one to two weeks. That has now been updated to reflect the fact that symptoms can be more severe and prolonged, but the updates have not yet translated into comprehensive and systematic changes to ensure that patients are adequately supported. Inconsistent guidance on antidepressant withdrawal has resulted in many patients experiencing distressing and debilitating symptoms. Patients have been misdiagnosed as suffering from a relapse of their original mental health condition, and others have been left fearful about stopping using their antidepressants. That may have contributed to many individuals staying on their antidepressant medication for longer than is necessary, with a report in 2023 suggesting that 2 million people are taking antidepressants for five years or more.
What improvements can be made to ensure the better facilitation of SSRI withdrawal? Olivia’s family believe that there are measures that could be taken that would go far in protecting patients when withdrawing from the medication. A move as simple as placing a warning label on the packaging of SSRI prescriptions would be a straightforward way to convey the dangers of the medication. It would not replace the more comprehensive information provided in a patient information leaflet, or the guidance of a GP. However, it would act as a safeguard in circumstances should those fail. The safety of patients’ prescribed medications must be guaranteed, not left to change based on appointment time constraints or whether a patient has read in full the often lengthy patient information leaflet.
The story of Olivia and her family is a painful reminder of the urgent need to address the risks associated with SSRI withdrawal, and the broader mental health crisis facing young people today. While SSRIs have transformed countless lives, we cannot overlook the vulnerability of those navigating withdrawal. We owe it to families like Olivia’s to ensure that no one feels unsupported or uninformed when taking such important decisions. Simple measures, such as enhanced warnings on medication packages, improved guidance for medical practitioners and comprehensive advice can make the process of withdrawal palpably easier and safer, potentially offering better outcomes for individuals navigating the complex process of withdrawal from SSRIs.
I would be grateful for the Minister’s consideration of the issues I have discussed. Finally, in Olivia’s instance, the coroner produced a prevention of future deaths report, so I ask the Minister how such a report can become wholesale advice to the medical profession? Will he work with me to ensure that it does, in order to prevent lives like Olivia’s being cut tragically short?
The Minister for Care (Stephen Kinnock)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) for securing this debate and raising many important issues. I also thank her for sharing the tragic story of Olivia. My heart goes out to Olivia’s family and loved ones; it is a truly heartbreaking situation and process that they have gone through.
The right hon. Lady made a number of important points about withdrawal from SSRI antidepressants. A number of those points are quite specific, and I do not have in specific responses my notes. With her leave, I would like to write to her with responses on those points. She made a point about the coroner’s advice, which contained a lot of useful counsel on how we might address and tackle the issues raised. I will certainly look at that in detail, and will happily take those matters forward with her. We have a shared interest in addressing the issue. If the system is not working and people who are on that antidepressant are not being supported with withdrawal, we need to look at that in detail. We need to tackle it—I share her views on that.
I will turn to some more general points about the Government’s position on mental health. We have made suicide prevention and mental health a priority, especially for young people. Many of the issues raised today are symptomatic of an NHS that is broken. Looking at the figures, the challenges that face the NHS are truly sobering.
About 50% of lifetime mental health conditions are established by the time an individual is 14 and 75% by the time they are 24. Evidence suggests that the prevalence of mental health conditions is rising among children and young people. In 2023, 20.3% of eight to 16-year-olds had a probable disorder, compared with 12.5% in 2017. Of course, the covid-19 pandemic exacerbated needs, with analysis showing that 1.5 million children and young people under the age of 18 could need new or increased mental health support following the pandemic.
According to the Darzi review, 343,000 referrals for children and young people under the age of 18 are waiting for mental health services, including 109,000 referrals waiting for more than a year. Under the NHS Cheshire and Merseyside integrated care board, as of the end of September 2024, 10% of children and young people still waiting for first contact with NHS-funded mental health services were waiting for more than 951 days, equating to 1,301 people. Half of those still waiting had been waiting for more than 300 days. There are 13,010 children and young people still waiting for first contact with NHS-funded mental health services.
Until recently, there had been an upward trend in suicide rates for children and young people. For women between the ages of 10 and 24, the rate has nearly doubled since 2012, rising from 1.6 per 100,000 to 3.1 per 100,000 in 2023.
Helen Grant (Maidstone and Malling) (Con)
Over the past 10 years in England and Wales, one student has died every four days as a result of suicide. Despite that forlorn tragedy, the law remains unclear about the duties and responsibilities universities have towards their often very vulnerable young students. Will the Minister meet me and members of the LEARN Network and ForThe100 to discuss the introduction of a statutory duty of care for all higher education providers?
Stephen Kinnock
I thank the hon. Lady for that important intervention. I am happy to meet her and the LEARN Network. The Government cannot do all this alone; we need to work in partnership with all sorts of different stakeholders, including universities and the higher education sector. We would support any partnership working that we can do.
Until recently, there had been an upward trend in suicide rates for children and young people. For women between the ages of 10 and 24, the rate has almost doubled, but the trend for children and young people has flattened in the past year, despite overall increases in suicide. Although those rates are low compared with those for other age groups, children and young people are a priority group in our mission to tackle suicide. The Department is commissioning research via the National Institute for Health and Care Research to advance our understanding of why rates of suicide have been increasing in certain age groups.
We are committed to reforming the NHS to ensure that we give mental health the same attention and focus as physical health. It is unacceptable that too many children, young people and adults are not receiving the mental health care that they need. We know that waits for mental health services are far too long. We are determined to change that. That is why we will recruit 8,500 additional mental health workers across children’s and adult mental health services. We will also introduce a specialist mental health professional in every school and roll out young futures hubs to provide timely mental health support to our children and young people.
We are working with our colleagues at NHS England and the Department for Education as we plan delivery of those commitments. Furthermore, the Government are also committed to tackling suicide as one of the biggest killers in our country. The suicide prevention strategy proposes targeted support for priority groups such as children and young people. The Department for Education is reviewing the statutory guidance on relationships, sex and health education, and the Secretary of State for Education is clear that children’s wellbeing should be at the heart of it.
Some 79 voluntary, community or social enterprise organisations up and down the country have been allocated funding through the Department of Health and Social Care’s £10 million suicide prevention grant fund over the two years to March 2025. These organisations—from local and community-led through to national—deliver a broad and diverse range of activity that will prevent suicides and save lives.
Early intervention on mental health issues is vital if we want to stop young people reaching crisis point. Schools and colleges play an important role in that early support, which is why we have committed to providing a mental health professional at every school. Mental health support teams help to meet the needs of children and young people in education settings; such teams, which are made up of mental health practitioners and education mental health specialists, are available in schools in Tatton.
However, it is not enough to provide access to a mental health professional when young people are struggling. We want the education system to set young people up to thrive, and we know that schools and colleges can have a profound impact in promoting good mental health and wellbeing. Doing this well takes a holistic approach, drawing in many aspects of the school or college’s provision. Many schools are already doing that, and my Department is working alongside the Department for Education to understand how we can support such good practice across the sector, and across the length and breadth of our country.
The opportunity mission will break the link between people’s background and their success. The mission will build opportunity for all by giving every child the best start in life: high-quality early education, early child health, home learning environments and family support. The mission will also support children to achieve and thrive, ensuring high school standards with a broad curriculum, excellent teachers and targeted interventions, an inclusive approach to special educational needs and disabilities, mental health support, access to arts, culture and sport, and youth services and provision.
In our manifesto, the Government committed to rolling out young futures hubs. This national network is expected to bring together local services, deliver support for teenagers at risk of being drawn into crime or facing mental health challenges, and, where appropriate, deliver universal youth provision. The hubs will provide open-access mental health support for children and young people in every community.
We are concerned about the widespread availability of harmful material online, promoting content on eating disorders, suicide and self-harm, that can easily be accessed by people who may be young and/or vulnerable. We have been clear that the Government’s priority is the effective implementation of the Online Safety Act 2023, so that those who use social media—especially children—can benefit from its wide-ranging protections as soon in their lives as possible. Earlier this year, Ofcom concluded its consultations on the draft illegal content and child safety codes of practice. We expect the illegal content codes to be in effect by spring 2025, with the child safety codes following in the summer.
I will turn to other aspects of our plans to improve mental health services. The Mental Health Bill, which was announced in the King’s Speech, will deliver the Government’s manifesto commitment to modernise the Mental Health Act 1983 by giving patients greater choice and autonomy and enhanced rights and support, and aims to ensure that everyone is treated with dignity and respect throughout their treatment. It is important to get the balance right to ensure people get the support and treatment they need when necessary for their protection and for that of others.
I am pleased to say that the Bill has been introduced in the Lords and will be coming to the Commons in the new year. The Bill will make the Mental Health Act fit for the 21st century, redressing the balance of power from the system to the patient and ensuring that people with the most severe mental health conditions get better, more personalised care. It will limit the scope to detain people with a learning disability and autistic people under the Act unless they have a co-occurring mental health disorder that needs hospital treatment.
I conclude by once again commending the right hon. Member for Tatton for securing the debate and colleagues from across the House, including the hon. Members for Maidstone and Malling (Helen Grant) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for sharing their insight on the vital issue of suicide prevention and mental health care for children and young people. I am committed to working with the right hon. Member for Tatton and her hon. Friend, the hon. Member for Maidstone and Malling, to take forward these issues, and I hope that we can, together—across the House—address this vital issue.
Question put and agreed to.
Project Gigabit
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the rollout of Project Gigabit in rural areas.
It is a pleasure to serve under your unexpected chairmanship, Mr Dowd.
Broadband and internet access are as vital today as electricity and water. They underpin our daily lives, helping us work, learn, access healthcare and stay in touch with loved ones.
In my former career in healthcare, I saw the transformative potential of digital connectivity. From telemedicine to electronic records, fast and reliable broadband has revolutionised how care is delivered, making it more efficient and accessible, but for too many of my constituents in rural areas these opportunities remain out of reach.
Over recent years, the UK has made remarkable progress in expanding broadband access. Project Gigabit, launched as part of the Conservative Government’s national infrastructure strategy in 2020, aims to deliver gigabit-capable broadband nationwide. Nearly four years on, 81% of UK households have gigabit access, compared with just 7% in January 2019—a dramatic leap that highlights the success of the initiative.
In constituencies like mine, Farnham and Bordon, that progress has been essential. Faster, more reliable broadband has driven economic growth, created jobs, improved educational opportunities and enhanced social inclusion. However, the roll-out has not been without challenges, especially in rural areas where significant disparities persist.
The Conservative Government committed £5 billion to Project Gigabit to deliver the fastest broadband to homes and businesses across the country. That funding has supported 37 major projects worth £1.9 billion and reached more than 1 million premises. An additional 118,000 gigabit vouchers have been awarded, enabling rural households and businesses to upgrade their broadband infrastructure.
The rural gigabit connectivity programme, with £200 million-worth of investment, targeted the most remote and hard-to-reach areas. These upgrades have transformed connectivity in places previously left behind. Public sector buildings such as GP surgeries, libraries and schools have also benefited, ensuring that vital services have the infrastructure to support their communities. The resilience provided by gigabit broadband was especially crucial during the covid-19 pandemic, enabling remote working, virtual learning and digital healthcare.
For those not covered by Project Gigabit, the universal service obligation introduced in the Digital Economy Act 2017 provided a safety net. That legal guarantee of a minimum of 10 megabits per second ensured that no one was completely left behind.
Despite these successes, however, there remains a stark urban/rural divide in broadband access. Although 81% of urban premises now have gigabit-capable broadband, only 44% of rural premises can say the same. These statistics highlight the ongoing challenges facing constituencies like Farnham and Bordon.
Gregory Stafford
I give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds).
Damian Hinds
My hon. Friend is right to identify the progress made in constituencies like his, Farnham and Bordon, or mine, East Hampshire. Does he agree, however, that improvement is all the more urgent and important in the most rural areas, where there is already very poor or no mobile signal and very poor broadband speed? They are not on the list for the commercial gigabit roll-out and some are not on the list for the second tier of gigabit roll-out. On top of all that, they hear the announcement that the PSTN—the public switched telephone network—is going to be switched off. In the event of an emergency, in the event of a power cut, they are in danger of being marooned.
Gregory Stafford
My right hon. Friend makes an extraordinarily prescient point. That is a combination of factors that will leave many in rural areas, especially those who are elderly or have other caring needs, at a real disadvantage. That is why it is so essential to turbocharge this roll-out going forward.
Ann Davies
Gigabit availability in my constituency of Caerfyrddin in west Wales is just 42%. The Welsh average is 70% and the UK average is 79%; we are on 42%. The Public Accounts Committee has previously said that the 2030 target for full UK-wide gigabit coverage is not feasible, given the delays and the overreliance on commercial providers. Can the Minister reassure the people in rural Wales that they will not continue to be left behind, and that the target will actually be met? Diolch.
Gregory Stafford
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. The fact is that many of our rural constituencies are so far below the national average that it is a real problem. In my constituency, gigabit coverage lags well below the national average, with 65.5% of premises connected in the old constituency of South West Surrey and 64.4% in the old constituency of East Hampshire. Both are over 10% below the UK average despite being just an hour’s drive away from London. In the villages of Tilford, Dippenhall and Greatham, broadband speeds are shockingly poor. In one Dippenhall postcode, 100% of properties lack speeds above 10 megabits per second. Similarly, in parts of Greatham, constituents are stuck with outdated speeds that cannot support modern digital demands. To put this in perspective, Londoners with gigabit connections enjoy speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, while my constituents struggle with speeds 100 times slower.
These numbers represent more than just technical deficiencies; they have a real and profound impact on people’s lives. Take, for example, a resident of Dippenhall who wrote to me to share their frustration. Their home is deemed inaccessible by Openreach, leaving them completely excluded from the benefits of gigabit broadband. Another example is Victoria, a magistrate in my constituency who commutes two hours each way to London. Victoria’s broadband speed—1.5 megabits per second download and 0.8 megabits per second upload—makes it impossible for her to work remotely or participate in virtual court hearings. During the covid-19 pandemic, while her colleagues in London worked from home with ease, Victoria was left unable to contribute. This digital inequality places an unnecessary strain on her family life, finances, and professional opportunities.
Even Moor Park, in the east of Farnham, suffers from poor speeds of just 20 megabits per second download and five megabits per second upload—far below what is needed for modern working or learning. These residents, along with those in Beacon Hill, Hindhead and Frensham, feel increasingly left behind in a world that is becoming ever more digital.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Perhaps we should hear a bit of good news, as it is only right that we should do that. Whenever the DUP were in partnership with the Conservatives, part of that deal was a £200 million boost for Northern Ireland to ensure better connectivity. All of that has been spent. Some 96.42% of premises in Northern Ireland now have the most up-to-date connectivity. But connectivity for rural businesses is the issue—there are still some 60,000 businesses that need to be reached. When it comes to looking forward to the future, to see what we can do, does the Minister agree that small businesses need to be focused on?
Gregory Stafford
Absolutely; I agree. As Conservatives, I am very happy to work with the DUP on any matters that are in our interest together. It just goes to show that this is not just a regional issue—it covers the whole of the United Kingdom. We need to support small businesses.
That brings me to a number of those compound challenges that my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) also talked about. According to a Lloyds bank report, 11 million people—nearly 21% of the UK population—are digitally disadvantaged. In Surrey, an estimated 200,000 people face digital exclusion. It is the same in Hampshire, particularly in Headley Down, Grayshott and Liphook. Even in more populated areas, such as Farnham town, broadband speeds are far below the national average, affecting businesses, schools, and families. For many of my constituents, the lack of reliable broadband creates barriers to accessing healthcare, education and job opportunities. It also isolates people socially, particularly the elderly and the vulnerable. I pay tribute to two county councillors in my constituency, Debbie Curnow-Ford and David Harmer, who are working hard to help with that.
In hard-to-reach areas such as Dippenhall and Moor Park, alternative technologies offer some hope. Satellite-based internet, for example, could provide connectivity to rural areas where traditional infrastructure is not economically viable. Competitive bidding within Project Gigabit has already allowed smaller telecom providers to target these underserved regions, breaking Openreach’s historical monopoly.
Earlier this week I met representatives from CityFibre, which operates in parts of Hampshire, including Bramshott, Liphook and Headley Down. Their involvement shows how opening the market to competition fosters innovation and provides tailored, affordable broadband packages to meet local needs. That diversification is critical for ensuring fair and affordable access for all.
Diversifying the network also encourages local internet service providers, such as Grayshott Gigabit in my constituency. It is an award-winning full fibre broadband service and the winner of the Internet Service Providers’ Association UK award in 2024 for best rural provider. Those smaller-scale operatives can only continue to expand if they have continued Government support.
While I recognise that the new Labour Government have pledged to deliver nationwide gigabit broadband by 2030, I want to hold them to account. As my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith) pointed out when he was the shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, we must avoid recreating the digital divide seen in Wales, as referenced earlier, where only 76% of premises have gigabit access, compared with nearly 90% in England.
The Labour Government must ensure that rural areas are not left behind. We cannot repeat past mistakes, in which funding and resources disproportionately favoured urban centres, leaving rural communities to fend for themselves. To address those challenges, I join colleagues in writing to the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology with the following requests: that the full £5 billion allocated to Project Gigabit is retained; that the funding is divided proportionately between urban and rural areas; and that rural areas where broadband is not commercially viable are prioritised for future investment.
As I have said, Project Gigabit has already transformed lives and communities, but there is much more to do. We owe it to constituents such as Victoria, the residents of Dippenhall and the families in Moor Park to deliver the connectivity that they deserve. Let us ensure that no community, urban or rural, is left behind in the digital age. It is time to close the digital divide once and for all.
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
I remind Members to bob if they wish to be called.
Mr Luke Charters (York Outer) (Lab)
While it is a pleasure to speak in the debate today, I am hoping it is one that we do not need to keep having. Like many of us, I represent a rural community, and if there is one thing I am desperate to fix, it is sorting out t’internet for my constituents. I make no apologies for my local dialect because up north, we all joke about the rubbish internet signal in rural Yorkshire. It is a huge barrier for many.
There are unique perplexities in the geography of my constituency of York Outer; anyone who has seen it on a map will know that. Some call it a doughnut and some call it a Polo mint. Effectively, it is sweeping Yorkshire countryside with vibrant villages and closely knit communities. However, we see one challenge, and that is the focus of today’s debate: broadband.
Those unique perplexities do not just extend to the constituency’s map; there are cases within it. Take Haxby and Huntington. Forgive me the pun: because of the way my constituency is wired, quite literally, there are roads where a house on one side has fantastic connectivity, but on the other side the internet is terribly slow, and the last time that side got an update, Teletext was on the TV.
A quick roll-out of good internet really matters for our mission of economic growth, so I welcome the more than £500 million in the Budget, committed for 2025-26, to deliver Project Gigabit and the shared rural network. It will play a pivotal role in delivering full gigabit broadband coverage by 2030. However, the focus of my remarks is to feed back on an important experience for one of my constituents, and on why an important upgrade in York Outer is needed.
I start on a specific issue that I would like to pick up with the Minister separately, if he would be so kind as to meet me. I have a Ministry of Defence site in my constituency, in the area of Strensall, that recently missed out on a roll-out of hyperfast connectivity. There are nearly 100 military houses on that site that need an upgrade, and they need it badly. For context, some of the people there are suffering with speeds of less than 10 megabytes per second on copper cables, compared with some residential houses opposite that now have speeds of up to 1,200 megabits per second, and—colleagues, wait for this—at the same cost! Serving families deserve so much better. I am not sure whether it is the Defence Infrastructure Organisation or Openreach that is responsible for the project, but I would love to get it fixed, if possible, with the Minister’s help. If I could meet him, that would be brilliant.
I will draw on another case study. I have heard from residents in Haxby about Project Lightning, a 2019 initiative to bring full-fibre to the village. Although the work was completed, unfortunately some houses were missed out. The cost of that is felt by one couple who recently told me that they work from home, but are now struggling to join calls with clients. They cannot both go on calls with clients at the same time, and that is affecting their fantastic small business.
I have also had constituents write to me about the need for upgrades in Hopgrove, just four miles from York city centre. I am hopeful that Project Gigabit and the Government’s work on the internet roll-out more broadly can help my constituents, something I would like to discuss in detail another time. I am supportive of the Government’s work to roll out Project Gigabit, and my case studies hopefully illustrate a glimpse of why it is so important.
Finally, I thank the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) for securing this debate, allowing me to raise those important constituency cases.
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
Thank you for your forbearance. Please try to keep to three minutes. I call Tim Farron.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your guidance this afternoon, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) on introducing a very important debate.
I will focus my remarks on my constituency. Project Gigabit has done an awful lot of good in Cumbria, but there are issues, even in postcodes within scope. For example, across Cumbria around 900 properties in my constituency are deemed within scope, but will not be connected because of their rural isolation. Many of those will be hill farms that desperately need to be connected, not least so that they can bid for funding through the environmental land management scheme.
Perhaps of greater concern are the places that are in scope, but in deferred scope. I want to name four parishes in my constituency, near Appleby: Hilton, Murton, Warcop and Ormside. Those are communities on very low speeds at the moment. Some people are forced, against their better judgment and almost against their will, to give money to Elon Musk to use Starlink instead of the very limited broadband opportunities that are available to them.
While those communities are within scope but in deferred scope, they wait for the contract holder, Fibrus, to give them a date, and because they are within deferred scope, nothing is happening on the ground to connect them. Also, they do not have access to the voucher scheme, which would allow them to work with our absolutely brilliant Cumbrian Broadband for the Rural North, otherwise known as B4RN, an award-winning community interest company that has connected so many homes throughout rural Cumbria to gigabit and greater broadband speeds.
So I want to press the Minister—this is my one ask of him—on whether he will ensure that those parishes I have listed, Ormside, Warcop, Hilton and Murton, are either given a date for connection under Project Gigabit, or are descoped so that vouchers can be made available and B4RN can then step in and fill the gap. We had a public meeting in the snow in Murton last December—next weekend it will be 12 months ago—where BDUK made all sorts of promises of which it has fulfilled absolutely none.
Will the Minister give personal attention to either descoping those communities so they can get broadband through the B4RN and the voucher system, or give Fibrus—and more importantly BDUK—a kick up the backside to make sure they bring the communities into scope, and give a date in the next few months so that those communities, which are very remote in many other ways, are connected properly to gigabit broadband speed?
Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)
It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) on securing this debate—although the mention of Liphook in his speech confused me, as I was always under the impression that my aunt’s MP was the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds)—
Joe Morris
Clearly, I have got something wrong.
I want to address a few of the issues experienced in my constituency. As many Members here today will be well aware, it is the largest constituency in England, taking in large parts of Northumberland, going all the way up to the Scottish border and all the way across to the border with Cumbria. I am regularly contacted by constituents who are trying to enjoy the dream situation of living in England’s most beautiful county, but who are unable properly to work, attend meetings with clients or generate the economic growth that this country so sorely needs.
I speak to people in villages such as Stocksfield, Riding Mill, Hedley on the Hill or even Darras Hall, who I know have had frequent issues with getting the appropriate broadband speeds delivered to them. Residents of those villages are continuously working to try to get the broadband speeds that they deserve.
There is a real feeling that for the past 14 years many rural communities were left to sit in splendid isolation, abandoned by the Conservative party. As the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon eloquently said in his opening remarks, they were left to fend for themselves.
I am absolutely proud to be part of the Labour party that won a swathe of rural seats at the last general election, that is committed to ensuring our rural businesses can grow, and that can ensure that the world-class businesses across my constituency are able not only to access high-speed internet, but to do so in the very smallest communities. When I go out and meet constituents across the north Tyne area, internet is one of the bugbears most commonly raised with me on the doorstep, alongside a lack of housing and the state of the NHS. I hope the Minister will consider how we can get high-speed internet to those most rural constituencies and the hill farms that the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) mentioned, to ensure that they are given the opportunity to benefit from Project Gigabit.
Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd.
I should start by saying that I have some sympathy with the Minister, because this is the second time today that he has had to suffer my representations on this subject. He kindly set aside 10 minutes this morning to hear all about Honiton and Sidmouth, and he will have to hear more about it now.
The village of Gittisham in east Devon illustrates the shortcomings of the rural broadband policy that we saw under the last Conservative Government. After four separate attempts by different commercial providers to lay fibre to some parts of the village, the connection still falls 100 metres short of many of the properties—and that is not an isolated example. Across the part of east Devon that I represent, I hear similar things from people in other villages, too.
Three weeks ago, Connecting Devon and Somerset, the local authority-led body charged with connecting commercial organisations, scaled back its full-fibre broadband roll-out. That provider, which four years ago said it would be able to deliver to Gittisham, is no longer able to do so. It was contracted to deliver broadband to over 55,000 properties across Devon and Somerset, but to date it has delivered to fewer than 19,000.
When I spoke with the Minister and his officials earlier today, it was very helpful to learn that, although national gigabit-capable broadband coverage now reaches 85% of the country, in rural Honiton and Sidmouth—the area I represent—we lag far behind at just 61%.
I will bring my remarks to a close, given that I have already had 10 minutes of the Minister’s and his officials’ time today, but I just want them to take this away: if coal was the fuel that powered the 19th century and oil was the fuel that powered the 20th century, then information—data—is the fuel that powers the 21st century, and in much of east Devon we are not getting it.
Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd.
I thank the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) for raising this important issue today. However, I wonder if he could come with me for a few seconds, away from Surrey, to Diracleit on the Isle of Harris, where I stood a few weeks ago. It is a small settlement, with only a few houses and a few social houses on the main road, but it is an internet desert. There are three tourism businesses in that settlement that know they are losing money, losing paying guests and losing their minds with frustration because of slow internet connections.
Despite superfast broadband fibre running along the main spine of the Western Isles, and many success stories—people can work for software companies in California from Lewis, and for insurance companies and accountancy firms in Glasgow and London—to be a few hundred metres off the beaten track is to remain in an internet desert.
In Harris, 10% of households are unable to get decent broadband, and the same is true across the rest of the Western Isles: 10% of households cannot get speeds over 10 megabits per second. Some of us are living life in the slow lane. Diracleit, small as it is, is not hard to reach; it is only one mile from the streetlights and sophistication of Tarbert in Harris—the ferry port and the centre of the Harris universe—and there are many other places in the Western Isles and rural Scotland just like Diracleit.
Scotland has a scheme similar to the UK gigabit voucher scheme: the Scottish broadband voucher scheme. Theoretically, that scheme would provide £5,000 to premises with speeds of less than 30 megabits per second and, theoretically, it was meant to be completed in 2021. However, it is still in the procurement stage. In response to a recent freedom of information request, the Scottish Government revealed that they expect the roll-out of superfast broadband through the R100, or Reaching 100%, scheme to reach everywhere by 2028. I do not know how many megabits per second there are until 2028 but, even in Scotland, the SNP manages to build ferries faster than that.
There are some successes. For example, the holy island of Iona has received superfast broadband. That is very good for Columba’s monks, who can now put down their quills and pick up their keyboards, but in the Western Isles, we feel we are waiting a long time. People and businesses in Diracleit and dozens of other single-track road settlements are staring at that never-connecting wheel of death. I know the Minister is under pressure to deliver for rural England, but I urge him to have words with Ministers in Scotland, who have let down the Western Isles and many other parts of rural Scotland. I hope he can press them to connect us—perhaps he could send them an email.
James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) for securing this important debate. One of the very first pieces of casework I received after the general election was from a constituent living in a village called Tollerton, who wanted access to full-fibre for domestic and commercial purposes. He told me that he had been contacting Openreach on and off for two years, trying to find out when the upgrade would start, and that the proposed connection date had moved four times. He consequently described the roll-out of full-fibre as “shockingly slow”. You will not be surprised, Mr Dowd, to hear that he lived in one of the 6 million hard-to-reach properties classified as area 3 by Ofcom. I encourage the Minister to think about how to best accelerate work to connect hard-to-reach properties as a priority to ensure that we meet our nationwide 2030 target.
Thankfully, I have been able to confirm that Openreach has a customised installation plan for Tollerton that will sit outside the core commercial build programme. My constituent described that confirmation as “amazing news”, and work should start early in the new year. None the less, the volume of communication I receive about full-fibre tells me that residents are frustrated about perceived delays. I would therefore be interested to hear more from the Minister about steps being taken to remove barriers to roll-out, including flexible permitting and sharing infrastructure where possible.
I acknowledge the work of the previous Government in starting the roll-out of full-fibre, which is of national importance. However, as our manifesto clearly says,
“the rollout of gigabit broadband has been slow.”
I therefore welcome the new Government’s commitment to
“make a renewed push to fulfil the ambition of full gigabit and national 5G coverage by 2030.”
Full-fibre uptake to date in my constituency of Rushcliffe is very high, at 55%, which is above the national average. With a growing tech industry, significant house building and many people continuing to work from home, I believe demand will only grow further. But for parts of rural Britain, that is likely to require early investment in wireless and satellite provision for places where it may prove prohibitively expensive to provide a full-fibre connection. I would therefore welcome hearing more from my hon. Friend the Minister about his planned approaches for this.
Chris Bloore (Redditch) (Lab)
First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) on securing this debate. From the comments made today, there seems to be consensus across the board about the challenges faced by our rural communities —challenges that are obstructing the growth of rural businesses and ensuring that some of the most vulnerable members of our community cannot reach key council and health services. Most importantly, as a constituent said to me on Saturday at my advice surgery, “How on earth am I meant to complain to you every day if I can’t connect to the internet?”
My hon. Friend the Minister has kindly already visited my constituency to meet my constituents. He visited the fantastic Redditch town centre, but he knows that my constituency is overwhelmingly rural. Although picturesque, many villages can sometimes be labelled hard to reach. I would be interested to know what plans the Government have to support these more remote locations. It is vital that rural businesses that are developing every day, families who want to stay connected and people fighting social isolation have the level of connectivity they deserve. The benefits can be immense for all our communities.
Progress has been made by the previous Government and by my own, Conservative-controlled Worcestershire County Council, but there is much more to do, and as my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Mr Charters) said, we really should not be having this conversation in five more years.
Victoria Collins (Harpenden and Berkhamsted) (LD)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I will start by saying that this is not really about fast internet. It is about fairness. It is about opportunity. It is about helping individuals and helping us as a nation to live up to our potential. How are we supposed to lead innovation on the national stage if we still have many areas where people cannot even make a phone call or children who cannot get online are left behind? We have been talking today about rural communities who feel left behind and have untapped potential. The hon. Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) highlighted that. My hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) talked about the fuel of our economy.
This is really about the people behind the slow internet and the inability to get access. It is about the businesses that cannot get off the ground and the remote workers who cannot work. I have a constituent right in the middle in Ashridge who actually works for UK Research and Innovation, but he cannot even get 4G access. Someone just down the road has 20 times the speed, but he himself is not eligible for a voucher. It is about the children in Scotland who have to use their phones to get online. It is about the grandma who cannot stay connected to her family, because there is no way for her to see her grandkids online. It is about the parent trying to get healthcare sorted out for their child.
The hon. Member for York Outer (Mr Charters) highlighted the patchiness of provision in his seat and how one street is wired differently from another, which is actually the picture across this nation. For me, what comes to mind are the words, “Inequality, inequality and inequality”. In my seat, I have one area—Markyate, Flamstead and Gaddesden—of which almost 90% has the worst 10% in the UK, whereas 2 miles down the road in east Harpenden 100% have the fastest 10% in the UK. It is inequality that is there throughout.
The patchy roll-out was mentioned. My hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) talked about those left in limbo. My hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and Sidmouth talked about those let down by the roll-out. This is about unlocking our economic potential, reducing those inequalities and connecting our communities. As Liberal Democrats, we are calling—as I am sure we all are—for no property to be left out of broadband connectivity. The Government must prioritise major investment in broadband for underserved communities. We also want to raise concerns about the inequality of provision in the 5G network.
I conclude with a series of questions. What is the Minister doing to ensure that there is roll-out to every home, including clarity on those who have slipped through the net or been let down by previous roll-outs? What work is he doing with local authorities and communities to ensure that those who are left out know what they can do? What work is being done with companies to drive innovative solutions, including on transport? I ask because many of these rural communities are connected by train and other transport, and once people leave, they still cannot get on the internet. What work is the Minister doing with new technologies, such as blockchain even, to drive connectivity? The other day I spoke to one of my friends, who had come over to the UK from Ukraine. He said, “I’m very happy that I have been really welcomed in this country, but the internet is slower here than back home in Ukraine.” We need to ensure that our country is leading on this issue and that we get the basics right for us to drive innovation.
Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) for securing this important debate. As was clear from his speech and his diligent, razor-sharp focus on targeting the delivery of gigabit broadband in different parts of his constituency, he is a true community champion. His constituents are lucky to have him.
That is a theme of the debate. All Members have spoken about individual parts of their constituency where broadband is a challenge. That goes to show how important our digital backbone is in the United Kingdom. I will resist the temptation to mention parts of my constituency, such as Queen’s Road or Ellesmere Road in Weybridge, where we have done work to deliver gigabit broadband. The debate demonstrates how important the issue is. It is one that inevitably and invariably gets the attention of Members of Parliament, so that they advocate for their constituents and try to deliver it.
Project Gigabit demonstrates simply that where there is a will, there is a way. Back in 2019, 7% of properties had what is defined as “gigabit access” or 1 gigabit per second. In April 2024—the last official stats we have—that had reached 81%. In fact, it is believed that the 85% target, due to be reached in ’25, has already been reached. That is a huge roll-out of gigabit broadband to households over the past five years of a Conservative Government.
There are of course people who do not have gigabit broadband, and it is critical that we work to ensure that they can have that vital accessibility. That is absolutely not just about being able to watch this debate in HD—to listen to my dulcet tones and to see the spots on my face; it is about industry and connectivity, and the events of covid showed just how important that is. Look at the £5 billion investment allocated to the project; some data shows that that is probably a £60 billion contribution to the UK economy.
How do we go about rolling out the delivery of gigabit broadband across the country? We as Conservatives know that the way to do it is to get industry involved and work with it. That is why 80% of the gigabit broadband target is linked to industry bringing it through, although we recognised that to get to the further 20% of roll-out, we needed to bring in subsidy and break down barriers. That is where we move from the initial phase of Project Gigabit, which was to do with industry delivering, to now, with the public subsidy we have seen over the past few years.
A great concern, however, is future inequalities, in particular in delivery to rural areas versus urban areas. The great concern is that over the next six months to a year, there will be a reallocation of priority away from rural areas to urban areas.
The Minister for Data Protection and Telecoms (Chris Bryant)
I do not know where the hon. Gentleman got that from.
Dr Spencer
The Minister chunters from his seat, but in his speech, please can he assuage that concern? The way to do so is to provide transparent data on the prioritisation of funding and the roll-out.
The Minister for Data Protection and Telecoms (Chris Bryant)
Lord, I had not expected that so quickly—nor did you earlier, Mr Dowd. It is great to see you in the Chair. I congratulate the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) on securing the debate.
I will say first that our ambition is no different from that of the previous Government, which is to get to precisely the same numbers by 2030 as was stated previously. I am pretty confident that we will be able to get there. There are significant challenges, which I will try to explain in a moment.
As the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) rightly said, the whole idea of BDUK and Project Gigabit was to enable gigabit-capable broadband to be brought to nearly every property in the UK, primarily through commercial operators advancing on the basis of commercial viability. We knew that that would be impossible in some areas, which was why there would have to be a subsidy from the Government—or the previous Government knew it, and we subscribed to that, too. The difficulty is that that precise decision by the commercial operators as to where is commercially viable changes all the time. It is a moving target; county by county, they constantly revise decisions on the properties they will cover on a commercial basis. Therefore, the decision by BDUK about how many properties to include in the subsidised roll-out also vary.
That is happening at a time when the market is considering long-term investments. Openreach has decided to increase significantly the number of places it expects to roll out to on a commercial basis. Other operators are worried. In the south-west, operators have already been unable to fulfil their commitments, and other contracts have had to be entered into. That makes reaching secure outcomes in each constituency a difficult process.
I have made this offer before. Some of the dramatis personae of this debate are similar to those I have met in other quarters at other times. I am happy for any individual MP who has concerns in their patch to meet my officials and those from BDUK to go through this issue village by village and do a precise piece of work. I know these are very real issues. As the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon said in his opening remarks, this is not a luxury that is nice to have; it is essential to people’s livelihoods, economy and sometimes their lives, whether we are talking about mobile connectivity or broadband. Many aspects of that have to be delivered over the next few years.
I issue one word of caution. A number of hon. Members referred to hard-to-reach properties. That is a very broad definition. There are properties that are very hard to reach where, frankly, a roll-out cannot be achieved by a commercial operator or the taxpayer. That is where, as several hon. Members have said, we must be imaginative over the next few years about alternative means of delivery. That might be a wi-fi operation or reliance on satellite. Some people have already taken up the satellite option at £75 a month, as has been mentioned, although I am not particularly advertising that. It is problematic that there is only one operator in that space. I hope there will be more in future because competition is good in this market. I would praise the previous Government for that. There is not just one operator; we have allowed competition to operate in the roll-out of broadband.
Members, including some on the Government Benches, have had conversations about ducts and poles. There have been rows about the inconsiderate roll-out from some operators that have brought in street furniture that is otiose, redundant or duplicates what is already there, or where they have chosen not to use ducts because they do not want to talk to the commercial operators. I have been trying hard to ensure that all operators work as collaboratively as possible, within the bounds of competition law, to deliver broadband without obstructions.
I feel as though I have had all the villages of the UK brought to mind, and I am not sure that I have managed to write them down correctly—I apologise if I get things wrong. I welcome the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon to the House; I believe a family member was also here for a while. I have good news for him, although he might already know it, so he may not think it is as good as I do. He has been worrying about connectivity at the Beaver industrial estate, and I think AllPoints Fibre is coming early in 2025 to sort that out.
I looked at the figures for superfast, ultrafast, full-fibre and gigabit in the hon. Member’s constituency. While his constituency is actually ahead of the rest of the UK on superfast—it gets more than 30 megabits per second —that is not going to be sufficient for most people in the next few years, so we want to get much higher than that. On all the other measures, his constituency is some way behind the rest of the UK. I accept that there is a challenge there, and I am thoroughly determined to meet it.
The hon. Member referred to digital exclusion, in terms of physical access to gigabit-capable, ultrafast or full-fibre broadband. There are many different factors that might lead to digital exclusion. If I had a criticism of the previous Government—well, I have quite a few criticisms, but one that even they would accept as fair—it would be that we did not have a digital inclusion strategy for 10 years. In that time, in many areas of the country, whether because of poor skills, poverty, disability or the physical exclusion that the hon. Member referred to—I know it well in the south Wales valleys—there has been a level of digital exclusion that makes it impossible for people to take part in today’s economy or society. We need to address all that. It is my hope that, before we get to the end of the year, we will be able to point to the next steps in digital inclusion that we as a Government need to take.
The hon. Member seemed to say that the previous Government were absolutely wonderful but left the country in a terrible state in relation to broadband, especially in his constituency. If I might gently say, Conservative Members, including the shadow Minister, have to decide which way they are going to go on that: were they a great Government or were they not really up to it? I know what the country decided.
There is no rural/urban divide on this issue. I fully accept that there are specific challenges in many rural areas—my own constituency is semi-rural—but in many urban areas, while superfast broadband or gigabit-capable fibre is theoretically going down the street, it is not going into every building because of a whole series of other issues that we also have to address. That does not mean that we are redirecting Project Gigabit money away from rural to urban areas; more than 90% of the money has been spent in rural areas and will continue to be spent in rural areas.
The fundamental misconception in the letter that the hon. Member signed, and which quite a lot of other Conservative Members signed, which was brought forward by the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale), was that Project Gigabit was always designed to take gigabit-capable broadband to wherever it was needed. There was not a specific definition of rural or urban, and I am not changing that. It is need that determines where the money is spent—nothing other than that—and I fully accept that the vast majority of that is going to be in rural areas.
I welcome the hon. Member for Caerfyrddin (Ann Davies) to the House; I have campaigned a lot in her seat—not very successfully. She makes a good point that many villages in rural Wales are some of the most disadvantaged in this area and in mobile connectivity, which is why I am pleased that we recently rolled out seven new enhanced masts for mobile connectivity in Wales, including, I think, in her constituency. That does not answer the broadband issue, but we hope to address that through Building Digital UK.
My hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Mr Charters) referred to t’internet. On the defence site in his constituency, my understanding is that that is a Ministry of Defence responsibility, but we will chase that up and write to him on that issue. He is absolutely right—Defence families should not be at a worse disadvantage than those across the road who are not in Defence properties. I know that the Secretary of State for Defence is keen to address those issues, because I have spoken to him about it.
The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) referred to Starlink, and he is absolutely right. He rightly gave a list of villages, which were Warcop, Hilton, Murton—with a “u”, not an “e”—and Ormside, about which BDUK is presently in the process of negotiating. I do not want to descope at this point, because I very much hope that we will get to a resolution in the next month, but he makes a strong point. If it proves necessary to abandon ship, as it were, he can come back at me on that.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) —we must stop meeting like this—was sitting in the same place in the Chamber last week when we had a debate about tourism in his constituency. He is right that the tourist industry cannot survive without proper broadband. To rectify some of the issues that he was talking about last week, including with some of the beautiful villages in his constituency, we need to be able to roll out broadband.
I need to be careful about this point, but there will be properties that are not commercially viable or viable for the taxpayer to fund, because they are simply too difficult to reach. I think everybody accepts that, but it will be a tiny proportion—probably 1% or fewer. As several Members have said, however, we at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology definitely need to accelerate the process of thinking about the alternative mechanisms we can provide. Some people are already relying on Starlink, but we may need to come up with other solutions.
The Lib Dem spokesperson, the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins), is absolutely right that we need to look for technical solutions. That is why, through UK Research and Innovation and the research and development side of DSIT, we are keen to look at those areas.
The hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) talked about villages where broadband stopped 100 metres short, which is absolutely infuriating for everybody. Obviously, that is the kind of thing that we want to address. I know that he has already had conversations, and we have another meeting with several of his colleagues coming up, so we will be able to address those issues then.
I know bits of the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Torcuil Crichton) well, as he knows, and I have visited where some of my family are from. We need to look for very creative solutions in his constituency, because he is right that if someone is making Harris tweed, they want to be able to sell it, but they cannot create a business unless they have proper high-speed broadband. I note that we have superfast on Iona. I do not think there are many monks left there, but there is a community. In fact, it has a couple of hotels that I have stayed in, which also want and need connectivity.
I will give the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon a couple of minutes to wind up, but I will quickly refer to my hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (James Naish), who is right that we need to do something about flexi permits. We have already written to the Department for Transport about that. My hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Chris Bloore) has similar issues in his patch.
Finally, I welcome the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge, to his post, as I failed to do when we had DSIT questions last week. He has to decide whether the last Government were absolutely brilliant or whether they completely failed in this area.
Gregory Stafford
I thank all Members who have contributed. Given that I have only one minute and 14 seconds to respond, I will not go through everyone’s villages. What has become clear today is that there is significant concern around the roll-out in rural areas. I am pleased that the Minister responded in the way that he did, and that he has offered to meet us to go through it “village by village”—I wrote that down. I am sure that many Members here will be taking him up on that.
I will go back to what I said at the start: the facility to have superfast, gigabit-enabled broadband is going to be essential, and it is essential that we reach the target by 2030. We need to ensure that those people who are living in the most rural areas are not left behind, and that with the Opposition and the Government working together, we can move forward so that every property that is able has gigabit connectivity.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the rollout of Project Gigabit in rural areas.
Written Correction
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Ministerial Correction
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Transport
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Gareth Bacon
… On Monday, in her statement on bus funding, the Secretary of State said that a formula was being used to allocate funding. She said that the formula will allocate funding
“based on local need, population, the distance that buses travel, and levels of deprivation…This formula and the funding allocated is a fair arrangement, ensuring that every area of the country gets the service levels it needs”.—[Official Report, 18 November 2024; Vol. 757, c. 43-45.]
The formula, including the weighting given to the various factors by the right hon. Lady, has not been published. When will it be?
Lilian Greenwood
I thank the shadow Secretary of State for his question. We are proud of the work that we have done to ensure that every part of the country benefits from additional funding for their buses, and we will publish that later today.
[Official Report, 21 November 2024; Vol. 757, c. 352.]
Written correction submitted by the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood):
Lilian Greenwood
I thank the shadow Secretary of State for his question. We are proud of the work that we have done to ensure that every part of the country benefits from additional funding for their buses, and we will provide further details in due course.
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Regulation of NHS Managers: Consultation
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The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Wes Streeting)
Ensuring strong and accountable NHS leadership will be critical to fixing a broken NHS and delivering our health mission. We know the important role that high-quality leadership plays in fostering a positive, compassionate, and transparent culture within the NHS while ensuring that local organisations are anchors of growth and opportunity in the areas that they serve.
Currently, NHS managers and leaders are not a regulated profession. Today, I am announcing that the Department of Health and Social Care is launching a 12-week consultation on options for the regulation of NHS managers, as part of a programme of work to meet the Government’s manifesto commitment to introduce professional standards for, and regulation of, NHS managers. This issue, and the related question of the duty of candour, has been variously highlighted by the Kark review (2019), the infected blood inquiry (2024) and the ongoing Thirlwall inquiry into events at the Countess of Chester hospital.
It is essential that managers are also supported with the skills they need to deliver transformation and increase productivity in the NHS, which is why today’s consultation forms part of a wider programme of leadership and management development work to equip the NHS with the leaders needed to deliver our 10-year plan. This includes establishing a college of executive and clinical leadership to champion and enhance the support available to NHS leaders, and asking Sir Gordon Messenger, through the 10-year plan process, to look at how we can accelerate efforts to develop more systematic talent management in the NHS.
This consultation seeks views from all partners, including health and care organisations, regulators, professional bodies, health and care managers and senior leaders, the public, patients, and other health and care staff, on the most effective way to strengthen oversight and accountability of NHS managers.We are seeking views on:
the type of regulation that may be most appropriate for managers
which managers should be in scope for any future regulatory system
what kind of body should exercise such a regulatory function
what types of standards managers should be required to demonstrate as part of a future system of regulation
the sequencing of the introduction of a regulatory regime for NHS managers, alongside work that is already being undertaken by NHS England to support their development
a new professional duty of candour to cover NHS managers, and making managers accountable for responding to concerns about patient safety.
We are today also publishing a separate report on the findings of the Department’s call for evidence—launched in April 2024—on the existing statutory duty of candour on providers, which is a key step to fulfilling a recommendation from the infected blood inquiry. We will use the findings of our consultation on manager regulation, and the call for evidence, to help inform the final response to the Department’s review of the statutory duty of candour.
Views from partners will be critical in informing further policy decisions during the next phase of this work to support and improve NHS leadership. We will publish our findings and set out next steps following the closure of the consultation.
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Radioisotope Shortage
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The Minister for Secondary Care (Karin Smyth)
I am today updating the House that the temporary reduction in the production of radioisotopes has been resolved and that the supply of affected radioisotopes has returned to normal.
Throughout the shortage, my Department worked with industry, the NHS, in particular the radiopharmacy community, and the devolved Governments to make best use of available stock, ensuring critical patients were prioritised. Suppliers and NHS trusts and hospitals displayed great flexibility throughout this incident. Thanks to this collaborative approach from all parts of the system, we were able to manage the unique challenges presented by radioisotope shortages and help ensure fair and equitable access for UK patients.
This will have been a challenging time for patients and their loved ones as well as healthcare professionals. Services are returning to normal, and the NHS is working to book in patients who have had scans delayed, while continuing to ensure patients with the most critical needs are prioritised.
My Department will continue to monitor supplies of the affected radioisotope.
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Immigration Rules Change
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Seema Malhotra)
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is today laying before the House a statement of changes in immigration rules.
Introduction of a visa requirement on Colombia
We are today introducing a visa requirement on all visitors from Colombia. Nationals of Colombia will also be required to obtain a direct airside transit visa if they intend to transit via the UK, having booked travel to another country. The visa requirement comes into force at 15:00 GMT today.
Consequently, the planned change to allow nationals of Colombia to apply for an electronic travel authorisation from 27 November 2024 for travel to the UK from 8 January 2025 will no longer be introduced.
There will be a four-week, visa-free transition period for those who already hold confirmed bookings to the UK obtained on or before 15:00 GMT 26 November 2024, where arrival in the UK is no later than 15:00 GMT, 24 December 2024. Arrangements are in place so that Colombian nationals can apply for visas. We are publicising the changes so that travellers are aware and can plan accordingly.
We are taking this action due to an increase in the number of Colombian nationals travelling to the UK for purposes other than those permitted under visitor rules since the visa requirement was lifted in November 2022. This has included a significant and sustained increase in asylum claims, and high rates of refusals at the border, due to people travelling without the intention of visiting for a permitted purpose. This increase in asylum claims and refusals has added significantly to operational pressures at the border, resulting in frontline resource being diverted from other operational priorities.
The decision to introduce a visa requirement has been taken solely for migration and border security reasons. Our relationship with Colombia remains a strong and friendly one. Any decision to change a visa status is not taken lightly, and we keep the border and immigration system under regular review to ensure it continues to work in the UK national interest.
Changes relating to the Ukraine schemes
Almost three years on from the start of the conflict, we continue to stand firm with the people of Ukraine, and to show that those who need our help are still warmly welcomed in the UK. We have extended that welcome to nearly 250,000 people who have come to the UK (or had their existing permission in the UK extended) under the Ukraine schemes. To provide future certainty, in February, the UK Government announced that Ukrainians with permission under one of the Ukraine schemes would be able to extend their permission for a further 18 months through the creation of a new Ukraine permission extension scheme. Applications are due to open in early 2025, and the immigration rules we lay today will provide people with further certainty about their future by outlining the requirements of the new scheme.
The bespoke scheme will provide the same rights and entitlements to access work, benefits, healthcare, and education that Ukrainians have enjoyed under the existing schemes. The scheme will also be fee-free, with applications being accepted within the last 28 days of their current permission—in line with most other visas routes—to ensure Ukrainians have sufficient time to apply to the scheme.
Ukraine permission extension scheme opening
The overarching principle of UPE is to provide continued sanctuary in the UK for those who still need it while the war in Ukraine continues. Under the principles of the Ukraine schemes, UPE will continue our generous offer to those Ukrainians, and their eligible family members, who are already here. It is open to those who have previously been granted permission in the UK under the Ukraine schemes (or leave outside the rules on the same basis) who meet the criteria for applying. Applicants will also be required to have been resident in the UK (and islands) and/or Ukraine since holding permission under the Ukraine schemes.
Individuals should apply before their current permission expires. This is important, because as is the case with all other visa routes, those who allow their permission to lapse will lose their rights to receive benefits and healthcare, and to work and rent. Work is under way to mitigate any risks associated with this, and my Department will continue to work closely with other Departments, and in particular with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Works and Pensions, to ensure that people make an application in time.
Under UPE, there will need to be adequate care and accommodation arrangements in place for children, in order to meet our safeguarding obligations. Where a child is not in the UK with their parent, we will seek parental consent to confirm their current living situation. In some cases, referral to the local authority where the child is living will be necessary. We are also aware that different members of some family units under the Ukraine schemes will currently have differing periods of permission, as they may have applied to come to the UK at different times due to their personal circumstances. Due to this, where a Ukrainian child is resident in the UK with their parent and both hold permission under the Ukraine schemes, the child’s period of permission granted to them under UPE will be aligned with that of their parent. We believe there is merit in aligning with the parent in the best interests of the child.
Ukraine extension scheme closure
In May this year, we closed the Ukraine extension scheme to all individuals, except to UK-born children with a parent who has, or has had, Ukraine scheme permission; they have still been able to apply under UES to regularise their permission in the UK. Upon the opening of the UPE scheme in early 2025, we will close the UES route completely, and UK-born children will instead apply through UPE, though they will not need to have had prior permission. This will streamline the visa routes by channelling all in-country applications through UPE, removing any confusion that might otherwise be created by having two “extension” schemes open at the same time. There is no change to the eligibility requirements for UK-born children in this regard.
Ending use of open-ended permission to travel letters
Additionally, we are ending the use of permission to travel letters in the Ukraine schemes. PTT letters were issued as part of an exceptional biometric deferral application process, implemented in response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to allow those fleeing war to quickly reach sanctuary in the UK. However, this process closed to new applicants on 7 December 2023, and all Ukraine scheme applicants are now required to attend a visa application centre to provide their biometrics before travelling.
We have provided advanced notice to applicants who have been issued with a PTT letter but not yet travelled to the UK, to ensure that any individual who wishes to use it has the opportunity to do so before restrictions take effect. Any applicants who have not travelled to the UK when the restrictions take effect will be informed that their PTT letters can no longer be used. The Homes for Ukraine scheme will remain open and uncapped for those who wish to reapply for sanctuary in the UK. This change is therefore not a reduction of support for Ukraine, and the UK Government remain steadfast in their support for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.
Changes to long residence route
We have always been clear that the Ukraine schemes provide temporary sanctuary in the UK only while the war in Ukraine remains ongoing, and that they are not a route to settlement in the UK. This is in line with the express wishes of the Ukrainian Government, who will need their nationals to return to help rebuild the country when it is safe to do so. To reflect this, we are making a minor change to the eligibility requirements for the long residence route, to make it clear that permission to stay in the UK under the Ukraine schemes, including the new UPE, cannot be used to qualify for permission to stay or settlement under the long residence route. This change brings the rules in step with the already established policy position.
These changes to the immigration rules are being laid on 26 November 2024. On the changes that introduce a visa requirement on Colombia, due to the need to safeguard the operation of the UK’s immigration system, those changes will come into effect at 15:00 GMT on 26 November 2024.
The changes regarding the long residence route will come into effect on 18 December 2024; the changes to open the Ukraine permission extension scheme and close the Ukraine extension scheme will come into effect on 4 February 2025; and the changes to end the use of open-ended permission to travel letters will come into effect on 13 February 2025.
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Older People's Housing Taskforce
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The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)
The Government have today published the report of the older people’s housing taskforce. Copies will also be deposited in the House Library.
Concluding in May 2024, the older people’s housing taskforce undertook an assessment of public and private specialised and supported older people’s housing, with a particular focus on the private market for those on middle incomes, and explored options for the provision of greater choice, quality and security of housing for older people. There is rightly significant national interest in the taskforce’s findings.
I would like to offer my sincere thanks to the chair of the taskforce, Professor Julienne Meyer, and all its members for producing such a comprehensive, detailed and well-researched report. I would also like to express my gratitude to the many stakeholders who contributed to the work of the taskforce.
The Government recognise the importance of increased supply and improving the housing options for older people in later life, and we will give careful consideration to the many recommendations set out in the report.
Providing a range of safe, suitable housing for older people in later life helps them live independently, safely and well, for longer. It can enhance the wellbeing of our senior citizens and reduce demand on adult social care services and the national health service. The Government have committed to building 1.5 million new homes over the next five years, including those to meet the needs of older people, and we will consider this issue further as we develop our long-term housing strategy.
We are determined to create a more diverse housing market; one that delivers homes quickly and responds to the needs of a range of communities. Through the recent consultation on proposed reforms to the national planning policy framework, we tested proposals to promote the delivery of mixed-use sites, including housing designed for specific groups such as older people. We have also indicated our intention to consider further planning policy changes in the future as we move to produce a more streamlined and accessible suite of policies, and we will ensure that considerations around older people’s housing inform our approach.
We are also working with the Planning Advisory Service to meet the recommendation of the taskforce for guidance to provide more clarity on how planning use classes apply to specialist older people’s housing.
As the report also makes clear, older people’s housing has not been immune to the challenges faced by other residential leaseholders across the country. The Government remain fully committed to providing homeowners with greater rights, powers and protections over their homes by quickly implementing the provisions of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024.
We will also take further steps over the Parliament to bring the feudal leasehold system to an end, including reinvigorating commonhold by modernising the legal framework as well as restricting the sale of new leasehold flats. We will consult on the best way to achieve this, and consider the needs of all parts of the housing market as we do this, including older people’s housing.
The Government are committed to helping older people to live comfortably and independently at home for as long as possible. The Minister for Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberafan Maesteg (Stephen Kinnock), and I thank the taskforce for their important contribution to this agenda.
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“Get Britain Working” White Paper
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The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Liz Kendall)
Today, the Government have published the “Get Britain Working” White Paper—bringing forward the biggest reforms to employment support in a generation, and turning a Department of welfare into a genuine Department for work. This takes the first steps towards delivering our bold ambition of an 80% employment rate, through a decade of national renewal.
The UK is the only country in the G7 whose employment rate has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. We have a near-record 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness or disability. Almost a million young people are not in education, employment or training. Millions are stuck in low paid, insecure work.
To turn the page on this, nothing short of a fundamentally different approach is needed. Our White Paper brings in three major reforms to:
Create a new jobs and careers service, overhauling jobcentres from a one-size-fits-all service that overwhelmingly focuses on administering benefits into a genuine public employment service providing personalised help and support. We will bring jobcentres together with the National Careers Service in England, beginning with a pathfinder early next year. We will work closely with mayors and local leaders to ensure the new service is rooted in local communities and properly joined up with local health and skills support. We will work closely with employers, so that it better meets their needs. We will also test, trial and develop a radically improved digital offer, using the latest technologies and AI to provide up-to-date information on jobs, skills and other support, and to free up work coach time. This is backed with £55 million of initial funding.
Establish a new youth guarantee in England to ensure that every young person is earning or learning. We will bring together all the different support for 18 to 21-year-olds, under the leadership of mayors and local areas, to ensure that all young people have access to education, training, and employment opportunities once they reach 18, and that no one misses out. Backed with £45 million of funding, we have announced eight trailblazers for our youth guarantee—in Liverpool City Region, the West Midlands, Tees Valley, East Midlands, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, West of England, and two areas in Greater London. We have also announced a new national partnership to provide exciting new opportunities for young people in sports, arts and culture. We will invest in young people and give them the choices and chances that they deserve, but in return, they will have a responsibility to take up the training or work that is on offer.
Address the growing and unsustainable problem of people being out of work due to poor health. We are already taking action to drive down waiting lists, including with targeted support at the 20 NHS trusts with the highest economic inactivity. We are joining up employment and health support, for example by expanding individual placement support and piloting new WorkWell services. However, we need to go much further and faster to tackle this issue.
To meet the scale of the challenge, we will devolve new funding, powers and responsibilities to tackle economic inactivity to mayors and local areas. Because local leaders know their communities best, we will support all areas in England to produce local “Get Britain Working” plans, joining up work, health and skills support. Today we have announced eight trailblazers, backed by £125 million of funding—in West Yorkshire, North East, South Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Wales, York and North Yorkshire, and two Greater London areas. To kick-start this work, we are funding a new supported employment programme called “Connect to Work”—backed by £115 million of initial funding for next year.
Alongside this action, we have announced an independent “Keep Britain Working” review. This will look at the role of UK employers and Government in tackling health-related economic inactivity and creating and maintaining healthy workplaces. This will be led by the former chair of John Lewis, Sir Charlie Mayfield, and will report in the autumn.
And we will bring forward in the spring a Green Paper setting out proposals on reforming the health and disability benefits system. This will ensure that disabled people and those with health conditions have the same rights and opportunities as everybody else, including the right to work; that they are treated with dignity and respect; and that the system responds to the complex and fluctuating nature of the health conditions that so many people are living with today. We will work closely with disabled people and representative organisations as we develop our proposals.
Many of the policy areas described in this White Paper are devolved in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Where this is the case, the focus of this paper is on the actions that the UK Government will take in England. The UK Government will work closely with the devolved Governments to maximise positive outcomes and learning across the UK, while respecting devolution settlements. Within Great Britain, we will work with the Scottish and Welsh Government to ensure that all aspects of our new approach to delivering employment support partner effectively with devolved provision. That includes, but is not limited to, skills, health and careers, as well as Scottish and Welsh Government funded employment support.
To deliver change, we need action across Government, which is why this White Paper has been developed with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Education, and with input from the Department for Health and Social Care and many other Departments.
Our “Get Britain Working” White Paper brings forward the real reforms needed to help more people into better jobs, to give young people the chance of a better life, and to make sure that our employment and social security system understands that a healthy nation and a healthy economy are two sides of the same coin. This is how we get Britain working again, and how we get Britain growing again.
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Grand Committee
Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL]
Tuesday 26th November 2024
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL] 2024-26 View all Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [HL] 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 38-II Second marshalled list for Grand Committee - (22 Nov 2024)
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Non-Afl)
Good afternoon, my Lords. If there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, which I do not expect, this Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and resume after 10 minutes.
Amendment 18
Lord Storey
“Report: functions transferred to the Secretary of StateWithin six months of the day on which this Act is passed and annually thereafter, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report, explaining how they have discharged the functions transferred to them by virtue of this Act.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to lay a report before Parliament at regular intervals detailing how they have used powers transferred to them by virtue of the Act.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I offer my apologies for not being able to be present at the first day in Committee, but I have read the Hansard of that day.
My amendment is very similar to lots of others in the various groups, and I think they all point to the same thing, really. The Minister talked about the “narrow IfATE model”. I would have thought an executive agency within her department is a very tight model, and I can perhaps see why from her point of view, whereas on these Benches we would prefer a wider, more inclusive model. Having said that, I understand and can see the driving force behind what the Minister wants to achieve from the comments she has made. She said that the Government want
“to move away from the current, narrow IfATE model. Creating any further requirement for parliamentary approval before Skills England operates fully would frustrate the intentions of the Bill to enable a smooth transfer and the delegation of functions to Skills England”.—[Official Report, 21/11/24; col. GC 96.]
I suppose we are all anxious for progress in this area. The skills shortages are frightening. You have only to look at any particular industry. I have spoken to the construction industry, and the number of job vacancies and areas where it just cannot get skilled labour are holding back not just that industry but the country.
Given that we are where we are, and that I, no doubt like my colleagues, trotted along to the Bill office and said, “I’d like to put an amendment down on this”, to be told, “Oh no, it’s not in the scope of the Bill”—the Bill is very tightly written, so we are frustrated in that we cannot talk about or suggest for improvement some of the things in the area of skills that we wanted to—mine is a simple amendment. It simply says that the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament at regular intervals how they have used the powers transferred to them. It is a supportive and helpful amendment because you do not want, in 12 months’ or two years’ time, to say, “Do you know what? I’ve been let down by my executive agency. It has not delivered”. But if you are able to report to Parliament on a regular basis—it does not specify a time—then we can share those successes and concerns and maybe, from time to time, we can make some helpful suggestions.
I should add that I added my name to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Knight, which I also support. I beg to move.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, this is part of a range of amendments all essentially about reporting and, as he accurately described, any number of us were wrestling with how to get something that looks like Skills England into the Bill. A way involved a reporting requirement— I was not allowed to mention Skills England in my amendment—in which I lifted some of the detail in paragraphs (a), (b), (c) and (d) from statements that the Government have made about Skills England and what they want it to be able to focus on and achieve. Hence the amendment lists:
“identification of skills gaps … the provision and funding of training to meet the skills needs of employers; … the development of occupational standards; …work with regional and local bodies to improve the skills of the workforce in England”.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, for managing to get in something around the green skills agenda, which I tried to get in in my amendment but failed to draft it as skilfully as he clearly was able to do in order to get that in. I also support having a specific mention of the responsibilities in climate legislation and its relationship to green skills.
As I understand it, IfATE has a requirement to report to Parliament annually. It does so well and has shown its success, so the capacity is there, assuming that IfATE’s capacity will successfully transfer into the executive agency. So I do not see this as onerous, and it is important that we as Parliament should receive a report on the additional things that IfATE does not currently cover that would be covered by Skills England.
It is, incidentally, important for Parliament to have an opportunity to scrutinise the really important work that Skills England will be able to do. The annual report is a common mechanism that we all use when we are trying to get a little more traction for Parliament, but I think it is merited in this case. I hope that, reflecting on this group and the next, which is also about reporting in slightly different ways, the Minister will be able to give some consideration as to whether this is a relatively straightforward crumb of comfort to give some of us who have been slightly anxious about the absence of Skills England in the legislation.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 35 in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, to which I have added my support. Although we have only just started this debate, the range of reporting requirements set out in amendments in the group and mentioned in the speeches we have already heard is because we are all concerned about the lack of detail and statutory underpinning for Skills England currently in the Bill. We share concern that there needs to be greater clarity and purpose for the organisation in the legislation. It is certainly that lack of detail about the way the Government will decide their strategic priorities and create new technical qualifications, where IfATE has previously acted independently and consulted with employers and businesses, that is the rationale behind the amendment I am speaking to now.
The amendment is an attempt to understand how the Government will make these decisions and mandate Skills England to publish the process it intends to follow. I hope that, in her reply, the Minister can provide some further detail and reassurance to the many in the sector who are rightly concerned by the uncertainty that the Bill is creating—about the lack of detail, in particular, on what were previously established and well-understood processes. In order for Skills England to have the effect that we all hope, the decision-making process it undertakes and uses to decide which sectors will receive new technical education qualifications needs to be transparent, robust and retain the confidence of employers, training providers and, of course, the students themselves.
I hope that, in addition to Amendment 35, the Minister will give careful consideration to Amendments 23, 31 and 36 in this group, which, if adopted as a whole, would bring some much needed further clarification and credibility to the work of Skills England from the outset and, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just said, provide a suitable opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny of its work.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, it might be an appropriate time to mention my Amendment 22. There seems to be an unwritten law in Parliament that, if the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is taking part in an education debate, he has to mention special educational needs. Yet again, I remind the Committee of my interests in that area.
The opportunity for the cock-up school of history to strike has been pointed out here on numerous occasions. If you do not have an opportunity to write it in, it gets ignored and left behind. I am sure that a lawyer would be rubbing his hands at that, saying, “Yes, we have legislation that will mean you can get into it”, but, as we know, at the moment, special educational needs is an area that is a little too rich with lawyers and court cases. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell me that, in future, the Government will make sure that there is a clear and definable duty—and, indeed, limitations—for where special educational needs and disabilities have to be covered in getting qualifications, and that, where there are practical difficulties, we would find out what is going on.
The technology is moving on all the time. I thought the stuff that I was using for my day-to-day activity was cutting-edge 10 years ago and discovered that it is not, and that I should have an upgrade, often using stuff that is built into computers now. There is a need to address this. Exams are now so much easier to take by means other than pen and paper—indeed, it is the norm—but only if you make sure that the system works and is compatible with what is required out there, which means monitoring.
I hope the Minister will be able to give me an answer that means I can stop worrying, and that we can take the Pepper v Hart reference and use it in any future disputes. Unless we get somebody who is on the ball and being told they have to do it, history says that the aforementioned cock-up school of history will come in and we will make other lawyers happy and certain candidates unhappy.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I never know what the protocols are for when to speak in Committee, but since both the amendments that I have added my name to in this group have been introduced, I will leap in. I hope the Minister does not think I am stalking her, having attended her evidence session this morning with the Industry and Regulators Committee, which was very interesting. I also look forward to reading the Government’s new White Paper Get Britain Working.
I have added my name to Amendment 18 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which I see as a catch-all for some of the reporting required from the Secretary of State by many of the amendments tabled. Of the 22 amendments we are discussing today, 12 would require the Secretary of State to produce reports, so I very much welcome the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, that an annual report might cover most if not all of those requirements.
I have also added my name to his Amendment 23, another reporting requirement, which focuses on many of the central functions of Skills England, identifying skills gaps and shortages and promoting ways of addressing them. It includes looking at training needs. One thing I would add to that is the education side of the picture, not just the training stage: making young people aware of the skills they need to find rewarding employment suited to their abilities and of the range of opportunities available to them.
I also welcome the inclusion in the amendment of working with regional and local bodies. I would expect to see Skills England, as I think the Minister mentioned this morning, playing an active role in consolidating local skills improvement plans, to ensure that, together, they properly address national as well as local needs and seek to forge a joined-up approach between the different government departments, which might otherwise be tempted, as they have been in the past, to develop their own skills policies that may not add up to a coherent whole. I am pleased to add my support for those two amendments.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I was pleased to add my name to Amendment 23 in the name of my noble friend Lord Knight, and I thank noble Lords who have supported Amendment 31 in my name. I said quite a lot last Thursday, which seems a lifetime ago—I was on so much medication I would have been disqualified from the Olympics—so I will try to keep it brief today.
Amendment 31 has elements which have already been overtaken by announcements by the Government, reinforced, at least as far as I can manage to access it, by the White Paper produced today. Thankfully, the foreword, signed by four Secretaries of State, mentions skills a lot and indicates the critical importance of the skills agenda to getting some of the 2.8 million people who are economically inactive back into work. It also mentions the youth guarantee and the reappraisal of priorities—for Skills England, I hope, but it is not entirely clear who is making decisions about what in terms of the growth and skills agenda and the new levy, and therefore who has actually made the decision in respect of what we are pressing for and what has been pressed for publicly in terms of prioritising entry-level and foundation apprenticeships.
Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I just want to give some context on IfATE being a statutory body, since I chair it. Statutory bodies take their responsibility very seriously when they issue reports to Parliament. First, when we go through that detail at IfATE annually, it is a rigorous and detailed process. It is absolutely evidenced and fact-checked. I would like to see that level of reporting, or even more, done in Skills England. I will not stand up and say that I am the expert on mechanisms, but I am concerned to think that that level and standard of reporting will not happen under a new, enhanced body.
Secondly, it is important that we do not lose sight, during the progress of the Bill, of what this transfer of powers is going to do. By transferring the powers of IfATE to the Secretary of State, we transfer the approval of technical qualifications as a whole—an end-to-end process that is understood and respected by employers and understood by colleges. Everyone must understand how qualifications will be arrived at and approved. I would like some assurances from the Minister that that process of end-to-end scrutiny with employers will continue and be enhanced in Skills England.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of my noble friend Lord Blunkett’s important Amendment 31 on apprenticeships and the growth and skills levy. Although it is important that apprenticeships are available to all age groups, thus ensuring that lifelong learning plays a key role in skills development in the years ahead, I am particularly keen that more young people should see them as a first step on a career ladder. That is clearly set out in Amendment 31.
Unfortunately, the bright new dawn that many of us expected when the apprenticeship levy was introduced in 2017 has failed to materialise. Noble Lords will be familiar with the analysis commissioned on behalf of the Association of Colleges earlier this year, which showed —I think this was for 2022-23—that some 160,000 fewer apprenticeships were started than in 2017. You might ask “How on earth can that possibly be the case?”, but it is. That decline was particularly alarming because it disproportionately impacted on those most in need of training, particularly younger people and those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
There were regional aspects to it as well, because the decline was particularly prevalent in regions of the country such as the north of England, which traditionally had high levels of apprenticeships, and among SMEs. There are particular structural issues with the levy for SMEs, but that is for another day. That decline in the apprenticeship statistics must be reversed and returned at least to the pre-2017 levels, so I was pleased to hear my noble friend the Minister say on Second Reading that foundation apprenticeships are to be developed as an alternative route for young people who may have faced barriers in the past.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, recounted how difficult it had been to get some of his amendments tabled, because the words “Skills England” could not be used. In today’s Marshalled List, any time that “Skills England” is mentioned it is in quotation marks. It is almost as if it is some soiled rag that needs to be picked up with a glove and held at some distance from your body. It is astonishing. Why should we be so afraid to say that, when we all know what we are talking about here? Let us just be open about it.
Critical to the effectiveness of “Skills England” will be the reshaped growth and skills levy. That must be released from the straitjacket of its predecessor, whose unspent employer funds reverted to the Treasury rather than being retained in the education and training budget. I think that there was some disappointment across the House that the Chancellor had nothing to say about the growth and skills levy in the Budget. I am at a disadvantage because I have not had the opportunity to look at today’s White Paper, to which other noble Lords have referred, but I hope that my noble friend might be able to say something about the growth and skills levy in her reply in respect of this amendment, regarding the scope and level of investment that it might enjoy.
This must affect local priorities, of course, which is why the amendment stresses the role of local skills improvement plans in delivering the co-ordination needed to plug the skills gaps. LSIPs already play a role there and I retain my belief that Skills England should be established as a statutory body, rather than an executive agency, the better to co-ordinate efforts across departments to ensure that we have the most effective approach and that we develop the skills that the country needs going forward.
That said, it is encouraging that Skills England, still in skeletal form, has already published its first report. Its title, Driving Growth and Widening Opportunities, is one that it must live up to. The report to Parliament outlined in Amendment 31 should further concentrate minds in the DfE to set out the direction being pursued and to provide a clear delineation of Skills England’s role in that, having been given those tasks and—I say this only to be helpful, I hope, to my noble friend the Minister—looking to the outcome of a buoyant skills landscape, which the Government and every noble Lord here today want to see emerge.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I support this amendment. Indeed, I express strong support for all the amendments that have managed to get themselves tabled in spite of the language of this Bill, which at this point are just calling for report. It seems quite extraordinary that, at a time when we have a Government who recognise the centrality of skills and have committed to a system-wide approach—as in today’s White Paper, for example—we are being asked to pass legislation that puts everything inside the department, reported to a DfE official, so that under this Bill there is not even a report for other government departments, never mind for the public at large and for Parliament. I cannot believe that this makes sense in terms of the Government’s expressed ambitions for Skills England: that it should be system-wide; that it should do something that goes beyond the remit of individual agencies and quangos; and that it should take in the whole scene effectively. I would very much prefer to see it as a statutory body, but I hope that, between now and Report, the Minister will at the very least take away this widely expressed request for us to have regular public reporting of what is going on, which everybody can use, so that we have documents in the public domain allowing us to see what is happening and how the Secretary of State’s new responsibilities are being carried out.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)
My Lords, I add my support for Amendment 36 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Like other amendments, it calls for—among other sensible things—a report, in this case on levels of investment in skills by employers.
If you have believed the CBI over the past few days, you would think that the investment climate for business had taken a turn for the worse in recent weeks, with what it is calling the “triple whammy” of increased employers’ national insurance contributions, the higher national minimum wage and various changes in labour market rules. The CBI feels that there is a palpable sense in the business community that the UK is becoming a more difficult environment for investment. Of course, skills are very much part of that picture. There is a clear risk that our levels of investment in skills, which are already running at half the levels of our peer group in the OECD, will suffer further if this climate of paralysis in the UK with respect to business investment is allowed to continue.
On the uncertainty that noble Lords have alluded to with respect to big government policy, notably the development of the growth and skills levy and the future of the LLE, these things may become compounding factors that risk current low levels of investment in skills dipping even further. Clearly, we cannot afford that as a country, so I believe it is vital that the Government take steps as rapidly as possible to lift the policy uncertainty that will potentially blight levels of investment in skills over the current year and accept the amendment, which will provide a healthy baseline against which we can measure progress in this respect in the months to come.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I have a tactic nowadays of speaking towards the end, when everybody else has said it better than I can. I just want to add that I have put my name to Amendment 18, and I agree with Amendment 23 and pretty much everything that includes the word “reporting”.
I am slightly concerned that our positions became entrenched in the last day in Committee, and that nimbleness is seen as being reduced by reporting. There is a lot that we do not know and a lot that we need to know. In my own profession of teaching, we have to teach with the door open and, at any time, somebody senior could come in, observe your lesson and give you formal feedback. At the very least, you get one formal observation a fortnight and—let us face it—we all work better with that kind of incentive. Skills England needs to be held to account; otherwise, we are looking at it being held to account by Henry VIII.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I am also slightly uncertain about the order of speakers; I thought it was in the same order as the amendments.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Non-Afl)
It can be in any order.
Baroness Barran (Con)
It can be in any order. I rise to speak to my Amendments 35 and 36 and to support Amendment 31 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. Before I talk to the amendments in detail, I will reflect briefly on some of the important points that were raised earlier in Committee and that have a bearing on the groups that we will be debating today.
In addition to the fundamental concerns raised about the abolition of IfATE, which we have heard again from your Lordships today, and the absorption of its powers by the Secretary of State, we heard concerns from my noble friend Lady McGregor-Smith about how long it takes for a new body to bed in and gain the trust of employers and, again from her, from my noble friend Lord Johnson and from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, about the risk that we lose momentum in implementing the Government’s skills reforms. Similarly, the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich, and the noble Lords, Lord Aberdare and Lord Knight of Weymouth, among others, expressed their doubts about the Government’s approach.
In particular, there was a real sense, as we have heard again today, that everybody wants Skills England to succeed but there is a worry that it will be swamped by the volume of technical work that it will have to do, which could prevent it from delivering on the changes that the nation needs to see. I absolutely echo the earlier words of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in hoping that the Government will bring forward their own amendments to address these concerns on Report.
My Amendments 35 and 36 seek to bring some focus and clarity to the work of Skills England by requiring regular reporting to Parliament. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, on the 12 different versions that he tracked in the Marshalled List. Without this, Skills England might disappear from view, buried under a mountain of technical processes. Importantly, critical accountability disappears with that; we will not be able to name who is accountable for different decisions.
I will first explain my Amendment 35. There are many people in the sector who are concerned by the uncertainty that the Bill creates surrounding previously established processes, such as the granting of new technical education qualifications. As your Lordships know, IfATE was an independent body and new qualifications were decided with the help of employers and businesses, informing them what skills were needed in the economy. However, with the arrival of Skills England we need to understand two things: first, how will the Government decide on its strategic priorities and, secondly, how will this be operationalised in the creation of new technical qualifications? With this transition, it is likely that the processes to decide which sectors receive new qualifications could change, so my Amendment 35 seeks to clarify how these decisions will be made and what will guide this decision-making. We need a level of transparency that retains the confidence of employers, training providers and, crucially, students for this approach to have a chance of success.
Next, I will give details on my Amendment 36, which seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to produce an annual report on various skills metrics. Your Lordships will have noted that this is a long list that reflects the complexity of this area. There may of course be better metrics and, ideally, a shorter list, but this is our starter for 10—or perhaps I should say 12, since the list stretches from paragraphs (a) to (l). I will go through these points individually—I apologise to your Lordships for the length of this, but it underlines how many areas we do not have clarity on where we need clarity.
Paragraph (a) in the proposed new clause seeks clarity on the level of need or skills gaps by sector, level of qualification and region. Without this, I fear we will get a generic report with broad-brush headings that might well reflect the national averages but does not give any actionable insight about where to focus or prioritise, or about the amount of progress made from year to year.
Paragraph (b) aims finally to bring some consistency to different qualifications across the sector, particularly as they apply to key core competencies. At the moment, we have a long and varied list of qualifications, and they are not really interoperable. For example, the standard of generic digital skills is not the same in two digital skills qualifications at the same level, and this contributes to the complexity of our system and is a blocker to streamlining it. This would be a key step to achieving the aims also mentioned in paragraph (i).
Paragraph (c) intends to give visibility to the earnings impact of completing different qualifications at different levels and in different regions. I do not think that we could answer that question today with solid data.
Paragraphs (d), (e) and (f) follow the same structure as paragraph (c) but in relation to how the Government are spending their budget in the area and how the landscape is evolving in terms of new qualifications, as well as the impact of both of these on trainees.
Paragraph (g) intends to explore whether the system is still meeting employer needs. We keep hearing from employers an urgent need for more clarity on what would happen if there were a gap in, say, engineers on Teesside, and what the Government, through Skills England, would do about it.
Paragraph (h) turns to the funding of skills training by employers. I thank my noble friend Lord Johnson for his comments on this. As he said, this is an area that we all know has declined significantly in real terms over the past 20 years, and we now lag badly behind other industrialised nations. We hope that there is some way that this can be measured annually to shine a light on this important area, both in financial terms and in relation to take-up by employers of new qualifications. Of course, this will be impacted by changes to the apprenticeship levy that the Government have proposed.
All these elements intend to create a far clearer picture of the impact of technical education qualifications on the people who take them, and the differences that happen through their learning. It also seeks to explore the way in which Skills England will work differently to IfATE and to provide an outcome-based framework by which its efficacy can be judged and adapted if necessary.
The letters after that intend to provide a framework to evaluate Skills England more generally, judged on the factors that matter to both employers and students. As noted above, paragraph (i) intends to ensure that this new system is created in a manner that is easy to understand for employers and students. For example, it is unclear how and where the Secretary of State will get advice on the content, accessibility, assessment and rigour of T-levels. This has much in common with Amendment 30 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett.
Paragraph (j) seeks to get regular updates on the impact of changes in the post-16 education strategy that the Government have committed to delivering, and its inclusion would commit the Government to detailing how they are delivering the objectives of the new strategy and what difference it is making on the ground.
I hope that, if my noble friend Lord Lucas reads the Hansard of this debate, he will be pleased to see paragraph (k), which looks at careers advice and seeks to ensure that there is a sufficiency—to be clear, I mean quality rather than just volume—of careers information, advice and guidance.
