House of Commons
Business before Questions
Oral Answers to Questions
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Sarah Coombes (West Bromwich) (Lab)
The Minister for Equalities (Olivia Bailey)
Trans people deserve to live their life with dignity and respect, and without shame. This Government are committed to protecting and advancing the rights of trans people, including by equalising hate-crime legislation, delivering a trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices, and improving gender healthcare services.
Sarah Coombes
I recently spoke to a trans woman at my coffee morning. She was in tears, as she feels that life for trans people in Britain has gone backwards. She was always able to live and work in peace and dignity, but feels that her right to do that has been severely impacted, and she is worried about her chances of getting new jobs because of the Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance on, for example, toilets. Can the Minister reassure me and my constituent that this Government will fight to protect the rights of trans people in Britain?
Olivia Bailey
I am so sorry to hear from my hon. Friend about the experience of her constituent, and I recognise how much anxiety there is in the trans community at the moment. Let me be clear that trans people’s rights against discrimination and harassment are protected in law—a fact that was underlined in the Supreme Court judgment. This Government are committed to defending and extending the rights of trans people in this country, including by equalising hate crime law and improving healthcare, and through our trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices.
Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)
Since the Supreme Court judgment—and even more so since the code of practice was published—my constituents who identify as trans are contacting me daily. One has told me that he feels entirely pushed out of public life, and has had to leave his job due to customer harassment. He says that finding a new job is nigh on impossible. Does the Minister perceive that to be an intended or unintended consequence of the draft guidance, and will the Government please give Parliament the opportunity to vote on it?
Olivia Bailey
I have said how greatly I recognise the significant anxiety that is felt by some in the trans community at the moment. The Supreme Court was extremely clear that trans people’s rights and protections against discrimination and harassment are protected in law, and the Government will defend and extend trans people’s rights. The draft code of practice is before the House for scrutiny, and Members can apply for additional debates on the subject if they wish.
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
The Minister for Equalities (Seema Malhotra)
The rise in antisemitism is unacceptable; antisemitism has no place in Britain. It requires a whole-of-society response. That is why we are strengthening policing, and investing in record protective security funding to keep Jewish communities safe. We are also clamping down on antisemitic extremism, tackling antisemitism in schools and universities, ensuring that Arts Council England withdraws funding from those who promote antisemitism, and accepting all the recommendations in Lord Mann’s review on antisemitism and racism in the health service.
Rebecca Smith
The inaugural Jewish Culture Month has just concluded. More than 100 events took place across the country to celebrate Jewish culture, community and creativity. For example, the Plymouth Jewish community partnered with the Klezmer Village Band to bring traditional Jewish music to local schools and Plymouth Theatre Royal, helping to share Jewish culture with a wider audience. Given that the Prime Minister believes that rooting out antisemitism is a highlight of his tenure, what support was the Minister able to show for Jewish Culture Month, and did she attend any events?
Seema Malhotra
The hon. Lady speaks for the whole House in recognising the importance of celebrating and sharing Jewish culture, and that is why this month has been so valuable. She may be aware that an event was held in the Department for Education. We will leave no stone unturned to tackle antisemitism. Members on both sides of this House are committed to ensuring that no person from the Jewish community feels that they have to change their way of life, or what they wear, in order to be safe.
Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)
I welcome the Minister’s comment that no Jewish person should have to change what they wear or how they go about their life, but she will know that this is exactly what is happening in this country, not least because antisemitism is perpetrated online by vile hate-mongers who seem to think that attacking Jewish people is fair game. What action is the Minister taking to ensure that those people online who pump out antisemitism and anti-Jewish hatred are brought to book very quickly?
Seema Malhotra
My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. He is absolutely right that this hate and abuse must also be tackled online; that is why the Online Safety Act 2023 has robust provisions to protect people from online abuse. We have ended the era of self-regulation, and are enforcing strict legal duties that compel platforms to design out racial hatred and protect users. It is vital that this work continues, and that we step up active enforcement programmes that have been under way since March last year.
Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)
Mr Connor Rand (Altrincham and Sale West) (Lab)
Alison Hume (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Catherine Atkinson)
We have made the landmark commitment to halve violence against women and girls within a decade, and we have begun delivering already; providing domestic abuse specialists in 999 call centres, specialist rape and sexual offence investigation units in our police forces, and £16 million for programmes in schools on healthy relationships and tackling harmful behaviour. Our ambition is clear, but there is much more work to do.
Jessica Toale
The most dangerous place for a woman is often her own home. That is in part why I have introduced a private Member’s Bill to extend domestic abuse protections to children and young people who may be in abusive relationships. What more are this Government doing to tackle the scourge of domestic violence?
Catherine Atkinson
My hon. Friend is right: far too often, the least safe place for a woman is her own home. Children who witness or experience abuse in their home are victims in their own right. This Government are determined to tackle domestic abuse; we are putting domestic abuse specialists in 999 call centres, prosecutions are rising, and domestic abuse protection orders can provide unlimited-duration protection, and are already protecting more than 1,000 victims. I welcome my hon. Friend’s commitment to legislating to protect children and young people who are caught in abusive relationships, and I look forward to working with her on her private Member’s Bill.
Mr Rand
Suicides caused by domestic violence are growing at such a rate that a woman in an abusive relationship is now more likely to take her own life than to be killed by her partner, yet we know that there is a significant under-reporting of cases, and criminal accountability for the men responsible is all too rare. Could the Minister update the House on what the Government are doing to tackle this crisis, and to bring to justice the men who drive women to end their lives?
Catherine Atkinson
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this important matter. Where domestic abuse drives a woman to take her own life, it is a profound tragedy and an injustice, and perpetrators must be held to account. Those who drive their partners to take their own life can face prosecution for the offences of manslaughter and encouraging suicide. The Government have asked the Law Commission to conduct a wholesale review of the law of homicide and the sentencing framework for murder, which will include a review of the use, and any obstacles to the use, of manslaughter charges where abuse may have driven someone to suicide. We recognise that there is more to do, particularly on better understanding and preventing suicides linked to domestic abuse, and we will continue to work with experts, frontline services and campaigners to strengthen our response.
Alison Hume
The hon. Member for Runcorn and Helsby (Sarah Pochin) embarrassed herself and this House when she said that the England football team needed to keep winning to keep women safe from domestic abuse. Does the Minister agree with me and with Refuge that linking domestic violence to football allows perpetrators to avoid accountability for their horrific actions?
Catherine Atkinson
I completely agree. Domestic abuse is not caused by football results; it is caused by perpetrators who make the choice to abuse women. Refuge, Women’s Aid and other specialist organisations are clear that suggesting otherwise allows abusers to deflect responsibility and avoid accountability. This Government are clear that there is no excuse, no context and no mitigating circumstances that make domestic abuse acceptable. I hope that the hon. Member for Runcorn and Helsby (Sarah Pochin) will reflect on the harm that that kind of framing causes to victims.
Sir Roger Gale (Herne Bay and Sandwich) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that it is iniquitous that at least one of the doctors responsible for the intrusive examination of young women prior to their rape and sexual abuse by Mohammed Fayed is still practising in London? If she does, would she approach the General Medical Council to ask why that is?
Catherine Atkinson
The scourge of abuse, whoever commits it, must be rooted out, across all professions. We are committed, through our violence against women and girls strategy, to halving violence against women and girls. We need to look at healthcare settings as well as everywhere else, and I would certainly be happy to meet the right hon. Gentleman to discuss that issue further.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
I recently hosted a roundtable with leading organisations in the VAWG sector to discuss the vile trend of men filming degrading videos of women enjoying a night out, and accompanying the videos with absolutely awful captions. Before she resigned, the former Minister, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), committed to meeting me to discuss solutions. I know that the political situation is a little fluid, but can the Minister ensure that her Department takes this very seriously, and will she meet me to discuss solutions?
Catherine Atkinson
We are committed to tackling violence against women and girls, whether it happens on the street, in people’s homes or online. In order to tackle abuse and harms online, we have criminalised the creation of non-consensual deepfakes and are banning nudification tools. We are also putting a legal duty on platforms to remove non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours. There is more that we can do, and I would be happy to meet the hon. Lady to discuss solutions.
Liz Jarvis (Eastleigh) (LD)
My constituent Paris Shears was subjected to domestic abuse, including coercive control, by her former partner. During his trial, he changed his plea to receive a shorter sentence. Paris’s parliamentary petition to change the law has received over 100,000 signatures. Does the Minister agree that victims of domestic abuse, including coercive control, deserve better?
Catherine Atkinson
Our police receive calls relating to domestic violence every 30 seconds. Victims of domestic violence need to be treated well, and to see much more action taken, whether we are talking about our police, our courts, or the services that victims need. This Government are taking that action, not only by putting domestic abuse specialists in 999 call centres, but through domestic abuse protection orders, but we know that there is so much more that is needed by victims of domestic abuse.
Mims Davies (East Grinstead and Uckfield) (Con)
As a 16-year-old, Kate worked a summer at Harrods. In 2024, she told her story of being raped at work. Intimate medical examinations were carried out on women by senior Harrods staff and security. Hundreds of women’s attacks were silenced. How will the Justice for Fayed and Harrods Survivors be heard? I met some of those brave women this week. How will they get the whole truth, justice, and systemic change, if the Met police inquiry remains stalled, and if enablers—some of them women—are left at large? Incredibly, over 500 victims still need answers.
Catherine Atkinson
I have met victims and campaigners from the al-Fayed campaign, as has the Prime Minister. We must ensure that no matter who you are or where you are, there is always justice. I look forward to continuing to work with campaigners to ensure that they get justice.
Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)
The Government’s recently announced social media ban for under-16s will play an important role in tackling violence against women and girls and the online spread of misogyny, but social media bans by themselves are not enough. While we welcome steps to address online harm, the Government’s proscriptive approach simply will not be enough. New platforms and apps will continue to spring up, and the Government are in danger of being a dangerously outpaced competitor in an online game of whack-a-mole.
Alongside legislation, we urgently need to give our parents, teachers and schools the tools that they need to ensure that when children come across harmful or inappropriate content, they are equipped to recognise and challenge it, and are ultimately kept safe from it. Will the Minister work with her colleagues in the Department for Education to ensure that teachers have the resources and support in the curriculum to cover that?
Catherine Atkinson
The hon. Member is right that we need to not just pursue perpetrators and provide support to victims, but prevent violence against women and girls. That is why this is a cross-Government strategy. No one Department can tackle this alone. The Department for Education is piloting programmes with young people in schools. We need to ensure that all Departments are doing their bit—and they are.
Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)
The Minister for Equalities (Olivia Bailey)
Conversion practices are an abhorrent and insidious form of abuse, perpetrated by people who believe that being LGBT is not only wrong but can be forcibly changed. This Government will ban that abuse.
Ms Minns
The work of Cumbria Pride and Pride in North Cumbria in supporting people to feel accepted and confident in their sexuality stands in stark contrast to those who peddle cruel and abusive conversion practices. The last Conservative Government failed multiple times to introduce a ban on these practices. Will the Minister please confirm that this Government will legislate, and will she set out the steps that the Government are taking to do this?
Olivia Bailey
I thank Pride in North Cumbria and Cumbria Pride for their brilliant work. My hon. Friend is right to say that Pride events are a wonderful asset to the community. Given recent decisions to defund Pride events, this is a lesson that Reform councils clearly need to learn. I can confirm that this Labour Government will ban abusive conversion practices, and we will be publishing our draft Bill very soon.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I am mindful of the question asked by the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) and the Minister’s response. What protection has the Minister put in place for those who actively and honestly seek help and prayerful support, and who are seeking guidance in churches and through Christian and faith-based groups? It is always important that people have an opportunity to seek that guidance. I know the Minister will be committed to that, and I would be very pleased to hear her answer.
Olivia Bailey
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question, and I look forward to discussing this matter further with him when we have published our draft Bill. Let me be very clear that what we are talking about is criminalising abuse that should happen to nobody, anywhere, in any situation or setting.