Paragraph (l) mirrors the wording in paragraphs (a) to (c) in subsection (1) of the proposed new clause to be inserted by Amendment 31 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. This would ensure that the Government’s reforms focus on the areas where there is the most urgent need for increased participation.
Finally, I want to touch briefly on Amendment 31 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, which I support; I have already spoken about its proposed subsection (1). The second subsection seeks to get a clearer sense of how the skills and growth levy will operate in practice and to build on the promising start that we have already seen from the local skills improvement partnerships.
I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments on this, but I hope that she has heard the message from all noble Lords who have spoken this afternoon: there is a pressing need to build confidence in the Government’s approach. A commitment to putting Skills England on a statutory footing, linked to a rigorous reporting regime, would be a helpful step in that direction.
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, including as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis and as a director of Peers for the Planet. I shall speak to my Amendment 36A; I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for his earlier support. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Watson: I am a bit bemused that I was unable to mention Skills England in my amendments, but we are where we are.
The skills landscape in the UK is undergoing seismic change and gearing up for both the industries of the future and the energy transition. In my engineering business, we are recruiting as fast as we can to deliver the transition in clean energy that is currently working its way through the economy. Renewables, carbon capture, nuclear, hydrogen and grid expansion are all seeing bottlenecks in terms of the skills availability in the UK to deliver the Government’s aspirations in this area. Of course, net zero is much broader than just the energy system. It is interesting to note, perhaps, the success that we are having in reskilling engineers from other industries. For example, we have recruited from Dyson many engineers who have fallen victim to the recent job cuts there and reskilled them to work on clean energy projects. They have gone from designing vacuum cleaners to designing nuclear reactors—no problem.
In 2021, I worked on my first Bill, which became the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022. Following the excellent work of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and others, the Government agreed to include a climate duty in local skills improvement plans; this was a great step forward. Although that climate duty is very welcome for the development of LSIPs, what we have seen to date is quite a piecemeal approach in that area. I set out some of the issues with LSIPs at Second Reading, including the need for a greater, systems-level join-up of these plans in order to avoid duplication and ensure consistency.
At the heart of this is the fact that we are currently without a national picture of how the UK can prepare workforces to close the skills gaps related to our net-zero targets; to seize new net-zero opportunities; and, crucially, to address the challenges posed by transitioning from high-carbon sector roles, for example in the oil and gas industry. That last point is crucial in maintaining public support for this agenda.
Some really good work has been done at a sector level, which I think we can work from. I highlight the excellent work done by the Nuclear Skills Taskforce, which resulted in the National Nuclear Strategic Plan for Skills. Crucially, it recognised that a tailored approach to the UK regions was necessary; as a result, we now have a number of new regional skills hubs for nuclear that co-ordinate approaches across regions, all tied together through an overarching strategy. We can learn from that. In the Midlands, we are planning to expand this regional hub approach more broadly across clean energy. One of our offers to the Government includes working to set up regional skills hubs and to provide the skilled workforce that will be so important if we are to maximise the opportunity from the energy transition. But we do need that national plan.
It reminds me in some ways of the commonality here with how we are implementing clean energy. We have local area energy plans rolling up to regional plans and the national plan, which is the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan. In the same way, we need that roll-up through the skills system, as also brought out by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in his excellent Amendment 31.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, in speaking to amendments in this first group, I wholly recognise the point made by noble Lords that this is about the importance of accountability and reporting, and I begin by reassuring your Lordships that the department, in this legislation and all the work we have done so far, takes transparency, accountability and reporting very seriously, including to Parliament. As the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said, I was accounting to the Industry and Regulators Committee just this morning on the inquiry that my noble friend Lord Blunkett referenced. Alongside my honourable friend the Minister for Employment, hopefully we both demonstrated cross-government working and gave a considerable amount of detail on a range of issues that have been raised during the course of this debate and were raised last week as well. In addition, the Government have today published the Get Britain Working White Paper that noble Lords have referenced.
I will just say, in response to the points made by my noble friend Lord Blunkett about the name of the Bill, that I remember, back in 1997, sitting on the Bill Committee for that piece of legislation. I was not clear at the time that the name had been as significant as my noble friend suggests, but I know that what was included not only in that legislation but in the commitment of that Government to make progress was what made such a difference to the education system under the leadership of my noble friend and that Labour Government.
All noble Lords have complained about how difficult it was to talk about Skills England, while talking at length about Skills England. Nevertheless, I would argue that there is a lot of information already in the public domain. In less than three months, this Government announced Skills England and ensured its first public report was delivered, which talks a lot about many of the questions that noble Lords have rightly identified as important: where are the current skills gaps; what will be the role of Skills England; how will Skills England work across government and with other stakeholders, including employers, trade unions and others? That was in less than three months after the start of the Government.
But we take accountability and reporting seriously and, as noble Lords have said, Amendments 18, 23, 31 and 36A, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Storey, Lord Knight, Lord Blunkett and Lord Ravensdale, and Amendment 36 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, all touch on that issue.
Through this legislation specifically, as we discussed last week, functions currently held by IfATE will be transferred to the Secretary of State, who is already accountable to Parliament. This fundamental accountability to Parliament naturally includes the exercise of any functions that are transferred from IfATE through this legislation. However, I understand that we need to go further than that to reassure noble Lords about the public accountability of Skills England. These functions, having been transferred to the Secretary of State, will be exercised by Skills England where appropriate.
As already discussed, we intend for Skills England to operate as an executive agency of the Department for Education. I emphasise that we are establishing Skills England as a new arm’s-length body, not as a department within the DfE or, as one noble Lord suggested, in some corner of Sanctuary Buildings. In establishing it as a new arm’s-length body, the department will adhere to the requirements set out in guidance published by the Cabinet Office, which provide the highest standards of corporate governance. Once set up, Skills England will report on its functions and performance in publicly available documents. In response to several noble Lords who argued for Skills England producing an annual report, I absolutely commit to that. In response to the noble Baroness, Lady McGregor-Smith, I assure her to the extent possible that equal care will be taken with that report to ensure that it is rigorous and accurate.
I can go even further than that. A sponsor Minister within the department will be accountable to Parliament on all matters concerning Skills England, including setting the policy framework in which it will operate. We will ensure that an annual letter from the Secretary of State sets the priorities on which Skills England will focus. That letter will also be publicly available.
As discussed at last week’s session, a framework document will be agreed between the Department for Education and Skills England in accordance with the Treasury’s handbook Managing Public Money. That publicly available document will set out matters including the governance and accountability framework within which Skills England will operate, Skills England’s core responsibilities and how the relationship between Skills England and the department will work in practice, including on financial matters. This will include setting out the responsibilities of the chief executive to the board and to the department. Once in place, the independent board will provide scrutiny of Skills England, ensure that it is operating effectively within this framework and provide assurance functions, as well as leadership and direction.
In response to the specific points made by noble Lords, particularly my noble friend Lord Watson, about progress on the growth and skills levy, first, we have committed to developing the growth and skills levy out of the apprenticeship levy precisely because we have heard calls from business for greater flexibility in our apprenticeships system and on how employers spend levy funds. It is true that fewer young people are starting apprenticeships now; there has been a 40% drop since 2015-16. That is why a key first step we announced back on 24 September was shorter-duration apprenticeships and new foundation apprenticeships for young people in targeted, growing sectors. These will help more people learn high-quality skills at work and fuel innovation in businesses across the country. The reformed growth and skills levy will also enable employers to fund training that meets priority skills needs identified by Skills England.
The noble Lord, Lord Johnson, rightly made an important point about the fall-off that we have also seen in employers’ investment in skills—an issue that we discussed at some length in the committee that I attended this morning. However, it is certainly the case that one of the things that would be likely to encourage employer investment is the flexibility and the listening to businesses that we have already done in order to ensure that the products available respond to the concerns of employers, both for more flexibility and for those changes to apprenticeships that will enable them to use them more freely.
This new offer will also be aligned with our industrial strategy, which I will return to in a moment, thereby creating routes into good skilled jobs in growing industries such as construction, digital and green skills. Skills England is currently engaging on the details of the growth and skills levy, and we expect to be able to say more about that when Skills England has completed that engagement in the spring next year.
I move on to the reporting requirements that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, included in her Amendment 36, all of which I consider to be important to be in the public domain. Much of what the Secretary of State would be required to report on as a result of that amendment, however, is already publicly available, or will be available as a result of the establishment of Skills England. I hope that I can provide some reassurance to noble Lords about that. Skills England will consolidate different sources of data and insight to inform its assessments of national and regional skills needs, which it will publish regularly. As I have already alluded to, the shadow Skills England published the first such assessment in September this year.
Skills England will also publish further analysis, including the delivery of a standardised taxonomy for the UK and mapping of education pathways to understand the most common routes into priority professions. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is right to say that it is important to bring greater clarity for learners about the appropriate pathways and routes. It will continue to provide published assessments of skills analysis as needed in support of the industrial strategy and the growth and opportunity missions.
Alongside Skills England, the Department for Education publishes a comprehensive catalogue of data. There are currently 11 statistical summaries available relating to further education and a further 119 datasets publicly available to explain the statistics. These include the Employer Skills Survey, which provides information on the skills challenges that employers face within their workforce and when recruiting, the nature of any training provided, and awareness and involvement in various initiatives and programmes. They include apprenticeship data that includes starts, achievements and participation, as well as breakdowns by age, sex, ethnicity, subject, provider and geography, and they include statistics on the employment, earnings and learning outcomes of further education learners in the year after completion of their qualification, including national and regional breakdowns available, and are split by the level and sector subject area of qualification.
Given the significant amount of data already published and Skills England’s role as the single authoritative voice of skills analysis and its publication of data and insights, placing an additional requirement in statute on the Secretary of State to report on a long list of different skills metrics is not necessary. We are taking action through Skills England to ensure skills, data and insight are better used to identify skills gaps and to help determine how they should be addressed. We have been clear from the outset that this is central to its role within an improved skills system.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I listened with great interest to what the Minister said and will read Hansard carefully—particularly her comments about accountability and accessibility to all. But, at this stage, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Addington
“Report: effect on other Government departmentsWithin six months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report on the impact of this Act on the remits of all government departments.”Member’s explanatory statement
The amendment requires the Secretary of State to lay before Parliament a report detailing the impact of the Act on the remits of all government departments.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, noble Lords will not be surprised to find this amendment in this group, which basically says, over and over again, “Tell us what you’re going to do in this new structure”. It starts by saying that, when the new structure is in place, we will find out how it will relate to the rest of government. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, tabled an amendment—to which I put my name—that mentions the departments. Either amendment would do, but, starting with government, at least government can talk to itself quite easily—or it should be able to. We all know that it does not often happen and that there are different agendas, but it should be able to happen. Other amendments in the group track different groups in a similar vein: they all want to know how we will structure this new arrangement for skills, which is necessary for growth going forward.
There is not much point in going on because, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare—who is a contributor to this—pointed out, everybody is in agreement that we do not have enough knowledge. When the Minister answers on these amendments, can she tell us how the Government intend to bridge this gap? If we just say that it is all published somewhere, that will not really do it. It should be published in a place where we can find it out and get hold of it, so that Parliament can discuss it. That is what we are about here.
I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will have an answer that addresses this basic point. We do not know how this body will relate or how it will work, and we do not know how to monitor it. We also do not know how to raise when something goes wrong. Everything goes wrong at some point or does not work as well as it should. I hope that, by having reports coming backwards and forwards, we will have a way to get in, see where the problems are, allow government to change it and allow the agenda to happen. Having said those words, I hope the Minister will give us a favourable response and I beg to move.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I have Amendment 20 in this group, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hampton and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for adding their names to it. I apologise for any repetition that may creep into what I say.
The Labour manifesto states that Skills England will
“bring together business, training providers and unions with national and local government to ensure we have the highly trained workforce needed to deliver Labour’s Industrial Strategy. Skills England will formally work with the Migration Advisory Committee to make sure training in England accounts for the overall needs of the labour market. And we are committed to devolving adult skills funding to Combined Authorities”.
My Amendment 20 would require the Secretary of State to report on how it has engaged with these and other bodies in discharging the functions transferred under the Bill. Specifically, it includes the industrial strategy advisory council, since the industrial strategy will provide the overall context for skills policy. It includes the Migration Advisory Committee and mayoral combined authorities, in line with the commitment made in the manifesto. It includes employers through the industry sector skills bodies, as well as the employer representative bodies responsible for developing the 38 local skills improvement plans across all areas of England. It includes education and training providers at all levels, which will need to deliver the skills identified as needed. It also includes other government departments, most of which will have their own skills needs and challenges, as well as trade unions and the devolved Administrations.
Like others, the amendment seeks to spell out the tasks that Skills England should undertake by requiring the Secretary of State to report on them. Taken together, all these reporting amendments underline the breadth and extent of these tasks, from taking over IfATE’s existing functions—which it seems to be performing pretty well—to defining new technical education qualifications and defunding existing ones, and to a wide range of new strategic tasks requiring close engagement with employers, other government departments, local and regional bodies, and trade unions. The only omission I can find is Uncle Tom Cobbleigh.
I cannot help thinking that it might be better if the issues on which we are seeking reports from the Secretary of State were embodied in the Bill. The crucial purpose that the Bill seeks to promote—developing a skills system that will more effectively identify the skills we need and match them with the skills we produce through our education and training systems—will not be reliably met by abolishing IfATE and setting up Skills England as an agency within the Department for Education, with a hugely broad and important remit but no statutory basis and limited scope for parliamentary oversight.
As I have said, I strongly support the concept of Skills England as the key to addressing this purpose, but the Bill seems a somewhat underwhelming first step to establishing it on the right footing. Despite the Government’s laudable desire and commitment to tackle the systemic skills challenges we face, I am not convinced that it will—or about how it will—avoid the fate of so many unsuccessful previous attempts to resolve them.
I hope we may find a way on Report to encourage the Government and the Commons to think about whether the Bill should more clearly spell out the status of Skills England, ideally through a government amendment, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in his remarks on the previous group. Much of what the Minister said was extremely encouraging but none of it is in the Bill, which is where I would like to see at least some of it.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 27 in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, to which I add my support. It would require the Secretary of State to consult LSIPs, mayoral combined authorities and other relevant employer-related groups on the introduction and number of technical education qualifications before exercising her powers under the Act. Such consultation is vital to ensure that any technical education qualifications introduced align with local and regional skills needs—one of the priorities of Skills England—to ensure that the workforce is equipped with the skills required to support the improved economic growth that we all want to see.
I recognise that Skills England has the potential to play a crucial strategic and co-ordinating role in bringing together local and national skills agendas—the Minister touched on this in her comments on the previous group—but I again come back to the fact that the approach set out in the Bill, in terms of the centralisation of powers in the Secretary of State, jars with the Government’s stated intention that Skills England will
“bring together business, training providers and unions with national and local government to ensure we have the highly trained workforce needed”
to ensure that our regional and national skills systems are meeting skills needs. I am afraid the approach set out in the Bill raises questions that the Minister is hearing time and again around whether we can be truly confident that this is the approach that will be taken when there is nothing in legislation or out there to ensure that that happens. As the Learning and Work Institute has said, it is important that Skills England must
“not be primarily a creature of Whitehall”.
I hope that the Minister can set out again, in a bit more detail, how Skills England will engage and involve local areas, local leaders and employer groups from the outset; and the mechanisms that will be developed to ensure we can have confidence that Skills England will effectively and consistently ensure, through the technical education qualifications introduced, that our regional and national skills needs are met.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 28 and 29 in my name. Given my noble friend the Minister’s comprehensive and extremely thorough response to our debate on the first group, I will try not to fall into the trap of once again appealing to the Oscar Wilde agency that cannot speak its name. If we are to have a whole-system approach—the White Paper on getting people back to work, which was published today, mentions this—and we start with ensuring both that there is joined-up thinking in government and that that is translatable in terms of relationships with business, then we need to be reassured that we are clear on where decisions are being taken. Again, I mentioned this in our debate on the first group.
I declare an interest in this group because I have some interest in a major infrastructure project at the moment. The excellent contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on the first group highlighted the issues around net zero and other environment-related issues, but there are major problems for us as a nation, as we know. HS2 has set us back. In this country we tend to look at what we are bad at rather than what we are good at, so we will obviously be affected by what has taken place with HS2 and by the massive mistakes that have been made, but there are other major infra- structure projects—some of which, in the nuclear industry, have been mentioned—where success has been substantial.
I had the privilege of going down to a college in Somerset to talk about Hinkley Point. I was deeply impressed with what has been done there but there seems to be a mismatch between the overall picture—the holistic picture, if you like—and the minutiae. I have written to my noble friend the Minister so I do not expect her to deal with this matter in detail this afternoon but, whatever we call boot camps in future and whatever immediate requirements on the ground are to be met by something such as one, if the decisions on funding them are to be devolved, how should an infrastructure project covering a substantial geographical area—as well as a sectoral one—deal with them?
I have another interest because, on Friday, I have the pleasure of initiating the new learning resource digital centre at the Northern College for Residential Adult Education. There are only two left in the country, and one is at Wentworth in Barnsley. That project has been funded because of the local schools improvement plan and the partnership that is arisen from it in terms of the digital needs of learners through lifelong learning. The reason why I am raising this and have touched on boot camps is that there is a real danger that, in our enthusiasm for devolution—I am an enthusiast for it—we start to create joins that did not exist. The Northern College has survived only because the elected Mayor of South Yorkshire has so far managed to find the resources but it was not possible to find resources joined up with West Yorkshire, which has students at the college because it is very much on the edge of South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire but does not fall within West Yorkshire—so it is not West Yorkshire’s concern any more.
With the best will in the world, the devolution that we are engaged in could disable unique things, where there is limited provision available and a holistic approach is difficult to achieve if people are not collaborating. With this Bill and the new executive agency, it would be possible to join things up if we knew where decisions were taken. It would be possible, if we accepted Amendment 29, to make sure that departments across government think and work together in order to ensure that the department responsible for housing, say—whatever it is called these days—understood what was needed to ensure that workers had a green card to get on site in the construction industry and be able to do the job.
Somehow, we have to put the bits back together while we are doing devolution where appropriate, either regionally or sectorally, and ensure that we do not by default end up with the department and Skills England, which will be part of the department, not being clear about who is doing what. In the example I gave in relation to infrastructure projects, it is not yet totally clear. I hope that, by raising the issue, we might be able to clarify it, but, at the moment, the embryo Skills England body will have to refer that to the department because nobody can give me an answer.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 30 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, partly because—I remind the Committee of this—I worked for City & Guilds for 20 years. I was working for it when national vocational qualifications were introduced—1990, I think—precisely to reduce the complexity in the qualification system. There are times when one feels that one has been around too long, but that was exactly it.
Those qualifications came in with levels 1 to 5 in order to be a simple way in which people could understand practical qualification levels. Levels 6 and 7, covering managerial and degree-level subjects, were then introduced as well. The qualifications were called “vocational” because we always wanted to include craft qualifications as well as technical ones. I worry now about what is happening to the encouragement of craft qualifications, which are vital to the economy of the country. I am not suggesting that we go back to NVQs again—they had their day and they went—but it worries me that memories are so short on this. It is a complex system because anything as complex as the myriad variations of employment inevitably will be so, but having a simple way in which one can measure levels of expertise seems to have some advantage to it.
This made me wonder how much discussion there has been with the awarding bodies. City & Guilds has been around for well over 100 years, as I say. Obviously, apprenticeships have been around since the Middle Ages, but I am not suggesting that we go back to then to find out what they did with them. The BTEC has been around for at least 50 or 60 years, I think. There is a mass of expertise there, yet they do not seem to be referenced or involved; I wonder why this is because they have some very useful skills to offer to this Bill.
I just felt that I needed to go down memory lane when I saw that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, had referred in his amendment to reducing
“the complexity of the qualifications system”.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I added my name to the important amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare. I was fascinated to hear that he actually read the Labour manifesto; that is very impressive. I also support my noble friend Lord Addington’s amendment.
It is quite important that the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, mentioned mayoral combined authorities—the noble Lord called them pan-regional partnerships, which I had not heard before—and local skills improvement partnerships. Can the Minister tell us how those will feed into the department or how she will consult them?
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, my amendment follows on nicely from what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said earlier. He put it very well: devolution is really good and something that we can all support, but it creates joins that we then have to knit back together. We have to consider carefully how we do that knitting together, which is what my Amendment 36B is aimed at.
I shamelessly copied Amendment 27 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which I support, in order to do this. However, I made one slight tweak to include the regional perspective, which I mentioned in our debate on the previous group, so that pan-regional partnerships are consulted; that refers to partnerships such as the Midlands engine and the northern powerhouse.
At Second Reading, I set out my concern that local areas that are not part of a combined authority or have other devolution deals could lose out under the proposals that the Government are putting forward. I listened carefully to the Minister’s response at Second Reading, which allayed some of my concerns, but I would like to test this issue in some additional detail.
Taking the Midlands, where I live—I live in Derby—as an example, following welcome devolution in recent years, we are now blessed with two really good combined authorities. We have the West Midlands Combined Authority and, as of recently, the East Midlands Combined County Authority. Although these combined authorities cover areas of the west and east Midlands, they account for less than half the population in the Midlands region, which is around 11 million people.
As I said at the start, this highlights something of a problem with the devolution agenda. The combined authorities have been successful at working with governments to unlock additional funding for their areas, but this has meant that those living outside combined authorities have sometimes been left behind. As an example, for many years, the East Midlands has lagged behind the West Midlands on many indicators, for example when we look at transport spend per head or public investment per head of population. This will be partly remedied by the new East Midlands Combined County Authority, but many areas of the Midlands are not covered. I am concerned that the same pattern will follow with skills, so the question is: how will Skills England ensure that the approximately 6 million people in the Midlands who do not live in a combined authority area are considered?
The Minister has stated that Skills England will consult regional bodies but it would be helpful for her to clarify how that governance structure will operate; that is the subject of my amendment. Pan-regional partnerships such as the Midlands engine are set up to consider these regional issues. They would be well placed to pull together those plans and to co-ordinate combined authorities and other areas of local government in order to ensure that regional skills needs are met; they could also act as a focal point for regional skills needs in working with Skills England.
In this way, the Government can unlock the benefits of an integrated regional skills approach, flowing up from local areas to the regions and to the national view that Skills England will have, and ensure that no areas of the regions are left behind or inadequately represented. The Government could also benefit from the powerful data capabilities of pan-regional partnerships such as the Midlands Engine Observatory. This would align with the approach I set out in the previous group on regional skills hubs and the work already ongoing there. The pan-regional partnerships are helping to facilitate those regional skills efforts. It would also be a means of achieving the join-up of local skills improvement plans that the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, referred to on the previous group.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I was just looking through my noble friend Lord Blunkett’s Amendments 28, 29 and 30, to which I added my name. I am sure noble Lords will be aware that, since Skills England was announced, the DfE has been using a pretty coloured diagram in five sections to describe the planned functions of the new executive agency. One of the sections says that Skills England
“identifies priorities for and shapes technical education to respond to skills needs”.
Having done that, it will need to update the necessary technical standards and work with sectoral industry bodies to develop them. Indeed, the Government will need to set out which functions currently with IfATE will be delegated to sectoral organisations and regional bodies. That is what Amendment 28 seeks to achieve.
My noble friend the Minister said in Committee last week that there needs to be “a sectoral approach” to the way that skills are developed across the economy. Of course, that is right. With that in mind, it is necessary that the Government’s plans for the powers that they anticipate will be required are set out, and this amendment would facilitate that.
Another of the sections in that DfE diagram says that Skills England will ensure
“national and regional systems are meeting skills needs”,
explaining that this will entail:
“Working with Mayoral Combined Authorities, Employer Representative Bodies, and other regional organisations to align national and regional systems with each other and with skills needs”.
All that seems fairly straightforward, but it is not clear how Skills England will achieve that without the necessary powers and some resources. We do not as yet know what these might be, so it is important that criteria for national skills priorities are set out and that the expectations of departments other than the DfE are made clear. My noble friend the Minister stated on several occasions how important the effect of joined-up government will be for the involvement of a wide range of stakeholders. Amendment 29 offers the opportunity for that to be spelled out.
Finally, there is more than a little uncertainty as to how the plethora of qualifications to be transferred will be subject to oversight. My noble friend Lord Blunkett has covered this, but I will simply say that qualifications at levels 3 and 4 are crucial in allowing young people the opportunity to build their skills in an environment in which they are not intimidated by unrealistic expectations or other barriers to entry, as has been the case too often with apprenticeships. The unfortunate tangle—let me put it no less kindly than that—that we currently have involving the introduction of T-levels and the consequent often rash and sometimes reckless defunding of some BTECs must not be allowed to happen with the transfer of the many essential qualifications validated by IfATE in its short lifetime.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 27 and in support of Amendment 28 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. I start by noting that I support very much the spirit of the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and the aspiration of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, although I have a certain sympathy with the Minister in trying to actually deliver on that.
My Amendment 27—I thank my noble friend Lady Evans of Bowes Park for adding her name to it—aims to ensure that the Government’s strategy is up to date and relevant for local areas and that the Government do this by consulting the relevant bodies. I suggest local skills improvement partnerships and mayoral combined authorities although, in his Amendment 36B and his extremely helpful, clear and practical explanation of it, the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, raises the relevance of other groups and the importance of making sure that we do not miss out significant parts of the population as we try to aggregate and understand these local views.
What we are trying to do is to balance technical education qualifications that can be tailored, to a degree, and that best support the needs of a local area, with the ability to aggregate and use the data and intelligence from them to inform national policy. That needs to then feed into an ability for the Government and those to whom they devolve their powers to understand where providers are delivering efficiently on these plans and where they are not, identifying gaps and seeking to address them.
I also want to speak to the importance of the Government setting out how they intend to delegate these powers that are being centralised. As my noble friend Lady Evans said, what the Government talk about and what is actually happening in terms of centralisation rather jars, so I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, has brought this forward through his Amendment 28. I do not think anyone is suggesting to the Minister that this is an easy task—if it was easy, somebody would have cracked it already—but it is clearly a very important task and the more she can say about how these different groups will interact with Skills England and how there will be lines of communication from the local to the national and back again, the more confident the Committee will feel.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, we have had a good discussion on this group of amendments about the importance of ensuring that there is both appropriate engagement across government and improved coherence of the qualifications system, alongside the challenges of ensuring that we get appropriate local and regional input into our skills system while maintaining some coherence across it.
The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is right that some of these issues around devolution are not neat government, as I think I said in a committee this morning, but they are nevertheless important in ensuring that local employers can contribute and there can be differentiation depending on different needs in different parts of the country. I will return to that as I address the amendments, but I wholeheartedly agree that it is very important that we are clear about the way in which a range of different stakeholders will be engaged. Some of this is already very clear; other aspects—I will be honest—will be part of the work of developing Skills England in the building of those relationships.
I turn to Amendment 19 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and Amendment 20 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, regarding Skills England’s work with key bodies, in particular government departments. It is really important that we are able to work collaboratively with a whole range of different partners. Extensive work is already under way across departments to ensure that skills sit at the heart of joined-up decision-making across government.
As I probably said on the first day of Committee— I usually say it when talking about skills—Skills England and our improved skills infrastructure will play a key role in supporting the skilled workforce needed to deliver the Government’s five missions: driving economic growth, breaking down barriers to opportunity, supporting our NHS, delivering safer streets and the clean energy transition. Therefore, it is crucial that there is a cross-government approach and input into improving our skills provision.
Skills England will work closely with the industrial strategy advisory council. The chair of Skills England will sit on that council and, although I accept that that is not sufficient on its own to ensure join-up, it is an important signal. It will work closely with the Migration Advisory Committee, because it is important that we identify how to understand the analysis of where migration is needed as well as understand what more we need to do to boost the domestic pipeline of skills development. It will also work with the Department for Work and Pensions to ensure that the Government have the analysis and advice needed to inform a coherent approach to the labour market. The publication of the Get Britain Working White Paper, which we touched on, is an important example of that joint working.
In order to ensure that Skills England’s first report was informed and took in this need to look at skills needs across government, the report was informed by a skills audit across government departments. The cross-government approach will also be driven forward through the regular mission boards, which bring together Ministers from across government, helping to break down departmental silos and ensure a strategic approach to our mission priorities. Together, these connections are creating a coherent approach to skills, migration and labour market policy.
Amendment 27 was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and Amendment 36B was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. Regarding consultation with contributors to local skills improvement plans on the introduction and number of new technical education qualifications, it is my view that local skills improvement plans are playing an important role in giving employers a voice in this area. When I was on a visit last Friday and heard from FE principals, one in particular had feared that the development of LSIPs would be just another quango, but she was actually finding it useful to have that engagement with local employers.
Mayoral combined authorities also have an important role to play, using the elements of skills funding that are devolved to them and their convening power, to bring together a clearer view of regional growth needs, through the regional growth plan, and to work alongside local skills improvement partnerships—as well as the other initiatives announced today in the Get Britain Working White Paper—to build a coherent approach to the labour market and to skills development at a regional level.
The assessment of skills needs set out in the first report by Skills England—published in September, as I said—drew strongly on evidence from LSIPs. Skills England has already begun to engage and gather evidence from mayoral combined authorities, employer representative bodies and others on skills needs. This will inform decisions on where standards and, therefore, technical qualifications or apprenticeships are required.
Several noble Lords talked about the challenges of devolution, as I suggested at the beginning. Supporting a more joined-up approach to decision-making on skills at regional and national levels will be central to Skills England’s role, putting the bits back together, as my noble friend Lord Blunkett described it. I accept that there is a challenge, as the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, identified. While there is a very clear remit for those areas that are mayoral combined authorities, those that are not have less devolution of skills funding. However, the Government are preparing a devolution White Paper and we will want to encourage further devolution. We will also want to support local authorities in carrying out their role to input into skills discussions in those non-mayoral combined authority areas. I share the noble Lord’s interest in this, living as I do in the Midlands, in an area without a mayoral combined authority.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, the Minister has made many encouraging statements about how the system will work. I still do not entirely understand why none of this can be in the Bill and why we are totally reliant, it seems, on the Secretary of State for Education as the only point of accountability to Parliament or indeed anybody else. It seems that something is missing here in terms of how Parliament in particular can hold Skills England to account.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I went on at some length in my response to the previous set of amendments to spell out what the accountability mechanisms to both the public and Parliament will be for Skills England, both directly in its publication of an annual report and, via the sponsoring department, to Parliament. In respect of specific amendments, the concern is that what we are trying to do here is create a strategic body that brings together the data analysis and insights with the ability then to inform efficiently, effectively and agilely—if that is the proper word—the development of occupational standards, assessment plans and the technical qualifications that employers tell us they need. Creating legislative requirements in advance of it being able to do so will, the Government believe, limit that flexibility, when we really intend to improve it. That is one of the criticisms that employers have made of the current IfATE process.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I have two points. First, if I heard correctly, the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, was asking why none of that could be in the Bill. Secondly, what the Minister just said might be a starter for 10, for the drafters, on what could go in the Bill. Of course, if you are incredibly precise about exactly what would be reported on, that limits you, but if something in the Bill says that this spirit will be aligned, it retains a degree of flexibility. With the level of flexibility that the Bill now affords the Government or any future Government, flexibility trumps accountability squarely, as the Minister has heard. I wonder whether she could reflect on that.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I understand why the amendments are formulated as they are, but most of them would create not just the requirement to describe but a condition that would be inserted into the process and that would therefore limit the flexibility and speed with which qualifications and occupational standards could be developed. I contend the suggestion that there is no public or parliamentary accountability in the way we are setting up Skills England. I went through at some length the routes through which both of those forms of accountability will be delivered to Parliament and, more widely, the public—while conceding the point about the requirement for an annual report, for example, and outlining the accountability through the sponsor Minister to Parliament to account for the progress and success in a whole range of areas that noble Lords have talked about.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, as nobody else wants to come in, I will try to bring the discussion to a close. I think the Minister effectively just opened up what the consideration is. I remember saying, in the briefing that the Minister courteously arranged for us, that she would be testing our ability for probing amendments here. I think we have come up with a reasonable pass grade on that. We have found out that, yes, there will be some reporting, but it is complicated, we do not know exactly where to find it and somebody new coming to the field might miss it. That happens all the time. Do the right people know about it? Do you have to be an expert to find out about it? That is one of the problems we have in going through this.
Before I withdraw my amendment, I will say that, if you do not allow us to get at this information easily, certain things will be missed. That is a guarantee. It tends to be that things are missed that it may even be helpful for the Government to address and correct. I hope that, by the time we get to the next stage, the Government will have had a little more time to think about how they can start to address this, because we all wish that Skills England—or what becomes Skills England, or the dark secret that is Skills England—becomes known to the public and functions properly. We just need to know, because that is what we are here for. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Barran
“Report: approval of new technical education qualifications Within six months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report on mechanisms for employers to apply for the approval of new technical education qualifications and to appeal the removal of any technical education qualifications.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment clarifies the route employers will take to approve new technical education qualifications.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 24, I will also speak to my Amendments 25 and 26. As we heard on earlier groups, there is a lot of concern among experts in the sector about how the Government’s plans will work in practice and whether the proposed changes in the governance of the skills sector will result in confusion and delay—obviously to the detriment of the Government’s growth agenda. My amendments seek to bring clarity to this confusion.
My Amendment 24 seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to explain to employers the way in which they will be able to approve new technical education qualifications and appeal where qualifications are planned to lose funding. It is, obviously, essential that employers know how to get new qualifications approved so that our qualifications can remain up to date and relevant to the needs of businesses, and that the Government can receive the input from businesses on what skills our economy is lacking.
My Amendments 25 and 26 seek to address the delays that will happen when these powers are transferred from IfATE to the Secretary of State, as laid out in the impact assessment that the Government published alongside the Bill. The impact assessment lays out details of how the creation of end-point assessments and the approval of new technical education qualifications will both be delayed. In order to minimise the impact that this has on students who are seeking to undertake a technical qualification, students who are midway through their course and businesses that are seeking to introduce qualifications, I felt it necessary to encourage the Government to give details as to how long this delay will be and the steps they are taking to ensure that it is as short as possible. It is important that businesses and students have certainty about the extent to which any delays will impact them. These amendments propose a timetable, when the Bill is passed, by which the Secretary of State must report on how long these delays will last and what the Government are doing to ensure as minimum a disruption as possible to the qualifications and to the students seeking to undertake them.
I hope the Minister will agree that these amendments are not controversial and may come back on Report with government amendments that look like mine. I beg to move.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendments 25 and 26, tabled by my noble friend, because the policy impact assessment also notes that mature students, learners with disabilities, ethnic minority learners and disadvantaged learners are likely to be disproportionately impacted by the delays she is talking about, which is obviously of concern. I just wanted to add that, because clarity on the delays, as would be addressed by the amendments of my noble friend, would be extremely reassuring, particularly when one looks at the groups that the Government’s policy impact assessment says may be disproportionately disadvantaged.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, quite rightly, the noble Baronesses have raised the issue of how we can ensure continuity of provision while transferring functions under the auspices of this Bill.
I reflect that coming back 14 years—probably 16 years —after the last time when I was responsible for doing any government legislation directly, there are some important improvements in the way in which Governments are expected to lay out the impact of their legislation, with the development of impact assessments. Of course, such things also provide grist to the mill for those who look at them and say, “Well, you’ve identified that there is potential concern about delay, and that must mean that the delay is going to happen”. The point of an impact assessment is that it enables, quite rightly, the Government pre-emptively to identify potential risks that could result from the transfer of functions and property from IfATE to the Secretary of State and think about how those risks can be mitigated. We are confident that that they can be, so I hope I can provide noble Lords with some reassurance about that.
I should also like at the outset to repeat assurances that I provided to noble Lords at last week’s session. We will ensure that the practical transition of functions from IfATE to the Secretary of State will be designed so that standards or apprenticeship assessment plans that are in the process of preparation or approval at the point of transition will continue. Similarly, approval decisions for technical qualifications that are part way through the process will also continue. It is our intention that employers and other stakeholders and, as rightly identified by the noble Baronesses opposite, learners perceive no interruption. The transition scheme that is being developed will be designed to ensure the minimum possible disruption for stakeholders.
I note that Amendments 25 and 26 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seek to place on the Secretary of State a duty to lay before Parliament a report on the timetable for the creation of, respectively, endpoint assessment and new technical education qualifications. As the noble Baroness said, Amendment 24 seeks to place on the Secretary of State a duty to lay before Parliament, within six months of Royal Assent, a report on mechanisms for employers to apply for the approval of new technical education qualifications and to appeal the removal of approved status for existing technical qualifications.
Skills England will undertake ongoing engagement with employers and other key stakeholders to identify skills needs that are not being met through the existing suite of technical qualifications and apprenticeships. This engagement will help identify where new standards should be produced and where existing standards and/or apprenticeship assessment plans should be updated, ensuring that the system responds quickly. With that in mind, Amendment 25 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would, to some extent, frustrate the Bill in enabling more effective prioritisation of the preparation and updating of apprenticeship assessment plans. We intend for the functions transferred to the Secretary of State to focus on where there is greatest need for a new or updated plan, informed by feedback from employers and other key stakeholders.
We also anticipate that plans in development at the point at which the functions transfer will continue and be finalised by the Secretary of State. Standards approved by the Secretary of State will be published, as is the case in the current system, as the basis for new technical qualifications to be developed. Awarding bodies will then, as now, submit applications for new technical qualifications to be approved in line with standards and reflecting employer demand. IfATE is currently responsible for the approval of technical qualifications; its function is being transferred through this Bill. Responsibility for decisions on the withdrawal of approval from technical qualifications will also transfer through this Bill, which includes a duty to publish information about matters taken into account when deciding whether or not to withdraw approval.
We would argue that Amendment 26 is also unnecessary as it would duplicate existing transparency, which will occur as a matter of course through the Secretary of State’s routine engagement with Parliament and through the establishment of Skills England as an arm’s-length body. As I have outlined previously, Skills England will report on delivery in line with standard practice, including as set out in its framework document and in a manner consistent with other executive agencies.
I turn to Amendment 24 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Placing on the Secretary of State a requirement to report on mechanisms for employers to apply for the approval of new technical education qualifications and to appeal the removal of approved status for existing technical qualifications is unnecessary. It would give employers an additional role in the approval of technical qualifications, which would risk undermining their central focus on highlighting skills needs and, as appropriate, preparing standards that reflect those needs. Where there was clear evidence of continued employer demand, it would be unlikely in practice that approval status would be removed—unless, for example, other significant issues had been identified in relation to the successful delivery of the qualification.
I hope I have provided some assurance that we do not expect a delay due to the transfer of functions in this Bill. We have already put mitigations in place and we will, in relation to the approval of—and the withdrawal of approval of—technical qualifications, continue to follow the current arrangements.
Lord Hampton (CB)
Before the Minister sits down, can I ask for a bit of clarification here? The Minister has described Skills England as an arm’s-length body a couple of times today. I apologise if everybody else knows this, but can you have an arm’s-length body within a department? I thought that the definition of an arm’s-length body was that you cannot.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Yes, you can. There is a whole range of different types of arm’s-length bodies. Executive agencies are one such type. They are governed by a governance document—the framework document that I have previously described—and by a set of requirements and relationships that I would be happy to spell out for noble Lords.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for highlighting the impact on the groups and communities that could be most affected by delays, as set out in the impact assessment.
I am honestly a bit puzzled by the Minister’s response. She said that my Amendment 24 is unnecessary, but employers are telling us that it is necessary. There is obviously a gap between what the Minister knows and what is being understood, so the more clarity the Government can bring to those specific points, the better.
Similarly, the Minister spoke very confidently about minimal delays—my words, not hers—in approving endpoint assessments and new qualifications. We do not want to frustrate the Government’s plans, but if it is so clear to the Minister that this is a very low-risk area then perhaps she can put that and the exact timescales she expects formally on the record on Report.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I commit to providing to the Committee more detail about the process for transition and some reassurance, which I suspect I have not sufficiently provided, on how that will mitigate some of the risks identified in the impact assessment.
Baroness Barran (Con)
When the Minister does that, which would be much appreciated, I request that, in addition to more detail about the process, she includes a sense of timescale, which would be most helpful. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
My Lords, I inform the Committee that, were Amendment 37 to be agreed, I would not be able to call Amendments 38 or 39 by reason of pre-emption.