David Williams (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)
Douglas McAllister (West Dunbartonshire) (Lab)
The Minister for Women and Equalities (Bridget Phillipson)
Tackling child poverty is a moral mission for this Labour Government. Background should not determine what people go on to achieve in life, but we know that inequality and poverty hold back too many of our children. We are improving the life chances of every child by scrapping the two-child limit, rolling out free childcare, Best Start family hubs, and free breakfast clubs, and expanding free school meals. Our child poverty strategy will deliver the largest reduction in child poverty in a single Parliament. This is the difference a Labour Government are making.
David Williams
In Stoke-on-Trent and Kidsgrove, literacy levels among our children and young people fall behind the England average. That can severely impact a young person’s future earnings. Our libraries play a key role in addressing that, yet Reform-led Staffordshire county council has ordered them to remove Pride displays. Does the Secretary of State agree that libraries should be inclusive and welcoming to all, and that children and young people should never be placed at the centre of such divisive culture wars?
Bridget Phillipson
I completely agree with my hon. Friend. The joy of reading should be open to every child, and that is really important in this National Year of Reading. Local libraries are special places, and Reform should be investing in our libraries, so that children can access them, not shutting down displays that make all families feel welcome. Sadly, this is characteristic of a party that, in my area, let back in a councillor who said that Nigerians should be “melted down” to fill potholes. Not fit for power at any level.
Douglas McAllister
We know that the attainment gap holds back children who grow up in poverty. The gap reached its highest levels under the Tories, and in Scotland the SNP has failed to close it. Does the Minister agree that it is shameful that the Tories’ only policies for children are bringing back the two-child limit, plunging hundreds of thousands into poverty, and bringing back tax breaks for private schools?
Bridget Phillipson
I am proud of the last Labour Government’s record on tackling child poverty, but this Labour Government are going even further. We will lift the largest ever number of children out of poverty in a single Parliament, in sharp contrast with the Conservative party, which would plunge half a million children back into poverty.
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)
The Minister for Women and Equalities (Bridget Phillipson)
The Equality Act 2010 is a monumental achievement, passed by the last Labour Government, that protects everyone from discrimination and harassment. The public sector equality duty makes our services fairer for everyone, and we are bolstering that by commencing the socioeconomic duty. The Equality Act is our quiet guardian—the law that stops bosses overlooking pregnant qualified workers for promotion and that requires shops and transport to adapt for wheelchair users, making their services accessible. To those who want to dismantle those protections, I say that we will not let them turn back the clock. We stand by those rights; we will strengthen them.
Andrew George
I have given Ministers advance notice of this question. Will they do more to better co-ordinate support across Government for women and child victims? The abuser of my constituent Caroline Eshghi was granted a lenient sentence because the abuse occurred before 2005, and my constituent Tina Nash, who was beaten, assaulted and blinded, feels insufficiently protected and supported by either the Parole Board or the victim contact scheme. Will Ministers please do more to support them?
Bridget Phillipson
The hon. Gentleman raises two incredibly powerful and distressing cases. I share with him my sympathy for those affected, given all that they have been through and the harm that they have suffered. I am more than happy to discuss the matter further with him, or to make sure that a Minister meets him to hear his constituents’ views.
Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister for Equalities (Olivia Bailey)
I thank my hon. Friend for that important question. The code is clear that nobody should be left without the services they need. The EHRC is clear that it will monitor the impact of the code.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
The Government’s Islamophobia definition is already being weaponised to shut down free speech, just as I warned it would. South Wales police tried to use it to effectively criminalise people for criticising Islam, which Ministers promised us time and again would not happen. Does the Minister understand how divisive that is? If so, will she finally withdraw that dangerous definition?
Bridget Phillipson
South Wales police has paused its plans. It is right that it has done so. There are no blasphemy laws in this country, but it is right that we take action against hatred, prejudice and racism wherever we find it. We have seen shocking examples of Muslims in our country being targeted on the basis of their faith and because of who they are. We need look no further than the shadow Justice Secretary, the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy), who engaged in appalling racism towards Muslims in our country and, rather shamefully, was not sacked by the Leader of the Opposition for those comments.
Claire Coutinho
Asking officers to record examples of an illegitimate criticism of Islam is nothing short of an assault on free speech. Let me try another issue: last night, Labour MPs voted to give children as young as 11 powerful puberty-blocking drugs that could leave them infertile for the rest of their lives. The right hon. Lady is the Cabinet Minister for children and she knows that children in the care system are over-represented in that group. This cannot sit right with her. Will she do the right thing and tell the Health Secretary to stop the puberty-blocking trial?
Bridget Phillipson
When Dr Hilary Cass published her review, we endorsed all those recommendations, as did the Conservatives. An important part of what Dr Cass set out was that it is essential that healthcare is available to children and young people who are experiencing gender dysphoria or incongruence, but that it must be safe, evidence-based and clinically appropriate. We have always been clear about the red lines regarding the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s trial and the prescription of puberty blockers, and the safety and wellbeing of children must be at the forefront of everything that we do, but the review by Dr Cass concluded that while not enough was known about the safety of puberty-suppressing hormones, it was necessary to take forward a trial.
Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)
The Prime Minister (Keir Starmer)
I start by saying that my thoughts are with all those injured in the rail collision last Friday. I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of the driver of the Corby to St Pancras train. His family have requested privacy, and we should all respect that. I send my deepest sympathies to them at this awful time. My thoughts are also with those injured in the appalling attack in Edinburgh, which appears to have been motivated by anti-Muslim hatred. Let us be clear: in this country, an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. We will not stand for it, and the perpetrator will face the full force of the law. Let me commend our emergency services, who responded to both incidents with outstanding bravery and professionalism in very difficult circumstances.
One of the greatest privileges of leading this country is meeting our armed forces, celebrating their work and marking Armed Forces Week, and I want to thank them all for their dedication, their courage and their sacrifice to protect our way of life. This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. I shall have further such meetings later today.
Clive Jones
I associate myself with the Prime Minister’s remarks. His Government can be really proud of the national cancer plan. Cancer patients in Wokingham and across the country cannot afford for it not to be implemented or regularly updated. Will the Prime Minister leave a lasting legacy and support my private Member’s Bill—the National Cancer Strategy Bill—to ensure that future Governments remain accountable for delivering the plan’s targets and ambitions?
The Prime Minister
I acknowledge the hon. Gentleman’s personal experience and pay tribute to his campaign. I am incredibly proud of the national cancer plan, which sets out how we are ending the postcode lottery through more cancer specialists, through paying the travel costs of children travelling for cancer care, and through investing in technology to drive research into rare cancers. Thanks to our record investment in the NHS, we have the shortest waits for cancer diagnosis on record. He will be pleased to know that, in his constituency, waiting lists in his local care board are down by 40,000. That is thanks to a Labour Government and Labour decisions.
Lee Barron (Corby and East Northamptonshire) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
My thoughts—and, I am sure, the thoughts of the whole House—are with Max and his family in what must be the most awful of circumstances. Through our cancer trials accelerator programme, we will make it easier to launch innovative new clinical trials and find new treatment. For people like Max, that will make young people’s cancer a research priority, make clinical trials more accessible and pay for his travel costs for care. I hope that comes as some comfort, but as a parent, I cannot imagine what his family are going through, given the circumstances that he faces. I know that a Minister would be happy to meet Max and his family.
Mrs Kemi Badenoch (North West Essex) (Con)
I associate the Opposition with the Prime Minister’s remarks on the horrific train crash, the attacks in Edinburgh and, of course, Armed Forces Week.
I want to start by congratulating the Prime Minister: he is the other party leader who won a by-election last week, although I think I am much happier with my new MP than he is with his. Two weeks ago, the Prime Minister told the House that the Government were funding defence and that everything was under control. The very next day, the Defence Secretary resigned, saying the Prime Minister was “unable” and the Treasury “unwilling” to fund the defence of our country. What changed?
The Prime Minister
The right hon. Lady references the by-election—I am very pleased with our new Member of Parliament. In Gorton and Denton, the Tories got 1.9% of the vote. I congratulate her because they got 2.2% of the vote in Makerfield, just edging past Count Binface. She says they are winning everywhere. At that rate, it will take them 500 years to get back into power. Meanwhile, back on the Government Benches, we have delivered the biggest sustained boost to defence spending since the 1980s—£270 billion over this Parliament. That is a record. The defence investment plan will take that even higher. That is about facing the future. We will finalise the plan with the Defence Secretary, and we will have it published before the NATO summit.
Mrs Badenoch
I think the Prime Minister forgot to mention that we got 50% of the vote in Aberdeen South. He says that he is funding defence; the truth is he would not be in this mess if his Chancellor had found money for the defence investment plan. The Prime Minister gave her the second most important job in Britain. She was the first female Chancellor. She lives next door to him, but would not even come out to stand by him during his resignation speech; she was too busy getting ready for a selfie with the new leader. Does the Prime Minister feel let down by his Chancellor?
The Prime Minister
This is the Chancellor who ended the austerity inflicted on our country for 14 long years. This is the Chancellor who got the economy growing. The Leader of the Opposition does not normally want to talk about the economy. That is because in the first quarter of this year, the UK had the fastest growing economy in the G7. Our growth was upgraded by the International Monetary Fund and the OECD. Last week, unemployment was down and inflation better. That is because with this Chancellor, we have the right economic plan and can weather the global storms of the war that the right hon. Lady wanted to jump into. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”]
Mrs Badenoch
Labour Members are cheering so loudly, but if it is all going so fine, why is the Prime Minister resigning? The fact is the Chancellor did let him down. She is the one who snatched the winter fuel payment and who announced a disastrous Budget that killed economic growth. Because of her, a Labour Prime Minister is once again leaving office with unemployment higher than when he came in.
But the Chancellor is not the only person who let him down: the Energy Secretary is putting up bills and killing jobs. [Hon. Members: “Where is he?”] He is not here, is he? He was a failed Labour leader rejected by the electorate, brought back from the wilderness by this man, and when the going got tough, he jumped into bed with the Mayor of Manchester—it is not the first time he has betrayed someone close to him, is it? Does the Prime Minister think that this treachery should be rewarded by being appointed Chancellor?
The Prime Minister
The Chancellor and I picked up our party six years ago from the worst defeat since 1935. We turned the party around and made it face the country, and we won a landslide general election, giving the Conservatives the biggest drubbing in their history. Thanks to this Chancellor, we have delivered the fastest fall in NHS waiting lists for 17 years, with new rights for renters and money for working people, and we are lifting half a million children out of poverty. The test for every Prime Minister is handing over the country in a better shape than they found it. I know I can do that, which is more than can be said for the right hon. Lady’s predecessor, her predecessor’s predecessor and her predecessor’s predecessor’s predecessor!
Mrs Badenoch
Once again I have to ask: if it is all so fantastic, why is the Prime Minister resigning? It is very generous of him to stick by his Ministers, because they did not stick by him. He can say what he likes, but the people of Aberdeen gave their verdict—they gave their verdict on his Energy Secretary by voting Conservative.
To be fair, the Cabinet are not all traitors and deserters; some of them have been loyal—loyal and incompetent. Hands up if you think that the Education Secretary is doing a good job—[Interruption.] Even she doesn’t think she’s doing a good job, Mr Speaker—[Interruption.] Oh, someone did. For those who raised their hands—the two people who raised their hands—yesterday, a poll found that 0% of teachers think that the Education Secretary is doing a good job. She taxed private schools to pay for more teachers, but the number of teachers has gone down. It turns out that appointing a spiteful class warrior as Education Secretary was a disaster. Does the Prime Minister agree that he has been let down by her incompetence?
The Prime Minister
The Education Secretary grew up in poverty. She knows exactly what it means to grow up in poverty. She was once reluctant to tell her story, but I know her story and it is an incredible story of social mobility and success. I am so proud that she is sitting there, as should be everybody in this country who cares about social mobility. She knows that education is absolutely vital for poor children, and that is why it drives every single priority and value that she has. I would have thought that Conservatives would recognise and understand some of that, but they have fallen so low that they don’t.