Clause 9: Power to make consequential provision
Amendment 37
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment removes the power for consequential changes to be made by delegated legislation to Acts other than those specified in the provisions of the Act.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 37 in my name, which is supported by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, would remove the Government’s power to introduce regulations that make consequential changes to Acts beyond the scope of this Bill. Like so much in the Bill, this represents a classic Henry VIII power. As we have highlighted elsewhere in our discussions on the Bill, it facilitates an Executive power grab and gives far too much power to the Secretary of State, who, as I have said before, may be someone with no interest or understanding of colleges and further education. We are lucky in our current Minister and I hope she lasts a long time, but Ministers can be moved without rhyme or reason.
The power in this clause would undermine parliamentary scrutiny and allow significant changes to be made without proper oversight. The amendment is a small safeguard in a potentially dangerous Bill. I also support Amendments 40 and 41 in this group in the name of my noble friend Lord Addington. I beg to move.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment, inspired by what might be described as the crusade of our much-missed former convener, Lord Judge, to root out unjustified Henry VIII clauses wherever possible. I considered putting down an amendment to make it clear in the Bill that the power under this clause could be exercised only where the provisions to be made by such regulations relate specifically to functions previously exercised by IfATE that are to be transferred under the Bill. However, Amendment 37 from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, addresses this point in a more straightforward way, so I have willingly added my name to it. I look forward to hearing from the Minister why she feels the power in Clause 9 to be necessary.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I hope to be as quick as I can. My amendments suggest that everything should be under the affirmative procedure when it is reported back. That is just to make sure that Parliament gets a real look and a chance not to have those reports buried in the huge piles of SIs that are brought forward. We should guarantee that we are all looking at what happens in this new body.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, despite the Minister’s dismissal of my concerns about the Henry VIII powers at Second Reading, I have brought two amendments in this group to make sure that the scope of those powers is less broad.
Amendment 38 seeks to restrict the Secretary of State’s powers to amend only the Acts that are already listed in Schedule 3, so that both Houses can appropriately scrutinise the way in which these powers are being used. Surely it is the job of the Government and the department to identify all the Acts to which these powers apply. I cannot see the need for such a clause, unless the Bill has been rushed and the Government are worried that they have failed to capture all the legislation that requires amending with the abolition of IfATE. If this is indeed the case, perhaps there is more redrafting to do than we have already attempted.
My Amendment 39 is focused on the same issue but, rather than restricting the Secretary of State’s powers specifically, it simply removes the power to amend future legislation. Again, I note that all Bills which name IfATE as the body for apprenticeships and technical education have already been passed, so there should be no need to amend future legislation, unless the Government have plans to refer to IfATE in any future legislation that they intend to draft. Given that this seems unlikely, I am once again left with the question as to why this is necessary. I urge the Minister to reconsider this.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, I begin on this group of amendments by reassuring the Committee that the department recognises and takes very seriously the important role that Parliament has in scrutinising consequential amendments. For this reason, we have made every effort to identify all the consequential amendments to primary legislation that are necessary, and to include them as Schedules 1 and 3 to the Bill.
Despite those extensive efforts, there is a risk that in the future we may uncover Acts which need amending because of provisions in this Bill. I reassure the Committee that this is a very limited and narrow power and that any use would be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. We have carefully considered the power and believe that it is entirely justified in this case. In fact, the inclusion of similar powers as a safeguard is well precedented in legislation. Our delegated powers memorandum has been considered by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which has confirmed that there is nothing in the Bill which it would wish to highlight to the House.
Therefore, the amendment, and Amendments 38 and 39 in the name of the noble Baronesses, Lady Barran and Lady Garden, would remove the delegated power to make consequential amendments to primary legislation. If this were accepted, it would be unnecessarily burdensome on Parliament and require greater amounts of parliamentary time should we uncover Acts that needed minor and genuinely consequential amendments to be made as a result of the Bill. It would, of course, require all those changes then to be made through primary legislation.
Depending on the nature of the issue, and to go back to the previous group of amendments, we might see an increased risk of disruption in the functioning of the skills system for learners and employers. I hope it might provide some reassurance to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, although perhaps not to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, that previous legislation, including legislation passed by the previous Government, has included a power such as this because it provides that important safety net should future amendments be identified.
The power is limited to consequential amendments to previous Acts and Acts passed later in the same parliamentary Session. It does not encompass all future legislation, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seemed to suggest. The amendments would limit consequential amendments to those Acts specified in Schedules 1 and 3 to the Bill, but our approach in relation to amending Acts passed later in the same Session is not unusual, notwithstanding the challenge from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. We have reviewed legislation and identified that including a power to amend primary legislation passed in the same parliamentary Session has been done in at least 20 other Acts since 2020. It may well be that the noble Baroness has now seen the light, but I suspect it is more likely that this is a sensible, narrow and reasonable provision to put into this legislation. That was why the previous Government decided to do it at least 20 times.
Amendments 40 and 41, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, would require regulations making consequential provisions that are subject to the negative procedure by virtue of Clause 9(5) to instead be subject to the affirmative procedure for a period of six months. As is customary, any consequential amendments to legislation other than primary legislation, which would be subject to the affirmative procedure, will be subject to the negative procedure. The limited and uncontroversial nature of such changes means that this procedure provides sufficient parliamentary oversight while enabling changes to be made without unduly taking up parliamentary time.
Consequential amendments to secondary legislation are not included in the Bill as the power to make or amend such legislation is held by the Secretary of State by virtue of the passing of that legislation previously. We have already identified the amendments to secondary legislation that are needed; these are of a similar nature to those included in Schedules 1 and 3 to the Bill. There is a strong precedent for delegated legislation under the negative procedure to be used to make consequential amendments to delegated legislation. Therefore, the amendment seeking affirmative resolution is not necessary.
I have set out in a letter to the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, the chair of the Constitution Committee, how the clause is inherently narrow in scope as it is limited to making amendments that are genuinely consequential on the provisions in the Bill.
Therefore, for the reasons that I have outlined, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, the noble Baroness is doing a mighty job in trying to convince us that this is a helpful Bill. Sadly, some of us still have concerns but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
House of Lords
Wales
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate
Lord Davies of Gower
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to strengthen the position of Wales within the United Kingdom.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, I start by paying tribute to the emergency services and local authority staff across Wales and the rest of the UK, who have worked tirelessly to keep us safe during Storm Bert. We will continue to support those who have been affected by the storm. Our efforts are focused on them, and our thoughts and prayers are with those who are grieving the loss of loved ones.
The Government have reset the relationship with the Welsh Government, based on respect, co-operation and delivery. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Wales is driving forward the partnership, meeting regularly with the First Minister of Wales to discuss key areas of joint work. This is already delivering better results for people in Wales, with last month’s Budget providing a record boost for the Welsh Government to support vital public services, including the NHS.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, having witnessed the terrible storms in Wales, I, too, thank the emergency services for the services they have provided. Recognising the need to enhance Welsh infrastructure, the last Government allocated £1 billion for the electrification of the north Wales main line, but Ministers in this Government have consistently refused to commit to this project since July. Can the Minister give the House a cast-iron assurance today that the north Wales main line electrification will be delivered in full?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his question, but I am somewhat surprised, given that the previous Government cancelled the electrification to Swansea, that he is asking it. As for future infrastructure projects, we will update the House in due course.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
Does my noble friend agree that the record settlement for the Welsh Government at the Budget—£1.5 billion, the largest since the dawn of devolution—will provide a much-needed spending boost for public services after years of neglect from previous Governments of the past 14 years? As a commissioner for South Wales Fire and Rescue Service, I draw attention to the wonderful blue light services that responded to the dreadful storms and flooding that we experienced.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for all the work that she does in support of the blue light services, and as a commissioner. The reality is that last month’s Budget was an extraordinary settlement for the people of Wales—£21 billion, and £1.7 billion in additional funding as part of the Barnett formula. That shows the difference there can be when you have a Labour Government at the Senedd and a Labour Government here.
Baroness Humphreys (LD)
I too express my appreciation for the work of the emergency services, and the search and rescue and mountain rescue teams from other parts of Wales who helped in the Conwy valley over the weekend.
When the Welsh Government’s commission on the constitutional future of Wales reported in February, it concluded that each of the options—enhanced devolution, a federal structure, and independence—could be a valuable way forward. We on these Benches would argue that the federal structure, giving each of our four nations equal powers, would strengthen the position of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in the UK most effectively. Is it not time to deal with the English problem: devolve powers properly to the regions of England and create a sensible federal structure that benefits all four nations?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for her question regarding England—while we are talking about Wales. There is a Question tomorrow on the role of the Council of the Nations and Regions and how devolution in action can work across the country, and I look forward to discussing that in more detail with her then.
Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)
My Lords, from the beginning the mantra has been that devolution is a process, not a terminus. What proposals are the Government bringing to the table in discussions with the Welsh Government for the next steps on devolution?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, it is 25 years since the last Labour Government introduced devolution, and we are very proud that it is an iterative and living process. As for future devolution, we are clear in our respect for devolution and our commitment to making the existing devolution settlement work effectively. We remain committed to the promises in our manifesto and will work to deliver them, including progressing conversations to consider devolution of youth and probation services, in order to enable them to be more locally responsive. We will also look to devolve employment support funding.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, last week I raised the topic of coal tip safety in Wales. On Sunday night, a coal tip slid down the mountain and hit the community of Cwmtillery. What more needs to happen for His Majesty’s Government to commit to the £600 million required to secure all coal tips in Wales? Does someone need to lose a home, or a life?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
Our thoughts and prayers go to the people who are currently living with the impact of Storm Bert. As we discussed last week, this Government invested £25 million, for the first time, to make sure that additional funding is in place to protect communities and ensure the safety of our coal tips. We will continue to do so and to have active conversations with the Government of Wales about what they need.
Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)
My Lords, will the Minister please assist me? By my calculations, this Government have been in power for nearly 150 days, but we still do not have a Lords Minister for the Wales Office, nor indeed for the Scotland Office or for Northern Ireland. How does all this fit in with Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to produce a Council of the Nations and Regions?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, but I believe that the Prime Minister has faith in me to deliver for this Government in this House.
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that this Government’s decision to appoint a new Welsh Commissioner for the Crown Estate will ensure that Welsh prosperity is at the heart of the Government’s mission to become a clean, green energy superpower? It is also proof of the positive partnership between Labour in London and Labour in Cardiff, which is delivering for the people of Wales, contrary to the previous Tory Government’s hostile attitude to Wales.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I put on record my thanks to my noble friend for the work he did with my noble friend Lord Livermore on the agreement for the Crown Estate Bill. Wales is at the forefront of our national mission to deliver economic growth and clean power by 2030. The Crown Estate has a key role to play in this and needs to understand and represent Welsh interests, which is why it is wonderful news that we will have a commissioner with special responsibility for Wales. This will deliver £1.4 billion of investment and secure 5,000 jobs.
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
The Minister speaks of respect and delivery and the advantage of having a Labour Government in both Westminster and the Senedd. Far from being hostile, the last Government promised that north Wales would get a new large-scale gigawatt nuclear power plant at Wylfa on Ynys Môn, powering millions of homes and creating thousands of jobs in the region. Will the Minister give the House a cast-iron assurance that this Government will do nothing to prevent or delay the delivery of the new nuclear plant at Wylfa?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Baroness has a future Question on this issue and I look forward to discussing it again. We recognise that a nuclear future at Wylfa could help to deliver several of our strategic objectives, achieving net zero and energy independence and restoring economic prosperity across the region. Nuclear developments in north Wales will provide high-quality jobs across the region and drive economic growth. Great British Nuclear completed the purchase of the site in June 2024 and we hope to make further announcements on its future soon.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend will not remember this, but during the Brexit discussions the last Government kept forgetting again and again about the devolved nations and their role in our relationship with Europe. Can she assure me—I am sure she will, and I am looking at her very hard for an answer—that the new Council of the Nations and Regions will reset their agreements, so that in every part of government policy they will be fully involved and discussed?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The Council of the Nations and Regions, as a manifesto commitment, is central to our engagement and resetting of relations across the United Kingdom. I am delighted that the Prime Minister, within hours of his appointment, reached out and spoke to the First Minister of Wales, visited within three days and has visited Wales three times. The Council of the Nations and Regions is at the heart of our engagement with our regions going forward.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
Let us hear from the noble Lord, Lord Harlech.
Lord Harlech (Con)
I am grateful to the noble Lord. Tourism is one of the most important areas for the Welsh economy. Indeed, many farmers and farming families have diversified into tourism. They are already reeling from the Budget announcement, but today the Welsh Government are going to put in place a levy on overnight tourist visitors. How can this be in any way good for growth and prosperity of Wales?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
As the noble Lord will know, this is a devolved matter. The Government respect the devolution settlement and the Senedd’s ability to legislate on it. Both this Government and the Welsh Government understand the importance of tourism to local economies, economic growth and jobs.
Drug-related Deaths in England and Wales
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Newcastle
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of data published by the Office for National Statistics on 23 October indicating that the number of drug-related deaths in England and Wales was higher in 2023 than in any other year since records began in 1993, and what steps they are taking to reduce the number of such deaths.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)
My Lords, drug-related deaths are tragically at record highs, especially in deprived areas. We are committed to tackling this problem, including by correcting the years of disinvestment in treatment services as highlighted by Dame Carol Black in her independent review. I was glad to lay legislation that widens access to naloxone, a life-saving opioid reversal medication, and this Government will continue to work across health, policing and the wider public services to prevent drug use and address the causes of inequality, including in Newcastle.
The Lord Bishop of Newcastle
I thank the Minister for her Answer. The ONS data revealed that the north-east has been the English region with the highest proportion of drug-related deaths for the 11th consecutive year—three times higher than the lowest rate, in London. Can the Minister say a little more about what targeted steps His Majesty’s Government are taking to reduce drug-related deaths, particularly in the north-east?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The right reverend Prelate is absolutely right to highlight the situation in the north- east. I can assure her that funding is allocated on the basis of need, and that includes the rates of drug-related deaths. I hope it was helpful that senior officials from the department recently met with the drug and alcohol service commissioners, the police and crime commissioners and the directors of public health from across the north-east to discuss synthetic drug threats. We will certainly continue to work with local areas, including the north-east, to tackle this very real issue.
Lord Bird (CB)
Can we accept the fact that a lot of the people who are dying are homeless, and a lot of them are the people who are on our streets? We know that drug addiction and bad health on the streets are a cocktail of death. Can we see some effort by the Government to put in place the rehab, detox and therapeutic communities that are necessary to get the demons out of the lives of people who are on the streets and in homelessness?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I understand the point that the noble Lord is making. We are funding the rough sleeping drug and alcohol treatment grant, which gives targeted treatment and wraparound support services to those who sleep rough, or who are at risk of doing so, in 83 local authorities. That includes a whole range of things. In addition, we are funding the housing support grant and working across government, including with the Deputy Prime Minister, who has brought together a dedicated interministerial group to tackle the very real problem that the noble Lord describes.
Lord Mendoza (Con)
My Lords, the Minister mentioned synthetic opioids. We all know the terrible scourge that they have wrought in America, with something like 75,000 deaths a year from synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and nitazenes. Can the Minister assure us that we are monitoring the supply of these drugs into this country so that we are spared the terrible scourge and loss of life among young people that has been experienced in America?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I understand what the noble Lord is saying. Synthetic opioids, as he will know, are certainly more potent, and indeed can be more deadly, than other forms of drugs. We are working with other government departments to enhance the surveillance to which he refers and to improve early warning in response to the threat of synthetic opioids, and we will continue that work.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, many charities that support those with drug addiction are raising concerns about the increased costs that they will have to fund as a result of the increases in national insurance charges. What assessment have the Government made of the impact on those critical services being able to support those with drug addictions?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The noble Baroness will have heard me say before that we had to take some tough decisions at the Budget to fix the foundations in the public finances, and that enabled a settlement for the Department of Health and Social Care of some £22.6 billion. As she knows, the employer national insurance rise will be implemented in April 2025, and in due course the department will set out further details of the allocation of the funding I referred to for next year.
Lord Kamall (Con)
My Lords, I know this Government take drug-related deaths seriously, as did the previous Conservative Government when we awarded 12 projects a share of a £5 million fund to reduce rates of fatal drug overdoses, adopting a similar approach to that of the Vaccine Taskforce to tackle health challenges. Has there been any evaluation of how successful those projects were? What plans are there to continue or expand them?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
Our continuing work in this area is part of the Office for Life Sciences programme. This Government continue to fund research into wearable technology, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, all in a bid to support people with drug addictions. Since coming into office, we have awarded £12 million to projects across the UK that are showing innovation in respect of technology, because we want to support people with addictions.
Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, what steps are the Government taking to support vulnerable children in schools who, without support, are likely to become addicted to drugs, in order to ensure that they reduce the numbers of drug deaths?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I assure the noble Baroness that education on drug use is an essential part of harm reduction and prevention. It is a statutory component of relationship, sex and health education.
Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
My Lords, the two-year review of the LGA’s 10-year drugs plan has made a number of recommendations to improve the response. On the question of synthetic drugs, it recommended the implementation of early-warning systems so that changes at street level can be responded to in real time and samples of new substances can be tested as soon as possible. Can the Minister please look into those recommendations and see what support can be provided by the Government?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I will indeed be doing that, not least because our work with other departments continues to take account of the early warning to which the noble Baroness refers. That is in respect of the threat of synthetic opioids, which we know is extremely real and pressing.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle is absolutely right: there is a direct relationship between poverty and drugs deaths, which is why it is vital that we increase our resources for fighting poverty and why we need to raise taxes on wealthy landowners such as James Dyson and Jeremy Clarkson.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
As always, I pay close attention to the contributions of my noble friend, who makes helpful observations. We do indeed need to continue our work in this area. It is quite important to look back at the history that Dame Carol Black reported on. She talked about one of the difficulties being that funding for community drug and alcohol services was subsumed into the public health grant in 2013, which meant that by 2019-20 funding for those services had been reduced by over a third. That is a £212 million disinvestment. The result of all this is that drug use has increased, with all the major indicators of its harm. This is something we need to turn around.
Lord Patel of Bradford (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I echo what the Minister has just said. The last Labour Administration set up the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse and ring-fenced £800 million to provide treatment when drug users needed it. It reduced drug-related crime, drug use plateaued, and drug-related deaths were at an all-time low. Sadly, this funding was pulled suddenly, which resulted in the highest level of drug-related deaths ever, with drug use on the increase and drug-related crime going up. Can we go back to some of the sensible ideas we had about providing treatment for drug users?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
My ministerial colleague Andrew Gwynne will be looking at how we improve drug and alcohol addiction services. In the light of recent Office for National Statistics data, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities has an action plan to reduce drug and alcohol-related deaths. Because of this recent data showing major increases, it will review the plan to make sure it is properly grounded and effective.
International Aid Workers: Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Lord Oates
To ask His Majesty’s Government what representations they are making to the government of Israel about the impact of visa restrictions on international aid workers to that country and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
My Lords, we are concerned by reports of humanitarian agencies being unable to do their jobs because of visa restrictions. As the Prime Minister has said, there can be no more excuses from the Israeli Government on humanitarian assistance. He and the Foreign Secretary have repeatedly pressed Israeli leaders to deliver on their promise to flood Gaza with aid, so we call on Israel to co-operate fully with the UN and other humanitarian agencies to facilitate visas and make provisions for humanitarians to carry out their work safely and effectively. Restricting their work is not acceptable.
Lord Oates (LD)
I thank the Minister for her Answer. Does she agree that, as the occupying power, Israel has a duty under international law to ensure adequate provision of food and medical supplies to the people of Gaza? Does she also agree that both the current and the former Governments have repeatedly urged Israel to comply with those obligations, yet obstruction to humanitarian assistance continues? Is it not time for the Government to make it clear that, unless this changes, sanctions will be applied to the responsible Israeli Ministers?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, as I have already said, we have concerns. Our priorities for humanitarian action in Gaza are to protect the civilian population with an immediate effort to prepare them for winter, to ensure effective and safe aid distribution in Gaza, to increase the volume and types of goods reaching Gaza and to enable fully the UN and its agencies, including UNRWA.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
My Lords, does the Minister accept that the efficacy of representations made by His Majesty’s Government is likely to be reduced given that they have made it plain that they will enforce the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, I think that our attempts to influence the Israeli Government in this regard should have nothing to do with the ICC ruling. We are making arguments about saving lives, ensuring that there is medical treatment and that children get fed.
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)
My Lords, your Lordships’ House will be aware of the commitment of the noble Lord, Lord Oates, to the eradication of malnutrition and hunger worldwide and the work he has done on it, for which I commend him. On that issue, the Government of Israel promised to “flood” Gaza with aid, yet essential supplies are still being restricted. What representations are our Government making to their Israeli counterparts to ensure that the Israelis meet this commitment so that aid that is desperately needed reaches its destination?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, we are using all our diplomatic efforts to get aid into Gaza, because the situation is becoming urgent as we approach winter. Some 1.9 million displaced people are living in just 57 square kilometres in the south of Gaza. The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Minister Dodds and Minister Falconer have raised this urgent situation and will continue to do so.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, it is very clear that representations are not enough; direct engagement is required with both the Government of Israel and the Governments of Egypt and Jordan. First, what specific meetings have been held, in country and at a ministerial level? Secondly, as I have discussed before, during the previous Government, we sought out-of-the-box thinking, not just on land routes, which are of course the major delivery mechanism, but on maritime and air routes. Has any work been done in that regard?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The noble Lord is completely right that this is the moment when we need out-of-the-box thinking, and we are looking at every available avenue. We have been working with the Government of Egypt to try to provide medical assistance, and we have been a major donor to that work. We are doing everything that we can. As I said, the Government-to-Government connections are being used as much as possible, because this problem is getting worse by the day, and we need action to save lives.
The Lord Bishop of Gloucester
My Lords, what specific steps are being taken to call on Israel to act consistently with its obligations under the Charter of the United Nations and its other obligations under international humanitarian law?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The right reverend Prelate is right to raise this question. We work using every channel we can and every lever available to us, and in a way that we hope maximises the chance of all this engagement having an impact. We have always said that Israel needs to act within international humanitarian law. As much as it has every right to defend itself, we are increasingly concerned, as the days and weeks progress, about what is happening, particularly in Gaza but also in Lebanon. As the UK Government, we will continue to work to bring about the access we need so that aid can get to the people who really need it.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, the Israeli Government have banned UNRWA from operating in Israel due to the number of its staff involved in the 7 October attack. Considering this information, can the Minister tell us why this Government chose to resume funding to UNRWA?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
As the noble Lord should know—perhaps his noble friend might like to remind him—UNRWA is the only viable way to get aid into Gaza at the scale that is needed now. We understand the concerns of the Israeli Government, which were investigated. We resumed funding because we have an approaching crisis; many thousands of people are about to lose their lives unless aid gets into Gaza.
Lord Singh of Wimbledon (CB)
My Lords, the United Nations aid agencies, the International Criminal Court and human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch all say that what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank is genocide. The Pope says it is genocide. In the circumstances, does the Minister agree that to talk of humanitarian aid while supplying weapons to assist in the genocide is nothing short of hypocrisy?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, I am very careful about the use of the word “genocide”. It is not a word that should be bandied around by any politician. Genocide is for a court to determine. That has not happened, and unless and until it does, I will not refer to this as genocide.
Baroness Helic (Con)
My Lords, there are numerous independent reports of sexual violence being perpetrated against imprisoned Palestinian aid workers and medics. The worst, tragic reported case is of a male orthopaedic surgeon who was allegedly raped to death. What specific actions have our Government taken to ensure that reported cases are documented and preserved in accordance with the Government’s International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict, with the purpose of supporting future investigations into sexual violence as a crime under international law?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The noble Baroness is right to highlight what has been happening to health workers and aid workers. Almost 1,000 health workers and around 300 aid workers have been killed since October 2023. It is important that what happens is documented and recorded for the future, as she says.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, we will hear from the Liberal Democrats Benches.
Baroness Janke (LD)
My Lords, in light of the findings of the ICC that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and his former Minister intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival—including food, water, medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity—will the Government publish in full the legal advice they have received from their law officers regarding the situation in Gaza and the legality of UK export licensing of arms to Israel?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, as we have discussed at length previously, we have a fairly well-established way of looking at arms licensing. I am confident that the decisions that have been made in regard to licensing, where we have restricted some items, have been completely and wholly in line with the UK legislation.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I am delighted to hear the Minister making the point that we need to be very careful about the use of the word “genocide”. I also urge that we be careful about words such as “famine” and “starvation” in this instance. Hyperbole is not going to help. The terrible hardship of the people of Gaza—perhaps the Minister can comment —seems to be blamed wholly on Israel in terms of aid. More than a million tonnes of aid have got through to Gaza, and there is a crisis of distribution. Can the Minister comment on the fact that Israel is in this instance being blamed for political reasons rather than out of humanitarian care for the ordinary people of Gaza, who are victims of Hamas and not of Israel?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, I am honestly not interested in having a big discussion about blame at this stage. Some 40% of the population of Gaza are under 15. I do not think that it is wrong to talk about starvation, when that is what is going to happen if aid does not get in. Aid not getting in is not a logistical problem; with regard to visas, it is a political problem—and it is a political problem that we as the UK Government want to do everything we can to see resolved.
Solar Farms and Food Production
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Lord Fuller
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to safeguard the overall quantity of agricultural land for food production in the light of recent proposals for solar farms.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government recognise that food security is national security. We will champion British farming and protect the environment, and we are committed to maintaining strong protections on agricultural land to ensure that our mission to deliver clean power will not come at a cost to food production or security. We are confident that the rollout of ground-mounted solar will not affect UK food security.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, you cannot eat a solar panel, yet very soon, a large proportion of our most productive and versatile farmland could be covered by them. Earlier this month, I tabled a Written Question asking the Government how much land was being considered for solar farms under the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects programme and the answer came back that just two farms of 1,400 hectares were being considered. In the last few days, the Eastern Daily Press has reported proposals for 7,000 hectares of farmland for solar panels in Norfolk alone, and I know that other Members have the same experience in other parts of the country. The Government have quite simply lost control of the numbers. Can the Minister say whether the upcoming land use strategy will explicitly stop the conversion of grades 1, 2 and 3 land, and does she agree that the NSIP programme is being abused by the aggregation of a large number of small proposals into one? Does she also agree that Britain will starve if all we have to eat are solar panels?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
First, I reassure the noble Lord that estimates suggest that ground-mounted solar used just over 0.1% of land in 2022, and we expect any future rollout to take up a very small amount of agricultural land. The large solar farms that I have information about are not on any grade 1 or grade 2 agricultural land, as far as I am aware. However, the noble Lord makes the very important point that the land use framework will be critical in how we manage what our land is used for. Is it used for energy, housing or farming, and so on? We expect the Green Paper to be published for consultation in the new year and I urge all noble Lords to read it and take part in the consultation.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, the Minister referred to the long-awaited land use framework, which she helpfully announced is due to be published in the new year. I would like to ask whether, at the same time, her department has considered what skills and data will be required to use the land use framework to inform decisions such as the one that is being debated in this Oral Question?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
As part of the consultation and the development of the land use framework, we are intending to engage with a very broad range of respondents in order to have meaningful co-design, and resources absolutely have to be part of that.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, creating energy through solar farms is vital to ensuring a mixed energy supply. It is also vital to use grade 1 agricultural land for producing food. In Canada, crops are grown under solar panels—agrivoltaic farming. Studies have shown that some crops thrive when grown in this way. This not only reduces carbon emissions but doubles up on the use of land. Are the Government looking at agrivoltaics as a way of producing food and sustainable energy?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
As the noble Baroness rightly points out, solar generation can be co-located with farmland. Many projects, for example, are designed so that livestock grazing can continue, and on the point she made on arable, there is some evidence that it can be better for growing and for nature if there is solar generation on the field.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
Is the noble Baroness following closely the test case of the tenant farms in Old Malton, bearing in mind that 48% of all farms in North Yorkshire are tenanted? They are about to be thrown off the land in favour of a solar farm, exactly as my noble friend has described. Will she watch this case very carefully and ensure that no land is taken out of productive farm use when solar panels could go on warehouse and other roofs, which are much more appropriate than farmland?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
Regarding tenant farming, the noble Baroness I am sure will be aware that we have announced that we are appointing the first ever commissioner for tenant farming. Clearly, part of their role will be ensuring that we have a fair, balanced, collaborative relationship between tenants and landowners. Part of that relationship will be to ensure that we do not have the kinds of scenarios that she refers to—so, absolutely, we will keep a close watching eye.
Lord Trees (CB)
My Lords, this is about a lot more than solo farms. Financial bodies are buying up estates and farms and planting trees, aided by large subsidies, then selling off the new woodlands to offset carbon emissions. We do need tree planting in the UK, but this irreversible change of land use is continuing unabated and we are losing food production capability. Can the Minister tell us, by letter if need be, the current rate of irreversible loss of agricultural land? If we do not know that, should not His Majesty’s Government be monitoring it?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I am very happy to write to the noble Lord with the detail on this but, as I said earlier, we expect only a very small percentage of land to be taken up with solar farms, as raised in the Question. Also, it comes back to the central importance of developing a fit-for-purpose land use framework. The reason we need to do that has been shown by the kinds of questions that have come up today.
Lord Roborough (Con)
My Lords, I refer the House to my interests as set out in the register. Replying to my Written Question of 4 September, the Government stated that
“Ministers consider all the evidence and views on both positive and negative impacts … with reference to the relevant National Policy Statement”.
This was in relation to the Secretary of State’s decision to approve large new solar farms immediately post election in Lincolnshire, Suffolk and Cambridge. Can the Minister help the House to understand why the sacrifice of grade 2 and grade 3 land in this case was apparently given so little weight?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Lord has not said which solar farms he is referring to, but a number of large solar farms have been approved in East Anglia recently. With regard to the Sunnica energy farm, which he may be referring to, I am aware that the examining body considered the impact on farming to carry moderate negative weight. However, the Secretary of State concluded that it carried “slightly” negative weight, which is why it was overruled in favour of allowing permission. My understanding is that it was grade 3 and below land, not 1 and 2, but I am happy to check that.
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, I commend my noble friend the Minister’s sensible response to this issue of balancing food with land use in general.
However, does she agree that these rants which we got from the opposite Benches against solar power, wind farms—onshore wind farms—when they were in government and refusing to strike a deal with offshore wind through a sensible strike price, are in defiance of the reality of the climate emergency which we have just seen with the terrible flooding across the country in recent days?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My noble friend raises a really important point. In a nutshell, we have to recognise that climate change is a much bigger threat to farming and to our food security, and we have to take action to secure that. A move to renewable energy is a central part.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, I get the sense from this Question that it is being viewed as a somewhat academic problem that will be solved by government fiat. However, if we are to have a robust and resilient food production capability in this country, does it not depend on agriculture becoming an economically attractive proposition for those who engage in it? Is that not much more to do with the prices that farmers receive for their produce than with things such as inheritance tax? What action will the Government take to look at those pricing structures to ensure that those who actually produce our food get a decent return for their efforts?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble and gallant Lord makes an extremely important point. Farmers have had their prices pushed down for years. I was looking at milk prices today. They seem to be doing okay at the moment, but part of the problem is that there is no stability. We need to look at how we bring stability into farming. The Groceries Code Adjudicator does so much, but we need to do much more than that. It is certainly an area that my honourable friend the Farming Minister is keen to move forward on, and I work very closely with him.
Water (Special Measures) Bill [HL]
Tuesday 26th November 2024
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Water (Special Measures) Bill [HL] 2024-26 View all Water (Special Measures) Bill [HL] 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 45-I(a) Amendment for Report (Supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (19 Nov 2024)
Baroness Hayman of Ullock
That the Bill be now read a third time.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)
My Lords, the Deputy First Minister for Wales and Cabinet Secretary for Climate Change and Rural Affairs has recommended that the provisions of the Bill extend to Wales. An initial legislative consent memorandum was laid in the Senedd on the Bill’s introduction. Supplementary legislative consent memorandums will be laid in parallel with any further Bill amendments. The Senedd will hold a vote on legislative consent before the end of the Bill’s passage through Parliament.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, I would like to say that it has been a great privilege to be responsible for the passage of the Bill through this House. I thank all noble Lords for their careful scrutiny of its provisions and the constructive suggestions and contributions made at each stage. While we may not have ended up agreeing on everything, I know we agree on the importance of the Bill and the need to drive meaningful improvement in the performance of the water industry as an urgent priority.
The public expect and deserve transformative change across the water sector, and the Bill is a crucial first step towards meaningful reform. The new provisions brought forward by the Bill will strengthen the regulation of water and sewerage companies while giving our regulators the most significant increase in enforcement powers in a decade.
The Bill will ensure that water company executives are held to high standards, reflecting the importance of their role in overseeing the operation of vital water and sewerage services. Crucially, the Bill will increase transparency around water company operations and pollution incidents, ensuring that the public, as well as the regulators, are well equipped to hold water companies to account.
With the passage of the Bill in this House, we have made inroads into turning around the performance of the water industry, and made clear our expectations for water companies in advance of the most ambitious investment period that the water industry has seen.
This Government are committed to working closely with counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to address the shared challenges facing our water environment. Our waterways and some of our water companies cross our shared borders, so the importance of working together to improve the water environment cannot be underestimated.
Of particular relevance to the Bill are the challenges faced across the privatised water sector in England and Wales. In line with this, my officials have worked constructively with Welsh counterparts throughout the passage of the Bill through this House, so I am also delighted that the UK Government and Welsh Government have together launched the independent commission to fundamentally transform how our water system works. The independent commission will provide the lasting change that England and Wales need to deliver much-needed reforms in the water sector, which I know all Members of this House are eager to see. We look forward to continued and long-term collaboration with the Welsh Government on the Bill and the independent commission.
In conclusion, I thank all noble Lords who have offered their expertise to enhance and strengthen the Bill in this House. The discussions have been truly collaborative. The Government carefully considered the important points raised during the Bill’s passage and, in consequence, tabled the amendments that we discussed on Report. I believe that the provisions of the Bill leave this House even stronger as a result.
Many of the wider points raised by noble Lords will be addressed by the independent commission, which, as we have discussed, will review the entire water sector regulatory system. I look forward to further collaboration with noble Lords during the course of the independent commission, and on future legislation, as we continue to work towards the shared goal of restoring and protecting our precious water environment.
Just before I finish, I record my special thanks to officials, particularly the wonderful Bill team, who worked so hard and gave me exemplary support throughout the passage of the Bill in this House.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, I thank my noble friends Lord Russell, Lady Parminter and Lady Pinnock for standing in for me when I was off with Covid. I am very grateful to them.
The Bill is essential, and it was essential that it began its journey in this Chamber. It is only one piece of the jigsaw that the Government will bring forward to deal with the problems of the water industry, but it is a vital one.
I thank the Minister and her officials for their time in listening to those of us across the Chamber who were concerned about some aspects of the Bill. She was extremely patient and receptive to the arguments we put forward, and we are grateful for the movement that the Government were able to make on the pollution incident reduction plans and the performance-related pay issues. Ofwat has been strengthened by measures in the Bill and it is to be hoped that, overall, the discharges of sewage will reduce quickly and the quality of water in our streams, rivers and lakes will improve as a consequence.
It is now up to the other place to take on the Bill, which has been much improved by the debates and changes made in this Chamber. For our part, we welcome the review of the water industry as a whole and look forward to seeing how the Bill will fit into the overall picture. It has been a pleasure to work with the Minister and her Bill team on this essential piece of legislation.
Lord Roborough (Con)
My Lords, the core objectives of the Bill were, of course, supported by all sides of your Lordships’ House. The water and sewerage industry has betrayed consumers, and the regulators have consistently failed to bring these companies to book for many years. It is not so much to ask that we should all be able to enjoy clean and healthy rivers, lakes and beaches. On our Benches, we proposed tough action on the companies and executives responsible, and we are pleased that the Bill now places greater responsibility on the industry to clean itself up, while granting greater powers to regulators to enforce those rules.
This Bill is only a short-term move to impose special measures on the industry while we await the results of the commission, which will report next year. Special measures are, by definition, temporary, and the Government must bring forward the next stage of reform urgently. We look forward to reading and debating those reports and engaging fully with the Government to ensure that the right medium to longer-term reforms are put in place to ensure that all stakeholders’ interests are properly recognised and balanced.
I am most grateful to the Minister for listening to the concerns of the House in constructive engagements in this Chamber and in private meetings with her and her excellent officials. Those engagements were always courteous and helpful in airing the issues around each topic of discussion or debate. The best traditions of the House may be frequently mentioned, but this is a very good example, and, in this case, the Bill is much improved as a result.
The House owes thanks to the Minister for the excellent amendments that the Government brought forward. In particular, the pollution incident reporting plans now have teeth and will be a valuable tool in pushing the industry to do better. I also highlight amendments that place much more weight on using nature-based solutions as an alternative to more traditional investment in infrastructure. These amendments will have a measurable impact on nature recovery efforts in this country.
Although this House amended the Bill to improve accountability on debt levels and financial structuring, thanks in particular to the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, as well as on the accountability of the Government on the rules being set, it was a little disappointing that the Government would not accept our amendments to protect the consumer in the event of an SAO, nor to enable the Secretary of State to limit water companies’ debt levels when necessary.
Finally, I thank all noble Lords from all Benches of this House who engaged in debates on the Bill and with whom I had many constructive discussions.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I add my congratulations to the Minister on securing her first Bill in this new Parliament, and through her I pass on my thanks to the Bill team for their solicitations throughout the procedure. I would like to tease her on one item if I may. We did not manage to carry the amendment on mandatory requirements for sustainable drains, nor the end to the automatic right to connect, but will she consider voluntarily bringing forward a report in six months’ time on where we are in introducing mandatory requirements for sustainable drains for major new developments?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I am very happy to take that back to the department and to discuss whether that is possible.
Israel-Gaza Conflict: Arrest Warrants
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)
My Lords, yesterday I wrote to the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General and explained that under the International Criminal Court Act 2001, a domestic UK statute, Prime Minister Netanyahu, as the serving Prime Minister of a state that is not a party to the ICC, continued to enjoy immunity from arrest and legal process. Can the Minister confirm which of these two alternatives reflects the Government’s position: is it that the moment he steps on to British soil Mr Netanyahu should be arrested and, after a court process, handed over to the ICC, or is it that his immunity should be respected, as provided for in a domestic Act of Parliament? Of course, the ultimate decision will be taken by the High Court. But what is the Government’s position on this critical issue?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, for his point, and I have seen the letter he wrote to the Attorney-General. It raises an important point and a question of law. There are two pieces of law here, both of which the Government respect but which need to be fought out in a court. That is the right way to resolve this and that is the process that would happen should we receive a warrant and should Mr Netanyahu visit the United Kingdom.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, that legislation allows only the ICC to issue a waiver on immunity, so can the Minister confirm whether such a waiver from the ICC has been provided? The Minister in the House of Commons said yesterday that it is for the courts to endorse the warrant. My understanding is that that is not correct. Under the legislation, it is the Secretary of State only who endorses the warrant and then passes it on to a judicial officer. It is then for the courts to determine whether they will deliver that person—if that person is in the UK—to the ICC in The Hague. Can the Minister confirm that the Secretary of State will endorse the ICC warrant?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, we will comply with our obligations under our membership of the ICC. My understanding is slightly different from the noble Lord’s in that, as of now, the warrants are not issued to all signatories to the ICC. The warrant would be issued should it become known that Mr Netanyahu intended to travel to the United Kingdom. As noble Lords will appreciate, as yet we have not received any such warrant.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
Does the Minister agree that although many of the actions of the Israeli Government in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza are grossly disproportionate, none the less the issue of the warrant is profoundly unhelpful and that it would be a good idea if, to the extent possible, we put it into the long grass?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The helpfulness or otherwise is not really at question. The ICC is independent of the United Kingdom Government, and rightly so. We will comply with our obligations as a member of the ICC.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I think the House deserves an answer from the Government to the question put by the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, particularly as we have a debate later on the rule of law. So how do the Government interpret Section 23 of the International Criminal Court Act 2001, which is domestic law? The ICC and the Rome statute is one issue, but the other issue is domestic law, which seems pretty clear. The Minister batted it to the courts. I think it is important to know the Government’s legal interpretation of Section 23.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I do not think I batted it away. I gave an accurate description of the Government’s position. It is not unprecedented for two pieces of law to cut across each other. The right way to resolve this is through the courts. Unlike some Members opposite, although happily by no means all, we accept our obligations under international law.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
My Lords, like the decision not to supply arms to Israel, this was a political decision, not a legal decision. Does the Minister agree that the decision taken in respect of the ICC is simply weaponising international justice and confirms many people’s opinion that the ICC is more a political tool than an international arbiter?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
On both questions, I am afraid that I disagree with the noble Lord. That is not how we view the ICC. We respect the ICC and our obligations as a signatory to it. As for the decisions on export licences, those were made in compliance with UK law.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that there is a misunderstanding by the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, if he thinks that this is a matter concerning proportionality with regard to self-defence? Warrants have been issued very specifically not in relation to disproportionate use of self-defence. They have been issued on the basis of the refusal to allow humanitarian aid to reach the civilian population of Gaza. That was the basis for the warrants being issued: the starvation that follows from that and the impact in particular on young children’s development and survival possibilities.
I want to ask a supplementary question. It is very important that people in this House know that the International Criminal Court is not indicting Israel. It is indicting two of its leaders who have conducted this war. Normally the principle of complementarity would have meant that we would respect the courts of Israel to investigate and deal with the matter. That was blocked by Prime Minister Netanyahu. Do the Government agree that because that avenue of complementarity was not available, after the opportunity had been given for an inquiry or an investigation by the Israeli authorities, warrants were issued for that reason? Does the Minister agree that it is about the people of Palestine being deprived of humanitarian aid?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My noble friend is correct in that the warrants are for war crimes of starvation, intentional attacks on civilians and other inhumane acts. I point out to noble Lords that the indictment is not a finding of guilt. It is the start of a process. There would theoretically be a court process that would investigate all the alleged crimes.
Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)
My Lords, the first principle of the rule of law, according to Lord Bingham, is that rules must be “intelligible, clear and predictable”. I echo the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, from the angle of international law: the Government say they are committed to the international rule of law, which means being committed to the conduct of foreign relations under clear and predictable rules, yet say they do not know whether those rules, including customary international law rules on immunity, would mandate or preclude the arrest of Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
That is right. The issue is that this has never happened. We have never had a serving Head of State subject to an ICC warrant visit the UK. We have had situations under European arrest warrants and the situation with Pinochet, but we have never had this. We need to see the warrant; it needs to be seen by the court, which needs to make a determination at that point.
Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)
My Lords, US Senators have rightly threatened sanctions against allies if they co-operate with the International Criminal Court’s decision on this matter. Is the Minister concerned that our diplomatic ties with our closest ally could be harmed if we do not speak out against the ICC’s political decision to issue arrest warrants for the Prime Minister of Israel and the former Defence Minister?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It is not my understanding that that is the position of the United States. One or two Senators may have made comments, but that is not the position of President Biden; nor do I think it is the position of incoming President Trump, based on what he has already said. We do not view the ICC as a political organisation or treat it politically. For the UK to sanction or pick and choose whom it thinks ought to be subject to an ICC judgment would undermine the entire institution. It is an institution that I respect and it saddens me that the party of Winston Churchill does not on this issue.
Storm Bert
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Lord Roborough (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for this Statement and I am pleased that the House has been given the opportunity to discuss the very serious flooding incidents over the weekend. I draw the attention of the House to my interests in the register as a farmer. I pay tribute to all the emergency workers, local authority staff, the Environment Agency and community volunteers who responded to the very difficult conditions caused by Storm Bert. I also thank the many members of the public who stepped in to help their neighbours and local communities.
The weekend’s extreme weather saw hundreds of homes flooded, with roads turned into rivers and winds of up to 82 miles per hour recorded across parts of the UK. At least five people in England and Wales have died. Our thoughts are with the loved ones of those who have lost their lives in recent days as well as the people whose homes and businesses have been devastated and all the communities affected by flooding and this weather.
Those affected by Storm Bert need practical support now and assurance that they will get the help they need in future. Reports that the Met Office failed to issue adequate weather warnings will have a real impact on people’s confidence in our national flood resilience. Given that we have much of the winter still ahead of us, can the Minister set out what steps she is taking to address concerns about the Met Office’s response to Storm Bert? Can she assure the House that action is being taken to prevent those alleged failings being repeated if we experience similarly extreme weather in the coming months? Can she also tell the House what actions the Government will take to ensure that flood warnings are accurate and timely?
My thoughts are also with the people of Pontypridd, who were shocked when their town was flooded despite the area being given a yellow weather warning by the Met Office. Many local residents said that lessons had not been learned from Storm Dennis in 2020. Can the Minister set out what discussions Ministers have had with their Welsh counterparts to ensure that the people of Pontypridd are properly supported and that they get the flood defence investment they deserve from the Labour-run Welsh Government?
Following the Government’s Statement in the House of Commons yesterday, I would also like to put a number of follow-up questions to the Minister. Does she agree that the new Floods Resilience Taskforce must show that it is capable of action, and will she set out what action the taskforce has agreed so far? Will the Government commit to continuing the work done by previous Conservative Governments to support frequently flooded communities? The last Conservative Government introduced the farming recovery fund to support farmers hit by flooding and exceptional wet weather. Will the Minister commit to maintaining the fund not just this year, but going forward?
Finally, Storm Bert will also have been a setback for many farmers, who are already worried about increased fertiliser costs and inheritance tax burdens following the Government’s Budget. What assessment have the Government made of the expected impact of Storm Bert on farmers directly affected by this storm?
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating this Statement. Like others, I want to thank the services involved in rescuing those affected by Storm Bert and those who have helped with clearing up in the aftermath. They have done a great job. We have all seen on television the appalling damage that the deluge of filthy water causes to land, homes and town centres. It is heartbreaking not only for those who have had their homes flooded, but for businesses which have been destroyed as a result—they are struggling to come to terms with their life’s work being washed away.
The level of flooding was similar to that which occurred in the autumn in Valencia. Then, there appeared to have been little warning given, and no help either. In England we have excellent weather forecasts and advance notice is generally given. However, in some cases the notice was so short that those affected had no time to move their possessions or take avoiding action. In some areas no sandbags were available, and in others recently installed flood defences were ineffective in holding back the water. What plans do the Government have to improve early-warning systems ahead of flooding events?
The current eligibility criteria for flood relief and financial support are unhelpful for those living in rural areas. The more densely populated the area hit by overwhelming flooding, the more relief is given. The Frequently Flooded Allowance requires 10 properties within a community to be flooded in order to be eligible. The flood recovery framework is engaged only at the Minister’s discretion following severe flooding events. In the past this has required 50 properties to be flooded in a single area in order to be eligible. The Minister will be aware of these criteria. Many of the areas flooded on Monday had already been flooded twice this year. Can the Minister say whether the qualifying criteria for the Frequently Flooded Allowance and the flood recovery framework will be amended to allow more homeowners to be eligible for post-flooding support?
I turn now to the effect on the farming community. While I welcome the £60 million extra allocated earlier in the year to assist farmers whose land had been flooded, farms are now in a much more serious state. The Statement indicates that a further £50 million will be allocated to internal drainage boards. Can the Minister give any indication of what the criteria will be for the distribution of this £50 million? I note that this money will not be allocated until 2028. What is needed is help now.
I previously lived in Somerset, where the Levels were regularly flooded. What are the Government doing to recompense, on a regular basis, those farmers who play a role in accepting flood water so that more densely populated areas are protected? These farmers are not able to grow crops nor graze their stock while their land is submerged. Is there likely to be recognition for the valuable service these farmers provide? It is important to encourage farmers to instigate ways of storing water and institute schemes for flood prevention. I am sure the Minister and her colleagues are doing this, but I would be grateful for an update.
Finally, I hope the Minister will agree that the actions of the farmer who drove his tractor at speed through the centre of Tenbury Wells, which was already flooded, causing increased destruction to businesses and properties, did nothing for the reputation of the farming community. He should be identified and brought to book for his reprehensible actions.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)
I thank noble Lords for their responses to the Statement and their questions. As other noble Lords have done, I pay tribute to all those who responded and supported communities affected by storm Bert. I offer our condolences in particular to the families who have lost a loved one.
Noble Lords asked about support for people during the flood event, and flood warnings were particularly mentioned. I know how this works as I live in a house that has been flooded. We get the Environment Agency’s flood warnings. In my experience, the service is good; the agency emails you, phones you and texts you. You usually get very good notice of any potential problems. But I understand that people were concerned that this time there was very short notice. My understanding is that the Environment Agency is looking into that to see whether there were issues with the timings in this case.
Going right back to the 2007 floods, much work has been done since then on collating information to inform regularly updated emergency plans and to look at the best way to facilitate a quick and efficient response. Clearly, this needs to be considered if local people feel that that did not happen in the best way it could have done.
Regarding how we are supporting the flood response in Wales, obviously it is a devolved matter, but I know that the Prime Minister spoke to the First Minister on Sunday regarding flood impacts and to offer support. The Welsh Government have reassured him that they have the situation under control. We are aware of the problems that certain communities in Wales are facing and we are there to support in any way we can.
The floods resilience task force was mentioned. That met for the first time in September. The idea is for it to set a new approach to preparing for flooding and working between national, regional and local government, including the devolved Administrations. The idea is for it to meet quarterly and consider both near-term resilience and preparedness. The next meeting will be in January and it will look at the situation we have just been facing. The important thing is for this to start to drive forward the actions we need to take to be best prepared for these events when they happen in future. Part of the January meeting will be looking at what happened, how we can move forward and how we can improve. It is a rolling programme of improvements.
One of the things is an agreement to share lessons learned across all tiers of government and with flood responders. We had an agreement from the meeting in September for Defra to write to all MPs, which has happened, in advance of winter, to provide advice on key flood preparedness messages for their constituents. That is one action that came out of the September meeting.
Farming was mentioned. The farming recovery fund—the £60 million from previous flooding—is being distributed to farmers. Payments for that started last week. In the investment programme, the amount of funding a project can attract depends on the damage it will avoid and the benefits it will deliver, with the impact on agricultural land included as part of the funding calculator. We are reviewing the existing funding formula to ensure that challenges facing businesses are adequately taken into account and we will of course be working with farmers to support recovery.
The noble Baroness mentioned the flood recovery framework. This is managed by the MHCLG, because it has a core package for business and community recovery support for the most severely affected areas, but the property flood resilience scheme is a Defra grant, which is managed and delivered via local authorities. They are traditionally activated alongside each other. Just to give a sense of scale, the property flood resilience grant scheme has been activated six times in the past, and on each of those occasions more than 2,000 properties were flooded across multiple authority areas. Again, you have to look at the scale of it, and the decision will be made on that basis.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, talked about the funding formula and eligibility for funding support. The floods funding framework was an inherited formula for allocating money for flood defences. We believe it to be outdated; it is something that as a shadow Minister I raised many times, because it concerned me that it did not take account of all situations—the frequency of flooding, for example. We are concerned that it slows down delivery and neglects more innovative approaches to flood management as it stands, such as nature-based solutions, as we discussed during the passage of the water Bill. Defra has announced a review of the partnership funding policy, which was a few days ago, and we intend to start a consultation on that in the new year. We want to ensure that the challenges facing businesses and rural and coastal communities are also properly considered and taken into account. Currently, we are looking at how we move forward with that.
The noble Baroness also asked about internal drainage boards and the distribution around allocations on that. She mentioned the fact that on 13 November we committed to provide the extra £50 million to internal drainage boards over the year and next year, to improve, repair or replace their flood-risk assets. The idea behind that investment is to put the internal drainage boards on a firm footing so they can deliver their vital role in flood and water management for years to come. As she rightly said, that builds on the £25 million that was provided to the internal drainage boards for storm recovery following the previous floods.
In previous debates, people have talked about surface water flooding. It is going to be incredibly important that we get this right, because it is not just about flooding from rivers and the sea and bursting barriers; it is also about how we manage surface water flooding. Internal drainage boards and the role of local authorities will be extremely important in that.
There is also the issue of the higher costs. The noble Baroness asked how we were going to distribute. Obviously, it is a very new allocation of funding and we have not gone into that detail. There are costs that need to be managed and we are working with the MHCLG to examine whether any changes are needed to the funding—because it really needs to deliver. But one thing that the Government are absolutely committed to is looking at existing flood defences. Many of the reports that have come out were about flood defences not doing what they should have done, and we know that maintenance of flood defences has been an issue. One thing that we have pledged to do is to look at that. I know that my honourable friend the Flooding Minister is extremely keen that we focus on ensuring that existing defences are fit for purpose, because they need to be as we move further into the winter; we know that serious storms are only likely to get worse. That is very much going to be part of our focus.
Lord Swire (Con)
Will the Minister convene a meeting of local authorities to discuss the issue of the concreting over of many driveways up and down the country? Often, the problem with surface water and local flooding is that the water has fewer and fewer places to run off.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely right that the more concrete there is, the harder it is. The water has to go somewhere, and this is the issue. You can never stop flooding; you can manage it the best way you can. I would be very happy to convene a meeting, although I am not sure whether I am the right person. Perhaps it should be MHCLG, because often this is a planning issue—or it could be a joint meeting. I am certainly very happy to explore that.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)
My Lords, following up on that important question, are the Government aware that there are alternative surfaces and one does not need simply to put tarmac everywhere? For instance, Richmond Council, instead of putting great slabs of concrete on pavements, now puts down little bricks which interlace with one another. Not only do they look better and cope better with roots of trees, they allow water to soak through. Will the Government do what they can to make local authorities and others aware of this alternative to tarmac?
While I am on my feet, I shall ask another question. London itself, of course, is not immune from risk. It is, for the most part, low-lying. With a combination of increasingly heavy rains and rising sea levels, are the Government confident that in 10 years’ time, the Thames Barrier will still be fit for purpose?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
On the noble and right reverend Lord’s first question, I know exactly the surface he is talking about. Interesting, different and innovative things are coming forward that can help alleviate the kinds of problems around surface water drainage we have been talking about. It is not just about putting it in, it is about replacing it. In certain areas, there has been a trend for concreting over drives to put your car on, where before you had surfaces that would drain. It is a really important area we need to look at, and local authorities clearly have an important role to play.
On the noble and right reverend Lord’s other question, we need to look at this completely in the round and consider all aspects of how we move forward. There are no simple solutions to this.
Baroness Humphreys (LD)
My Lords, I begin by expressing my condolences to the family and friends of the missing dog walker whose body was found after floodwaters hit the Conwy Valley over the weekend. I also express my appreciation of the work of the emergency services and those from the local community in the village of Trefriw who helped and supported them. Those of us who live in the Conwy Valley well understand the impacts of flooding and sympathise with those in the valleys of south Wales who suffered devastating floods this weekend after 80% of a month’s rain fell in less than 48 hours in the area.
The abiding image in the minds of many will be that of residents desperately trying to clear blocked drains in attempts to release the floodwaters. Is the Minister convinced that all funds allocated by the former Government have been utilised by the spending of local government and Natural Resources Wales in this area? How much of the promised new funding will be allocated to Wales?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
In response to the noble Baroness’s first question, clearly, these are devolved issues, so how the allocation works is a matter for the Welsh Government, but, as I mentioned earlier, we are working very closely with the First Minister and the Welsh Government to offer any support we possibly can. I do not have the specific details of the formula, but we are working very closely with the Welsh Government to ensure that they get the support and focus that they need.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, I ask the Minister to return to our farming communities. We know that this is a complex problem and we rely on our farmers to work very collaboratively with all sorts of agencies to try to prevent the water coming down into vulnerable areas. As we have noted in the last few days, our farming community is already quite vulnerable and feeling very nervous, particularly because there are some reports that the Countryside Stewardship higher-tier scheme may not open until mid-2025. It is another thing that may affect some of our farmers. Will the Minister commit to ensuring that her department does everything it can to bring the application dates of the Countryside Stewardship higher-tier fund forward as much as possible, to help our farmers?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The right reverend Prelate makes a very good point about higher-tier stewardship. We need to move forward with it. I know that the Farming Minister is keen to get this moving because it is clearly important to a cohort of farmers. I will relay his concerns and those of the House, because it is something we are very focused on moving forward.
Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests as a resident of Worcestershire. Following the floods of 2007 and 2015, quite a number of the flood defences were strengthened. I was glad that the Minister referred to looking at and maintaining the existing flood defences, but the last weekend told us that even those reinforced new flood defences, which were put in following the 2015 flooding, were not adequate. I urge the Minister to review—not just maintain—the existing defences and look at whether they are still fit for purpose.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I start by wishing the noble Baroness a very happy birthday. She makes an extremely good point. The maintenance of existing flood defences is critical, but we also need to make sure that they are fit for purpose and fit for the future.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, leading on from some previous questions and points made about Wales, although this is a devolved matter, there needs to be recognition that coal tips are a legacy of the mining past of Wales. The Minister might point to the £25 million announced recently in the Budget, but that pre-dates what just happened over the last few days, with the coal tip hitting the community of Cwmtillery. There is the precedent that the previous UK Government gave £9 million when Storm Dennis hit and a coal tip in Tylorstown collapsed. I press the Minister: will His Majesty’s Government be providing funding for this specific incident? Comments have been made by other Members about the willingness to pick up the phone to the Welsh Government. Will any funding include financial support for these communities?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
As I said, the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State have been in touch with the Welsh Government. We want to offer what support we can. As to the extent to which that looks at new funding or whether or not there is other funding, that will be part of ongoing discussions around the coal tips. The Coal Authority, as I am sure the noble Baroness is aware, has responsibility for them. I worked with the Coal Authority in the past when I was a Member of Parliament. I always found it very open, sensible and good to work with. I would hope that both the Welsh Government and our Government will continue to work with the Coal Authority to ensure the safety of these different coal tips.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, the whole House is united around the concept of nature-based solutions. I am determined to invite the Minister to visit Slowing the Flow at Pickering in North Yorkshire, which is commendable for not having flooded downstream since it was built. For these schemes to be effective, and to roll them out across the country, to prevent floods of the scale we have seen all this week, by planting trees and creating dams upstream, will the Minister look favourably on rolling out more private funds, such as from water companies—United Utilities in her area, Yorkshire Water in my area—but also funding farmers and others to pay for these nature- based solutions?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
Obviously, the noble Baroness is aware that we discussed this at some length during the Water (Special Measures) Bill. It is important that water authorities and water companies look at how they can best use nature-based solutions. It is an important way to prevent flooding and pollution. I am sure that as we continue to work with water companies, going through the commission, the review and so on, we can make sure that these are a central part of how they design their drainage structures going forward. I think I am going to have to cave in and say I would love to come to Pickering.
Lord Bellingham (Con)
My Lords, obviously, one of the consequences of severe floods is a big increase in the amount of raw sewage being discharged through storm overflows. For example, apparently, 7 million extra litres of storm overflow went into Lake Windermere. Can the Minister confirm to the House that there will be a comprehensive analysis of these incidents, and whether the Cunliffe review will be looking at the problems caused by these recent floods?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My understanding is that the review will be wide ranging. Clearly, pollution incidents, particularly around sewage, will be part of what the review can look at. I think the water companies and the Environment Agency will be looking at the extent of pollution incidents during the recent flooding, and that can then be evaluated.
Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard (UUP)
My Lords, out of every crisis comes some good as well. We saw a huge working together of people from various communities to help those affected by the floods and by the storm in general. In particular, I saw a number of farmers out clearing roads and cutting trees. Will the Minister accept that, even though the farmers have got a really bad deal out of the recent Budget, they are still out there helping the community and supporting those in need?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I live in a community in Cumbria that floods a lot, and one of the most extraordinary things when you have faced a serious flooding event is the way the local community comes together, whether that is farmers helping to clear the roads, people checking on vulnerable residents or people looking after other people’s pets when they have had to go into hotel accommodation. Community support, the way communities come together, should be hugely commended in our society, and farmers have an important role to play in that in rural areas.
Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)
My Lords, given that we seem to have more and more floods, do the Government have any analysis of whether people are taking flood warnings more or less seriously than they used to?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
That is an interesting question. All I can say, for my part and that of people I know locally, is that in the last 20 to 25 years, since the flood warning system was set up and made available to communities, we have taken the warnings extremely seriously. It is important that we have these systems set up in order that they can help people in advance. If that did not happen this time, that is something we need to look at.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, are the emergency services getting involved at all with voluntary organisations such as the Maritime Volunteer Service, which has a mass of inflatables, boats, people trained to work on water and bases all over the country, and could assist in these sorts of times after the event has happened?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
That has happened in the past, in my experience. When we had the floods in Cumbria, the maritime organisations certainly came together to provide support. For example, the RNLI and Maryport Rescue came in and played an incredibly important role with inflatable boats. They went into cities such as Carlisle, rescuing and supporting people. In Cumbria, mountain rescue is entirely voluntary based. However, we need to be careful not to start totally relying on volunteers. Our emergency services play a very important role, as do the voluntary groups, but we must not take them for granted. It is important that the work they do is recognised and properly supported.
Rule of Law
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Baroness Smith of Cluny
That this House takes note of the importance of the rule of law.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Baroness Smith of Cluny) (Lab) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, it is a privilege to open this debate as the Advocate-General for Scotland. As some may know, this is also my maiden speech, so I hope the House will indulge me in saying a few words of a more personal nature before moving on to the substance of the debate.
I start with a thank you for the welcome I have received from all sides of the House and from Black Rod, her office, the catering staff and many other colleagues who work so hard to make this place run smoothly. The doorkeepers get special mention. I am reliably informed that I am going to get lost in the corridors here for years to come, so their thank you is prospective as well as retrospective—a wee joke there for the lawyers.
I am here primarily as a law officer, and it is with great pride that I am. The role of Advocate-General is vital to the UK Government, delivering for Scotland and the devolution settlement in which I passionately believe. I will make sure that Scotland’s voice is heard and properly taken account of in both policy formation and legislation. It is by doing that that we can thrive as individual nations as well as strengthening the union. It has also been my honour to join this House, and I hope to make a meaningful contribution here as well.
The role of Advocate-General and the associated responsibilities in this House have traditionally attracted weekly attendance in London from my predecessors. Living in Scotland with just my daughter and me at home, I am pleased and proud that this Labour Government immediately and enthusiastically supported my request to undertake the role primarily from Edinburgh. In doing so, we have signalled clearly that this is a family-friendly and modern Government, leading by example. There are other advantages. I have long thought that the Advocate-General seemed a remote figure on the Scottish legal landscape and it is my view that if you are representing Scotland’s interests, it is vital to be rooted in that nation and aware of what those living there want and need.
I have gleaned that the House is prepared to indulge new Members in paying tribute in their maiden speech to those in their personal life who have supported them, so I wish to mention two titanic women. The first is my mother, who persuaded me that there was more than one way to be a parliamentarian, quietly arguing for the effectiveness of this House, despite my initial mistaken view that it was only the other place that mattered. Her insatiable intellectual curiosity continues to be an inspiration to me. The second is my daughter, the bold Ella. Being the child of a parliamentarian is not always easy—I know this—but Ella’s experience is particularly acute. When your only flatmate leaves for a trip to London and you are 10 years old, it leaves a big space. She is finding it very hard but, despite this, I have lost count of the number of times she has told me she is proud of me. I want to pay testimony to her sacrifice and that of the children and families of all parliamentarians who lose out to allow us to serve. I hope that this lesson in the value of public service stays with her for life, as it did for me.
Many in this House have very kindly welcomed me in the context of knowing my parents. If the Times diary column is to be believed, I and my mother are the first mother and daughter Peers. If nothing else, we are destined to live on in pub quizes for ever. I am very proud of both my parents and it is a privilege to bask in their reflected glory, but only for a while. I hope that this House will find space here for me to be me, not just my parents’ daughter. I believe I am here because of a hard-earned legal career, which included taking Silk, sitting as a judge in various fora and earning the respect of my profession over many years. I will contribute to this House as a product of that, with my own thoughts and beliefs guiding me. So, if I may gently encourage Members to call me Catherine, not Elizabeth—nor indeed Sarah—I can seek to forge my own way here and in time, I hope, earn your Lordships’ respect as an individual.
I also wish to acknowledge my second supporter, the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. The law is so much more than the black letter of it. It is a tool with which to change and improve lives, and indeed whole nations, as we will discuss today. Using the law as a campaigning tool for the greater good is something the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, is a past master at.
I turn to the rule of law. The rule of law is sacrosanct; it is the bedrock on which democracy sits. As the Attorney-General explained in this Chamber, the rule of law will serve as this Government’s lodestar. I will begin by mentioning the principal aspects of this Government’s position, looking at international law, human rights and the constitutional role of Parliament and the courts, before concluding by highlighting the importance of the rule of law in the context of devolution in Scotland.
This Government are clear that the rule of law encompasses international law. This Government will, without question, honour our obligations under international law and promote the rule of law internationally. The Prime Minister has already taken action through the publication of the new Ministerial Code, which reinserts express reference to the duty of Ministers to comply with international law and treaty obligations. Compliance with international law is not only the right thing to do morally; it also upholds our international reputation. That in turn enhances our ability to work with partners to address global challenges, whether they are climate change, artificial intelligence, migration or economic growth. We have made plain our commitment to our cornerstone international institutions, which the UK will once again champion.
These institutions are fundamental to ensuring justice for people with no other recourse. I have seen first hand the immense challenges to the rule of law in other countries through the work I have done in the NGO and charity sectors. I have been visiting Ukraine since 2004, when I first met Martin Harris, our ambassador there, working on projects promoting the rule of law. Both the Attorney-General and I have been to Ukraine in the last year, speaking to lawyers about how the UK can seek to support them, including through our commitment to the rule of law.
This Government are equally clear that the protection of human rights is an essential element of the rule of law. We are fully committed to complying with our obligations under international human rights law. This includes our unequivocal commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights—to which the UK was the first signatory, a fact we should be proud of—and to the treaties we have ratified in the United Nations. Domestically, the Human Rights Act is an important part of our constitution and fundamental to the rights protection of everyone in the UK. It is thanks to our robust domestic human rights framework that, out of 46 Council of Europe member states, the UK has the lowest per capita rate of applications to the European Court of Human Rights.
I will now acknowledge the importance of respecting the constitutional balance between Parliament, the Executive and the courts. Parliamentary sovereignty is a fundamental feature of our constitution. Parliament must have a proper opportunity to scrutinise the actions of the Government, and a proper balance between primary and secondary legislation is vital. In a modern, regulated society, secondary legislation is crucial to efficient government, and it absolutely has its place. However, the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and the Covid pandemic resulted in concentrating immense power in the hands of the Executive. As the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee pointed out, this represented an acceleration and intensification of an existing trend.
This raises real questions about how we are governed. As a Government, we will seize the opportunity to reset our approach, respecting the constitutional role of Parliament. We, the law officers, will ensure that the Government’s legislation is accessible, clear and predictable and reflects the correct balance between primary and secondary legislation. To this end, the Attorney-General has already issued new guidance on the appropriate use of secondary legislation in government Bills.
In the courts, our judges are rightly respected around the world for their expertise, impartiality and independence. Judicial independence is a prerequisite of the rule of law. This Government and our Lord Chancellor will robustly and swiftly defend any attacks on this from any quarter.
I will conclude with some comments on the rule of law in the context of Scottish devolution. I believe that the rule of law underpins the success of the settlement through the promotion of effective collaboration between the UK and Scottish Governments, and the mechanisms for clarification by the courts where necessary. As a Parliament, I believe we should be incredibly proud of an excellent piece of drafting in the Scotland Act, which has stood the test of its first 25 years. Deliberation in this Chamber was fundamental to that.
Since the Scotland Act’s debate and passing in 1998, we have seen political change that many would not have predicted then: a majority Government in Scotland—indeed, a nationalist majority Government; a referendum on independence; 17 years of different political parties being in power in the two Parliaments; and not to mention the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. During this time, the Scotland Act has governed the relationship between the UK and Scottish Governments, such that these seismic constitutional events have been well managed and, in the main, handled with respect. Indeed, it is important to acknowledge the collaboration that regularly occurs between UK and Scottish Governments, underpinned by a common respect for the rule of law.
My department works constructively and effectively with counterparts in the Scottish Government on numerous issues on a daily basis, achieving consensus under the radar and away from the headlines. By way of example, the new devolved pension age disability payment in Scotland will sit properly in the mixed reserved and devolved benefits regime because of technical changes delivered through a Scotland Act order made by the UK Government in October. Scotland’s two Governments working together to put in place a coherent legislative framework, in accordance with the rule of law, for the benefit of the people—this is what a resetting of the relationship looks like in practice.
I particularly look forward to working together effectively with the Lord Advocate and Solicitor-General for Scotland. Indeed, in the vein of collaboration, may I take this opportunity to congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, and the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, on their appointments as shadow Advocate-General for Scotland and shadow Attorney-General? I look forward to working constructively with them as well.
The rule of law is also fundamental to resolving questions regarding the construction of the devolution settlement. I have heard it suggested that the litigation we have seen in this area is indicative of a failure in the devolution architecture; indeed, some describe it as broken. I strongly rebut that suggestion. Litigation is, in my view, further evidence of the devolution settlement working well. The drafters of the Scotland Act had the foresight to include powers for law officers of the UK and Scottish Governments to refer questions regarding the competence of the devolved institutions for judicial determination. As acknowledged by the Supreme Court, the actual practice of the UK and Scottish law officers has borne out that the reference procedures have been exercised in the public interest. Far from being symptomatic of a system that is broken, judgments of the court have helpfully clarified the Act; and, looking at it another way, one might think it odd if those mechanisms had never been used in 25 years. For example, the Supreme Court has confirmed that the Sewel convention is a political convention, not a justiciable legal rule. This Government’s commitment to strengthening the Sewel convention will be taken forward consistent with that position.
In respect of Acts of the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament has granted consent in respect of over 200 Acts. The number of occasions when this Parliament has legislated without consent that has been sought is fewer than a dozen, and the majority of those occasions concerned the withdrawal from the EU, a fraught and complex legislative event that might well be thought to be very far out of the ordinary. In terms of Acts of the Scottish Parliament, 368 have been enacted since devolution. The UK Government law officers have referred to the Supreme Court the question of whether a Scottish Parliament Bill is within competence only three times.
This picture I have set out demonstrates that the Act is operating as it ought to in a mature democracy—working well day to day but containing provision for the limits of the settlement to be tested, and those provisions being used appropriately from time to time.
Lord Bingham described the rule of law as one of the greatest unifying factors—perhaps the greatest—and as an ideal worth striving for, in the interests of good government and peace, at home and in the world at large. This most elegant formulation cogently demonstrates why the rule of law will serve as this Government’s lodestar, there for all to see.
I look forward to hearing noble Lords’ insightful contributions and I beg to move.
Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)
My Lords, it is a privilege and a pleasure to begin by welcoming the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith of Cluny, the Advocate-General, to her place, and to congratulate her on a very fine maiden speech. Given her illustrious background, both personal and professional, we expected a great deal from her—but she met and indeed exceeded those expectations.
As to her personal background, it must have been a particular pleasure for the Advocate-General to be introduced into this House by her mother—or should I say kinswoman?—the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Gilmorehill. It is an underappreciated virtue of the new Labour form of the hereditary peerage that both generations can sit here simultaneously.
However, in light of her professional background, the truth is that the Advocate-General is here very much on her own merits. I did not know her, as we practise in different areas of the law and indeed in different jurisdictions, but I can confirm to the House that she has a most impressive CV and—other members of this Government should take note—one which is 100% accurate and required no embellishment. I therefore look forward to her future contributions in this House, notwithstanding our political differences.
When it comes to the rule of law, one is tempted to say that there are no such differences and we are all on the same side. I do not expect anyone in this debate—given the quality of the list, I too look forward to many insightful speeches—to speak against the rule of law. None of us wants to live in a society governed by despotic whim or by mob rule.
In opening for the Opposition Benches, I could give a speech which would be the legal equivalent of motherhood and apple pie. It is an easy speech to give. It would trace the rule of law not only to the work of Dicey in the 19th century and then to the work of Locke in the 17th but as far back as the writings of Aristotle, who wrote that
“it is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens”.
It would explain that, far from being some abstract constitutional principle—because that is what the rule of law is; it is not a law but a foundational constitutional principle—the rule of law underpins not only our politics and civil society but our commercial endeavours too. If the huge glass panels of the City’s skyscrapers are held together by invisible building materials, the financial markets and stock and other exchanges are held together by the rule of law.
In my own practice as a commercial lawyer— I declare the obvious interest—the rule of law is one of the reasons why litigants and commercial parties from all over the world choose to have their disputes determined in London. They come here not only because, as the Advocate-General said, our judges are independent and of unimpeachable integrity—though they are. They come here not only because our legal profession is of the highest calibre—though it is. They come here not only because English law, and perhaps also Scots law, has kept pace with the modern world—though it has, through the Law Commission and through legislation passed in this place. Ultimately, they come here to our courts because they know that the UK is a country governed by the rule of law.
What is the rule of law? At its heart, the rule of law means that the state is governed by laws and that everyone in the state, and the state itself, is subject to those laws. The core features of the rule of law are not now in doubt. They include that everybody is subject to the same laws; wealth, power, status or privilege provide no special protection. Governments and public officials are subject to the law. They must exercise their powers lawfully. The law must be accessible and clear. Disputes should be determined by independent courts and tribunals. A vibrant and independent legal profession is necessary to promote liberty under the rule of law. Without the rule of law, underpinned by an independent judiciary and the courts, much else would fail to prosper. It is one of the foundations that supports economic activity, wider prosperity and a settled society. In short, the rule of law, independent courts and an independent judiciary are not optional extras or simply a service, but one of the foundations on which everything else is built.
I want to make three points about the ambit of the rule of law. The first is as to what is encompassed by it. We have heard Lord Bingham’s name mentioned already, and I suspect that we will hear it many more times. Of course, he wrote a book on the subject, The Rule of Law, published in 2010. If you entitle your book, “The Rule of Law”, people will think that is what it is: the rule of law is what he says it is. I read with interest the recent lecture given by the noble and learned Lord, the Attorney-General, at the Bingham Centre, which is named after him. However, Lord Bingham’s view of the rule of law is a very expansive or “thick” view. It is not shared by many others. To give just one example, his view is very different from that of Sir John Laws, the Government’s senior barrister or “Treasury devil” for eight years and then a Lord Justice of Appeal, in his book, somewhat less attractively titled The Constitutional Balance.
The problem with Lord Bingham’s expansive view of the rule of law, as Professor Gardner wrote in a trenchant review in the London Review of Books, is that it includes within the rule of law
“the full range of human rights: not just those ensuring due process of law for all, but also those concerned with … life, privacy, association, property and assembly”.
On that approach, it is very hard to leave logical space for regimes that respect the rule of law but are otherwise notably illiberal; for example, they forbid gay relationships or organised religion. I would not want to live in a country like that, but is it right that such a state would not have the rule of law? Where you end up, as Professor Gardner put it, is the conceit that
“no country has the rule of law unless it would be morally suitable to join the Council of Europe”.
We do the rule of law a disservice if we try to cram within it any and every social good. Not every social good is a human right, and not all human rights are part of the rule of law. The rule of law with its traditional limits is important enough in itself. It does not need to encompass or express every conceivable legal or social good.
I now turn to international law, because the rule of law applies in the international arena too. International law is law and, just as we should obey domestic law, we as a state should abide by international law. That does not mean we should fetishise international law. It might sometimes be not very good law and might often require updating for a different world, but all that can be true of domestic law as well. Yet it is remarkable how those who, quite rightly, feel able to criticise domestic law, although they will continue to obey it, suddenly regard any hint of a suggestion that this or that point of international law might not be totally perfect as an immediate challenge to the rule of law and an affront to the international order.
Criticising a law is not a challenge to the rule of law. That is true of domestic law and it is also true of international law, especially when we are told that what we all believed to be customary international law has now suddenly changed to whatever certain lawyers close to this Government would like it to be—a process we might call the shifting sands of international law. Nor is it a challenge to the rule of law to make submissions to an international court, urging it not to do something it was minded to do. The previous Government informed the ICC that they would make submissions to the effect that it had no jurisdiction to issue the arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Gallant, with an already-dead Hamas leader thrown in, in some grotesque form of moral equivalence.
But almost the first act of this Government was to announce that they would not make any submissions to the ICC. Why? The explanation from the Prime Minister’s spokesman was that
“this is a matter for the court to decide on”,
going on to say:
“The government feels very strongly about the rule of law internationally and domestically”.
As a reason for not making submissions to a court, that is risible. To paraphrase Mrs Thatcher, advocates advocate and judges decide. You do not offend a court, or the rule of law, by making submissions, especially if the court has invited those submissions. Perhaps the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General will explain whether he thinks Germany, which did make those submissions to the ICC, thereby demonstrated that it did not feel very strongly about the rule of law?
Just as we should be careful not to expand the rule of law to include any and every social good, we should also not abuse the concept of the rule of law by dressing up what are essentially political decisions as legal issues. Perhaps if we had made submissions, the ICC would not have reached the legally doubtful—at its highest, I suggest—decision that it reached. But it issued those arrest warrants, and another element of the rule of law is that people need to know what the law is and what the rules are. I did not get a clear answer from the Minister when I asked her just after Questions whether Mr Netanyahu’s immunity, as the serving Prime Minister of a state that is not a party to the ICC, precludes his arrest and handover to the ICC.
That immunity—this is critical—is specifically preserved in our domestic law in a UK statute: the International Criminal Court Act 2001. The Minister told me earlier that there is a conflict between that statute and customary international law, and that it is up to the court to sort it out. On the basis, as I was told this afternoon, that the Government’s position is that this entire question comes down to a “conflict” between an Act of Parliament and customary international law, will the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General confirm that, in this jurisdiction, a domestic statute always prevails over unincorporated customary international law? If that is right, will he therefore agree that Mr Netanyahu retains his immunity? I appreciate that the final decision on this question will be a matter for the High Court, but the Government must have a position on this issue, and I look forward to the Attorney- General telling us, finally, what that position is.
The third and last feature of the rule of law that I want to mention is equality before the law. This is a fundamental principle. All people must be treated equally and in accordance with the law. We all know the phrase: justice must not only be done but be seen to be done. That applies not only in court but, I suggest, across the entire justice system.
We are rightly proud that we live in a country where we are policed by consent—where our police are not routinely armed. But to maintain public confidence, which is critical, we must ensure that the police not only do their work without fear or favour—as I am sure they do—but are perceived to do so.
I have spoken before about my astonishment that a sign calling for jihad on the streets of London was regarded by the police as not requiring any further investigation. Last week’s Jewish Chronicle reported that a sermon that called for the destruction of Jewish homes and was delivered two weeks after the 7 October massacre was originally not deemed by the Metropolitan Police to meet the criminal threshold, once the context— I emphasise “the context”—was taken into account. After something of an uproar, the police have said that they are now reviewing their earlier decision.
I am well aware of the difficult job that the police have. We on this side of the House—and, I am sure, all of us on all sides—support the police in the work they do. But to maintain public confidence, we need to make sure that justice is done and seen to be done. That applies from the moment when there is a knock on the door by a police officer, right up to the handing down of a sentence by a judge.
I know that the noble and learned Baroness the Advocate-General and the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General might not agree with everything I have said, but I will conclude with a point that I am sure will command universal support: the rule of law is too important to be left to party politics. Some on the right deride the left for confusing the rule of law with the rule of lawyers. Sometimes, that is a fair criticism. The rule of law should not be a fig leaf to cover up contested policy decisions. Using law as a way of avoiding political debate risks undermining the rule of law. Some on the left—as we heard from the Lord Chancellor and the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General at Labour’s party conference—like to say that
“the rule of law is back”.
Perhaps this debate is part of that supposed narrative, but we in this House know that their immediate predecessors, Alex Chalk and Victoria Prentis, also firmly believed in, and unflinchingly upheld, the rule of law. This ought not to be a party-political point.
The truth is that we all need the rule of law, and we all want to live in a society governed by the rule of law. It is too important to become a political football. We must all defend it, or we will find that we have lost one of the critical—if often invisible—elements that holds our entire society together.
Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)
My Lords, it was a great pleasure to hear the thoughtful speech of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith of Cluny, who so much adds to the lustre of her family. She referred to her parents; the moment I walked out of court into the Old Bailey on an afternoon in May 1994 is fixed and etched in my memory. On a newspaper board opposite the entrance, I saw the sad headlines relating to her father and I was shocked and dismayed, even though I was not a member of his party. I wish her every success in this Chamber and in her new position, which her own talents and hard work have so richly deserved.