Mrs Badenoch
The fact is that if the Education Secretary knew so much about poor children, she would not have given them fewer teachers. Teacher numbers have gone down—[Interruption.] It is amazing; I have never seen this much excitement on the Labour Benches. They are cheering so loudly, while there are 400 knives stuck in the Prime Minister’s back. Shame on them. They don’t like it up them, but they know that what I am saying is true.
There were times when the Prime Minister tried to do the right thing. He tried—he did try to cut welfare, and who stopped him? Those MPs behind him. In the words of the Welfare Secretary, his MPs only want to know who they can tax to fund more benefits. They are not Labour MPs, they are welfare MPs. Does the Prime Minister feel betrayed by the people he got into Parliament?
Mr Speaker
Order. We should think about the language we are using. When we leave this Chamber, do not be surprised if constituents feel that they can use the same language against each other. Let us show a little bit more decorum and respect to each other.
The Prime Minister
Thank you Mr Speaker. I was trying to do all this with as much good grace as I could, but I shall certainly miss these exchanges. I am very proud of every one of our MPs who, with a landslide Labour victory, come from all different backgrounds and different places across the country. We inflicted the biggest loss on the Tories in the history of their party. We have picked up our party and we turned it around. We had to address what went wrong, we turned it around, and we won a landslide victory. The right hon. Lady will not address or even talk about their failure after 14 long years.
Mrs Badenoch
The right hon. and learned Gentleman is the one who is resigning because of his MPs. There is no point trying to distract from that. Let’s be honest: the Prime Minister has made many mistakes, otherwise he would not be going, but he has also been let down—I am only saying what his staff have been briefing. He has been let down by an Energy Secretary who is killing industry, let down by a Chancellor who is killing jobs, and let down by Back-Benchers who do not understand that government is about tough choices. He U-turned again and again and again to appease them, and now they have abandoned him. And for what? A pair of eyelashes and a black T-shirt. Is it not the truth that, whoever is in charge, the real problem is the Labour party?
The Prime Minister
Two years ago, I walked into No. 10 and found a broken economy, broken public services and broken trust in politics. Because of our decisions—my decisions—the country is moving in the right direction: a stronger and fairer Britain, ending austerity, investing in our public services, the fastest fall in NHS waiting lists for 17 years, more rights for workers, more rights for renters, standing with Ukraine, Britain’s reputation restored, and half a million children being lifted out of poverty. Change promised by a Labour Government, change fought for by a Labour Government, change delivered by a Labour Government.
David Pinto-Duschinsky (Hendon) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
Antisemitism is a poison and that is why I drove it out of the Labour party. In government, we are acting to drive it out of society: new powers to ban repeated protests, new plans to root antisemitism out of our schools, universities and the health service, and new proscription-like powers to clamp down on malign state activity that incites hatred and violence, and we will take further steps. I am proud to lead this tolerant, decent country, and I will always fight for the security, safety and freedom of British Jews.
Ed Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)
I associate myself and my party with the Prime Minister’s remarks about the horrifying train crash in Bedford and the appalling attacks near a mosque in Edinburgh. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.
May I mention today’s review of Nottingham’s maternity services, which is truly shocking? I hope that the Government will rise to the moment and implement Donna Ockenden’s recommendations in full, without delay.
I recognise how difficult it was for the Prime Minister to make the statement that he made on Monday. As we debate issues robustly in this House, it is an important reminder that we are all human—that is something that everyone should remember. [Interruption.]
We all know how hard it is when relationships break down with close friends and allies, and when even our next door neighbour barely speaks to us some of the time, so have the Prime Minister’s experiences opened his eyes to the need to rebuild Britain’s relationship with our European friends and allies? Will he advise the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) to put his EU red lines in the past and to adopt our plan for a new growth and defence partnership?
The Prime Minister
I am very proud of the fact that we have reset our relationship with the EU and we are bringing it closer. That is in the best interests of our country and I know that the right hon. Gentleman understands that. I know that, like me, he has been reflecting on his own career. Given the revelation that he turned down a job with MI6, I think the whole House will be wondering what might have been—“Double O” Davey!
Ed Davey
It is very tempting to respond to that, but I have signed the Official Secrets Act. [Laughter.] On Europe, when history looks back at the Prime Minister’s time in office, I fear that clinging to those old red lines will be judged to have been a mistake.
As we swelter through this dangerous heatwave, we see the damage caused by extreme weather and climate change—schools closed, travel chaos, lives at risk, and massive costs to our economy and society. With the Met Office already warning that future summers will regularly break 40°C and bring even greater human and financial costs, is the Prime Minister alarmed that some parties in this House still follow Donald Trump with policies to send temperatures soaring even higher? Will the Prime Minister warn his successor not to listen to Conservative and Reform voices and instead to back our plans to cut bills and tackle climate change?
The Prime Minister
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for raising climate change, because it is one of the most significant challenges of our time, and the weather today reminds us just how important it is. It used to be common ground across this House that climate change was the generational challenge and that the UK should be a leader on it globally. I remember not so long ago the Conservatives leading in the COP summit—something that we were able to support. It is a shame that in order to chase Reform votes, they have changed their mind, and that we do not have that consensus across the House, but I will always maintain that we must be global leaders on climate change, and we always will be.
Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
It is clear that severe heatwaves are evidence that climate change is impacting our country. We have been working to co-ordinate the response, and I urge people to follow the guidance from the UK Health Security Agency. We are making our country more resilient for the future by modernising building regulations so that homes are cooler and better ventilated. We are building nine new reservoirs to protect water supplies and investing record amounts in flood defences and sustainable farming. While Labour is doing that, the Tories and Reform want to rip up the Climate Change Act 2008. That is the wrong approach for our country.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
Diolch yn fawr iawn, Lefarydd. The end of the Prime Minister’s premiership comes close on the heels of the end of Labour’s 100-year dominance in Wales. People simply did not feel that his party stood up for them, and it is irrefutable that that too is part of the Prime Minister’s legacy.
I believe there is a tradition of leaving notes on desks for successors. Will the Prime Minister leave a useful note to the incoming Prime Minister, saying that respect and understanding go a very long way and that democratic choices, including those of devolution, cannot be dismissed?
The Prime Minister
I shall leave a note saying that what we delivered for Wales in these two years was the largest ever devolution settlement; the UK’s first small nuclear reactor, in Anglesey; investing £14 billion in Welsh rail; and a pay rise for 170,000 workers across Wales. I will end the note by saying, “We are lifting 70,000 Welsh children out of poverty—Keir Starmer”.
Paula Barker (Liverpool Wavertree) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
May I start by sending my best wishes to Jake and his family? The change we have made to the way that NICE evaluates medicines is already increasing access to innovative new medicines. I will make sure that my hon. Friend gets the chance to meet a Health Minister to discuss Jake’s case and the related issues.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
The Prime Minister
I thank the right hon. Gentleman—he is always most generous. I will never forget when, just a few years ago, I went on holiday in his constituency with my family. I was in the kitchen of the place we were renting when somebody leant through the open door—it was the right hon. Gentleman with a bottle of champagne saying, “Welcome to the New Forest.” He then took time to speak to my family, including my wife’s elderly father and my children. I thank him for his generosity.
Paulette Hamilton (Birmingham Erdington) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
Everyone deserves a safe place to call home. The Housing Secretary has the power to introduce locally led licensing, and will consult on those regulations in the summer. Under our proposals, national standards for supported housing will be enforced by local authorities. I am proud of the action we have taken to back renters—abolishing section 21 evictions, expanding the decent homes standard, and extending Awaab’s law to cover the private rental market.
Jack Rankin (Windsor) (Con)
The Prime Minister
That is a first duty that the last Government spectacularly failed at, because they hollowed out our armed forces. We have already delivered the biggest sustained boost in defence spending since the ’80s—that is £270 billion over this Parliament—and we will increase that with the defence investment plan, which will be published before the NATO summit.
Rachel Hopkins (Luton South and South Bedfordshire) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
The thoughts of the whole House are with the family of the driver who lost his life and those who were injured, some of them extremely seriously. On Saturday, I spoke to the CEO of the East of England ambulance service to thank his team for their professionalism in responding. We talked through the nature and the scale of the challenge that they faced in relation to that crash. They were outstanding in the most difficult of circumstances. When I called him on Saturday morning, he assured me that they were all back at work and back on duty dealing with whatever else might happen that weekend, having delivered those who needed to be delivered to the hospitals. I found that humbling. It is a real tribute to those who responded, as they always do, including, I must say, the local community in this case. I also want to thank the brilliant NHS staff, who are still caring for those who were seriously injured.
Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)
The Prime Minister
I want the hon. Member’s children to feel safe in this country, and I will do everything to make sure that they are. We will all fight anti-Muslim hatred with everything that we have got. An attack on one is an attack on all of us. That is what I said at the top of PMQs, and I hope he heard it.
Ian Lavery (Blyth and Ashington) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
I thank my hon. Friend for raising this important issue. I know that Members across the House have raised issues with the organisation directly. It is imperative that these communities are listened to. I understand that the Charity Commission has opened a compliance case, but I will get that confirmed for him. I am proud that this Government have stood up for mining communities, including ending the injustice of coal pension schemes, increasing the pensions of more than 150,000 former British Coal employees. I thank him for raising this case.
Martin Wrigley (Newton Abbot) (LD)
The Prime Minister
The hon. Member will have seen the action we are taking in relation to social media—it includes the social media ban for under-16s, which has been welcomed by families across the country; strengthening the Online Safety Act 2023 to tackle intimate image abuse and cyber-flashing, and closing loopholes in chatbots; and taking on Grok—but there is more to do.
Alex Baker (Aldershot) (Lab)
In Aldershot and Farnborough, thanks to this Labour Government, this week we are bringing the National Armed Forces Day celebrations back to the home of the British Army. However, in a week when we salute those who have served and are serving our country, elderly Gurkha veterans were assaulted in the park by our war memorial and told to go home. Will the Prime Minister and the House join me in standing against that despicable attack, and commend the heroism of our Gurkhas, and does the Prime Minister agree that now is the time to resolve the long-standing issues relating to Gurkha pensions that we have been working towards, because the Gurkhas have given so much for our country?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is a great champion of our armed forces, and the fact that the national celebrations are returning to Aldershot this week is a testament to her campaigning. The racist attack that she described is utterly disgraceful. I condemn it, as I hope the whole House will. We stand with our Gurkhas, who have made an incredible contribution to our armed forces and continue to do so. Ministers have met my hon. Friend, veterans and the Government of Nepal for constructive discussions on Gurkha pensions, and those discussions will continue. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for her dedicated work on this.
John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)
The Prime Minister
I, too, wish Scotland well in the upcoming match, and of course I wish England well in the third match—a little better than last night, hopefully.
The SNP and the Scottish Government need to answer a serious set of questions, and they simply refuse to do so. They call for transparency and accountability from everyone else when they have giant questions of their own to answer. “Nothing to see here, don’t want to know, don’t want to have an inquiry”—totally the wrong approach.
Becky Gittins (Clwyd East) (Lab)
This Government’s commitment, under the leadership and influence of the Prime Minister, to tackling violence against women and girls is shared by many of my constituents. On Saturday, I was out in Llangollen for a Welsh Women’s Aid fundraiser organised by the community champion Moira Gleed. Llangollen’s “Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever” saw me join more than 230 Cathys, learn a dance routine, while dressed all in red, and take part in a performance that was streamed across the world. We have even been contacted by some fans from Japan. Will the Prime Minister join me in recognising the hard work of Moira, her daughter Rowena and all the organisers, volunteers and, importantly, performers in enabling that important event to happen?
The Prime Minister
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and all those who took part. I am really glad that it was noticed around the world, because this is what raises awareness. I thought my hon. Friend was going to ask me to join her in the next dance, but if it is simply to pay tribute, I am very happy to do so.
Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)
The Prime Minister
I think the first would be, “Don’t ever inflict austerity on the country.” But since the hon. Gentleman is a Lib Dem, I would probably add, “Don’t wear a wetsuit.”
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)
As you will be aware, Mr Speaker, Monday was Windrush Day, founded by Patrick Vernon to celebrate the contribution of migrants to our community. Will the Prime Minister outline exactly what this Government are doing to recognise and serve the Windrush generation, who did so much to play a vital role in our country’s history?
The Prime Minister
I join my hon. Friend in marking Windrush Day and thank her for raising it, because it gives me the opportunity to thank a community who made an extraordinary contribution to our country, and to remember the injustice that they faced. I am proud that we have overhauled the compensation scheme to deliver faster access to compensation and justice, providing £1.5 million for organisations supporting claimants, and we have appointed the first ever Windrush commissioner to rebuild trust and deliver justice. I am incredibly proud to lead a country that is built on dignity and respect, where everyone is seen and everyone is valued.
Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)
The Prime Minister
I do like the right hon. Lady. When she talks about destroying legacies, I remember that she was the Chief Whip to Liz Truss. I am very proud that we are building the houses that we need so that everyone has a base camp for their opportunity and aspiration—something the last Government failed on and we are succeeding on.
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
Gareth Southgate’s documentary last month spotlighted some of the heartbreaking ways that we are failing too many young men growing up in Britain today, but it was heartening to see the inspiring work that Hitchin youth worker Dan Gaze was able to carry out with young men in my community who had found themselves in hard times. Both Dan and the boys at Hitchin boys’ school who were interviewed as part of the documentary were an absolute credit to my town, but how can we make sure that we are encouraging more men into teaching and youth work roles, so that every young man growing up in Britain today can benefit from positive role models across their community?
The Prime Minister
I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to inspiring community members like Dan, who truly represent the best of Britain. Having an inspiring role model is vital for young men. That is why we are investing £500 million in our national youth strategy, which includes launching 50 new Young Futures hubs, creating more mentoring and youth worker opportunities.
Media Green Paper
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Nigel Huddleston (Droitwich and Evesham) (Con)
(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport if she will make a statement on the publication of the media Green Paper.
The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Lisa Nandy)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this urgent question to the House and giving us an opportunity to discuss this important advancement. Yesterday the Government published a Green Paper, “Watch this Space”, to set a new strategic direction for media policy in the UK. The way we consume broadcast media is changing, and television is undergoing a profound transformation, having moved away from a system of traditional channels to a far more fragmented system in which people access TV on demand and on video-sharing platforms. Young people, in particular, are far more likely to access media on their phones and tablets through streaming services and platforms, and the Government believe that we are not adequately equipping that generation with access to high-quality media.
There are three key areas where we intend to act. The first is digital prominence, where we are exploring legislative options to require social media platforms and connected TV interfaces to make public service media content, particularly trusted news, highly visible and easy to discover. This is not about promoting Government narratives or only the BBC; it is about ensuring that brilliant journalism from many of our news publishers—both local and national—and broadcasters can get in front of the public. For that reason, we are also opening a conversation about how we define “public service broadcasting” in the modern age.
Secondly, the transition to internet TV is where we are outlining plans for a managed shift away from terrestrial broadcasting to internet-delivered IPTV. We know this is an essential switchover in terms of both access and cost, but we want to ensure that the transition is managed responsibly and that nobody is left behind. We are therefore consulting on two dates for the switchover: 2034, when current licences expire, or 2044, with any date contingent on a full and watertight transition plan.
Finally, we are protecting major sporting events. We will add on-demand and streaming rights for major sporting events such as the world cup and the Olympics to the listed events regime, protecting free universal fan access as viewing habits shift online.
Taken together, these proposals set out a vision for a future TV and media policy in which everyone can access world-leading public service broadcasting content, including children’s and news programming, away from the misinformation and disinformation that has defined too many of our online lives. This Government will ensure that no matter where people access their TV, they are given access to high-quality programming that informs, educates and entertains, and this Green Paper is the next stage of our ambition.
Nigel Huddleston
Thank you for granting this urgent question, Mr Speaker. I agree with much of what the Secretary of State has said, and there is much to be applauded in the media strategy. The overall intent, which is to ensure that everyone has access to trustworthy news and to counter misinformation, is noble. The challenge and its potential danger is how we do that.
Of the positive elements that the Secretary of State mentioned in the strategy, I welcome the Government’s intention to add on-demand rights to the free-to-air listed sports regime, but there are many controversial aspects. As she said, the plan to close down digital terrestrial transmission by 2034 or 2044 is a major concern, especially for those living in remote or rural areas. The strategy also covers interventions to support media literacy and promoting the questioning of the accuracy of news, but pushing such an onus of responsibility on to the media companies themselves may reduce the responsibility on schools or, indeed, parents. What are her thoughts on that?
We then come to the thorny issue of prominence. The Government are proposing interventions to make trustworthy news providers easily discoverable to counter misinformation, and that includes national and local news publishers and broadcasters, but who decides who is a trustworthy news provider and what trusted content is? Will there be an approved list, or will it be an algorithm or a human being? We need to be careful about descending into some kind of Orwellian society. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are vital to our free society, and the concern of some of the press is that, to qualify for prominence, a newspaper may need to sign up to a state-backed regulator. Can the Secretary of State rule that out?
The proposals in the Green Paper to support our public service broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are well intended, especially in an age when there is undeniably so much misinformation online, but a requirement for third-party platforms and social media entities to make such broadcasters’ content prominent is problematic for the obvious reason that their content is not always to be trusted and is not always unbiased either, so who decides whether it is? Many people question the BBC’s coverage of politics in general, of trans rights, of Israel and so on. The BBC doctored a video of President Trump, it fails to call Hamas a terrorist organisation, it has pushed highly questionable content through BBC Arabic and it reprimanded a newsreader for saying “pregnant women” rather than “pregnant people”. There may be plenty of people who like the idea of legislation to push woke or leftie content online, but I am not one of them, and many people agree with me. Can the Secretary of State provide more details about how trusted content will be defined and who will ultimately be the arbiter?
Finally, can the Secretary of State confirm how extensively she has engaged with the industry to come up with these proposals?
Lisa Nandy
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that series of questions, and I will do my best to answer them all as swiftly as I can. First, he rightly talks about the importance of getting the transition right and choosing the date of 2034 or 2044 well. He talks about the particular challenges in remote and rural areas, which this Government recognise. As he knows and as we have discussed before, there are also particular issues for older people, people with disabilities and others. We are working with the industry to put together a watertight plan to help people make that transition and ensure that nobody is left behind. We are asking these questions now precisely to make sure that we are ready and do not leave people behind.
On media literacy, the hon. Gentleman is right to say that the onus cannot just be on media companies alone. There is a responsibility on all of us, including schools and those of us in public life, to make sure we are equipping our young people with the skills they need to be able to navigate a completely transformed media landscape from the one we had in this country when he and I were growing up. I want to reassure him that this is not about pushing all the responsibility on to media companies and letting everybody else off the hook. We all have to work together to achieve this. It is not just about young people, either. There are serious challenges with people from every generation seeing information online that is just simply false.
Who defines trustworthy news—who decides what is trustworthy news and how we decide what is trustworthy—is one of the most challenging aspects of the consultation. The hon. Gentleman will know that the definition of public service broadcasting is set out in law, but trustworthy news is a separate matter and that is precisely why we have asked the question.
I would gently push back on some of the narrative that the hon. Gentleman advanced about the BBC. It is still the most trustworthy source of news not just in this country but across the world. On Monday, I was on “Newsround” explaining the consultation and the social media ban that we are introducing to the generation of children who will be most affected by it. It strikes me that there is no other country in the world that has quality programming like that through their public service broadcaster, so I think we should be careful about not trashing the BBC. He and I have shared serious frustrations about some of the specific issues that he mentioned, and we should always demand the highest quality content, but I still firmly believe that the BBC is one of the best broadcasters in the world.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
I welcome this bold Green Paper, which refers to:
“access to, accurate news, and informative and entertaining content that reflects the diversity of the UK and brings audiences together.”
Will my right hon. Friend do all she can to uphold the practice of independent, rigorously researched journalism in this world of algorithmically driven clickbait content that monetises hate? Given the record fines it has had from Ofcom, is there any way of reining in GB News—and maybe even looking at the effectiveness of Ofcom?
Lisa Nandy
My hon. Friend asks a number of questions and I will try to address them. First, in the Green Paper we have deliberately broadened out access to good quality trusted news and content to potentially include print media as well. It is not lost on me that during the Southport riots people were seeking out the Liverpool Echo and other local news outlets to try to find real information, as opposed to the misinformation and disinformation they were seeing online. She will know that alongside that, one of the things the Government have done is publish the first ever local media strategy to try to support that industry to be able to continue to provide high-quality news.
My hon. Friend mentions algorithms. One reason we are particularly keen to ensure the prominence of quality, trusted and high-quality content online and on platforms such as YouTube is that at the moment the algorithms decide what children, in particular, see. I commend YouTube for its work on YouTube Kids, but we need to see more of that. At the moment, we are putting up with a situation where the older generation tends to watch traditional television on television sets and can easily find good-quality content and trusted news, but the younger generation tend to be on devices online and cannot do so. That is not acceptable.
Anna Sabine (Frome and East Somerset) (LD)
The Green Paper rightly recognises the severe financial challenges facing our public service broadcasters, which have been vividly exposed by recent devastating cuts at the BBC. The Liberal Democrats have long proposed that the BBC World Service should be fully funded directly from Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office budgets, protecting its vital global footprint while freeing up £221 million a year to be reinvested at home. Will the Secretary of State take on board our proposals? What urgent conversations has she had with her Foreign Office colleagues to make that a reality?
Turning to online spaces, the proposal to highlight trusted news sources on social media is welcome, but unfortunately this is just a sticking plaster over the fundamental issue that big social media platforms are already rigged against truth, fairness and impartiality. The real threat to our democracy are the harmful platforms themselves, which use algorithms deliberately engineered to amplify foreign disinformation while systematically choking out trusted journalistic sources. Should the Secretary of State not be focusing the full weight of her Department, and that of her colleagues in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, on cleaning up social media platforms once and for all, rather than fighting a losing battle against bad actors on systems that are built to work against us?
Lisa Nandy
The hon. Lady rightly talks about online regulation. She will know that that is primarily the responsibility of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, but my colleague the Secretary of State and I work very closely together on that. We must ensure that we both take action to deal with the scourge of misinformation and disinformation online, which she rightly talks about, but that we give people access to news they can genuinely trust and that that news is much more readily available. The two things should be seen together.
I apologise, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) also asked me about Ofcom. She will know that we recently appointed a new chair of Ofcom. We believe that Ofcom must do more to act decisively and quickly in this space.
On the BBC World Service, the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine) will know that the Government have already stepped in, with the support of the FCDO, to ensure it continues to be funded, but colleagues across the House will have seen recently the funding cuts that were announced at the BBC.
The hon. Lady rightly says that one of the pressures on such broadcasters is the fact that they are currently trying to broadcast through two distinct channels, so it is important that the Government grip that issue. She will know that the charter review is running in parallel to this process. We wanted to look at it all in the round. It is our intention, through the charter review, to ensure that the BBC is adequately funded and that it goes on not just to survive, but to thrive until well into the latter part of this century. She will also know that we recently announced that through that process we will put the BBC on a permanent charter, so that it exists for all of us forever.
Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)
I declare an interest: I worked for a public service broadcaster and my husband still does. I say as somebody who understands the sector a bit that it is not just about public service but about recognising Britishness on our screens and in the media and, essentially, protecting what it is to be us, as well as providing opportunities for people to get into the sector. I really welcome the thinking on this issue, but can the Secretary of State give us a bit more detail on how the changes will ensure that our public service media are protected for the future, so that people can continue to access high-quality news and content in general, and are given opportunities?
Lisa Nandy
I strongly endorse what my hon. Friend says. We have lost many parts of our civic realm: thriving town centres where people come together, the social clubs that used to exist all over our country, and the youth clubs that we are busy rebuilding. I thank her for all her help and support. I believe that the media, and in particular public service media, are an essential part of that civic realm. Whether it is VE Day, Remembrance Sunday or the world cup which we are all currently enjoying, public service broadcasters provide the shared moments where we come together as a nation and celebrate what it means to be us. We are determined to grip these issues and not allow us to drift into a transition, so that our public service media are adequately funded and are able to continue to do that.
Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)
The Secretary of State knows as well as I do that the media landscape is changing so quickly that no sooner was the ink dry on the Media Act 2024 than it was almost obsolete. We know that for the first time YouTube has overtaken the BBC in audience reach, which is why the Green Paper is really welcome, but I wonder whether it is a first step towards a new and more extensive media Bill that reflects the nation’s viewing habits and reaches a definitive definition of television. The Green Paper talks about new television when talking about video-sharing platforms, YouTube and so on. We need a new definition of television to reflect technological change. Finally, the consultation refers to media literacy, but surely if we are really planning to future-proof that, we should be talking about AI literacy too—and not just for children.
Lisa Nandy
On legislation, we will of course keep that option open and will not hesitate to legislate should we need to do so. We deliberately drew the parameters and contours of the Green Paper very broadly so that we could have that very open discussion and work together to ensure that we then take the action we need to take.
On a slightly more reflective note, the point that the hon. Lady makes about the ink not being dry before the landscape had changed is particularly true in the online space. Rather than thinking about a piece of legislation, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology and I have been reflecting on the probable need to legislate quite frequently to keep pace with change.
When it comes to media literacy, I agree with the hon. Lady about AI. I think there are two parts to the issue: first, ensuring that we have the right regulation so that people can trust what they see and that we do nothing in the AI space that prevents good-quality journalism from being able to thrive; and secondly, equipping and empowering the people of this country with the skills and ability to navigate AI.
Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
Right now, Britain’s adversaries around the world are investing heavily in disinformation designed to disrupt democracies across the west; we are seeing the impact in this country as well. I welcome the regime set out to promote truthful content on social media, but promoting the good content is not the same as tackling the bad. I worry that there is quite a disparate approach across Government—across Ofcom, DCMS and the defending democracy taskforce. What will the Secretary of State do to pull together across Government to address disinformation and misinformation from hostile states around the world?
Lisa Nandy
I reassure my hon. Friend that I am working closely with the Secretary and State for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Home Secretary, as well as with the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, who leads the social cohesion taskforce that is specifically looking at misinformation and disinformation, and at how we join up across Government to tackle the issue. We have recently had a huge debate in this House about the defence of our nation, and, given the global climate, we are rightly stepping up to invest more in defence, but there is a war being waged in our communities—on our streets, online, on social media—that we have got to take as seriously as we take equipping our armed forces with what they need.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
This House ended the licensing of the press on 3 May 1695, when it declined to renew the relevant legislation. That makes the definition of news sources difficult. Perhaps that is why the Green Paper talks about prominence for public service media and “potentially” for local and national news sources. Does the Secretary of State agree that it is unthinkable to have a situation where we would be promoting BBC and Channel 4 news, but not our major national newspapers and trusted local news sources?
Lisa Nandy
That is precisely why we have asked the question. The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that there are different ways of approaching the issue. One is, quite simply, to promote public service broadcasters. We think we may be missing a trick there, which is why we have asked the question in the consultation.
Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford) (Lab)
The Secretary of State’s dedication to trusted news and promoting public service media is really welcome, but I am sure she shares my concerns that this will be dramatically undermined by the recent announcements of brutal cuts at STV and the BBC, as thousands of jobs and programmes are at risk of being lost. Will she urgently intervene to project jobs and the future of public service media?
Lisa Nandy
The Government have been talking to the journalism trade unions to ensure that people are protected when those cuts are made, and that we do everything we can to protect that really good quality—not just the journalists, but the technical staff and others, particularly those across our nations and regions, who feel vulnerable to those cuts. The cuts at STV and the BBC are precisely why we need to manage the transition and get it right. We cannot duck the question of when we make the transition, because doing so places incredibly onerous costs on public service broadcasters in an already very tight funding landscape. As my hon. Friend will have heard me say to the hon. Member for Droitwich and Evesham (Nigel Huddleston), we are determined to manage the transition well and ensure that nobody is left behind.
Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)
During a recent bombing of Tehran, a power outage hit that city and 20,000 bots promoting the cause of Scottish nationalism turned off instantaneously. I say that not to question in any way the legitimacy of a political position—admittedly one that I disagree with—but because it reveals the extent to which our country is under daily assault from those who would seek to tear us apart. What plans does the Secretary of State have to build out from this media Green Paper and take a whole-of-Government approach in order to enhance media literacy, to bear down on the conduits that are driving disinformation in our society, and to ensure that our armed forces and security services have precisely the resources they need to secure our integrity as a nation?
Lisa Nandy
The hon. Gentleman asked a number of questions, and I strongly agree with the essence of what he is saying. There is a war being waged in our communities and on our streets, and on local online forums as much as on national ones. When the recent by-election in Makerfield was triggered, overnight the targeting of people in my town of Wigan with misinformation and disinformation went through the roof. That is often deliberate, it is often triggered by foreign state actors, it can have an extremely disruptive influence on communities, and it is something that we need to deal with. The Green Paper deals with questions of media literacy and prominence, and other measures that we think will help, but nobody in this House should take this as the beginning and end of the conversation. I am working closely with colleagues across the House—including in Defence—to make sure we are equipped on every front for the war that we find ourselves in.
Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)
The Secretary of State will be aware that terrestrial television is not just an entertainment platform but a resilient form of communication that reaches into communities where digital, broadband or mobile signal quite simply do not have the reach or the reliability. Does she share my concern that the switch-off of terrestrial TV in either 2034 or 2044 could cut off communities in my constituency from that resilient communication platform, and will she meet me to discuss my concerns?
Lisa Nandy
I am confident, having heard my hon. Friend championing his constituents in this House, that he would never allow that to happen, and neither will we. I am happy to offer him a meeting with the relevant Minister.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
On a similar theme, undoubtedly near the top of the Secretary of State’s to-do list today is to answer written question No. 11584, which is due for answer tomorrow. The question is about the threat posed by the BBC World Service apparently discontinuing its longwave transmitters at Droitwich, Burghead and Westerglen. What we want to know is: how will closed societies like Russia be able to receive news information when they are subject to the suppression of all the internet-based routes?
Lisa Nandy
I will, of course, ensure that the right hon. Member gets the answer to his written question in a timely fashion—by tomorrow. I am also more than happy to follow up and discuss it with him.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
I welcome the Green Paper’s focus on media literacy, so that people in Portsmouth have the skills they need to identify misinformation and disinformation. As viewing habits change and technology develops, can the Secretary of State reassure the House and residents in Portsmouth, particularly those who may be less confident online and have limited access to digital services, that any transition towards internet-based television will be carefully managed?
Lisa Nandy
I am really happy to give my hon. Friend that assurance. That is why we are getting on the front foot now and working with industry to manage the transition. Access is obviously extremely important, but so too is affordability, and we are looking at that closely.
Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Reform)
Let me get this straight: the Government—either a Minister or, worse, unaccountable civil servants—are planning to decide which news providers are deemed trustworthy and which are deemed untrustworthy; and then the Government, or unaccountable civil servants and quangos, are going to give priority to the services that they deem to be trustworthy, and reduce the prominence of those that they do not like and consider to be untrustworthy. That sounds quite dystopian to me. How can it be seen as anything other than a serious attack on freedom of the press and freedom of speech?
Lisa Nandy
I am not going to take any lessons from him and his disgusting party, given the way that they spread misinformation and disinformation. This House has already come together to define what “public service media” is in law. The definition was passed by Parliament, and I do not recall there being a lot of concern about that; it has been enormously beneficial. One way that we could define “trusted news” would be to follow that definition, but we could also, for example, align with the editors’ code of practice. There are lots of different options, but to somehow claim that this is about the Government controlling what people see is absolute nonsense.
Jeff Smith (Manchester Withington) (Lab)
I warmly welcome the publication of the Green Paper. None of us has all the answers when it comes to the fast-moving media landscape, but setting out the challenges and some principled ways forward is a good start. I especially welcome the focus on a duty for media literacy. My personal view is that a public purpose for the BBC on media literacy might be better than one on growth, but that is a debate for another day. Is the Secretary of State slightly disappointed, as I was, in the tone of some of the contributions from the Opposition about the prominence of trusted news? We already have a prominence regime in place; we just need to update it for the modern age. In an era when misinformation and disinformation are rife, is it not more important than ever that people get access to trustworthy news, and is that not what a prominence regime allows?
Lisa Nandy
I agree. In particular, we are letting down a generation of young people, who, as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq), are often consuming media very differently from my generation and the generations before us. It cannot be right that my generation, who often watch and consume broadcasts on television sets, are able to easily and quickly find high-quality content and trusted news, but the younger generation are not.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
Hostile state actors routinely broadcast misinformation to our young people and radicalise them in their own homes. I agree completely with the Secretary of State that we have to take action; the problem is that primary legislation will never keep up with technology. I urge her to therefore consider a media Bill with wide-ranging powers that makes use of secondary legislation that can keep up with those changes to technology.
Lisa Nandy
The hon. Gentleman makes a similar point to the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. He is right to push us to think about how we can very rapidly adapt to this very rapidly changing landscape. There is a question for the whole House as to how much oversight the House will want to have and how much scrutiny will be given to any measures that we bring forward. The House will have to decide together whether the use of secondary legislation in this space is something that we collectively believe is acceptable. However, there is merit in what he proposes.
Matt Turmaine (Watford) (Lab)
As a former employee of the BBC for 15 years, I know the importance of those Reithian principles to educate, inform and entertain, which are at the core everything the organisation does. Dissemination of fake news and misinformation online is a genuine risk to our democracy. Does the Secretary of State agree that even if people are going to trusted sites and sources online, such as the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, there is a real risk of the mix of slop around it polluting people’s ability to see accurate information, and that this demonstrates the absolute need for trusted news sources online?
Lisa Nandy
As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton earlier, during the Southport riots, there was an increase in people going to the BBC and the Liverpool Echo to get information; we saw something similar after the Manchester Arena bombing, when people sought out the Manchester Evening News as a trusted source of news. My hon. Friend will be aware that many of those trusted sources are under serious financial pressure, which is one of the reasons that we acted—particularly through the local media strategy—to ensure that they remain available. We want to ensure that those sources are more prominent and easier to find online, but in order to do that, we have to ensure that they are actually there in the first place.
Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) (SNP)
The proliferation of misinformation, invidious algorithms and harmful content are the defining features of the current media landscape, and they are causing real harms and divisions within our communities. We need bold action to tackle this, and that surely includes taking on those who direct and abuse these situations. How will the Secretary of State promote trusted sources when there are people, even in this House, who are prepared to undermine them, and we are losing jobs and services at public service broadcasters?
Lisa Nandy
That is partly what this TV Green Paper is designed to address, although, as I said earlier, it is one part of the whole. Getting regulation online right, getting the enforcement of that regulation right, and being far more proactive through Ofcom in enforcing the existing law, are essential parts of this, as well as the measures that we have proposed around prominence and other areas.
Gordon McKee (Glasgow South) (Lab)
I welcome this Green Paper, which is both timely and forward looking. The Government are right to respond to the fact that people get much of their news from social media nowadays. As more and more people turn to artificial intelligence chatbots for news and information, what work are the Government doing to ensure that trusted sources of information are given prominence?
Lisa Nandy
We have done a number of things in this space. AI summaries online put real pressure on existing publishers, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology and I have met the publishing industry to discuss how we can better protect original sources, which are often far more accurate than the AI summaries that draw on their work. As I said to the Chair of the Select Committee, when it comes to media literacy, we need to equip not just the younger generation, but all of us with the skills necessary to navigate AI.