The assault on the rule of law started rather badly in September 2019, when the Government of the day’s unlawful attempt to prorogue Parliament was halted by the Supreme Court. But it was the bold attempt of Brandon Lewis, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in September 2020, to legislate in breach of international obligations that brought the rule of law into even sharper focus. He told the House of Commons that the internal market Bill broke
“international law in a very specific and limited way”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/9/20; col. 509.]
The Constitution Committee concluded in its 17th report of that Session:
“Adherence to the rule of law is not negotiable … A government that brandishes the threat of breaching its international obligations, even in ‘specific and limited’ circumstances, is one that undermines the rule of law”.
This debacle was followed by the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which permitted the breach, by secondary legislation, of the United Kingdom’s international obligations as agreed in the Northern Ireland protocol. The Constitution Committee found that these were two conscious attempts to breach the United Kingdom’s international obligations, contravening Lord Bingham’s eighth principle that
“the rule of law requires compliance by the state with its obligations in international law”.
The Cabinet Office set out HMG’s legal position in 2020. The then Government argued that treaty obligations become binding only to the extent that they are enshrined as a matter of domestic law. It was claimed that there was nothing unlawful in Parliament passing legislation that was in breach of the United Kingdom’s obligations. The Constitution Committee rejected that argument in its ninth report of 2022-23, to which I was a party, stating:
“Whatever Parliament decides to do does not affect whether the state is in breach of international law … A treaty, once agreed, binds the state … the responsibility of the Government to honour the state’s international obligations requires it to refrain from inviting Parliament to legislate knowingly contrary to the United Kingdom’s international obligations”.
Parliamentary sovereignty is the foundation of our domestic law, but it is not the overarching, unbridled principle that is commonly claimed by political parties when they are in power. It is subject to constitutional principles: in particular, to the principle that a Government should not legislate to break international law. Indeed, the Ministerial Code is explicit in paragraph 1.6, which refers to
“the overarching duty on ministers to comply with the law, including international law and treaty obligations”.
The Rwanda Bill was another attempt to violate our international obligations, specifically the refugee conventions and the European Convention on Human Rights. The proposal was to bar access by asylum seekers to the courts of this country, contrary to Lord Bingham’s fifth principle of the rule of law and Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The granting of an interim order by the European Court of Human Rights, which in effect prevented the removal of asylum seekers to Rwanda, had the originalists leaping snarling from their den. Originalists are those who deny that the European convention is a living instrument. The majority view is that the convention should develop through case law: modern remedies for modern problems. Society changes. Attitudes towards the status of women or towards gay rights have changed in the seven decades that have followed the signing of the convention. In the area with which I have a particular concern, military justice, the case of Findlay in the European Court set in train changes to the scope and procedures of military law in a way that the 1950 founders could never have foreseen.
As for the European Court’s interim order in the Rwanda case, it was in the 1970s that rules were made by the court, specifically rule 34, which required member states not to hinder the rights of an individual to make applications for relief to the court. You may well think that whisking Africans off on a one-way ticket to Rwanda would be something of a hindrance to such an application, and indeed a judge of the court, faced with an application by an asylum seeker, made an interim order under rule 39 to delay the flight. In due course, the UK Supreme Court ruled the proposed dispatch of asylum seekers to Rwanda to be unlawful and further European court proceedings were unnecessary.
“These European court rules were made in the ‘70s”—so wail the originalists. The scope of the European Convention on Human Rights, they say, should be confined to the powers explicitly agreed in 1950. “Do not look beyond the 1950 text, as illustrated by the preparatory papers of the time”. This argument was expounded by Professor Ekins of Oxford University in the unlikely forum of the Atkin Lecture in the Reform Club, of all places, and it has been supported by the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar.
Originalism is a right-wing doctrine developed in the past 40 or 50 years in the United States of America. It has found its way into the United States Supreme Court. It will not surprise noble Lords that four of the six Supreme Court justices who granted full presidential immunity to Donald Trump recently are self-confessed originalists. They believe that the US constitution should be construed as originally drafted and understood by the Founders in 1789. But somehow I doubt that Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of them would have been natural Trumpsters in their aspirations.
This odd, fossilising theory of interpretation has crept across the Atlantic to this country, probably through the secret funders of the Tufton Street think tanks. That may be the reason why the recent Conservative manifesto referred to the European court as a “foreign court”—a phrase repeatedly on the lips of Rishi Sunak during the recent campaign. It is a sad withdrawal from the ideals promoted, paradoxically in 1950, by the Conservative Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, later Lord Chancellor and the Earl of Kilmuir, and developed by British judges of the court.
My final point is that, if parliamentary sovereignty and executive government are to be subject to the rule of law, an independent judiciary is essential. Your Lordships may not fully realise the necessity of an impartial court, but I have had the experience of appearing in a foreign court in an action brought against my client by the premier of the country in question. My apprehension, whether right or wrong, that no submission I made could possibly succeed before that court induced feelings of utter frustration. I was wasting my time. Subsequently, success in the Privy Council in a linked case on behalf of the same client was followed within three months by the withdrawal of the country concerned from the jurisdiction of the Judicial Committee for ever. That Government said there was no connection between the two things.
I look forward eagerly to a commitment by this Government that the United Kingdom will observe the rule of law in all circumstances, that the independence of the judiciary will be properly defended, that Parliament will no more be invited to break international laws and treaty obligations—even in “a very specific and limited way”—and that they will maintain our good name as a country abiding by the rule of law in an increasingly lawless world.
Lord Etherton (CB)
I too welcome the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith of Cluny, to her ministerial position and congratulate her on an excellent speech.
What is the importance of the rule of law? In brief, it is a national standard of minimum rights for a free and democratic United Kingdom and an international standard for democracies across the world. On both these points, I agree with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, said. Lord Bingham specified in his book, already referred to in this debate, eight core ingredients of the rule of law. I shall not weary the House by setting them out, but they must be borne in mind as each is specific and limited. It is sufficient for me to say that he summarised the core principle as:
“all persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of laws publicly”
made, generally taking effect in the future
“and publicly administered in the courts”.
I will mention a few of the ingredients of the rule of law in more detail. First, the rule of law requires access to an adjudication process that will resolve disputes and enable rights to be enforced. Traditionally, that adjudication has taken place in physical buildings and with the parties physically present or represented before a judge or panel of judges. Nowadays, such processes are increasingly conducted remotely by videolink, telephone or online procedural processes.
There has sometimes been a tendency to see litigants as customers, paying court fees in return for service, but the provision of this facility is the responsibility of the state as part of the rule of law. People are entitled to the resolution of their disputes not because they are customers but because that is the right of a citizen living in a state governed by the rule of law. It is not impermissible for the state to charge a fee; it can do so, but only if the fee is reasonable and affordable.
The first question arising from this ingredient of the rule of law is whether this country satisfies that requirement. Bearing in mind the backlog of cases in family, civil and criminal law, the shortage of judges and, in some cases in criminal law, the absence of sufficient counsel to deal with the matters, I question whether the United Kingdom is in compliance with that aspect of the rule of law.
Next, I turn to the question of holding the Government, public bodies and officials to account for abuse of the law and of their powers. The first thing to acknowledge is that if laws themselves comply with the eight factors set out by Lord Bingham, that will in practice have some constraining influence on official oppression and abuse. If laws are generally applicable without exclusion for officials and are known and clear, the scope for corruption or other abuse of power is reduced. It is equally plain, however, that for there to be an effective constraint on official abuse and oppression, citizens must have access to dispute resolution procedures administered by an independent judiciary in which such abuses can be challenged.
As the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, mentioned, this reflects the fact that the concept of the rule of law antedates by many centuries our present concepts of protection of human rights. Indeed Aristotle wrote about this in the fourth century BCE, as the noble Lord said. Again, as of the previous questions I posed, I think one must question whether the current state of the resources for the courts for the adjudication of these claims is adequate to satisfy our obligations as a country under the rule of law.
Before I turn to the next item, which should be the question of human rights, it is important that I address the rule of law as an international standard. In a report to the Security Council of the United Nations in August 2004, the then UN Secretary-General said:
“The ‘rule of law’ is a concept at the very heart of the Organization’s mission”.
In September 2015, the UN agreed a set of sustainable development goals for 2015 to 2030 that came into force in January 2016. Goal 16.3 enshrines a commitment by all UN members to:
“Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all”.
In March 2016, the Council of Europe’s Commission for Democracy through Law, known as the Venice Commission, published a rule that said:
“The Rule of Law is a concept of universal validity”.
The setting of UN SDG goal 16.3 to
“Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels”
underlines that the concept of the rule of law must be appropriate as an international standard capable of applying to different countries with their varied histories, cultures, constitutions and political engagements. The concept of the rule of law is rightly applied as an international kitemark of minimum standards. It is therefore used both to criticise and to encourage improvement in failing regimes.
There is not any one court which adjudicates on human rights across the world, however. Many courts adjudicate in relation to different concepts of human rights in different countries. That is why although there is, inevitably, some overlap between the rule of law and some human rights, such as the right to a fair trial before an independent tribunal according to known laws, which provide the measure of constraint against official corruption, that overlap is quite different in principle from the notion that the rule of law requires the promotion or protection of human rights generally. I agree with noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, that this thin edge—as it is called—or thin version of the rule of law is consistent with the checklist appropriate for an international concept of the rule of law and is also supported by the position of the Venice Commission in a report in March 2016.
There is here an area in which the United Kingdom, with its long history of the rule of law and human rights, can take a lead in bringing about a consensus as to the most essential human rights in a democracy, perhaps centred on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the same time, however, as I have said, the United Kingdom itself must improve its adherence to the rule of law by increasing the available facilities and resources for resolving disputes between citizens and between citizens and public bodies. I hope that the Attorney-General’s welcome initiative on the rule of law addresses these important points.
Lord Faulks (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith, on her excellent maiden speech. I also greatly look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Laing.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith, rightly identified many of the core ingredients of the rule of law. However, I regret to say that I have profound reservations about the use of the rule of law in political discourse. The expression is too often deployed as some sort of trump card in what are in reality highly contested circumstances.
In fairness, the rule of law has always been hard to pin down. As a Minister, I went to China. My visit coincided with Rule of Law Week in Beijing. I was told by university professors about the reflection of the rule of law in the Chinese constitution, including the independence of the judiciary. The problem, however, was that, superimposed above rule of law principles, there was always the Communist Party. When I told the intelligent and respectful audience that in this country the Government regularly lost cases, and that we regarded this as an important part of the rule of law, the response was one of amazement, accompanied by nervous giggles.
Closer to home, I remember receiving much thoughtful advice from civil servants when the Ministry of Justice was contemplating some new policy initiative. Not much of it was concerned with the merits of the particular policy, or indeed the lack of them. It was much more was focused on the potential risk of judicial review and the possibility—it was usually couched in terms to reflect uncertainty—of a violation of the Human Rights Act, or of at least of one interpretation of the Strasbourg jurisprudence in the relevant area.
In this context, the recent publication of the Attorney-General’s new legal risk guidelines concerns me. The new emphasis on international law, despite its frequent vagueness and notwithstanding our dualist system, runs the risk of a Government being hemmed in by rather subjective interpretations of what does or does not constitute a so-called “respectable argument”.
I could give many examples of rule of law arguments that have meant that a Government democratically elected, of whatever colour, have found it extremely difficult to govern. I think of the problems the Blair Government had in trying to combat the threat of terrorism and finding that their policies were unlawful. The Conservative Government of course ran into all sorts of difficulties when trying to combat illegal migration. This culminated in the Supreme Court holding that the Rwanda scheme was unlawful. There were legitimate grounds for opposing the policy, but they were, in reality, far more political than legal.
A low point for me was when, in the dying days of the last Government, your Lordships’ House was considering legislation to impose regulation on the internet to combat the anti-competitive and monopolistic practices of big tech. Cross-party amendments were put down, but we were met with the argument—no doubt advanced by government lawyers—that undermining Google’s position would be contrary to Google’s human rights and thus, in effect, contrary to the rule of law.
Decisions in the Strasbourg court about the environment and the decision by an unnamed judge in respect of interim orders under the Rwanda scheme are just a couple of recent examples of where the Strasbourg court has come to conclusions that are at variance with what most people would regard as the core principles of the rule of law. I do not regard this as an originalist view, incidentally. The influence of Strasbourg and the Human Rights Act is the subject of a powerful paper by Policy Exchange, The Impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 in Twenty-Five Cases.
When I chaired the Independent Review of Administrative Law a few years ago, I think that many thought that the panel would recommend the complete abolition of judicial review. This was of course never a possibility, although we did conclude that there were occasions when the courts had strayed into political areas. However, at the centre of the panel’s analysis was the acknowledgment that parliamentary sovereignty was the governing principle of our constitution. This was consistent not only with Lord Bingham’s views in his book but also with the views of every judge who made submissions to our committee. Other views are available and I fear that they may be held by this Government, or at least by those with responsibility for constitutional and legal matters. It may be that the Government’s view of the rule of law will be whatever government lawyers say it might be and what an international court might say it is.
To illustrate different views of the rule of law, let me compare two pronouncements by judges on the subject. Lord Hughes, a former Supreme Court judge, said in the case of Evans v Attorney-General in 2015 that
“it is an integral part of the rule of law that courts give effect to Parliamentary intention. The rule of law is not the same as a rule that courts must prevail, no matter what the statute says”.
On the other hand, one of the European Court of Human Rights judges in the recent, and controversial, Swiss climate change case, speaking for the majority, said that
“democracy cannot be reduced to the will of the majority of the electorate and elected representatives, in disregard of the requirements of the rule of law”.
In other words, judges know best.
If this latter view of the rule of law represents the Government’s approach, I see trouble ahead. Responding to terrorism, maintaining public order, combating illegal migration and even fighting a war have become judicialised. I have heard senior soldiers saying that legal advice is inhibiting their ability to fight effectively and, among allies, we are accused of “legal freeloading” because of our reluctance to participate in some military activities in the light of that legal advice.
I have enormous respect for our judiciary, well represented in your Lordships’ House this afternoon, but, as we said in the Independent Review of Administrative Law, there should be institutional boundaries. The rule of law certainly does not mean rule by lawyers—or even by judges.
Lord Bach (Lab)
My Lords, I start of course by congratulating my noble and learned friend Lady Smith of Cluny on her wonderful maiden speech. I enjoyed it thoroughly, as I think the House did too. I would also like to say that I look forward very much to the maiden speech that is to follow me, from the noble Baroness, Lady Laing.
I declare a registered interest, in that I am the unremunerated chair of a board of trustees of the Leicester law centre. I am also the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Access to Justice.
I very much welcome this debate; in my years here, I do not remember another like it. In itself it is significant as evidence that this Government mean it on the subject of the rule of law. The emphasis on the rule of law by the Attorney-General and Advocate-General has been both striking and encouraging. For me, the strong reference to it by the Prime Minister in his conference speech in October was a breath of fresh air, and the best moment of the speech. Noble Lords will understand my using the Bingham principles as the basis of my remarks. I will argue that a number of those principles were broken, or at least stretched to the limit, by the last Government in relation to social welfare law and family law.
Of course, I am immensely proud that our country, the United Kingdom, enjoys a unique reputation for putting our rule-of-law principles into practice. This is clearly, as we have already been told, what attracts so many from abroad to want to litigate in London, and so much more. But do we still fully deserve that reputation or is it the case that, over the last few years, it has slipped away in certain areas of the law? Is it because we have allowed part of our legal system to be attacked and dealt with without enough regard for rule-of-law principles? My view is that it is not too late to remedy this, but I believe that some damage has been done and we do not have endless time to put it right.
I will concentrate on social welfare law, which is a way of describing legal disputes involving mainly housing, debt, welfare benefits, immigration, asylum, and employment law. These issues may sometimes seem quite trivial compared with dramatic criminal trials or substantial civil cases between powerful interests. However, to the claimants and, I argue, to our system as well, they are of potentially huge significance. If you are evicted, if you lose your job, if you do not receive the benefits that you are absolutely entitled to, it can affect you and your family for ever, leading to that downward spiral that we read about so often. Under a system that works, many of those issues can be resolved by early legal advice. This was the purpose behind the old green form that many of us regret the passing of, and the system of small amounts of legal aid, supported by all political parties, that so often dealt with these problems quickly and without recourse to the courts.
Of course, the majority of people using this sensible, pragmatic system were poor and had little. They were not able to pay for legal advice, let alone representation. There never was a golden age, but the passing and coming into force, 11 and a half years ago, of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act—LASPO—took many areas of law outside the scope of legal aid and has had a devastating effect on this crucial area of access to justice and thus to the rule of law. LASPO was part of the austerity programme but, sadly, has cost so much more than it has saved, in both financial and human terms. It has done so much damage that it is no exaggeration to say that the system is a long way to being broken.
I shall give noble Lords a couple of facts. The number of legal aid cases to help people get the early advice they need and are entitled to dropped from almost 1 million in 2009-10 to just 130,000 in 2021-22. The number of people having to go to court without representation has trebled. The number of advice agencies and law centres doing this important work has fallen by 59%. It is estimated that the number of people helped by legal aid in that period dropped by 4.5 million. Not surprisingly in this context, by next year a single person will not be eligible for legal aid unless he or she earns less than £9 a day, or £268 a month, 81% below the minimum income standard. Frankly, if it were not for the wonderful and selfless work done by lawyers and others, including law centres and advice centres—and pro bono work too, of course—this part of the law would be gone by now.
How does what I have tried to describe fit it with the Bingham principles on the rule of law? In my fairly amateur view, three come into play. The first is:
“The law must be accessible”.
Clearly, it is not accessible for many thousands of our fellow citizens. Another is:
“The law must afford adequate protection of fundamental human rights”.
It does not. The exceptional case funding part of LASPO has been pretty much a total failure. Perhaps most tellingly, Lord Bingham said:
“Means must be provided for resolving, without prohibitive cost or inordinate delay, bona fide civil disputes which the parties themselves are unable to resolve”.
This is exactly what the present state of the law does not allow for.
The truth is, and it is disappointing to have to say it, that the rule of law does not seem to apply meaningfully to this—I would argue—vital area of the law. There will always be a majority of people of good will in this House and beyond who will agree that this sounds like a common-sense issue that in theory at least can be reasonably easily put right. To be fair, the last Government began to see the errors of their ways, and small steps were taken to try to relieve the worst of LASPO, which had been pointed out in many reports and studies over the years.
Of course, what is needed is an increase in legal aid and making it available for early advice in the areas of law struck down by LASPO. I accept, of course, the dire straits of the state of the finances bequeathed to this Government. My plea would be that such an egregious and clear breach of access to justice, and thus to the rule of law, should be remedied as quickly as possible; in other words, this issue should be given high priority.
I end by quoting from the Westminster Commission on Legal Aid in 2021. It said that
“there must be a recognition across government that the Rule of Law is not something we can have for free. It is a choice we make as a society: either we decide that the law should apply to us all equally or we don’t. If we decide we do, then there is a cost. It is a small cost relative to other areas of public spending and it is one that we believe is worth paying”.
Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Con) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, it is with some trepidation that I rise to speak for the first time in this magnificent Chamber. How fortunate we are to spend so many of our working hours surrounded by such historical splendour.
I begin by thanking a great many people. First and foremost, I am eternally grateful to the residents of the Epping Forest constituency who returned me as their Member of Parliament at seven general elections. It was an enormous privilege to be their representative and, although I no longer represent them, I hope I can still speak up for them and the things they care about. Epping Forest is a hidden gem—not far from London, but far enough—and I am so very fortunate to live there among so many friends.
I thank sincerely the Clerk of the Parliaments, Black Rod and the wonderful doorkeepers for their guidance in recent weeks. I worked with them all for many years in my previous existence. The Clerk, Black Rod and I have dealt with some tricky issues together and I have always held them, and their colleagues, in the highest regard.
I am also extremely fortunate in my official supporters and other mentors. My noble friends Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Gardiner of Kimble were very kind, courteous and extraordinarily patient in the way in which they introduced me to your Lordships’ House. My noble friend Lord Forsyth was one of my first political heroes when he was stirring up trouble—there is a surprise—in the Scottish Conservative Party while I was a young candidate during the 1987 general election campaign. He remains my political hero, of course, and I note that he is still stirring up trouble.
My noble friend Lord Gardiner of Kimble was my opposite number as Senior Deputy Speaker for many years. We have fought many battles together, and I have always valued and relied upon his wisdom, experience and courtesy.
My noble friend Lady Stowell of Beeston has been a brilliant mentor to me over these last few weeks. She is of course full of knowledge and experience as a former Leader of your Lordships’ House, but she is also brilliant at answering the trivial questions that it seems too silly to ask. There is much to learn here and—for me, with the customs and procedures of the House of Commons running through my very veins—much to unlearn.
I crave your Lordships’ indulgence to allow me to thank two other mentors. The first time I ever set foot in the Palace of Westminster, I had just graduated from the law school at Edinburgh University. In those days many people just laughed at a young woman who wanted to be taken seriously in politics, but the Member of Parliament for Edinburgh South did not. He encouraged me and invited me here to Parliament. He was then Michael Ancram, more recently known to your Lordships, until his untimely death just a few weeks ago, as the Marquess of Lothian. It is heartbreaking that Michael is no longer with us. I am sure that noble Lords all share my sadness and my enormous admiration for such a lovely man.
I also thank Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market, who, although he has retired from your Lordships’ House, continues to observe noble Lords’ proceedings from his home in Norfolk. Lord MacGregor, to whom I was special adviser for the many years during which he served in the Cabinets of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, is a highly principled politician who elevates argument with decency and kindness. I am extremely fortunate to have been taught so much by him.
Lord MacGregor was also a distinguished member of the Magic Circle, and while training me in politics he also trained me as a magician’s assistant. On one momentous occasion, on the big stage over in St John’s Smith Square, we set up a guillotine and cut off Jim Naughtie’s head. It is for your Lordships to decide whether putting Jim’s head back on was an appropriate, or indeed wise, course of action.
I congratulate the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith of Cluny, on introducing this important debate and on her maiden speech. Many of us remember with affection her esteemed father, who was held in great respect on both sides of the political divide. His legacy clearly flourishes in the noble and learned Baroness, but I commend her determination to forge her own way—and I commend her decision to operate mainly from Edinburgh. We are one country.
When I made my maiden speech in the other place 27 years ago, I quoted Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn, which said that, as Finn stood up in the House of Commons for the first time:
“All was confused, and there arose as it were a sound of waters in his ears, and a feeling as of a great hell around him”.
How very different is your Lordships’ House. Having spent almost 11 years trying to keep order in the other Chamber along with my partner in crime, the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton of Doncaster, I am most impressed by your Lordships’ ability to self-regulate—extremely surprised, but most impressed.
I am grateful also to the Garter King of Arms and the Lord Lyon King of Arms for permitting me to take the title Laing of Elderslie. Elderslie is the village, about 12 miles from Glasgow, in which I was born and brought up. It is the place where my grandfather set up a small business in 1910, and it is the village that my father represented on the district council for 25 years, and of which he was immensely proud.
Rather more notably, Elderslie was the birthplace of Sir William Wallace, the Scottish patriot who led the fight against oppression in the 13th century. Make no mistake: William Wallace was not fighting for any kind of modern-day nationalism. He was fighting for the basic liberty of the people he led. He was fighting for freedom, and surely we are all warriors in the cause of freedom. Wallace was defeated in battle, subjected to a show trial here in Westminster Hall and brutally executed. In 1305 there was no open justice, no protection for the weak from the strong, no rule of law.
I fully appreciate that a maiden speech should be uncontroversial. I thought the subject of today’s debate would provide that opportunity, as we must all surely agree on the importance of the rule of law, but everything is relative and nothing is absolute. It is a privilege to listen today to the wise arguments of noble and learned Lords, but I dare to question whether our current governmental processes are fulfilling their constitutional role in an adequate way. Are the legislature, the Executive and the judiciary really correctly balanced? There must of course be the potential for judicial review of administrative action but, as things stand now, the fear of judicial review is in practice hindering the proper implementation of policy. That may largely be due to an inappropriate risk-aversion culture among Ministers—and I mean Ministers of all parties, as the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, just alluded to.
For the rule of law to operate effectively, those who make the law must have confidence that their intent will not be diverted or diluted by other parts of our constitutional apparatus. The way in which we make laws is as important as the laws themselves, and what a challenge that is for your Lordships’ House. What a heavy responsibility for the revising Chamber.
I am in danger of straying into contentious territory, so I must conclude. I reiterate my praise for the noble and learned Baroness’s introduction of this important debate, along with my thanks to the many wonderful people who have given me so much personal and professional support in my journey to your Lordships’ House.
Lord Lilley (Con)
My Lords, we have had two excellent maiden speeches from two feisty Scottish noble Baronesses, who are a great addition to our House. I particularly welcome from the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith, her thoughtful and promising remarks about secondary legislation, an issue where I think her talents will be put to good use.
It is a particular pleasure to congratulate my noble friend Lady Laing of Elderslie on her outstanding, amusing, punchy and at times moving maiden speech. She is best known for her near-record tenure in the Speaker’s Chair as Senior Deputy Speaker and the first woman chair of Ways and Means, where she was a commanding figure, as we probably appreciated from her maiden speech. In that role she had to practise that most valuable and rarest skill: the art of listening. It also meant that she was constrained in expressing in the Chamber what I know from private conversation are her always sensible and well-informed opinions. That did not stop her impressing her constituents, as her share of the vote over her seven elections rose from less than half the vote to nearly two-thirds. And now she will be able to express her views openly and bring her wisdom, learning and enthusiasm to your Lordships’ House, and we look forward to hearing much from her in future.
We are blessed to live in a democratic country with freedom under the law. I speak with some trepidation as the first non-lawyer to contribute to this debate, but to me the freedom of the law, as it has developed in Britain over centuries, surely means this. First, we are free to do anything, not just some list of things but anything not prohibited by law. Secondly, laws are made in Parliament, which is elected by and accountable to us. Thirdly, all of us—every citizen, public official, policeman, Minister, MP, Peer of the realm—is subject equally to those laws. Fourthly, the role of the courts is to implement those laws impartially and fairly, by due legal process. Finally, if the courts interpret statutes in ways Parliament did not intend or develop common law in ways Parliament feels is out of line with the values of the electorate, Parliament can change the law.
As a result, British people feel we own the law and overwhelmingly abide by it, and we look to Parliament to defend our freedoms. That is what generations of British people have been prepared to risk their lives to preserve. It was good enough for them, but it is not good enough for the noble and learned Lord the Attorney- General, who described it in his Bingham lecture as “thin gruel”. He said:
“Viewing the rule of law through this distorting lens of ultimate decision-making authority … risks mistaking it for the purely formal, and thin, conception of rule by law”.
He wants something “thicker and more substantive”. It turns out that means he wants it to be supplemented by
“an authority that requires that Parliament maintains in its legislation the ideals of the rule of law”
as determined by that authority.
I can find only one country constituted on this model, where an elected Parliament and Government are overseen by an unaccountable authority—a council of guardians—that can tell the elected representatives what laws they may, must and may not enact so that legislation accords with those guardians’ interpretation of their sacred text. That country is Iran, the guardians are the Ayatollahs and their sacred text is the Koran. Here, according to the Attorney-General, our unelected, unaccountable guardians are judges and lawyers. Their sacred text is the European Convention on Human Rights. In Iran, the system was established by a popular revolution; here it is being imposed by a stealthy constitutional revolution.
There has been no upsurge of public demand for the courts to be able to override Parliament. Such support as there has been has come almost entirely from lawyers, many of whom, not surprisingly, favour a system which assumes that their judgment is always wise and objective. The Attorney-General would of course deny that our courts have been given powers like those of the Ayatollahs to annul or replace laws. The Human Rights Act gives our courts the power only to declare a law incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. It is then up to the Government and Parliament to decide whether to repeal, amend or replace the offending legislation.
But that is half the truth which conceals the real truth, because, if the Government decline to make the law compatible, a citizen affected by it can take the case to the European court. It is then a racing certainty that the Strasbourg court will uphold or reinforce the Supreme Court ruling and the UK will then be treaty-bound to implement that judgment. That is why, of the 47 declarations of incompatibility so far, 12 of which have been overturned on appeal, which shows how subjective they are, all the rest have resulted in Parliament amending the law.
Many lay people assume that this cannot be a problem in practice. Human rights sound eminently sensible to all of us. Who could object to the right to life, freedom of expression, respect for family life, and so on? Moreover, they sound as if they are clear and absolute—but far from it. Convention rights were open to a wide range of interpretations even before the court decided that the convention is a living document into which they can read whatever they decide is appropriate, without waiting for any changes to the articles of the convention to be made by those adhering to it.
Even when the convention was being negotiated, the British team recognised that these vague rights would give the courts the right to create new laws. They concluded that it was
“inconceivable that any Government … would take the risk of entrusting these unprecedented powers to an international court, legislative powers which Parliament would never agree to entrust to the courts of this country”.
This is why, contrary to the assiduously propagated mythology, both the Attlee and Churchill Governments accepted the convention only on the basis that the UK opted out of the jurisdiction of the court and treated the convention as being purely declaratory, requiring no change in laws, even those known to conflict with it—a position which continued for 15 years.
The only thing that is certain about the meaning of human rights, so vague are they, is that they mean whatever the Strasbourg court decides they mean. The court’s interpretation cannot be repealed, amended or changed by Parliament. Take even the first right: the right to life. That sounds pretty clear-cut, but when does life begin and how should it end? Parliament is shortly to consider the Assisted Dying Bill. Suppose we enact it but the Strasbourg court were then to decide that the state cannot participate in taking life—a very plausible interpretation of that article. Then the court would prevail: the Bill would have to be annulled and Parliament would have been overruled. Suppose the reverse happens and Parliament rejects the Bill but the Strasbourg court rules, under some other article, that state-assisted dying is a human right. Again, the court, accountable to no one, would prevail over Parliament. Those are theoretical scenarios to show how the power to make intrinsically political decisions has been transferred to unaccountable judges.
Consider the recent Strasbourg court decision, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, telling the Swiss Government to set aside a referendum result that had agreed a gradual route to net zero by 2050, and replace it by an accelerated programme costing billions of francs. The court ruled:
“Democracy cannot be reduced to the will of the majority of the electorate and elected representatives, in disregard of the requirements of the rule of law”—
in other words, the opinions of the Strasbourg judges. Do the Government share the European court’s view of the relationship between democracy and the law? If they do, they are effectively saying that the rule of lawyers should replace the rule of law. The two are very different, as the excellent work of the Policy Exchange judicial power project has shown.
Indeed, the rule of lawyers, giving lawyers the right to create laws rather than implement them and encouraging US-style judicial activism, is one of the most dangerous threats to the rule of law. Giving judges and lawyers who are accountable to no one the power to make laws and tell Parliament what laws it may, may not and must make inevitably politicises the judiciary. This undermines public respect for the judiciary and for law itself. It is already happening and it will lead inexorably and ineluctably to demands for the political appointment and vetting of judges. Those demands are already being voiced.
We do not want to end up like America, where Supreme Court judges are appointed on the basis of their political opinions and their actuarial life expectancy, so that the President who appoints them can determine legislation for decades ahead. That sort of thing is the almost inevitable consequence of continuing on the path described by the Attorney-General in his Bingham speech. The Attorney-General may think the rule of law is “thin gruel”, but I fear that rule by lawyers is a mess of pottage, and a dangerous brew at that.
Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith of Cluny, on her excellent opening remarks; I wish her every success in her new role. With the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General in the other place, they make a very impressive trio of law officers. I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Laing of Elderslie, on her very gracious and thoughtful speech.
I will focus my remarks on the meaning of the expression “the rule of law” and on international law. In his essay, “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue”, Joseph Raz began with a warning:
“Not uncommonly when a political ideal captures the imagination of large numbers of people its name becomes a slogan used by supporters of ideals which bear little or no relation to the one it originally designated”.
Raz went on to argue for what is sometimes described as the thin conception of the rule of law. It was thin, not because he did not believe in other values such as democracy, human rights and international law— I think that a number of noble Lords here who knew him will confirm that he was no conservative—but, on the contrary, because he wanted to set forth a viable and coherent conception of the rule of law that did not conflate the rule of law and the rule of good law. The latter, as he put it, would require “a complete social philosophy”.
Inflating the concept of the rule of law to accommodate other ideals, wishes and causes, however worthy, is a bad idea for at least two reasons. First, we will not be able to agree on it, as today’s debate shows. The thicker the conception of the rule of law, the more politicised the rule of law will become. The scope and interpretation of some fundamental rights, and the ways in which conflicts between rights should be resolved, are an example. Those issues will remain contested. I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, that a fair trial is the obvious exception because it is intertwined with the rule of law.
Secondly, the key features of the rule of law are legal certainty, clarity and predictability—that is the very first principle of the rule of law, according to Lord Bingham. By expanding the rule of law to include democracy—a list of fundamental rights that is itself unsettled and ever expanding—as well as every rule of international law, we end up with an all-encompassing, panoptic concept of the rule of law that itself becomes a source of unclarity, uncertainty and unpredictability; in other words, we end up with a conception of the rule of law that does not advance the rule of law. As anticipated by Raz, when the concept of the rule of law is bloated in this way, there is also a risk that it becomes a perfunctory slogan.
As far as international law is concerned, it has been the long-standing policy of successive British Governments that Britain complies with its obligations under international law and promotes respect for international law globally. This commitment has historically been accompanied by a well-informed and savvy understanding of international law, of how it is created and of the fundamental differences between international law and national law. The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, referred to the new guidance from the Attorney-General on legal risk; I am less concerned than the noble Lord, but I would welcome a discussion on that document because it is very important and useful.
The two main sources of international law—treaties and custom—have no equivalent in domestic law. Critics of international law have often argued that international law does not have the clarity and certainty that the rule of law requires. They say in particular that customary international law is too vague. Customary international law is defined by two elements, each of which is linked to the state. It is formed through the practice and the views of states—states create custom. For that reason, states that support the rule of law, such as Britain, have a responsibility to be transparent and clear about what they consider to be the rules of customary international law. This is one of the ways in which, historically, Britain has ensured the progress of international law. It was one of the states that published the most complete records of its practice and statements on its position on customary international law. One of the most wonderful books in international law is Law Officers’ Opinions to the Foreign Office, 1793-1860, edited by Clive Parry. It shows how Britain contributed to the formation and development of international law more than perhaps any other state. It also shows what made the reputation of Britain in international law. In the 19th century, when law officers were asked what their views were on the right to stop and search vessels on the high seas in certain circumstances, they always had a clear answer.
This takes me to a very topical question, on which I have written a paper with Professor Ekins: whether, under customary international law, there is a rule that requires the United Kingdom to respect the immunity of a Head of Government of a state that is not a party to the ICC. I believe the answer to be clear: I do not think that there is a conflict between customary international law and domestic law. The position under customary international law is clear, and it is reflected in Article 98.1 of the statute. However, it is important for us to know what the Government’s position is. To invoke the rule of law as a reason for not stating their position on this or other matters is, with respect, rule of law double-speak.
In conclusion, I will make three points that I hope can help us to rebuild consensus on the rule of law. First, we must proceed on the basis of a meaning of the rule of law that is coherent and enjoys wide support across different political views. We cannot have the Government of the thin conception of the rule of law followed by the Government of the thick conception of the rule of law. We cannot use the rule of law as a vehicle for imposing a particular political wish list, or a particular philosophical view, on others.
Secondly, no political party owns the rule of law. In an adversarial political system, Newton’s Third Law of Motion applies:
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”.
If one political side claims ownership of the rule of law—or of human rights or international law—someone on the other side will disown it, and we will all be worse off because of it.
Thirdly, we have to protect the rule of law from demagogues. That was the focus of the Attorney-General’s very well-chosen theme for his speech at the Bingham Centre. I agree on the importance of this objective, but I take issue slightly with a comment that was reported in the press. To be fair, it was probably off the cuff, but it was reported quite widely. He said that
“we need to be militant about our belief in the rule of law … We should be shouting it from the rooftops”.
It is precisely because I am concerned about populism—as he is—that I am wary of metaphors. Populism thrives on the effective use of metaphors to mobilise the masses behind certain emotional causes. At a time of great political division, such as we are going through now, there is no shortage of people in our society who want to scream slogans on megaphones, bang pots and climb lamp posts—we see them on the streets of London every Saturday—but that is not what lawyers do. We should not be the ones who try to climb higher or scream louder—although, unfortunately, looking at social media, there are lawyers these days who seem to think that this is precisely our role. Our social responsibility is to resist these populist trends. We listen to and respect each other because we value civil disagreement. We only ever seek to persuade through argument. These are the best traditions and habits of the legal professions, and they are crucial to the rule of law.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith of Cluny, and the noble Baroness, Lady Laing of Elderslie, on their excellent speeches. I welcome them to the House and look forward to working with them.
The rule of law is the foundation stone of democratic, open and peaceful societies. It provides stability, accountability and the protection of rights. When applied correctly, it can limit the arbitrary powers of the state and wealthy elites. But all is not well: the rule of law is weakened when people cannot afford access to the courts and are forced to suffer in silence. With the erosion of legal aid, access to the law is now denied to millions of people. The backlog of some 60,000 Crown Court cases means that legal processes are not delivered on a timely basis and justice is denied.
There can be no equality before the law unless there is equality of access to the law. Even if people get access to the courts, at best they will get only an interpretation of law, not justice. The rule of law and justice are not synonymous. Justice is a higher-order concept and is concerned with fairness, equity, respect for others, freedom, equality, human rights and much more. Such concerns are increasingly downgraded in the creation of new laws.
There is also concern that some are not subject to the laws applied to the masses. For example, the Duchy of Cornwall enjoys tax exemptions not available to other businesses that compete with it. Its exemptions, in my view, are not consistent with the rule of law. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever organised petitions or marches demanding social harms, but that is what is inflicted on the people by Governments and Parliament as they enact a large number of laws.
Some 6.34 million people in England are waiting for 7.57 million hospital appointments; 2.8 million people are chronically ill and 300,000 people a year die while awaiting hospital appointments; but Governments prioritise arbitrary fiscal rules over human welfare. For the last 14 years and more, Governments and Parliament have passed numerous laws to impose austerity, cuts in real wages—especially in the public sector—and cuts in benefits and public services. Major parties now compete to see who can cut the most, but they never talk about justice and human cost and what the consequences of these new laws are in human terms.
Earlier this year, a report published by the Institute of Health Equity at University College London reported that more than 1 million people in England died prematurely in the decade following 2011 due to poverty, austerity, and the impact of Covid, all of which could have been controlled by the Government. This month, Marie Curie reported that last year 111,000 people died in poverty; 16 million people, including 5.2 million children, live in poverty. Many go hungry, but Governments continue to enact laws which perpetuate hunger, injustice and poverty on people.
Governments remain obsessed with austerity. Laws are passed to impose a two-child benefit cap and winter fuel payment cuts on pensioners living below the poverty line. Hungry children, shivering pensioners and premature deaths of millions are the product of the contemporary rule of law, which is increasingly held in contempt by many people for the hardship that it inflicts on them; yet at the same time they want laws changed so that they can be protected. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 introduced indeterminate prison sentences for minor offences, and has blighted lives. Such laws are the outcome of political populism, which has little regard for the human consequences, and a political system where legislators are pressurised to follow the diktats of the party machine. Justice simply takes a back seat. It is good to know that the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 abolished IPP sentences, but the abolition did not apply retrospectively to people who had already received such a sentence. Injustice continues.
Parliament plays a dual role. It excludes people and inflicts injustices, yet at the same time it is the only body that can address them. Women had to resort to violence to get the right to vote. People have long highlighted the evils of gender and racial discrimination through petitions, marches and social disruption before Parliament could be persuaded to move. Why does the rule of law seek to exclude people and make them second-class citizens? Why is Parliament not proactive in dealing with injustices? Why do these injustices have to linger on for decades and decades?
Such is the rule of law in this country that the state actually protects organisations with criminal records. Water companies are permitted by law to dump sewage in rivers, seas and lakes because it is profitable. They have 1,109 criminal convictions, yet this House has just passed a law saying that these organisations can remain in control of the supply of a vital resource.
Any discussion of the rule of law ought to ask these fundamental questions: whose rule, whose law, and for whose benefit? We live in a society differentiated by class, income, wealth, age, gender and many other factors. There are no universal laws that benefit everyone, but that is what we should be aiming at. Regulators often act as judges, juries and quasi-courts. They very rarely act with any impartiality. Just today, a report by the Investment Fraud and Fairer Financial Services APPG said that the Financial Conduct Authority failed to investigate frauds.