Sir Oliver Dowden (Hertsmere) (Con)
I urge the Secretary of State to keep a genuinely open mind on this consultation, and to be prepared to drop measures if the evidence does not stack up. The concept of prominence in particular will be very difficult to translate from a linear age to this age without imposing excessive costs and bureaucracy on broadcasters. As we have seen, the concept of trustworthy news is problematic, because one person’s “trustworthy news” is someone else’s propaganda. Just look at the debate between the BBC and GB News—frankly, right now, plenty of my constituents would trust GB News over the BBC. We cannot allow debate on this issue to become an echo chamber for liberal/left groupthink; otherwise, it will further undermine trust and confidence in this place.
Lisa Nandy
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to say that any responsible Government will be careful about how we navigate this landscape, because the definition of “high quality” and “trustworthy” is contested, and we need to protect the plurality and diversity of our news and the broader media industry. I do believe, however, that we have for a long time failed to empower our citizens and equip them with the ability to navigate the new landscape that we are in. The Government are particularly concerned about the blurring of news and fact with polemic and opinion, and that is a space in which we intend to act.
Sarah Coombes (West Bromwich) (Lab)
Given that we are in a world of fake news, and the impact of that on public trust, I really welcome the Secretary of State’s work to modernise the prominence regime. The BBC is the jewel in our national crown. People have mentioned the cuts; it is a real shame that we are seeing cuts to really important consumer shows, like “Money Box Live”. Scams are everywhere, so these shows are vital to our nation. Can the Secretary of State say a bit more about the BBC and its importance to our nation?
Lisa Nandy
I will say, very candidly, that I am concerned about the cuts that have been announced, too, and I raised those concerns directly with the incoming director general. The charter review process is obviously ongoing, and I would not want to see the BBC dismantling good structures, dismissing good journalists and closing down good programmes at a time when we are seeking to work together constructively to ensure that it is properly and adequately funded going forwards. There are significant pressures on all our public service broadcasters at the moment, and that is one reason why we have to grip this issue of transition, and work together to ensure nobody is left behind.
Mike Martin (Tunbridge Wells) (LD)
My question is in a similar vein to that asked by the hon. Member for West Bromwich (Sarah Coombes). I was really concerned to hear of the cuts at the BBC; “The World Tonight” is going, and “Today” is being cut back. This follows on the heels of cuts at “Newsnight”. It seems that the justification for these cuts is that programmes are being reoriented towards young people, which is obviously a good thing in and of itself. However, when I was 18, I did not listen to any of those programmes; now that I am in my 40s, I listen to them all. Do these cuts not undermine the BBC’s mission to educate and inform, and in this age of disinformation, is it not vital that we keep those programmes?
Lisa Nandy
As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich (Sarah Coombes), the elephant in the room is funding, because the BBC has not been adequately funded for quite some time. The hon. Gentleman will know that fewer and fewer people are paying the licence fee, which is becoming a major challenge for the BBC. We will set out a range of options, through the charter process, that are designed to tackle that, so that we can protect the high-quality programming that he rightly commends.
Chris Webb (Blackpool South) (Lab)
We know that misinformation and disinformation is on the rise right across our country, and that was shown in the recent Makerfield by-election; the Social Market Foundation reported that ahead of that by-election, there was a quadrupling of fake news, and that one in six posts on all the local Facebook groups were fake news. We have seen the same thing in my constituency; after a news article was published, the news went rampant across our town that a woman and child had been attacked at a train station. It never happened, but it caused fear and anxiety.
I warmly welcome the Green Paper, but how can we get more support for our trusted local news services, including local papers and broadcasters? They are what residents turn to in times of crisis when they need information. The Secretary of State rightly pointed to the example of the Liverpool Echo.
Lisa Nandy
I was really struck by that report by the SMF, and I certainly recognise that there is misinformation very close to home. My hon. Friend rightly says that that is not new. In fact, my local police force says that the biggest challenge it faces is misinformation and disinformation online, which leads people to believe that more violent crime is happening than there actually is, and that streets are not safe. It causes serious challenges to social cohesion. Earlier this year, we published the local media strategy, which is the start of our ambition for local media—it is the floor, not the ceiling. There is more we need to do, particularly in the online space, to ensure that publications such as the Liverpool Echo are able to thrive.
John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)
As a former journalist, I salute the Secretary of State’s ambition to leave no one behind, but as the hon. Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) pointed out, the death of terrestrial television risks leaving a lot of people in remote and rural Scotland behind. My constituency has a lot of notspots, and terrestrial television is a key source of news and entertainment. Can I ask the Secretary of State to use her influence in the forthcoming northern powerhouse Cabinet to get broadband rolled out properly across this country?
Lisa Nandy
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to talk about the centrality of broadband access. We are looking really carefully at digital exclusion, and we will make sure that this transition does not leave his constituents behind. I am looking to work with him to make sure that we get this right.
Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)
Last week we had a powerful reminder of how important trusted news broadcasting is when the BBC reported that arson attacks targeting the Prime Minister and his family were orchestrated by Russia. Not stopping there, Russian-backed bots then spread homophobic misinformation about those attacks. We know how the Conservative party responded to that: its deputy chair, the hon. Member for Stockton West (Matt Vickers), went on national TV and laughed. Now we can see how this Labour Government are responding to the issue. Can I urge the Secretary of State to go even further on supporting trusted news sources, as a powerful response to misinformation and disinformation online, a lot of it fuelled by our foreign adversaries?
Lisa Nandy
My hon. Friend is right to say that we should demand the highest standards from Members across this House and people in public life. I share his absolute horror at the way that the deputy chairman of the Conservative party responded.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Your Party)
I absolutely welcome this Green Paper. I think it is a really good step forward that we are having this national debate, but in it, I hope that the Leveson inquiry and its proposals will not be forgotten.
The Secretary will be aware that younger people—the majority of the population, in fact—do not watch mainstream television, or read newspapers, either in print or online; instead, they rely entirely on social media for their news, information, opinions and so on. Much of that content comes from behind a cloak of anonymity, and often it is dangerous, racist or abusive. We have a whole generation growing up whose only source of information is anonymous stuff on social media. I realise that we face a very difficult balancing act, in controlling access to wonderful technology and ensuring some degree of accuracy and accountability. I am sure that the Secretary of State is aware of this huge problem. Does she feel that there is a way forward on this conundrum through debate on the Green Paper?
Lisa Nandy
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the Leveson inquiry. I can tell the House that I met the families of the victims of press intrusion very recently. We have always acted with care in this space to ensure that we protect a free and fair press, but he is right to say that action is needed to better protect people in this space, and this Government are determined to take that action. I share his serious concern about the way that young people consume news. That is partly what this Green Paper is intended to address, but it is also one of the key driving forces behind the social media ban that my colleague the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology announced recently. We have not done enough to protect young people online, and we need to do more.
Several hon. Members rose—
Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)
Thank you, Mr Speaker—21 again. I thank the Secretary of State for her response to this urgent question, and particularly for her emphasis on the importance online literacy, which, as a former teacher—Chris Vince bingo in full force today—I know to be really important. I pay tribute to Michael Casey, editor of Your Harlow, an online newspaper that prints tens of thousands of articles every year, and that filled the hole left by Harlow Star when it closed down.
I would like to build on the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South (Gordon McKee), who said that more and more people are using AI summaries to get their news, and are not relying on trusted sources. Is there not a danger that if we, and the AI companies, do not provide support to trusted sources, they will not be able to continue?
Lisa Nandy
I have been working with the publishing industry to make sure that we protect our trusted sources and do not allow higher-quality content to be undermined by AI summaries. It is a concern that we recognise and share, and we will bring forward proposals around that to the House. We have seen lots of very good-quality independent news providers spring up around the country, and it is great to hear about my hon. Friend’s local newspaper in Harlow, but there are too many local news deserts across our country. That is precisely what the local media strategy intends to address.
Martin Vickers (Brigg and Immingham) (Con)
I have been relying on the BBC to deliver news since the days when Jack de Manio was presenting the “Today” programme and John Snagge was reading the news, and I still rely on the BBC to a considerable extend, but it does annoy me intensely at times, particularly recently, when cuts were announced. The programmes that it seems to be cutting are public service programmes, not ones delivered by the commercial sector. On top of that, we see the demise of news coverage on local radio. Will the Secretary of State assure me that she will convey those views to the BBC? Hopefully, it will have a rethink.
Lisa Nandy
I am very happy to do so, and the hon. Gentleman is right to mention the importance of local radio.
Ann Davies (Caerfyrddin) (PC)
I thank the Secretary of State for her informed answers. The new media Green Paper highlights the importance of continued universal access to good-quality, trusted television. Part of maintaining that access is making the content in the first place. With the news that the BBC Cymru Wales will face £9 million in spending cuts by the end of 2027-28, it is inevitable that Welsh commissions, already on the decrease, will decline even further. How will the Secretary of State protect Welsh-language content from such sweeping cuts, especially considering that access is already limited for us?
Lisa Nandy
I was recently at the BBC in Cardiff. The importance of Welsh-language content is not lost on this Government, and I have discussed the matter with both the interim director general and the new director general. We have been very keen to impress on the BBC the importance of protecting a regional footprint across all our nations and regions—something pioneered by former director general Tim Davie. Through the charter review process, we are ambitious for more power and funding to be dispersed out of London, so that the BBC becomes the engine of the nations and regions, producing content that reflects all our nations and regions, not just some parts of the country.
Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)
I add my voice to those concerned about the transfer to TV over IP. Technology moves very fast, and I accept at face value the Secretary of State’s commitment that no one will be left behind. However, we have had 20 years of change, from fibre to cabinet and now fibre to premises, yet some of my constituents are still on copper to premises, surviving on download speeds of 2 or 3 megabits per second, which is not capable of getting television into their homes, whether the switchover is in 2034 or later.
Can I urge the Secretary of State, before any decision is made, to work very closely with DSIT? No matter what the core statistics say about how many homes have fibre to premises, people will still be left behind, particularly in rural communities. Added to that, in many villages where there is only one fibre provider and no competition, there is fibre and there is fibre, and not all of it is as reliable as it looks.
Lisa Nandy
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I am happy to give him that assurance. He will know that the Minister for Media is also a Minister in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and I am sure he will be working closely with his colleagues to make sure that we address those concerns.
Mr Joshua Reynolds (Maidenhead) (LD)
Over recent weeks, one of the most frequent adverts served to me and many others on X is an AI-generated fake image of a Member of this House fighting with the Governor of the Bank of England. When half of adults cite social media as one of the sources from which they get their news, can the Secretary of State confirm what conversations she has had with colleagues in DSIT to make sure that these fake-news social media adverts do not become our news?
Lisa Nandy
The hon. Gentleman is right to raise that issue, which I have discussed with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. She and I are determined to make sure that we properly regulate the online space so that we protect people from those sorts of fake, generated images.
Dr Neil Hudson (Epping Forest) (Con)
Many of my constituents in Epping Forest are very worried about proposals to stop terrestrial TV broadcasts from 2034. Like local radio, for many people in both urban and rural areas, and for older and more vulnerable people, terrestrial TV is a lifeline in their daily lives. Will the Government have a strong rethink about this?
Lisa Nandy
As I said in previous answers, we have to manage this transition. We cannot just drift into an unmanaged transition, which is precisely why we have brought these proposals forward early, with genuinely open questions about the date of the transition. I reiterate what I have said to many hon. Members: we are absolutely determined to get on the front foot and make sure that nobody is left behind.
Ayoub Khan (Birmingham Perry Barr) (Ind)
I am confident that everybody in this House wants freedom of speech and freedom of expression. However, we are all against freely available misinformation and disinformation, whether it is about the lack of integration in certain neighbourhoods or international affairs. There is clearly distrust, so something needs to be done. I welcome the Secretary of State bringing forward a Green Paper, but how will the Government ensure that those with the deepest pockets do not get prevalence when we look at mainstream media?
Lisa Nandy
One of the things we are trying to do is protect the plurality and diversity of our media, and also make sure that people have better access to high-quality sources not just of news but of content as well. That includes things such as children’s programming, which are really important. However, the hon. Gentleman is right to recognise that we have lived through a revolution in media and media consumption, and we just have not been quick enough to respond. That is partly what this TV Green Paper is designed to address.
Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)
I welcome the Green Paper. Many of my constituents in Stockland Bristol and Fiddington continue to endure very poor or non-existent broadband coverage and mobile signals, so they are concerned about the Secretary of State’s proposal to stop terrestrial broadcasts by 2034. Will she ensure that the proposal does not cut off my constituents in rural areas?
Lisa Nandy
I also represent a largely rural constituency, and I absolutely recognise the challenges that the hon. Gentleman talks about in relation not just to broadband but mobile signals. I cannot get reception in my own house, to be honest. There is a real challenge, which is precisely why we have brought forward these proposals now, with a genuinely open question about 2034 or 2044, so that we can work with industry to ensure that his constituents are not left behind.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Secretary of State very much for her answers and her positivity in responding to all the questions that have been asked. Mine is a very specific question relating to Northern Ireland, and I think she will be quite perturbed when I give her some figures. With the new media Green Paper pushing for a total IPTV transition by 2034, what specific guarantees can she give to nearly half of all households in Northern Ireland—some 370,000 people—that still rely entirely on digital terrestrial TV via an aerial, so that our rural and vulnerable communities are not left in a digital blackout as a result of the Green Paper’s proposals?
Lisa Nandy
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to say that there are particular challenges in certain parts of the country, and Northern Ireland is very firmly at the forefront of not just my mind but the mind of the Minister for Media as well. I would be more than happy to discuss it further with him, but we will work together to make sure that nobody is left behind.
Nottingham Maternity and Neonatal Services
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (James Murray)
With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will make a statement on the independent review of maternity services at Nottingham University hospitals NHS trust.
Donna Ockenden’s review is the largest into a maternity service in the history of the NHS. The nature and sheer scale of the failings it exposes are horrific. It uncovers dangerously and tragically deficient care at almost every turn. Its findings and conclusions are chilling.
The report covers 13 years, including accounts from 838 members of staff and, crucially, the experiences of 2,536 affected families. I met a small number of those affected families last week, and I felt numb after hearing the depth of their pain. I felt even more numb when I considered how many families not in the room went through such trauma too, and the forgotten children who survived but live every day with the consequences of maternity care failings.
I felt devastated that so many women and babies, as well as their fathers and other family members, had suffered injury, death and lasting trauma while under the care of the NHS. Now having met the families, and having seen the report, I feel appalled by the neglect, incompetence, racism, discrimination, contempt and harassment that so many suffered. I feel heartbroken to know that, so many times, when they tried to raise the alarm about their care, they were ignored, sneered at, disbelieved, blamed and lied to. How on earth could this have happened? There is no single answer, but Donna Ockenden shines a light on what was going on.
First and foremost, women were not listened to. Donna Ockenden says that the staff shortages and lack of training in Nottingham were among the worst she has ever come across. Bullying by doctors and senior midwives was rife, which meant that staff who tried to speak up were intimidated and ridiculed. There was a culture of cover-up at the highest levels of the trust, and there were ineffective and inadequate responses from regulators.
Perhaps most damning of all, for years the trust ignored evidence of clinical and cultural flaws in both internal and external reviews that it had itself ordered. When I met Donna Ockenden last week, she told me that those inquiries were “diligent” and of “good quality” but that they were effectively swept under the carpet by the board. That refusal to act is unforgivable.
Donna Ockenden and her team deserve huge credit for their forensic and compassionate approach, as does my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), herself a harmed mother, as well as Members for neighbouring constituencies who have walked side by side with their constituents through years of anguish and struggle.
However, the driving force behind the review has been the affected families themselves. They have demonstrated more patience, more courage and more tenacity than one might imagine is possible from those dealing with broken hearts that will never mend. Though each of their experiences is unique, one feature is common: at the very moment when they were at their most vulnerable, they placed themselves and the lives of their unborn babies in the hands of the NHS—and the NHS failed them catastrophically.
To all those who have suffered so appallingly, I say today, on behalf of the NHS: I am sorry. I am sorry not just for the failures, or the heartless and undignified treatment, but because your cries of concern went unheard for too long—and so the Government will act. We will act by taking immediate steps, including to expand Martha’s rule to all maternity and neonatal settings so that parents can demand a second opinion if they feel their concerns are being ignored.
I know that some people may want me to accept all the review’s recommendations today, but in the past too many recommendations have been accepted and then have sat on a shelf gathering dust, and we have seen more deaths and more suffering. I do not want to let down the families I met in Nottingham, or bereaved parents anywhere else in the country. I want to use the national maternity and neonatal taskforce, which I chair, to create a comprehensive action plan to be published by the end of this year that will address all the national-level recommendations from this review and others. I am confident that work will be welcomed by all those midwives, obstetricians, paediatricians and other healthcare workers who strive every day to make sure that babies are born safely and that women receive outstanding levels of care.
It is clear that, in case after case, families felt that regulators, including the General Medical Council, the Nursing and Midwifery Council and the Care Quality Commission, were more concerned with protecting clinicians than with providing accountability. That is damning and that is wrong. As one grieving mother told me:
“They put the fox in charge of the hen house.”
Clinicians and trust leaders must know that their behaviour will be properly scrutinised and that their actions will have consequences. We must meet the test of the Nottingham victim who told me last week that “accountability drives action”.
We are making changes to the CQC, one of which is to extend the cut-off period to initiate proceedings from three to five years so there is more time for families to bring cases. I will also call in the chair and chief executive of the GMC to hear directly their account of the failures at NUH. Let me be clear: if their response falls short, things will change at the GMC.
From speaking to families in Nottingham, I know that there is real and understandable anger that some leaders and clinicians at the centre of this review were able to avoid giving evidence. Today, I make a commitment that, when passed, we will use the Hillsborough law’s duty of candour to ensure that witnesses in upcoming reviews of maternity service failures, including those in Leeds and Sussex, can be forced to provide evidence. That change will make sure no one is able to refuse to co-operate in the search for accountability and justice ever again.
There is so much in the stories of the families in Nottingham that is shocking and heartbreaking, but the way the bodies of their loved ones were handled by hospital mortuary services revealed a level of disrespect and a lack of humanity that—I will be honest—left me utterly aghast. The details are disturbing, but they need to be heard to understand the gravity of what families were confronted with: deceased babies referred to as a “specimen” or “sample”; a baby placed into a mortuary space already occupied by an unknown and unrelated adult; a baby disposed of as clinical waste against the express wishes of their parents; and a baby kept in a domestic fridge in a bereavement room. The emotional and psychological effect of those dehumanising failures was to layer the most profound disrespect on the most unbearable distress. There is also evidence that the trust actively decided not to report failings in mortuary care to families.
As hon. Members will know, there is an active police investigation and arrests have been made, which limits what I can say. As a start, however, I have asked NHS England to write to trusts to make sure these appalling experiences are not happening elsewhere in the NHS. I confirm today that the Human Tissue Authority will require all mortuaries to review internal records going back 10 years to ensure all incidents have been logged and reported. I have instructed them to report the findings directly to me by 16 October.
When I met the Nottingham families last week, they also raised with me the issue around what are known as secondary victims. In maternity settings, fathers, partners and others are actively encouraged to be present to support mothers through labour and delivery. However, the law does not allow them to bring their own claims for the psychiatric illness suffered as a direct result of witnessing their partner or baby suffer injury or die. I have therefore asked David Lock KC to work with my officials to consider that important issue as part of his wider work on clinical negligence.
Donna Ockenden acknowledges that NUH has not waited for her findings to be published to start making improvements. I will speak to the chief executive next week to interrogate the trust’s response and make sure there is a proper plan in place for implementing the recommendations speedily and effectively. But there is a long road ahead before NUH fully addresses all the issues and before it can possibly regain the full trust and confidence of the communities it serves.
I close where I began: with the families. Nothing can make up for what they have gone through, but this report is a tribute to their resilience and tenacity. I say to them directly: you had to drive this for so long, but you are no longer driving this alone. We are with you and we will not stop until you have the accountability and the justice you deserve. I commend this statement to the House.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)
I call the shadow Secretary of State.
Stuart Andrew (Daventry) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement and Donna Ockenden and her team for the care and compassion with which they conducted the review. We had a meeting with her yesterday, and I have to say that it was probably one of the most difficult meetings that I have ever had. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh). I can see how deeply personal and painful this is, and I admire her and all her colleagues from the region at what must be a very difficult moment.
Let me say from the outset that I want to be constructive in opposition when it comes to this issue. We need to work together; we have to see improvements. I begin with the women, babies, fathers, partners and families whose lives sit behind the review’s findings. To them, we owe a profound apology for failing them when a family should feel safest, most supported and most able to trust the care around them. For too many, that trust was broken; women were not listened to, families were not believed and warning signs were missed. Some suffered the deepest lost, others were left physically unsafe and others psychologically scarred. No statement can repair that pain, but it can mark the point at which testimony becomes responsibility, and responsibility becomes action.
The painful truth is not only that the failings occurred but that the themes are familiar: women not heard, families dismissed, poor communication, missed deterioration, weak governance and people unable to speak up. Maternity and neonatal safety has challenged Governments of both parties, but it would be wrong to let that history soften the urgency. Women and families are tired of telling their story, hearing promises and seeing the same themes return. The question is whether the system will move because of this review, and so I put three tests to the Secretary of State.
The first is the listening test. Women and families were not consistently listened to. Their concerns were too often dismissed or not acted upon. That is not a soft issue; it is a safety issue. How will the Government embed listening as a clinical discipline? How will trusts measure whether women feel heard? Will complaints and near misses be treated as information for improvement?
The second is the culture test. The review describes bullying, hierarchy and poor psychological safety affecting staff’s decisions and willingness to escalate. I pay tribute to those who were brave enough to do so. In maternity and neonatal care, minutes matter. If staff cannot challenge, safety is weakened. Staff cannot provide the care they want to if they are exhausted or unsupported, or if hierarchy matters more than candour. So I ask: how will boards be held accountable for that ward culture?
The third test is the delivery test. Harm rarely followed one error; it usually followed a chain of poor communication, weak risk assessment, delayed escalation, staff pressure, inadequate governance and missed learning. The response cannot be a single announcement. It must be accompanied by a delivery plan, so will the Secretary of State publish a national implementation plan with named accountability, delivery dates and regular updates to this House? That plan must address the workforce so that staff have the support and information they need to fulfil their roles to the ability they wish.
That plan must design services for today and the future, not rely on assumptions from the past. Women are having children older, pregnancies are more complex and more women are entering pregnancy with pre-existing conditions, previous loss, fertility treatment, mental health needs or circumstances shaping care. That means a need for practical, personalised care, informed choice and each woman being treated as a whole. The review also requires us to confront inequalities. The safety of a patient must not depend on confidence, class, ethnicity, language or an ability to fight through the system. The issue with our mortuaries is also really shocking. The horror stories that we have heard must never happen again. Is the Secretary of State working with colleagues in the Department of Justice to see what more needs to be done to overhaul this area?
Finally, we must recognise the psychological harm caused through silence, poor communication, lack of bereavement support and the battle for honesty. We know that our mortuaries need to have the highest standards. Compassion after harm is not a courtesy; it is a duty. Trust is rebuilt when women feel the difference in the room, when words change decisions, when staff speak without fear, when risk is escalated in time and when boards are judged by results. Where the Government act to improve safety, accountability, staffing and family voice, they will have our support so that we can see this through together. Where they do not, they will face our scrutiny. This review began with families who had to fight to be heard. The task now is to ensure that no family has to fight so hard again.