Frauds at HBOS go back to 2002 but are yet to be investigated. No Minister is pushing the FCA to investigate. In 2012, HSBC pleaded guilty to “criminal conduct” in the US and was fined $1.9 billion but the then Chancellor, George Osborne, and the regulators secretly urged the US authorities to go easy on HSBC. To this day, there has been no UK investigation, and no Statement has been made to Parliament to explain the Government’s position. People expect the rule of law to be impartial and fair, but that is not the case.
Parliament makes laws which privilege the rich and powerful. A carer earning £1 over the income threshold faces the possibility of being prosecuted and forced to pay back large sums of money. That does not apply to people dodging taxes by using offshore vehicles. No questions are asked about their conduct. HMRC has absolutely no estimate of the taxes lost due to profit shifting. The Criminal Finances Act 2017 was introduced to curb corporate tax abuses, but to this day there has been no prosecution at all under it.
Under the insolvency laws, secured creditors, which are usually banks, private equity or hedge funds, have the first bite of the assets available when the borrower goes bankrupt. Small people—SMEs or individual traders—get nothing. There is no equity in insolvency law; there is no equality; there is no fairness. We really need to ask questions about whose rule it is, whose law it is and who actually benefits from it.
The Lord Bishop of Norwich
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith, for bringing this debate forward and congratulate her on her outstanding maiden speech. I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Laing of Elderslie, on hers.
While I feel an utter novice in this area, especially following such informed speeches, I am acutely aware that your Lordships have a role in reviewing decisions of the General Synod of the Church of England and passing—or not—our Measures into law. As such, our ecclesiastical laws are also laws of the land. The Church of England values its participation in this process, and, by virtue of that, engaging with any debate on the rule of law that strengthens the ordering of a safe, healthy and flourishing society.
The speech by the noble and learned Baroness the Advocate-General reminded me of themes that confront any pilgrim to the isle of Iona, a thin place so beloved of her late and admired father. For, in the hymns of the Iona Community, themes of justice, equality, fairness and transformation are entwined, living out in a very modern way the care and communal responsibility that St Columba lived in that ancient place of prayer.
Although the concept of the rule of law predates Judaism and Christianity, both faith communities later adopted and adapted substantial elements of legal codes and practices from antiquity to order their community life. In turn, they commended the core principles within these legal codes for application in wider society, with the hope of promoting communities in which all could flourish.
Among the important ways in which Judaism and Christianity modified the pre-existing legal tradition was to change a system that explicitly favoured the powerful in its laws into one that was infused with the idea of equal justice for all, regardless of social class. Christians, together with our Jewish neighbours, continue to believe this fundamental principle of equality of all human beings before the law—just as we believe in the equality of all human beings before God. It is perhaps one of the greatest gifts that Judaism and Christianity have given to cultures shaped by the Bible. In fact, the historian Tom Holland makes the case in his book Dominion that much of what is shared in so-called western culture—ideas about human rights and a legal system that treats all equally—has its underlying rationale in Christian belief and its influence on society in promoting the flourishing of all people.
Jesus, drawing on the Book of Leviticus, appeals to his followers to love our neighbours as ourselves. This commandment continues to order so many of the convictions about the rule of law that are expressed from these Benches and from others in your Lordships’ House. We see it lived out in our work in seeking to have legislative and judicial processes that balance protecting the innocent with the aim of rehabilitation and restoration of the guilty. We see it lived out in seeking to safeguard nature by honouring our commitments under international law and treaties to care for our planet home through fairness, transparency and accountability, and, for example, in combating illegal logging, poaching and wildlife trafficking.
We see it lived out also in our work in seeking a just and fair society that uses its laws and its judicial system to protect the vulnerable and marginalised. When Exodus calls for protection of the widow, the foreigner and the orphan, this is so that the most precarious and vulnerable receive legislative and judicial care. Of course, all people deserve our care and proactive concern, but protection for the most vulnerable may need to be enshrined in law and judicial decisions in order to ensure that the rule of law is administered equitably to all.
We have seen in recent years a sad willingness to disapply human rights legislation, particularly with respect to the most marginalised people in the asylum and criminal justice systems, in direct contravention of our proud traditions in this country. Does the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General agree that when we allow a chipping away of universal rights, we are in fact betraying a proud tradition and undermining the society we all seek to build?
Lord Bellamy (Con)
My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble and learned Baroness the Advocate-General for Scotland and to my noble friend Lady Laing on outstanding maiden speeches.
I will address something that has not been directly touched on so far, which is the importance of the role and the integrity of lawyers in the application of the rule of law. I will then come on to discuss some of the issues that may arise as a result of the Horizon scandal.
I ask first, as some other noble Lords already have: what is the essence of the rule of law? My answer is the same as that of Thomas Fuller in the 17th century:
“Be ye never so high, the law is above you”.
Indeed, we sit here in this Chamber under the visual representation of that principle. If noble Lords opposite look at the fresco up on the left-hand side, they will see the famous scene from Shakespeare in which King Henry V—in modern terms, the Government—kneels in front of the Lord Chief Justice, Judge Gascoigne, and accepts his authority as embodying the rule of law. If every thought one has ever had is to be found somewhere in Shakespeare, for the rule of law please see “Henry IV, Part 2”, act 5, scene 2.
In a modern, democratic society such as ours, the law in question, and hence the rule of law, requires not only the consent but the trust of the governed. This trust we achieve, broadly speaking, through parliamentary democracy and an independent and incorruptible judiciary, both priceless aspects of the rule of law. But in our adversarial common-law system, the judges determine cases that are presented and largely conducted by the lawyers. So today I would like to concentrate on the role of lawyers in the English common-law system, particularly in cases where the resources of the parties are not evenly matched.
I say the role of lawyers in the English common-law system since very long ago, in the last century, I once worked as an EU judge in a system essentially based on the more inquisitorial approach of French civil law. In a more inquisitorial civil law system, the role of the lawyer is much reduced: it is the judge who has the primary responsibility for ascertaining the truth, examining the witnesses and deciding the law, with only limited participation by the lawyers. By contrast, in our adversarial common-law system, the lawyer’s role is central. The lawyers assemble the evidence, present and shape the case and challenge the witnesses. The role of the first instance judge, or in criminal cases the jury, is essentially to decide which of two rival versions is to be preferred. The judge and the court rely on the lawyers to a very considerable extent to draw attention to the evidence, to ensure disclosure, to cross-examine and so forth. So the fairness and the integrity of our legal system in practice depend significantly on the competence and integrity of the lawyers. If that competence or integrity weakens for any reason, the system is vulnerable to injustice, particularly where there is inequality of arms between the parties, and thus the rule of law is itself diminished.
It is for that reason that lawyers have ethical duties, not only to the client but to the court, to act with
“complete integrity, probity and trustworthiness”—
to quote Tom Bingham when Master of the Rolls. But, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hoffmann, has said, for the lawyer, this in turn gives rise to “divided loyalties”, because the lawyer also has a duty to the client to do the best they can for the client. In practice, there may be very heavy pressures on the lawyer to act primarily in the client’s commercial or reputational interest, in the interest of the lawyer’s firm or, for an in-house lawyer, in the interest of his or her employer. In a civil law system, those conflicts are reduced because the role of the lawyer is reduced, but in a common-law system, very difficult dilemmas are sometimes presented to our lawyers. Those very difficult dilemmas and the rules applicable to them must be worked through very openly and very thoroughly for the rule of law to thrive.
I am sorry to say that in my short time as a Minister, answerable to your Lordships for the affairs of the Ministry of Justice until the last election, I began to wonder whether everything in these regards was entirely in order. In my conversations around the country, judges in courts and tribunals operating at the sharp end, if I may call it so, raised concerns about declining ethical standards, not least the widespread use of inexperienced and often poorly trained paralegals. Then along came SLAPPs, where lawyers in essence weaponised the law to the detriment of weaker parties. Before your Lordships on behalf of the Government, my noble friend Lord Sharpe and I sought to address that problem, at least in part, in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act. Later, when I was responsible in your Lordships’ House for the Arbitration Bill, questions of ethics came up again, including what is known as the Nigeria case, where it turned out that even the lawyers conducting the arbitration were personally implicated in corruption.
However, towering above and overshadowing all that was the Horizon scandal, involving hundreds of wrongful convictions, wrongful imprisonment and many other cases where money was wrongfully extracted from sub-postmasters or sub-postmistresses, leaving lives ruined, families in deep distress and, in some cases, deaths or suicides. My last ministerial duty was to support my noble friend Lord Offord in passing the unprecedented legislation needed to overturn those convictions. I have been asked by fair-minded observers how the legal system in this country can be said to uphold the rule of law if such an appalling disaster as Horizon can be allowed to happen. There are no doubt many views, but in the post office inquiry, great attention has been focused—whether fairly or not, I do not know—on the role of the lawyers. We need to wait for the outcome of Sir Wyn Williams’ report before we have the full picture, but there is a question as to whether Horizon was a one-off or whether there are weaknesses in how our lawyers approach their duties and responsibilities.
Richard Moorhead, professor of law and ethics at the University of Exeter, considers that there is a problem. He sets that out in his Hamlyn lecture this month, entitled “Frail Professionalism: Lawyers’ Ethics After the Post Office and Other Cases”. These are highly prestigious lectures. Recent lecturers having included the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd. Professor Moorhead suggests that current ways of thinking in the legal profession result in some cases in damage to the rule of law, particularly where there is inequality of arms. He discusses ways of promoting more rigour and honesty on the part of our lawyers.
Therefore, does the Attorney-General agree, in the light in particular of Horizon, that there should be now a full review of the ethical standards and training of all lawyers in England and Wales, including paralegals, and that that review should further define the ethical standards applicable, reinvigorate those standards and ensure that there is proper accountability and effective regulation of the legal profession?
Baroness O'Loan (CB)
My Lords, the rule of law is a pillar of our constitution, proudly proclaimed and promoted across the world. We criticise autocracies and dictatorships which deprive people of that due process which enables them to access their rights, yet we have problems. I was very reassured by the commitments made by the Minister in her excellent speech. I congratulate her and the noble Baroness, Lady Laing, on their maiden speeches.
In 2010, Lord Bingham said:
“Ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, without exceeding the limits of such powers and not unreasonably”.
In 2022, your Lordships’ Constitution Committee described the rule of law as
“vitally important to the health of our democracy”,
saying that it was “critical” that Ministers understood the rule of law’s key principles and considered these to have primacy over political expediency.
I am not sure that we have a mechanism for ensuring that all Ministers understand the primacy of the rule of law. We do not have a requirement to consider whether a proposed law is compliant with the rule of law. Would it be desirable to introduce such a requirement? Even the requirement to ensure compliance with our obligations under the ECHR does not seem to work. In 2023, Justice reported, correctly, that there had been
“a growing legislative disregard for human rights … Laws like the Public Order Act 2023 could have a chilling effect on our rights to freedom of thought, expression, and peaceful assembly”.
It cited the excessive use of Henry VIII powers, saying that this was evident, for example, in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, in which
“power is bounded by whether the minister thinks its exercise is ‘appropriate’, rather than it being objectively ‘necessary’”.
In 2022, the much-missed Lord Judge, speaking of the extensive use of secondary legislation under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 during the coronavirus epidemic, observed that of the 582 measures passed under that Act, 537 were made by negative resolution and 66 came into effect before the statutory instrument was laid before Parliament. He spoke graphically of the nature of those measures, which had the effect of interfering with our right to live our lives, carry on business and try to conserve the economy. Breach of the Covid-19 regulations was a criminal offence, and almost 120,000 fines were issued over the two years. It now appears that many of those restrictions were not necessary, effective or proportionate.
Most regrettably, the UK has recently seen a number of very questionable Acts and statutory instruments forced through Parliament. The Illegal Migration Act, referred to at length by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, required the detention and removal of individuals arriving in the UK without a visa, either to Rwanda or another safe third country, with no consideration of the asylum or human rights of any asylum seeker, who could be detained with no access to judicial review or immigration bail for the first 28 days. In November 2023, the UK Supreme Court unanimously found the Government’s policy of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda unlawful, because it is not currently a safe country. Government then entered into the Rwanda treaty, forcing through the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, which states that courts, tribunals, the Home Secretary and others, when deciding on the removal of a person to Rwanda, must conclusively treat Rwanda as a safe country. Passing a law saying that Rwanda is a safe country did not make it one.
We also saw the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 come into effect in May this year. Under that Act, bereaved families of Troubles bombings and other murders, no matter where those atrocities occurred, were deprived of the ancient legal processes of inquests and civil actions. In many cases, the prospect of prosecution even for murder was removed as a consequence of giving immunity to those who provided an account to the ICRIR describing their Troubles-related conduct.
This May, inquests in progress, which had not reached the point of final determination, ceased. In Belfast 38 inquests involving 70 individuals stopped: a small number for the coronial system, yet of massive importance to the families who sought those inquests. Many inquests involve allegations by families that state agents, from both republican and loyalist paramilitary groupings, working for or employed, assisted or enabled by the state, were involved in murders and other serious crime during the Troubles.
In April this year, the Court of Appeal rejected a claim that a coroner’s decision that a limited summary of some material should be released to the family of Paul Thompson would cause too much damage to national security. The Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, Dame Siobhan Keegan, said:
“We are not convinced that disclosure of the information would breach or depart from the (Government’s) NCND … policy”.
Similar issues apply in a number of other cases, and the Secretary of State immediately announced plans to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.
In other cases, coroners declared their inability to continue inquests because they cannot hear evidence in closed session and called for public inquiries. Sixty year-old Sean Brown was abducted in 1997, driven some six miles in the boot of his car and shot dead. His inquest began in 1997; the first hearing was in 2023. There were 40 hearings to discuss disclosure of sensitive material, which was opposed on grounds of national security. In February this year, it emerged that more than 25 people, including state agents, have been linked by intelligence to his murder. The inquest concluded in March because the coroner would have had to use intelligence material to answer the questions that he must by law answer. Mr Justice Kinney said that a public inquiry was
“the appropriate way to consider the circumstances of Mr Brown’s murder”.
The Secretary of State rejected this and has said that the Brown family should go to the ICRIR, yet it has been criticised by the Court of Appeal because the Secretary of State can restrict access to precisely the information with which the coroner could not deal. I understand that the Brown family are now engaged in judicial review of the Secretary of State’s decision not to grant an inquiry.
Following a Northern Ireland High Court decision about the Troubles Act, the Secretary of State appealed, as did some of the families. The Court of Appeal ruled two months ago and said that Article 2(1) of the Windsor Framework imposes an obligation on the UK
“to ensure that no diminution of rights, safeguards or equality of opportunity”
arises for individuals who are resident in Northern Ireland as a result of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, that this provision is “directly effective”, and that relevant civil rights were engaged, including certain rights under the EU victims directive.
The court said that the legacy Act had resulted in a diminution of the rights of the applicants, who have been
“deprived of access to inquests, police and Police Ombudsman investigations”,
the potential of criminal investigations of offenders and civil remedies against alleged perpetrators. All those constraints were “incompatible with the Directive”. The court concluded that by virtue of Article 2(1) of the Windsor Framework, the UK-EU withdrawal agreement and the European Union (Withdrawal) Act, the correct remedy was disapplication of the legacy Act
“to the extent of the incompatibility”.
There may yet be appeal to the Supreme Court. The Government have lodged notice of appeal but have yet to decide whether to proceed.
Before the election, the Labour Party stated that the Troubles Act would be repealed. The Secretary of State has repeatedly said that he will do so—nothing has happened yet. There has been international condemnation of the UK’s passing of the Act. Ireland is bringing proceedings against the UK in the European Court of Human Rights. More importantly, people whose loved ones died or who were seriously injured over 30 years throughout the United Kingdom have been deprived of the legal remedies that are available to all other people in the UK in cases of non-Troubles-related injuries and deaths, and their pain and suffering has been enormously exacerbated.
Trust in the rule of law and in the integrity of successive British Governments has been seriously eroded as a consequence of what has happened. It is to be hoped that His Majesty’s Government will honour their repeated promises to repeal the Troubles Act. What is required is a system that does not limit investigation, and that enables the operation of the rule of law in the context of the ongoing resolution of these matters.
Lord Stewart of Dirleton (Con)
My Lords, I join the whole House in welcoming the noble and learned Baroness to her place. I seek to give the House an assurance of two things that she already knows. First, as Advocate-General for Scotland, she enjoys the support of a dedicated, professional and, in every way, excellent department of civil servants. As a self-employed advocate, it may come to her, as it did to me, as something of a surprise to find, among other things attaching to the role of Advocate-General, that one is suddenly responsible for 500 employees. I am sure that the noble and learned Baroness will take to that readily. Secondly, in her role she will enjoy the support of all of us who have had the honour and privilege to serve in the office she now holds.
I am particularly glad to see the noble and learned Baroness in her place, as there seemed to be some delay in her appointment after the general election—so much so that when I was in the House for the debates on the King’s Speech, I was approached by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, who asked: “Are you still Advocate-General?”. I had to tell him that, as far as I was concerned, the Government had elected to seek advice about Scots law from another quarter. He said: “Well, they haven’t appointed a successor yet”. I said: “Well, that may well be the case, George, but they have stopped paying me and, as far as I am concerned, that determines the matter”.
The excellent debate, which we have enjoyed, points up something of the Protean nature of the rule of law: a concept shifting subtly in our hands as we seek to define it. It was that very act of pinning down to which the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, spoke in his submission to your Lordships. It was also echoed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, and the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame. It defies a simple definition that is universally applicable. It is made up of a number of component parts, and I associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lords, Lord Bach and Lord Sikka, concerning the importance of access to law. In so doing, I declare my interest as an advocate with a justiciary practice who is therefore paid substantially out of the public purse.
We must also be careful to test some of the assertions made by the noble and learned Baroness in her excellent speech. When she says that compliance with international law is the right thing to do morally, does that not rather beg the question of whether international law in specific circumstances is moral in itself? Does it not beg the question of whether its materials are apt, necessarily, for contemporary circumstances? When the noble and learned Baroness pays tribute to the role of the Human Rights Act in protecting human rights, is that not as much a recognition of the hard work done by generations of our predecessors as lawyers and as parliamentarians? It is not surprising, surely, given that the convention was conceived of as a means of inoculating other jurisdictions with our legal norms—other jurisdictions as culturally and as materially sophisticated as ours.
We cannot, as lawyers and parliamentarians, be blind to the fact that law has, over the course of history, supported oppression. My noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy, in his thoughtful submission, made reference to that in the context of the ongoing Horizon scandal. The House will be aware that, over the years and centuries, eminent lawyers in different times, working within noble legal traditions, have bent their talents and learning to erecting a framework for what to us, but not to them, seemed to be morally indefensible concepts. The obvious examples that I can give would be the use of Roman law in erecting a framework around the concept of slavery, or the role of lawyers in South Africa who did not honourably distance themselves from the exercise, working within the noble Roman Dutch tradition, in building a structure for apartheid.
My noble friend Lord Wolfson, replying to the noble and learned Baroness, gave a speech with not one word of which I would disagree. In the course of my short remarks, I seek to echo just a couple of the points he made. I contend that one of the most important would be that we must not, and must be careful of, dressing up political decisions as legal ones. There is a worrying trend of judicialising what are political matters, of taking out of the political realm matters that belong there and placing them out of the reach of democratic oversight. Parliaments, courts and judges put law in place, but they cannot of themselves clothe law with authority—my noble friend Lord Lilley made that point in his excellent submissions to your Lordships. Ultimately, in a parliamentary democracy, it is for Parliament, the apex of the rule of law, to confer authority on law. We must acknowledge that and seek to live up to it. To the Executive alone rests that task.
Only the Executive have the expertise and infrastructure properly to enact law, to research its implications, to predict its outcomes and to see it in the context of other law. The legislature is the means by which we and the Executive can be satisfied that laws proposed will be acceptable to the electorate. Because our judges have no mandate: unlike Governments, they cannot be voted out. Our courts lack the scope to assess the impact of their decisions, and that is sensible where they operate in their proper role of interpreting and applying laws enacted by Parliament. To echo something said by the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, in an earlier stage of today’s proceedings—during Questions—laws must be clear and intelligible. That principle inspired the initiative of King Alfred the Great to express law in the English language so that it could be acceptable and accessible to everybody. We must recognise the importance of that democratic consent—my noble friend Lady Laing of Elderslie alluded to this in her splendid and moving maiden speech. The public will not have confidence in law enacted in a manner remote from them and apparently dismissive of their concerns.
My noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy gives voice to the view that all things are ultimately to be found in Shakespeare. Let us be careful lest the public come to echo the call of the rioters in “Henry VI”,
“first … let’s kill all the lawyers”.
The second verse of our national anthem contains a series of desiderata. The third is, “May he”—the antecedent of the pronoun “he” being the King—
“defend our laws,
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice
God save the King”.
By our laws, that conveys laws enjoying the confidence of the governed. Any consideration of the rule of law must bear that important concept in mind.
Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I, like other speakers, begin by welcoming this important debate and the remarkable speeches we have heard. In addition, I congratulate the noble and learned Baroness the Advocate-General on both her appointment to her role and the splendid maiden speech she gave us.
We are talking about something that really matters in today’s turbulent and uncertain political world, both here at home and abroad. From my perspective, freedom, democracy and the rule of law are the main building blocks of our own country’s political being. None of them by themselves can ensure its continuance, but each is a necessary, if not a totally sufficient, component. I do not think that it is alarmist to point out, as others have in this afternoon’s debate, that it was not all that long ago that we spent quite a lot of time in this Chamber discussing the then Government’s wish to disapply the courts’ oversight of their own activities. It concerned me then, and it concerns me now, and I do not think it is an esoteric or theoretical topic: it is a contemporary and a relevant one. These things are now in the political air, and when they are there, it is time for us all to be vigilant.
In the run-up to the general election, some of the incoming Government’s advocates were calling for reform of the House of Lords to remove some of their political opponents from Parliament. I should explain that I am a hereditary Peer and, unlike the noble Baroness the Advocate-General, I am heading for the knacker’s yard—although I can say that I became a Member of two Parliaments in one week and, since the other one was the European Parliament, neither is now possible. I think there are plenty of good reasons to reform your Lordships’ Chamber, but that particular one is the worst, not least because of the Parliament Acts.
I have said it before and, no doubt, may well say it again: there is a real case for at least thinking about and looking at the Parliament Act 1911, as amended, in the context of the abolition of the hereditary Peers Bill, to see whether it is necessary and appropriate for some special additional exclusion to be included, lest, at some time in the future, some Government wish to completely reform the second Chamber or abolish it—or even, I suppose, possibly, in theory, abolish Parliament. We are not now in 1911 or 1949, and the world is a different place: the “good chaps” theory of government is less widely endorsed.
When we were thinking about this debate, something struck me—and I am clearly not the only member of your Lordships’ House who thought it. While enormous areas of current activity in the world are regulated in some form or other by soft law, which is hardly touched on in Lord Bingham’s seminal book, the cocktail of policy, hard law and soft law is various and wide ranging, and the rule of law—which, as we have heard, apart from anything else, has to provide redress—is in a bit of an uncertain place in some respects. This got me thinking about the recent budgetary announcement in respect of BPR and APR.
First, I apologise for bringing it up in this context. Secondly, I have to declare a personal interest, which will affect my family more than me, I think. I am sure the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General will tell me that this is completely irrelevant, so I raise the point now to save him the trouble—but actually I am not quite so sure. We know from what the Secretary of State for Defra has publicly stated that he and his department were blindsided by this move. We also know that the Government have laws and policies in respect of food, land use, the wider environment, climate change and so on, and these clearly were not taken into account when formulating that policy.
We also know from the recent cases of Finch and West Cumbria Mining that the Government, in exercising their discretion, must take all their policies into account. The purpose of raising the tax is to get your hands on the money—the money that the farmers and the businessmen own. That is what taxation is all about. It would be perfectly possible to do this without damaging the other policies and destroying working capital in an important sector that is currently under the cosh because of the policies of this Government and the last and which, in a period of change, faces particular expense.
While many in this debate are lawyers of much greater distinction than I could ever be, I am possibly the only one of us who has a City and Guilds qualification from an agricultural college in dairy enterprise management and farm business management. Agricultural economics is different and distinct from conventional mainstream economics and does not necessarily accord with the more generally understood rules of City banking and academic and commercial analysis.
Empirical analysis suggests that the way in which farming and land use happens is a bit different. In approaching this, the Government have not only ignored their own policies but applied an inapplicable methodology: conventional business economics. This is not the right way to do it. The proper way of approaching this matter would be a bit different. What they have done does not accord with the principles of the rule of law; the process is flawed and will not command public confidence.
I conclude my remarks by saying that the rule of law should and must be at the centre of our political processes and culture because, if it is not, we shall be replacing it with the law of the jungle, where life is nasty, brutish and short—and I do not think that any of us wants that.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)
My Lords, I have been listening to some very high-level exchanges, including two extremely distinguished maiden speeches. I am one of the minority of non-lawyers participating in this debate today, so I am afraid I shall be operating at a less rarefied level. For the purposes of this debate at least I, as a non-lawyer, will be the man on the Clapham omnibus.
I want to make it clear that this man on the Clapham omnibus understands, appreciates and supports the vital role that the rule of law plays in our society. You cannot study history at university, as I did, without realising that to be the case. But I am also of the view that there are aspects of the rule of law, as seen from my omnibus, that are under strain. This non-lawyer offers three for thought and discussion.
The first is the danger of the law becoming deracinated and distanced from the society it seeks to serve. An essential part of maintaining general confidence in the rule of law is what I have called before in speeches in your Lordships’ House “informed consent”—my noble and learned friend Lord Stewart of Dirleton dealt with this topic a bit in his remarks—by which I mean that the rule of law cannot consist of ex cathedra judgments from some lofty chamber. Rather, it has to take cognisance of how our society is changing and how our social attitudes and approach are altering. In short, it has to remain in touch with, and be seen to be relevant by, those of us on the Clapham omnibus.
I appreciate that many lawyers will see this as wrong and inappropriate. Some might say that I am suggesting that the courts bow to the whims of temporary public opinion and that, if society wants a different approach, it is up to Parliament to change the law and make it so. I understand this up to a point, but we all know that the law needs interpreting and there is no fixed, immediate and completely correct view. That is, after all, what legal cases are about. Where on this possible spectrum of interpretations does the judicial judgment fall? If these judgments are seen by us on the Clapham omnibus to be at odds with our life experience, and persistently so, our confidence in the rule of law will be weakened. That is my first point.
My second point is about the rule of law and secondary legislation. I was interested to hear in her very impressive maiden speech the noble Baroness the Advocate-General refer to this issue, as indeed did my noble friend Lady Laing of Elderslie.
Some Members of your Lordships’ House will recall that I was, for a time, chairman of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. With my noble friend Lord Blencathra, who was, at the same time, chairman of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, and assisted enormously by, sadly, the late Lord Judge, we ran a campaign. Our report was called Government by Diktat. The DPRRC report was called Democracy Denied?
There were several debates on these reports held in your Lordships’ House and, if the noble Baroness the Advocate-General, and indeed the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General, have a moment to glance through Hansard, they will see that there was an overwhelming level of support for addressing this issue from across the House, not least from the Front Bench of what was then Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition —now His Majesty’s Government. We have heard a little less about this since the general election, although tonight gave me renewed hope that things might be changing. The Advocate-General said in her opening speech, while promising a fresh approach, “This is what a reset looks like in practice”. I hope I have quoted her correctly and that she will forgive me if I say that it is a little skeletal for what I am hoping for in this. I wonder whether the Attorney-General might be able to give the House a bit more detail about this reset when he comes to wind up in an hour or so’s time.
From a rule of law and a secondary legislation scrutiny point of view, it is not the regulations themselves that cause the major part of the trouble but the stuff that comes with them—the guidance, circulars, statements and codes of practice on which judges seem to be tempted to make comments.
Let me give a very quick example. Members of the House will recall that, when Covid struck, we were all restricted on how much we could exercise. We could exercise once per day, as the House may recall. But, in fact, that was not in the law; it was in the guidance. The law—the regulation—said nothing about how often you could exercise; it was up to the guidance. In my humble view, courts and judges are unwise to allow themselves to be tempted to comment on matters of guidance. Inter alia, if judges comment, as many have, about the need to have regard to the guidance, I, as the man on the Clapham omnibus, will take that to mean that I had better do it. Therefore, guidance morphs into law and practice. This development, along with the deracination point I made earlier, comes close to offending the Bingham principle of the law having to be
“accessible … intelligible, clear and predictable”.
My last point is about another of Lord Bingham’s points:
“Means must be provided for resolving, without prohibitive cost or inordinate delay, bona fide civil disputes”.
This is about the practical application of the rule of law and the issue of equality before the law referred to by my noble friend Lord Wolfson in his opening remarks, and indeed dealt with by my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy.
I have been distressed many times in my career by the way in which big companies, rich men and, dare I say, dishonest men, can bend—note that I say “bend”, not “break”—the rule of law to their purposes. Let me give a simple example again. I have advised a small company. It had the capacity of inventiveness and found a way to create a better chiller mechanism—the chillers that you see in your supermarket. A big company bought six of them, not to sell them but to take them apart and re-engineer them so that the patent my client company thought it had was not broken. The advice that my client had was that actually the patent had been broken. A seminal meeting took place at which the big company said, “Fine, we’re going ahead and if you don’t like it, sue us—and by the way, before you start, our lawyers say it’ll be two years before this gets to court”.
That is game over—no small company has the resources, let alone the psychological stamina, to keep up with that pressure. Then we move on to individuals. An individual architect I knew had a client who asked for work to be done and then refused to pay any of the bill on some minor fault. When the case was coming to court, the client claimed he was ill, he changed his solicitor, the case was not ready, and the delays went on and on. Individuals, particularly individuals dealing with rich men, wish to bring a case to court so that their life can go on. They want to have closure and move on, and too often the law has not provided the right balance and the right protection to these people. Part of my vision of the rule of law is that they should be provided with that—they should be allowed to have that and the law should be there. The equality, in essence, is too often being broken.
I conclude where I began. Of course I am a strong supporter of the rule of law, but there are some areas where it needs persistent examination, to look at and consider the ways that we can make it real for everybody, including the people with me on the Clapham omnibus.
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, I join noble Lords in congratulating the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith of Cluny—the Advocate-General for Scotland —and the noble Baroness, Lady Laing of Elderslie, on their magnificent maiden speeches. They were truly great contributions to begin their long service in your Lordships’ House. I also congratulate the noble and learned Baroness on the thoughtful way in which she introduced this important debate.
As a surgeon by training I too am nervous about intervening in this debate, but I do so as chairman of the Judicial Appointments Commission between 2016 and 2022. The noble and learned Baroness, in mentioning the importance of an independent judiciary in securing the rule of law in our country, provided me with an opportunity to make some observations about one of the most important elements that underlies the fact that we have an independent judiciary in this country: it is that we enjoy an independent judicial appointment process. It was secured in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, nearly 20 years ago. An important part of that legislation sets out the two statutory duties of the independent Judicial Appointments Commission: to appoint on merit individuals of good character, and to ensure diversity of application among those seeking judicial appointment. By large measure, that has been achieved over the past 20 years. We know that the principles that underlie independent judicial appointment include transparency, ensuring that there is no corruption in the judicial appointment process, appointments made on merit, and diversity of representation in the appointment process. Indeed, that appointment process can ultimately achieve diversity among the judiciary.
In pursuing independent judicial appointment, the Constitutional Reform Act rightly ensured that the levers that might be properly exercised to achieve diversity of appointment and representation in the judiciary were distributed across three main bodies: the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chancellor and the Judicial Appointments Commission. In so doing, it might be suggested that there was some limitation in bringing those three elements together to ensure that action could be taken that would drive forward achieving diversity among the different jurisdictions in England and Wales.
When one looks at how other common-law jurisdictions have performed and succeeded with regard to judicial appointment to secure independence and achieve diversity, one finds research undertaken a few years ago by the Judicial Appointments Commission and recently published. It established that we have the largest number of initiatives and give the greatest attention to achieving the important objective of diversity, but always in the context of putting at the very heart of our appointment process the need to appoint on merit. We also take every possible action to ensure that candidates are not put off by the appointment process but rather are encouraged to seek appointment and therefore to serve in the judiciary and to ensure, as a result of that, that we secure and maintain the confidence of the public in the judicial system and, indeed, our judges.
There are important challenges that face all this. One of the difficult questions that has been faced over recent years is criticism of judges. Criticism of judges for whatever reason has, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, the potential to suggest that judicial appointment in our country should be conducted in a different way. Some commentators have suggested that rather than having an independent commission responsible for that independent process—indeed, the previous Administration made clear that they would not interfere in it—one of the ways to overcome the problem of the perception that the courts are some way distant from the will of Parliament, or indeed the will of the Executive, is for there to be greater parliamentary scrutiny of judicial appointments.
It is quite right that the appointment process is scrutinised. The chair of the Judicial Appointments Commission is obliged to appear before the Justice Select Committee in the House of Commons on a regular basis and before the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House to ensure that Parliament has the capacity to scrutinise that independent process and give a view on it. However, to move to the system in the United States where there is congressional involvement, with direct questioning of candidates appointed to senior judicial office, would be quite alien to our system and would draw Parliament into a position of direct influence in the appointment of an independent judiciary that would be very unhelpful and unwelcome.
Indeed, one might argue that if one day the House of Lords Appointments Commission, which I also had the privilege of chairing for a period of time, were to be put on a statutory basis and its criteria were to become statutory, ultimately there might be an opportunity for that statute and decisions based on those criteria to be challenged in the courts by way of judicial review. If that were the case, ultimately judges might start to determine who would sit in your Lordships’ House. That would be considered inappropriate, so these divisions are vital.
In answering, will the Attorney-General confirm, first, His Majesty’s Government’s commitment to independent judicial appointment as laid out in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005? Secondly, with regard to the important challenge pertaining to the diversity of the judiciary and the pace at which it is achieved—we always hear about it when there is a discussion about judicial appointment in the jurisdiction of England and Wales—can he confirm that, although there are well-meaning suggestions that quotas might be introduced and imposed on the appointment process to determine the proportion of judges appointed, the best way is to ensure that the system is fair and transparent and that every opportunity is taken to ensure that there are schemes and opportunities through exposure and other tools to develop those who wish to seek judicial appointment, so that they are properly prepared to participate successfully in the process and then serve on the Bench, in such a way that every appointment is considered to be made on the basis of merit and merit alone?
Lord Banner (Con)
My Lords, I add my welcome to the Advocate-General and congratulate her on a powerful and moving maiden speech. Having cut my teeth as a judicial assistant to Lord Rodger of Earlsferry when he was a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary of this House, I have particular respect for Scottish law officers—as well as English ones, of course—and wish her well in her new role. I also congratulate her fellow Scot, my noble friend Lady Laing, on her similarly excellent and moving maiden speech.
I also belatedly welcome to his place the Attorney-General, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer. We are on opposite sides of this House now, but he may recall that in April 2007—can he believe it was that long ago?—we acted on the same side before the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, including Lord Bingham presiding over the committee, in a case called Al-Skeini. We were led by one Keir Starmer QC—whatever happened to him? Our unison in that case, despite our differences of political stance in this House now, is a paradigm illustration of the cab rank rule of the Bar. That itself is a manifestation of the United Kingdom approach to equality before the law, which is in turn an important illustration of the rule of law.
These are not new concepts. My noble friend Lord Wolfson, with whom I am entirely in agreement, said that the concept of equality before the law goes back to Aristotle. In fact, it goes back at least 124 years prior to the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC, pursuant to which isonomia—equality before the law—was the precursor to and foundation of the world’s first democracy, in Athens. Just as a foundation stone must be stable, constitutional principles need to be based on consensus if they are to have legitimacy as the ground rules of democracy, as my noble friend Lord Lilley said. In that context, I will make a few observations on the focus of much of today’s debate: the difference between the thin and thick versions of the rule of law.
The thin conception—which, broadly speaking, I favour—holds that the rule of law requires clear, prospective rules, known in advance, applied equally and fairly through proper procedures. It demands that no one is above the law, that justice is accessible and that state power is exercised through established legal frameworks. None of these fundamental tenets is or should be controversial. By contrast, the so-called thick conception is broadly understood to incorporate political considerations and subjective moral values into the definition of the rule of law. With respect, this approach risks conflating what the law is with what some might wish it to be. It risks judges and lawyers substituting their moral judgments for those of Parliament—a role for which they are neither equipped nor democratically mandated—and risks undermining legal certainty, which is a core component of the rule of law, properly understood.
The advantage of the thin conception lies in its clarity about the respective roles of Parliament and the judiciary, as Sir John Laws recognised in his book The Constitutional Balance, which has been quoted already. Parliament makes law, incorporating subjective values that it deems appropriate. Courts ensure that those laws are clear, prospective and properly applied. That division maintains democratic legitimacy, judicial authority and legal certainty.
Against those general principles, I will make three observations. The first is on legal risk in the context of the Attorney-General’s recent guidance. I suggest that it is not unconstitutional or contrary to the rule of law for the Government to take decisions which are at risk—indeed, at considerable risk—of legal challenge. To hold otherwise would be to sterilise government decision-making and neuter innovation. The rule of law requires the Government to respect successful challenges to their decisions but not to act shy of taking difficult or bold decisions for fear of such challenge, provided that there is a proper, reasonable basis for considering them to be lawful. To be fair, unlike some on this side of the House and some recent literature, I do not read the new Attorney-General’s guidance as necessarily being in conflict with what I have outlined. I welcome his clarification and see him nodding; to my mind, there is not much difference between a respectable legal view and a tenable one. They are different ways of saying essentially the same thing.
Secondly, I turn to international law. There is plainly a duty on this country and all countries to follow international agreements that they are signed up to. That duty is in the international law sphere, so to that extent there is an international rule of law. However, we must be mindful that in this country we apply a largely dualist constitutional approach to international law. It is normally for Parliament to legislate to give effect to international treaties so that the Government cannot, in using their treaty-signing powers, legislate through the back door by committing us, and therefore changing the law, without parliamentary consent. Therefore, treating international law as equating to constitutional principles and the rule of law domestically risks undermining that principle. It is important to be mindful of that.
Thirdly, in the context of the rule of law, there are fundamental rights—distinct from human rights as enshrined in the convention and the Human Rights Act. In principle, I take no issue with the concept of fundamental rights, properly understood, forming part of the rule of law. Obviously, that begs the question of what that means. I go back to what I said at the beginning of my speech: provided that those fundamental rights are uncontroversial and based on consensus, as opposed to politically subjective considerations, there ought not to be a problem. There is a problem when the concept of fundamental rights is used to wedge in political factors under the disguise of being part of the constitution.
In conclusion, if the rules of the game are slanted, the game cannot be fairly played.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, after that brilliant maiden speech from my noble and learned friend Lady Smith of Cluny, who is not in her place at the moment, and so many learned speeches from eminent colleagues, including a notable one from the noble Baroness, Lady Laing of Elderslie, I speak with trepidation as a non-lawyer. I brave myself to do this because I believe law is for people, and lawyers are its distinguished engineers, if I may say so. I have two very simple points—I hope not embarrassingly simple: first, to repeat, the rule of law is essential to democracy, but democracy also requires a framework of human rights; secondly, this is a package that should be taught in schools as part of instilling that culture. I declare an interest as an advisory board member of the British Institute of Human Rights.
I want to try to explain my lay man’s view of the first point. Our democracy is based on our consent to various rules. We consent that their principles apply to all of us. They are the law. These conform to the norms of the time, and if we think the law has not caught up with changing norms we can influence or elect a Parliament which promises changes. If we think any of these rules have been broken to our detriment, we can have recourse to the law for a remedy. So far, so obvious. For that law to be fair, it must accord with a system that takes into account not only our rights but the rights of others. That is where responsibilities come in. I think that system is what our law calls human rights. When many years ago the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I was then a member, proposed a human rights commission, we decided it should be an Equality and Human Rights Commission so that it was clear that equal treatment was essential or the rights would not have general application; that is, they could not be fairly applied.
This makes a powerful culture, and it is one which exemplifies the generally accepted principles of fairness, respect for others and acknowledgment of their dignity. These are what we incorporated into our drafting of the international human rights instruments, where we played a leading part, and what the Labour Government incorporated into domestic law. They are recognised British values. Because they are generally accepted principles, they can form the basis of consent to or disagreement with the rules Parliament makes.
This culture has a particular importance now, which brings me to my second point. We live in a diverse country, with several religions and beliefs and multiple heritages. This is demonstrably an enrichment of our world, but it has also been interpreted to cause alienation, discrimination, prejudice, hostility and violence. We cannot say that any single one of our religions or beliefs or heritages should be the only basis of our rules because that would not be fair to others. So fairness—equality—demands that we find a way to tolerate difference. But we do still need a basis of accepted norms to test our consent, and I think the acceptable one is human rights.
This would be an important ingredient in our counterextremism strategy. It could help to erode the scepticism about democracy which has crept into our public discourse. The respected charity HOPE not hate has found that over a quarter of British citizens—27%—would choose
“having a strong and decisive leader who did not have to bother with parliament or elections”.
Among 18 to 24 year-olds this rises to 41%. From that we must surely conclude that our children need as much education in human rights, democracy and the rule of law as they do in their culture or their religion or belief. The education department is clear that the rule of law should be taught in schools as a “fundamental British value”, but can my noble and learned friend the Attorney-General urge his colleagues to get it packaged with democracy and human rights?
Finally, we should make sure we have the right texts which can engage, in particular, young people. We have no equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. There are some attractive books—Amnesty International has a picture book on human rights law, We Are All Born Free, which is eminently suitable for primary schools. But I have not seen an authoritative text which links the rule of law, democracy and human rights, suitable not only for schools but for new arrivals in this country and for citizenship tests. Does my noble and learned friend know of one? If not, what about a national competition to produce one?
Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)
My Lords, I join others in welcoming the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith of Cluny, and congratulate her on both initiating this important debate and her wonderful maiden speech. I also welcome and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Laing of Elderslie, on her maiden speech. I will focus on one defining aspect of the rule of law: the requirement to secure a fair, open and timely means of adjudicating disputes between citizens and the state, typically in criminal justice.
I want to address this issue because I believe that the quality of its criminal justice speaks eloquently about a country’s attachment to the rule of law. In fact, our country has a proud record in this area, often held up as an example to the world, and followed in many other nations whose own systems of justice are correspondingly impressive—with incorruptible judges, fair trials, and associations of lawyers that are strong and independent. These are all British legacies—rule-of-law legacies.
Of course, there have been exceptions to the high quality of British justice but it is notable that when they have occurred we have usually recognised them as historic failures requiring a condign response. One thinks of particularly shameful executions in the days when hanging was a process of law: Ruth Ellis, David Bentley and Timothy Evans—all long since dead, but these travesties contributed a few years later to the eventual abolition of capital punishment.
The Maxwell Confait case imposed a terrible miscarriage of justice on two youths of impaired mental capacity who were bullied into confessing to a sadistic murder they had not committed. But it led, eventually, to the setting up of an independent prosecuting authority, the Crown Prosecution Service, in England and Wales, to take prosecution decision-making away from the police, and to provide a bulwark against such abuses in the future.
The dreadful miscarriages of justice in the 1970s—the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven and Judith Ward—all featuring a combination of false confessions, police misconduct, non-disclosure and unreliable expert testimonies, led eventually to the creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission to pick up where justice had previously failed.
More generally, shaken baby syndrome, killings of their tormentors by women subjected to decades of abuse, and rape within marriage are all areas where lawyers, the courts and finally Governments used the living instruments of the criminal law to secure new routes to justice.
In the past, more often than not, we learned from our mistakes. But are we learning now? I pose the question because now our criminal justice system is facing a challenge that I think is broader and deeper than any individual miscarriages of justice, although it will surely bring those along in its wake.
This challenge has been growing for some years. Between 2010 and 2014, my old service, the Crown Prosecution Service, lost more than 30% of its budget and more than 30% of its front-line prosecutors. Imagine if the NHS lost 30% of its budget and 30% of its front-line doctors. Imagine if our schools had faced a similar catastrophe. During this period, legal aid rates were slashed, and they remain today much lower in real terms than they were many years ago.
These cuts have been mirrored across the criminal justice system—which was seen as an easy target by many Ministers—from the courts service to prisons and probation, which, like our trial processes, have never really recovered and are terribly understaffed, underfunded and suffering from poor morale.
Today, many court buildings are a decrepit disgrace, with broken heating, ramshackle furniture, worn-out carpets, and buckets in corridors and courtrooms to catch rainwater from leaking roofs and windows. This is a shabby message to send the public about the importance and dignity of our institutions of justice and about the pre-eminence its delivery should enjoy in our national life. To cap it all, chronic underfunding has led to a huge exodus from the ranks of criminal lawyers, from among solicitors of course, but particularly from the criminal Bar.
It is right to acknowledge that in the recent Budget, the Government allowed modest increases in spending for criminal justice, in place of feared further cuts, which would have been disastrous. This is very welcome and the Government are to be congratulated on it, particularly in relation to increases for the Crown Prosecution Service, which has been under impossible strain for many years, and which now receives an additional 7.5%.
The Probation Service, too, is in dire need of the extra officers it has been promised, although it will need many more. It is important to note that the bulk of the new money, £2.3 billion, will go on prison expansion and renewal. According to research conducted for the Bar Council, these single-digit increases come in the context that spending on justice decreased by no less than 22.4% in real terms between 2010 and 2023.
Furthermore, in October the Justice Secretary declined outright a request from the Lady Chief Justice that courts should return to sitting at greater capacity to deal with the disastrous backlogs in our courts, which are so corrosive of public justice. Instead of the 5,500 extra sitting days a year she asked for, the courts were given just 500. In response, the senior presiding judges wrote a letter to the Circuit Bench, which was immediately leaked. It said that
“the consequence … is that a very large number of trials and other hearings that are scheduled to be heard will now have to be rescheduled … probably for a lengthy period”.
This is precisely what has happened, at great human cost. I have spoken to circuit judges who, in the face of the Government prioritising relatively minor savings over the timely delivery of justice, are beside themselves with frustration. They are having to share one prosecuting barrister between several courtrooms because there are no others available. They are forced to adjourn cases again and again for want of defence counsel who no longer do criminal work because the rates and conditions are so poor. Resident judges are having to shutter several courtrooms in their Crown Court centres because of the Government’s decision to refuse the Lady Chief Justice’s request. As we conduct this debate, I am told that no less than 25% of the courtrooms in London’s largest and busiest Crown Court complex are locked and dark, doing justice for nobody. Meanwhile, the backlog in the Crown Court approaches 70,000 cases. Trials in the London area are being listed for 2027 or even in some cases 2028.
Some people in Britain used to sneer at other countries, particularly in Europe, for the length of time their criminal procedures took. Perhaps now they are sneering at us. To state the obvious, to postpone the arrival of justice by three or even four or five years after a crime has been committed destroys deterrence, makes sentencing a farce and adds the grossest insult to every true victim’s injury.
This cannot go on. Since the election, we have heard stirring words from the Prime Minister and the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General about the United Kingdom’s adherence to the rule of law. Personally, I take great pleasure in these expressions of principle, which are consistent with our very best traditions. They have underpinned not only our individual rights and freedoms over the years, but also the success of our banking, trade and commerce. Indeed, they come from old colleagues whom I know well, like and have always held in high professional esteem at the Bar, as I still do.
However, we are now at a point where the faltering state of our criminal justice system is a reproach to words alone. They must be matched with action—action at a far greater scale than the recent Budget allowed, and which begins to deal with the deep systemic problems that lack of funding, lack of care and, in the end, plain old lack of interest have brought in recent years. Let the Government demonstrate a real adherence to the rule of law, beyond protestations of fealty that cost nothing, by making a new commitment to treat justice as a great and deserving public service without which no democracy can expect to retain the allegiance of its citizens.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, with your Lordships’ leave, I would like to make a short intervention in the gap. I join all other Members of the House in congratulating our two maiden speakers on their excellent speeches—first, the noble Baroness, Lady Laing of Elderslie. As she told us, Elderslie was the birthplace of William Wallace. I mention not what happened to William Wallace when he came down to our realm. Secondly and most importantly, I congratulate my new noble and learned friend Lady Smith of Cluny. As a hereditary Peer, I am rather excited by her arrival, because my party is now being more respectful than it has hitherto been on hereditary Peers, with her joining her much-respected mother—the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Gilmorehill—in this House on these Benches.
Speaking in the gap gives the advantage of being able to listen to some excellent speeches. I will not outline those speeches, because noble Lords have heard them all, but the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, as usual made a very good speech. I did not agree with him about the International Criminal Court but, other than that, I agreed with everything he said. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas, made an absolutely splendid speech. I agreed with it and, if noble Lords were listening, they will have heard me saying “Hear, hear” quite strongly after he spoke. The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, gave another excellent speech, as did my noble friend Lord Bach. There were also others of high quality.
We have been discussing a difficult subject. Justice described the rule of law as,
“a phrase much used and little explained”.
We have assistance from Lord Bingham in his seminal work on the rule of law. Interestingly, he said:
“There is a significant disagreement initially on how to define the rule of law”,
and that:
“The rule of law has been referred to as a ‘wrapper’ that is placed around a bundle of constitutional principles”.
This leads us to the fourth century BC and not only to Aristotle but to Plato, as Aristotle was a student of Plato. These great Greek philosophers identified the rule of law as separate from the “rule of men”. That is a very interesting test to be applied if society has a different agenda from that of the men at law.
When my noble and learned friend the Attorney-General sums up, I urge him to stand stoically behind the European Court of Human Rights, notwithstanding the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, who was not exactly enthusiastic about it. I also ask my noble and learned friend to travel back with the noble Lords, Lord Wolfson and Lord Banner, and myself to the fourth century BC.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, I also beg the indulgence of the House. I did not want the day to pass without also paying tribute to my special friend, my noble and learned friend Lady Smith, who made a wonderful maiden speech. She will be a great Minister, I have absolutely no doubt. As the House will come to know, she is not just a brilliant lawyer and a person with a very sharp mind and great insight. She is also incredibly good fun company and I recommend that all noble Lords should get to know her.
I also welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Laing. She was a great inspiration when she was in the other place and to have her adorning this House is also a great pleasure.
I want to emphasise something I mentioned earlier today. The principles of the rule of law have been expounded in this wonderful debate, but the main thing to emphasise is that to have the confidence of the public—whether in this country or internationally—courts have to be seen to be just and fair and the law has to be applied in a way that is impartial. No one should enjoy impunity. No one is above the law. To repeat the words of the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, wealth, power, status and privilege should in no way influence, for example, the issuing of warrants.
I was invited to be on the external evidence review panel for the International Criminal Court in relation to the warrants issued against Hamas, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Minister Gallant. It is not unusual for an independent panel to be invited to review evidence to see whether it reaches thresholds and to make sure external eyes are being applied. I was part of that panel, which comprised a number of very distinguished lawyers; I do not put myself in that category.
We were in the hands of the most remarkable man, Theodor Meron. He is a Holocaust survivor; his parents were murdered in the camps. He managed, as a child of 13, to be given a home with a Jewish family in Palestine. They brought him up. He went to the Hebrew University, then to Havard and then Cambridge. He went back and was a government lawyer of great esteem in Israel. He was then an Israeli ambassador and became the president of the court that tried the cases that came out of the horrors of Yugoslavia and that war. He is a great war crimes lawyer. Being in his company and being led by him was like being in a masterclass. The other lawyers were Adrian Fulford, a retired Lord Justice of Appeal from this country, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a very distinguished government lawyer, Amal Clooney, Danny Friedman, myself and two very distinguished leading academics from the field of war crimes scholarship.
We reviewed the evidence, which is what I have spent my life doing—reviewing evidence to see whether it reaches the thresholds required at different stages in a case. I say in response to the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, who is a colleague in the law, that this was not about equivalence. It was quite different. The warrants for the Hamas leaders were very different from the Israeli ones. They were individuals who had held real responsibility; these were not allegations about disproportionality of the conduct of the war—it was very specifically about the failure to provide humanitarian aid, water and so on, and the creation of starvation and malnutrition.
I just wanted the House to know that I had played that role. We cannot have impunity for certain people. There are no children of a lesser god. A very high percentage of children have died, and we have to make sure that there is a just process. That is what the International Criminal Court is there to provide.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)
My Lords, this has been a very important debate on the rule of law. We have been very fortunate to be able to have it, and it has been a great credit to this House. It has also been a great privilege and pleasure to hear two fine maiden speeches. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith of Cluny, delivered a maiden speech that has been unanimously acclaimed as a tour de force. She spoke clearly for the House and the Government, but also for Scotland, the devolution settlement and the Scotland Act. She also spoke movingly, if I may say so, about her family, her mother and her daughter Ella. In her new role, her dedicated commitment to our international obligations and the European Convention on Human Rights these Benches unstintingly support.
The noble Baroness, Lady Laing of Elderslie, another distinguished lawyer from Scotland, also gave us a brilliant maiden speech. She is a distinguished constitutionalist and parliamentarian of note, “with the customs and procedures of the House of Commons running through her veins”, as she put it. She reminded us of how democratic argument in Parliament also requires the honest and impartial application of a system of rules, another aspect of the rule of law, which is important in any democracy. Along with the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Stewart of Dirleton, and the one that we are about to hear from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, we are reminded of the importance of Scotland’s distinctive voice in this House on legal issues and the discussion of the devolution settlement and constitutional affairs in the United Kingdom.
As might have been expected, a majority of our speakers have been lawyers, but the voice of non-lawyers has also been important and significant in today’s debate. I found in particular the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, really helpful on equality before the law and making the rule of law real. Significantly, last week also saw the 103rd plenary meeting of the European Committee on Legal Co-operation, which approved a draft convention for the protection of the profession of lawyer. At a time when both the rule of law and lawyers’ independence are under threat, international co-operation to enable lawyers freely and independently to represent their clients is a vital component of the rule of law. As the Bar Council’s Manifesto for Justice put it:
“Recent and repeated public attacks on the legal profession and on the independence of the judiciary by politicians, coupled with negative rhetoric, has undermined the trust and confidence in our justice system—both at home and abroad”.
I ask the Minister and the Government for a commitment that the United Kingdom will take steps to ensure that this country plays its full part and signs up to this convention. That would recognise the importance of lawyers to the rule of law, stressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy.
However, we can be too defensive—and I say that for two reasons. The first is the positive. Our outstanding judges and our legal system as a whole maintain the highest reputation for independence, integrity, incorruptibility and impartiality—but increasing diversity is also crucial, as the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, argued. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, reminded us of Fuller’s principle:
“Be ye never so high, the law is above you”.
That is a principle that underlies all that we say. The result has been that our civil justice system enjoys an unparalleled reputation, particularly in the commercial world, as the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, said, and our international standing and the earnings that it brings to this country are very high indeed.
In this connection, I mention the success of international arbitration; the passing of the Arbitration Bill through this House after an unwarranted glitch in the wash-up has advanced that cause. I ask the Government now to turn their attention to passing legislation on litigation funding to reverse the PACCAR decision, as was to have been done before the election, with all-party support, leaving the acknowledged need for regulation of funders to be considered by the Civil Justice Council later.
The second reason we can be too defensive is negative. Much of what has gone wrong in the fields of criminal justice, our penal system, access to justice and public respect for the law is our fault—the fault not just of lawyers but of politicians and government. I depart from those who maintain that a commitment to the rule of law does not extend to those political and societal features of our national life that generate the confidence of the public that the law is there for them and that the law will be fairly administered. I regard it as central that the concept of the rule of law is close to the theme of government by consent. That means trust in the police, the courts and the penal system, and trust that Governments and government agencies will apply the law fairly. It is about maintaining the compact between government and governed that keeps trust alive. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Stewart of Dirleton put it, it is about our laws “enjoying the confidence of the governed”. Regrettably, I suggest that that confidence and that trust has been breaking down.
The rule of law on our streets and in our communities is not just about policing. In the criminal context, or the quasi-criminal context, the failure of the system over recent years to address increasing violence against women and girls has been lamentable. I welcome the commitment of the Government to halve violence against women and girls, and I welcome the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence that is currently under way. The public commitment to ending domestic abuse in particular has improved beyond recognition, but the real-life plight of women and children in their homes, at risk from those they live with, remains a sad reflection on the unreality of the rule of law for millions.
On the police, we in this House, and in politics in general—I suspect because of there being different Ministries—tend to separate out issues of criminal justice and policing. A mistake, I suggest. We cannot sort out issues of policing unless we sort out issues of criminal justice, and vice versa. The rule of law demands that we address the inability of police to tackle low-level crime; the ability of street gangs to operate unchecked in our communities; poor community relations and often still outright hostility between black communities and police; the courts’ inability to handle their case load, discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven; and the crisis in our prisons and probation service.
The rule of law is imperilled by a lack of public confidence that the law will be followed and enforced by the agents of the law. Certainly, much of the difficulty in maintaining trust in policing on our streets and in our communities, in our criminal justice system and in our prison and probation services stems from lack of resources.
Part of the challenge is to maintain and rebuild trust in the face of shortage of resources, but more is to restore the levels of funding that the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, rightly argued the case for a little earlier. With all these resourcing issues, we need to persuade the Treasury to take a fresh and far less bunkered approach. Reoffending costs this country £18 billion a year and that is just the direct cost of reoffending. It does not cover the costs across the rest of national and local government: social services, education, housing, and lost tax revenues. The Treasury needs to work on developing a cross-government strategy on spend to save, and it is miles away from it yet.
I suggest that it is uncontroversial that the health and working of the courts and justice system are central to the rule of law. Continuing court backlogs are disgraceful. We have too few criminal courts that are working. We have a shortage of judges. That could be solved, partially, at least, by recruiting more assistant recorders and by increasing sitting hours and sitting days. It is wrong that there is an imposed cap on sitting days: 105,000 this year, down from 107,700 last year. There is a shortage of lawyers, caused in large part by a shortage of resources, because criminal barristers are unhappily unwilling—by which I mean they are unwilling, but that is because they cannot afford to be willing to accept the work.
The rule of law suffers real damage from delays, as well as from miscarriages of justice, as those tied up with cases that have not come on have their lives put on hold, as cases are abandoned, as witnesses withdraw their evidence, and as recollections inevitably dim. The main issue, again, is lack of resources. A secondary issue, though, is reluctance to innovate. We need smarter use of technology and cleverer ways of listing cases and ensuring that resources are properly used.
In the civil justice system, lack of accessibility is a central issue. The damage to access to justice and the availability of legal aid discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, who has been a tireless campaigner for access to justice for many years, has been incalculable. The increase in access to justice for all our citizens is essential across the board. Legal aid is hardly available for housing cases, debt cases, social security cases, education, immigration or the interface between government and system, and where it is available, it is inadequate. The restriction of legal aid has largely destroyed access to justice, a case that has been eloquently argued by the noble and learned Lords, Lord Etherton and Lord Stewart of Dirleton, and the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. Protection of the most vulnerable was the paramount theme of the speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich.
In all courts, we need to welcome innovation. I mentioned the greater use of technology, but we need to reduce unnecessary hearings and delays and lawyers must be astute not to be Luddite about this. We have also considered in this debate the ways in which our lawmaking here in Parliament and in government affects the rule of law. The noble and learned Baroness the Advocate-General spoke of the balance between the Executive and the legislature. I suggest that we need two major changes. First, there must be an end to skeleton Bills full of powers for Ministers to make law by secondary legislation. In this House, we had the pleasure and the privilege of hearing frequently from the late Lord Judge on the excessive grant of Henry VIII powers, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan.
Secondly, we need more pre-legislative scrutiny. I was a member of the committee that heard the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Defamation Act and, more recently, the Arbitration Bill, as well as the Special Committee. Those were Law Commission Bills, and the Law Commission does very thorough work. It has the benefit of a mass of expert input into proposals before any draft legislation is introduced, and the legislation that is introduced as a result of Law Commission work is generally the better for it. A wide range of Bills that come to this House receive thorough consultation, but I am afraid that many do not. That is an important point: when we are asked to legislate on Bills that come to us, frankly, half-digested, we cannot do a proper job.
A further point of great importance to the rule of law relates to the balance between the legislature and the Executive. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, pointed out, the law must sustain a balance between officials and citizens. That means a clear commitment to the law being able to hold, and actually holding, government, local and national, to account. In this country, much of this has been guaranteed by judicial review—it may be no surprise that I do not necessarily agree with everything that fell from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, on this. That goes particularly for human rights, the subject of the speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. Yet under the last Government, we were frequently given the impression that they saw judges as getting in the way of democracy and that judicial review was a nuisance that ought to be curbed.
There is always a tendency in government to dislike judicial interference, and one can understand why there is a natural tension there. The account by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, of his experience as a Minister was instructive, and although he and I do not always agree on the limits of judicial intervention, his account was, I suggest, balanced. Nevertheless, my view of judicial review is that it is one of the most important developments of the law over the last half-century. From these Benches, we will see this new Government’s approach to judicial review as a litmus test of their commitment to the rule of law.
Internationally, our standing depends on our respect for the rule of law. The last Government’s willingness to flout our international commitments relating to Northern Ireland and the Rwanda legislation, now thankfully abandoned, were lamentable departures from the rule of law and threats to our international reputation and standing, as argued by my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford and the noble Lady Baroness, Lady O’Loan. On these Benches, we are strongly encouraged by the noble and learned Baroness’s commitment to the Government’s compliance with our international obligations. In the wider context, respect for the rule of law at home is reflected on the world stage by our international commitments and our honouring those commitments, and we should never forget it.
Lord Keen of Elie (Con)
My Lords, first, I extend my welcome to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith of Cluny, both to her place in this House and to the office of Advocate-General. I thank her for a thoughtful maiden speech. I also extend my welcome to my noble friend Lady Laing of Elderslie, who also made a very gentle and compelling maiden speech to this House.
As the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith, and I both began our careers at the Bar of Scotland, some anecdote might be appropriate, but that presents something of a generational challenge. However, I can notice this. I first encountered her when she was in about primary 4. This came about in 1984, when I was instructed to appear in the Court of Session to challenge the relevancy of a series of personal injury actions brought on behalf of a firm called Thompsons. I appeared in court, as a rather callow junior, to find that Thompsons had instructed, on the other part of the case, one John Smith MP. And so, we went to debate for a full day. As noble Lords might expect, he proved to be not only a formidable opponent but a most charming colleague. At the end of the day, he invited me to Cluny the following evening for drinks. I arrived there at about 7 pm to find a young lady handing out canapés and a number of formidable political and legal luminaries in the room, including the late Lord Stott, who was a neighbour and who had been Lord Advocate in Harold Wilson’s first Government.
After about half an hour, John’s wife came into the room and announced that Tam Dalyell MP was on the telephone. He was in a public telephone box in Yorkshire and required immediate advice on the law of secondary picketing. More observant Members of your Lordships’ House will recall that this was in the midst of the miners’ strike. John went to the telephone and returned rather quickly, at which point Lord Stott observed that his advice on the law of secondary picketing must have been rather concise, to which John answered, “My advice would have been longer, but Tam ran out of change”. Thus was our first meeting, although I will forgive the noble and learned Baroness if she does not recollect it in detail.
This debate has been rather like one of the opening rounds of the FA Cup; it seems to be 20-0. None of your Lordships came out in favour of tyranny or despotism. I will not say I am surprised by that, but of course there was a fundamental difference of view about what the rule of law actually is. Generally speaking, it fell between two areas—the thin approach to the rule of law, which embraces fundamental rights, and what was termed the thick approach to the rule of law, which is intended to embrace the wide spectrum of human rights, which are flexible, elastic, and sometimes politicised, as well as being in constant development. I come down on the side of the thin approach to the definition and understanding of human rights.
The rule of law is not a rule, and it is not a law. The rule of law is not the rule of a tolerant society as contrasted with the rule of an intolerant society. The rule of law is not the rule of democratic institutions as contrasted with the rule of undemocratic institutions—albeit that experience and history tell us that the rule of law is far more likely to be adhered to when we have democratic rather than undemocratic institutions of government.
The rule of law is a conceptual framework—some might say a principle—within which we can decide what kind of society we want to live in and what laws we wish to be subject to. The rule of law does not define that society and it does not determine those laws. What it tells us is that our society should be governed by law, and not by despotic whim; that such law should be certain and accessible; and that law should be applied equally and without favour to all persons and institutions within our society. For example, a society that determines by law that only persons over the age of 40 may vote in any election may adhere just as closely to the rule of law as a society that determines that anyone over the age of 16 will vote. A society that determines by law that a person may be subject to physical punishment may adhere just as closely to the rule of law as a society that absolutely rejects any such form of punishment. A breach of the laws made by society is not per se a breach of the rule of law. However, the rule of law requires that those who breach the law should be able to determine the existence of such law and be treated equally.
This is where I agree with the observations made by the noble Lords, Lord Sikka, Lord Bach, Lord Bellingham and Lord Hodgson, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, that without access to justice there cannot be equality before the law.
In his work on the rule of law that has been referred to on a number of occasions, Lord Bingham described it as follows:
“The core of the existing principle is … that all persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of laws publicly and prospectively promulgated and publicly administered in the courts”.
To that extent, Lord Bingham’s definition of the rule of law is consistent with that of Dicey and Joseph Raz, but Lord Bingham went on to specify eight subcategories to his definition. This is where he appears to depart from both Dicey and Raz. For example, his subcategory 4 states:
“The law must afford adequate protection of … human rights”.
This is where we part between the thin approach to what is properly the rule of law and fundamental rights and the thicker approach which seeks to embrace the rather more flexible concept of human rights.
Of course, the law of any civilised society should afford protection to what are identified as human rights, but is that what we define as the rule of law? The law might expressly place limits on freedom of movement or freedom of expression, both of which may be regarded as human rights. Such a law, publicly and prospectively promulgated, is not per se a departure from the rule of law. If we attempt to merge a society’s present perception of human rights with the principle of the rule of law, then we are liable to create confusion rather than certainty. There, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, that while there is room for fundamental rights at the core of the rule of law, such as equality before the law, it cannot be expanded into the more politicised area—and always developing area—of what are termed human rights.
The Roman republic developed a sophisticated legal system and courts which made citizens of Rome subject to the law and not the rule of tyrants. At the same time, it embraced slavery and had a well-developed jurisprudence dealing with all aspects of slavery. Slavery was subject to the rule of law in the Roman republic and not the whim of individuals. Both master and slave were the subject of law. I give that example in order to emphasise that while the rule of law as properly understood and expressed by Aristotle is clear, it is not to be confused with our perception of or belief in human rights. We consider the concept of slavery to be abhorrent. It does not follow that a society which embraced slavery had abandoned the rule of law. The same essential principles apply at the level of international law between states. The relationship between states is generally governed by customary law, conventions and treaties consented to by the states. Such law should be certain and accessible. Such law should be applied equally between states.
Nation states adhere to their treaty obligations as a matter of principle and indeed political expediency. Nation states adhere to their obligations under international conventions on the understanding that, if they do not do so, they may be subject to sanction. However, a breach of a treaty or convention is not to be regarded simply as a departure from the rule of law.
I suggest that it is critical that we begin and end with a correct and certain understanding of what the rule of law is. When you seek to incorporate all aspects of human rights, as interpreted from time to time by courts and international tribunals, you are going to lose the certainty that is required in such an important definition. Indeed, such a step will, as the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, observed, lead eventually not to the to the rule of law but to the rule of lawyers.
So I have to take issue with the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Smith, on the suggestion that all human rights, the Human Rights Act and all human rights embraced by the Council of Europe are fundamental parts of the rule of law. That, I suggest, is to diminish them and confuse what the rule of law actually represents. Of course, human rights have an important place in our society and law, but they stand on their own feet and are not to be confused with the rule of law as such. I thank your Lordships for your attention.
The Attorney-General (Lord Hermer) (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great honour to close this important debate on one of the Government’s key priorities, which is upholding and reaffirming our commitment to the rule of law, and I thank noble Lords for their many contributions this evening. I spent too many years going to rule of law seminars, but I can genuinely say I have never experienced a debate of this quality. It has been a privilege.
I welcome my noble and learned friend Lady Smith, the Advocate-General for Scotland, and congratulate her on her maiden address to this House. With her wealth of experience, it is a privilege to serve with her as a law officer, and I know she will make an enormous contribution to this place. I also welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Laing, and congratulate her on her excellent maiden speech.
I echo the Advocate-General’s congratulations to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, and the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, on their appointments as shadow Advocate-General for Scotland and shadow Attorney-General respectively. I consider that not only does their party benefit from two such esteemed lawyers but this entire House benefits from the contributions that I know they are going to make. I look forward to working with them constructively on the many areas of shared concern—and to disagreeing with them respectfully on the many areas on which we are not going to agree.
I observe from the outset that we are privileged to be in a country where there can be a rule of law debate in which there are so many areas of agreement for so many of us. We all agree on the importance of the rule of law, and we agree with many of its essential tenets. Laws must be clear; they must be accessible; they must apply equally to each of us, and they must be adjudicated on by an independent judiciary—and we in this country all agree that we are blessed with an independent judiciary that is admired the world over.
There are areas on which we disagree, though, and, if I may say so, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, identified those brilliantly. In the course of the time allotted, I shall try to respond to as many of the contributions by noble Lords as I can. I am going to leave until the end—and I shall make sure I have plenty of time—what the noble and learned Lord identified as the sharp divide in beliefs as to what the rule of law encompasses and what it does not, particularly human rights, democracy and international law.
Before addressing the subjects raised by noble Lords, perhaps I may begin by setting what the Government consider to be the important context: that there is a great deal of work to be done to restore this country’s reputation, internationally and domestically, on the rule of law. I was grateful for, and learned greatly from, the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Thomas and Lord Marks, and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, and their analysis of the degradation of rule of law standards over recent years.
I want the rule of law to be a project that we all work on together. As I have already said, there are many aspects of it on which we agree and I do not wish to descend to point-scoring, but it is important to set the context. At home, I suggest that respect for the rule of law was materially undermined by Covid. I do not just mean the point that has been raised by some noble Lords in respect of the acceleration of the use of delegated legislation, to which I will return, but it was also because people felt genuine, visceral anger that lawmakers were seen to be rulebreakers. That undermines a real fabric of the rule of law. It was also undermined, I respectfully suggest, by the failure of government to protect independent judges from shameful attacks in the media, and indeed then engaging in shadowboxing with the judiciary, with veiled threats to curtail judicial review and impose parliamentary scrutiny of judicial appointments.
Likewise, our reputation nose-dived internationally. As some noble Lords have raised, we legislated expressly to avoid a recently signed treaty obligation. It was followed by further legislation that was not simply a breach of international law but was contrary to our own constitutional principles, not least, under the Rwanda Act, to apply fiction in the courts—to mandate fiction rather than fact. I pay tribute to the noble Lord and the noble and learned Lord in respect of some of these aspects for taking principled stands.
All this was watched by friends overseas with surprise, pity and shame. Not only did it damage our reputation as a country, a proud champion of the rule of law, but it was potentially hugely damaging to our economy. All noble Lords will know that what international and domestic businesses want is the certainty and stability that come in countries that comply with international law. Why sign an investment treaty with a party that you know might ignore its terms when it gets a bit uncomfortable? Rule of law is paramount to the fabric of our society; it reflects who we are as a country, and it is very important to our economy.
I will start with access to justice, drawing on the speeches of the noble and learned Lords, Lord Etherton and Lord Stewart, and the noble Lords, Lord Marks and Lord Sikka. We obviously accept and endorse the principle that meaningful access to a court is a fundamental component of the rule of law. If people do not feel they can have access to a court to vindicate what they would see as their rights, and if people observe others getting away with crime, it unravels the very heart of our fabric of society and cuts to the quick of international law.
As a Government we have inherited a profound problem, raised not least in the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, drawing on his great experience as DPP, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and others. To give one example, it can now take years for a rape case to get to trial and the not infrequent but nevertheless shameful experience of many is that they can attend a courtroom—often, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, falling apart—to be told that there is no prosecution counsel available and their case needs to be adjourned to another date. We would all agree that is an unacceptable state of affairs. Similarly, in civil, family and social welfare cases, meaningful access to justice is either sparse or non-existent.
Of course, the Lord Chancellor would wish, if she could, to change the entire position overnight to properly fund legal aid across the board, to rebuild our courts to the condition in which we would expect them to be, and to have unlimited sitting days in the Crown Court and in other courts and tribunals. But we have inherited an economic situation that simply does not permit us to wave that magic wand, however much we want to and however much we identify the need as urgent. What I can promise your Lordships’ House is that this is a priority for the Lord Chancellor. We understand the problem, we understand its importance from a rule of law perspective, and we are determined to deal with it. To respond to one point from the noble Lord, Lord Marks, let us take the scourge of violence against women and girls as an example. We want to do it in a multilayered and intelligent way. We want to tackle it not simply through the criminal justice system; we want to understand the causes of it; we want to work within education, so that girls and boys in schools have education about how they relate to each other, what consent means, et cetera, to fundamentally grasp the problems that currently blight society.
I will now deal very briefly with the question of my legal risk guidance, which was the subject of the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Faulks—and it is a pleasure to be once again debating with the noble Lord, albeit in a different environment. I will try to put some of the concerns to rest—and I hope I was able to do that by a nod during the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Banner. Any Government who aspire to comply with the rule of law will want to ensure that they attain the highest legal standards in their decision-making. I think that is a virtue that would be shared across the House. We are supported in that endeavour by a quite brilliant government legal service of dedicated and hard-working lawyers, and I have been anxious to ensure that they have the tools necessary to ensure that the Government stay within the confines of the law. There are going to be many areas, as the guidance expressly recognises, in which the law may be uncertain and a risk may need to be taken, and in the circumstances specified that is absolutely legitimate. I want to move away from a default position in which Ministers are told there is a respectable argument without being told that that means it is probably unlawful. The Government are determined to drive legal standards up.
In that light, to respond to the noble Baroness, Lady Laing, judicial review is not an inhibition on government. This Government are not afraid of taking decisions because they may be challenged in the courts. That will either improve our decision-making if we are challenged and found to be wrong or it will send out a clear message that we are not going to be intimidated by those bringing legal threats. Judicial review is an essential component of society to challenge decisions of government for people to be able to hold us to account.
I turn next to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, and his analysis of the speech that I gave in the Bingham lecture. The noble Lord outlined concerns about the relationship between courts, lawyers and parliamentary sovereignty. I wish to put his concerns to one side. He may see that, in that speech, I was not addressing parliamentary sovereignty in the context that he outlined. I started with the completely unremarkable premise that Parliament is of course sovereign. In that passage of the speech—I will repeat it now—I was addressing precisely the point that Sir John Laws was making in his collection of essays, The Constitutional Balance. It is a given that Parliament is sovereign, but with that enormous power comes responsibility about how Parliament chooses to exercise that power in relationship to the courts and certainly in the Executive’s relationship to Parliament. It is about the constitutional balance that protects and enshrines our constitution.
I turn next to a further point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, about the European convention and the Human Rights Act, which was not the point I made about parliamentary sovereignty. The Human Rights Act reflects the sovereignty of Parliament. It was passed by Parliament, and Parliament decided that it wanted to indirectly incorporate some convention rights. So I respectfully say that the argument that those convention rights are somehow irreconcilable with parliamentary sovereignty begins and ends there. Also, the impeachment is undermined by the careful balance that Parliament itself struck within the body of the Act. It does not empower courts to strike down primary legislation; it merely empowers courts to identify, by way of declarations of incompatibility, when that legislation is not convention rights compliant—it remains a matter for Parliament.
With respect, equally misplaced is the notion that somehow the rights that Parliament has chosen to place and protect as human rights are, in some way, foreign. That is simply not correct. Unsurprisingly for a convention that was drafted not least by David Maxwell Fyfe, the rights contained reflect long-standing traditional common-law rights in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland: habeas corpus in Article 5; freedom from torture in Article 3; and the right to privacy in Entick v Carrington. That was a nod to some of the lawyers in the House.
I turn to the role of lawyers and the rule of law, raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy. Any system—as the noble and learned Lord raised and as Lord Bingham described—depends, for its adherence to the rule of law, on those who work within it, striving to those very same principles. The noble and learned Lord identified the tension that can sometimes arise between them. One of the great joys of being Attorney-General is that I am the head of the Bar, a profession that has a very high ethical standard. There are very few professions in which you can be disbarred for misleading a court. That is not to say that it is perfect, and it is certainly not to say that appropriate lessons cannot be drawn from the various inquiries that touch on legal behaviour. This Government, like any Government, will want to learn those lessons; they will see the report on Horizon, as well as other reports, and seek to learn their lessons.
There is the flip side—a point raised by the noble Lords, Lord Banner and Lord Marks—that lawyers must be protected in going about their job. The essence of the independent Bar and the independent solicitors’ profession is that we represent our clients without fear or favour. That is a hallmark, and lawyers must be protected.
I will deal very briefly with judicial independence. The Lord Chancellor is a champion of judicial independence; she will stand up for it fearlessly. The Judicial Appointments Commission—I declare an interest in having been appointed a deputy High Court judge through it—is an essential part of that. There are other constitutional frameworks overseas in which there is a different system. They are absolutely not better systems, but they can often be distinguished and explained because, in those jurisdictions, courts often have a power, which courts do not have here, to override what we would describe as primary legislation.
I will very briefly touch on the point about culture and the rule of law that the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, raised. We see it as a cross-party venture to work together to ingrain the core rule-of-law values on which we agree in society. The noble Baroness asked for some examples of what can be done in education and for suggestions of books or a national competition. I went to Spellow Library after the riots in Liverpool and chatted to children who had volunteered to help clear up. I gave them some books on the rule of law and discussed it with them. In addition to To Kill a Mockingbird for the teenagers and Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court for the children, I also gave them a copy of The Rule of Law by Lord Bingham.
I will be as quick as I possibly can on thin and thick conceptions, if your Lordships will indulge me for an extra minute or two. The noble Lords, Lord Wolfson, Lord Verdirame, Lord Faulks and Lord Lilley, all advocate for the thin conception of a rule of law. The noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, describes Lord Bingham as if he were an outlier. I suggest that the contrary is the case: Lord Bingham’s conception—that human rights, democracy and international law are integral parts of what a rule of law means—has been accepted as mainstream not only domestically but, increasingly, internationally. They also reflect a long Conservative tradition, from Churchill to Maxwell Fyfe through to great Attorneys-General past such as Dominic Grieve.
In responding to the challenge from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, I will identify why a thick conception of the rule of law is the one that is true to rule-of-law values. It draws upon an analogy given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Stewart, of apartheid in South Africa. Under apartheid, the laws were very clear. There was certainty as to the contents of those laws. Those laws were passed by a Parliament; those laws were adjudicated upon by an independent judiciary, including some brilliant lawyers who afterwards sat in your Lordships’ House—one still does. That, I suggest, was not a country that operated according to the rule of law. That was rule by law. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich set out in his brilliant and insightful speech, fundamental human rights have to be an integral part of what we understand to be the rule of law as distinct from ruled by laws.
Fundamental human rights reflect what underlies rules and what underlies our systems: our belief in the fundamental dignity of our fellow human being and the need for laws to protect it. Laws have to have a quality that protects those fundamental rights in order to properly comply with what we would understand to be a society truly ruled by law. So too with democracy and the consent of those who are governed—if we are to be bound by people’s laws, we need a say, and a proper say. That is why I endorse your Lordships’ comments about the importance of secondary legislation being applied when appropriate, and that is why I have taken steps to produce a toolkit for policymakers to try to raise standards.
Finally, if your Lordships will indulge me, I will deal with international law very briefly. Just like domestic law, international law is not perfect, but just like domestic law, we have an important role to play in its shaping. Certainly, this country has played an enormous role in its creation, and so too do we in its shaping in the halls of the United Nations through the Sixth Committee, through the International Law Commission, and through our work through the Foreign Secretary, moulding and shaping international law.
Compliance with international law also benefits us all. It is a source of pride for this country, it makes us a safer and more secure world, and, as I have already said, it is necessary to provide a foundation for growth in this country. We should all be immensely proud of it, and this Government will seek at every turn to comply with our obligations.
There is little time in this job for reading things I used to once read on weekends, but I was struck by reading the words of the great constitutional scholar Professor Tribe over the weekend:
“By all means valorize the rule of law and the integrity of our legal institutions, including the traditions and customs that provide the guardrails beyond those of our inevitably imperfect constitutional design. But never forget that law can oppress as easily as it can liberate and that it is the content and spirit of our laws and the character of those we entrust with enacting and enforcing them that makes fidelity to law so central to our experiment in self-government”.
The Government accept that challenge.