James Murray
I thank the shadow Secretary of State for not only the content but the tone of his response, and for the approach that he has taken. I firmly welcome this collaborative approach, because he rightly points out that this is an area that we should work across parties and across this whole House to address. His summary of the key issues that we must address through the work that we are doing—first and foremost, ensuring that women are listened to; the cultural changes we need to see; and the delivery test, recognising that this is a chain of failure—was very well made and in line with where I and the Department are coming at this issue from.
As I mentioned earlier, all the recommendations from today’s report, as well as the recommendations from the national report that Baroness Amos has been working on and from other inquiries and reviews of maternity service failures, will come to the national taskforce that I chair, precisely to deliver that delivery plan—that comprehensive plan of action. We will ensure that it is published by the end of this year, and the Government, working with the Opposition, will ensure that it is delivered across this country.
Michelle Welsh (Sherwood Forest) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. For openness and transparency, I note that I have been campaigning on this for six years and I am a harmed mother at Nottingham University hospitals NHS trust. I start by thanking the brave families—my friends—and Donna Ockenden and her team. What has happened is horrific: bullying, cover-ups, racism, discrimination and appalling practice. The way babies have been treated at birth and then at the end of their life is a national disgrace.
One of the most uncomfortable truths in this report is that it was not a regulator, a policy, a protocol, a law or a Government Department that brought us this inquiry; it was families—bereaved families, harmed families—having to speak again and again about their most horrendous and traumatic experience for more than a decade. That does not signify a system that is working. The report identified avoidable deaths, harm and profound failings. The publication of this report is simply not enough. What is required now is action, accountability and change. Can the Secretary of State therefore assure the House that there will be a plan with robust oversight and questioning of regulators and senior staff? Will he work with Nottinghamshire families and Nottinghamshire MPs to ensure that justice is truly and fully delivered?
James Murray
I thank my hon. Friend for her questions. Let me put on record again how much I have appreciated her advocacy, her support, her sharing of her own experience and her standing up for the many hundreds of families in the area she represents. Her contribution is invaluable to this most important work that we are doing as a Government. She talked about families driving this report and making sure that it happened, and she is absolutely right. I met some of those families last week in Nottingham, and as well as feeling numb at the depth and breadth of their pain, the feeling I left with was a sense of their exhaustion at having fought for so long to be listened to and to get this into the open. Our responsibility as a Government and as MPs is to say that, now it is out in the open for us all to see, we all bear a responsibility to help them carry this forward. I take that responsibility with the utmost seriousness.
My hon. Friend asked about a plan to change maternity services in Nottingham and across the country. There will be specific local recommendations in Nottingham, and I am meeting the chief executive of the trust next week to pick that up directly with him, but there are more recommendations in the report that will have national implications, along with the recommendations from the national review that is under way. It is crucial that all those recommendations are formed into a plan of action, and the taskforce that I chair will be crucial in making sure that these recommendations do not just get accepted and then sit on a shelf gathering dust, but form a plan of action that we can stand behind as a Government.
Finally, my hon. Friend mentioned the importance of action, accountability and change. I repeat what I said in my statement: one of the phrases that stuck with me powerfully from my meeting with Nottingham families last week was from the person who said that “accountability drives action”. Without that accountability, we cannot have a guarantee of action. That is why the accountability that the families seek is the change that we as a Government must seek to deliver.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)
I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
May I start by acknowledging the hon. Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), Donna Ockenden and the Secretary of State for the statement and for their hard work? I thank the Secretary of State for the actions that he has proposed so far, which I think are the first tangible actions we have heard in this place. I must also acknowledge the incredible courage and resilience of the Nottingham families who have been instrumental in bringing about this review. No one can imagine the pain that they have gone through.
I am distressed and angry to be stood here once again speaking about babies who should not have lost their lives, mothers who should not have lost their lives and trauma that families should not have experienced. Review after review has led to 748 recommendations since 2015, but birth injury and mortality rates have continued to rise. These reviews all reveal similar issues: unsafe staffing levels, lessons not learned, issues not escalated, insufficient training, and women’s concerns ignored.
Four years ago, after the Shrewsbury review, we found that over 200 babies had died unnecessarily in Shropshire, yet things have got worse. Donna Ockenden’s Nottingham report reveals new and extremely distressing revelations about serious failures to protect the dignity of the deceased in after-death care, something that must be addressed through proper regulation.
Liberal Democrats have put forward a maternity rescue package that would guarantee one-to-one midwifery care and introduce a national maternity commissioner to oversee vital improvements. It would be nonsensical for the Government not to take a strategy forward. Will the Secretary of State pledge to implement every single one of the Nottingham report’s essential actions, and to work with us to deliver the essential investment we need to make Britain a safe place to have a baby, and end this shocking cycle of failure? Anger is not enough. Mothers, doctors and midwives are sick of seeing review after review and being met with stasis, with the same failures repeated over and over again. This must be the moment we say, “Enough.”
James Murray
I thank the hon. Lady for her words. When she spoke about ending this cycle, she sums up a feeling that I think many of us have: the cycle of inquiries and investigations revealing what has been happening in maternity services and leading to recommendations, which are accepted, but then things do not change enough, and action is not taken to address all the issues raised. That is the cycle we need to break. The national taskforce, which is established and which I chair, will take all the recommendations from Donna Ockenden’s report, as well as those from Baroness Amos’s national review, which will be published shortly, as well as some of the other hundreds of recommendations that the hon. Lady mentioned, and ensure that it produces a comprehensive action plan by the end of the year. The challenge for us is not simply to accept recommendations, but to produce and deliver that action plan.
Michael Payne (Gedling) (Lab)
Today’s publication of Donna Ockenden’s report into maternity services in Nottinghamshire is a difficult and deeply emotional moment for families across our county and city. I want to place on the record my thanks to Donna Ockenden and her outstanding team for the care, compassion and thoroughness with which they have exposed the devastating cases of these families. Let me also place on the record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh). She is a fearless and formidable campaigner for justice and has walked this journey with the families every step of the way, and I know just how proud her son Billy will be watching her from home today.
My thoughts are first and foremost with the families whose lives have been changed forever by the loss of their babies, and the mothers who should have received safe care but were harmed. Behind every page of this report are families who have endured unimaginable grief and who have spent years fighting simply to have their voices heard. I pay tribute to their courage, dignity and determination. In the face of heartbreak, they refused to be silenced. They fought not only for answers about their loved ones, but to ensure that other families would not suffer the same pain.
Can my right hon. Friend confirm that he will consider all options available to deliver justice and accountability for those families who have waited far too long for answers? Will he assure me and the whole House that the lessons identified in the report will be fully implemented and embedded throughout maternity services in Nottinghamshire and around the United Kingdom, so that no family has to endure what far too many families have already endured?
James Murray
I thank my hon. Friend for his comments and questions, and I echo his words about paying tribute to the courage, dignity and determination of the families who have driven the report and driven these shocking failures out into the open, so that we can all see the scale and depth of what has happened. He asks me about embedding the lessons from the review. I assure him that my priority is to ensure that the local lessons around the situation in Nottingham are embedded, and I will meet the chief executive of the trust next week, but also that those recommendations that have implications about national maternity services are taken directly into the taskforce that I chair, along with recommendations from other reports, and that we produce that plan of action by the end of the year. Let me also reassure him that, in that search for change, justice and accountability, I will take nothing off the table.
Madam Deputy Speaker
I call the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee.
Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)
I, too, pay tribute to those families who came forward with their stories, but also to the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of families across the country who are hearing these stories today and are triggered because it reminds them of their own, including in my area in Oxfordshire.
What struck me most about the report was the section on leadership and culture, and how when midwives and members of staff raised the alarm, they did not have access to the board, and board members were not curious enough to ask the right questions. I am also struck that in the Secretary of State’s answers—he is right to point to the national recommendations that are yet to come; our understanding is they are coming next week—he failed to mention whether there will be any pot of money to ensure that any recommendations that need double-running in order to happen quickly will have the necessary resources. Can he assure the House not only that will his taskforce seek to implement these recommendations, but that he will ensure that the money exists for staffing, training and buildings so that they are implemented as quickly as possible, so that we do not have to sit here crying on these Benches on behalf of our constituents any more?
James Murray
I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. She speaks about funding, which is of course a very important part of the response that we need to have to the failings in maternity care. We are investing £25 million, as I am sure she is aware, in tackling the causes of maternal death, to enhance bereavement facilities and to improve triage facilities, as well as £145 million through the estates safety fund to address safety risks in the maternity and neonatal estate. For me, this is not just about funding; this is also about culture, exactly as she says. When there is a culture of mothers and midwives not being listened to, and of the board, in this case, commissioning reviews and then ignoring them, that is where the problem lies. That is what we need to change. There is no single lever we can pull, no single change we need to make; we need to ensure that, from top to bottom, maternity services are overhauled in order to be fit for the future.
Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)
First, I want to thank the families who were bereaved and harmed by Nottingham University hospitals NHS trust—some of the most courageous and selfless people I have had the privilege of knowing, including my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh). They have for years relentlessly pursued the truth, justice, accountability and real change, often at great personal cost, and not only for their own families but to prevent future families having to endure similar trauma and cruelty. I also want to express my sincere gratitude to Donna Ockenden for her service to Nottinghamshire. I am so thankful that it was her who led this review.
The scale and magnitude of the systemic failures uncovered by the review are truly harrowing. Mothers and babies were harmed and even died through the most shocking negligence and indifference. Families were lied to, disbelieved, blamed and gaslit. Mistakes were covered up and regulators failed to do their jobs. One of my constituents included in the review summed up well where we go from here when she told the Secretary of State that
“we need immediate action and we need long-term accountability”.
On immediate actions, will the Secretary of State set out a timeline of when he expects to be able to implement the recommendations in full? On accountability, is he open to a statutory inquiry, provided that it does not delay criminal proceedings?
James Murray
I thank my hon. Friend for her comments and questions. As well as thanking the families for what they have done to drive the report forward, she also thanked Donna Ockenden for her critical work in producing this report, and to those thanks I add my own. My hon. Friend asks about the timetable for action. The national taskforce, which I chair, will draw together all the national recommendations, all the recommendations from Donna Ockenden’s report, the recommendations from Baroness Amos’s report, and any other report on failures in maternity services, and the taskforce will report by the end of the year. That will be the timetable for us ensuring that there is a comprehensive plan of action. I know from my conversations with families that some have wanted a public inquiry and others have had different views. Let me be clear that, for me, no options are off the table.
Sir Jeremy Hunt (Godalming and Ash) (Con)
It is a matter of profound shame for all of us in the House that in a society that we call compassionate, a baby’s body could be disposed of as clinical waste. I add my thanks to the families and salute their courage, including the hon. Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), and particularly Jack and Sarah Hawkins, and all those families who have shown such courage in coming forward with these utterly appalling stories.
I commissioned a number of maternity reviews, and I am afraid that today I feel a terrible sense of déjà-vu. I worry that a lot of the recommendations, and the things that I suspect the Government will end up doing, amount to central direction and central control, which we know usually does not work in the NHS. I was encouraged that the Secretary of State, in his thoughtful comments, used the word “accountability”, because the core problem is a lack of clinical accountability. For his solutions, will he consider a complete overhaul, so that every mother, the moment she knows she is pregnant, is given a small team, including a doctor and midwives, and is told, “This is the team, this is the person who is responsible for the safe birth of your child”, so that she always knows who to go to? That is where things are currently falling between the seams. Ensuring that people always know who is responsible and who to go to is the only way that we will stop these things happening time after time.
James Murray
I sincerely thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments. I have a great deal of respect for him, as he knows, so I very much appreciate him making his suggestions in that manner. Let me add to what he said about Jack and Sarah Hawkins, who I met last week in Nottingham. Their sheer determination to push for accountability and justice is incredibly humbling. The right hon. Gentleman mentions the importance of clinical accountability, which gets to the core of how to drive change in the NHS—as he knows, and as I now know, that is not always possible through central control, or by instructions being sent out from the Department of Health and Social Care or NHS England. We must ensure that the entire system is structured in the right way to provide that accountability and to drive change and action, and I will put under careful consideration his suggestion about how that might be achieved.
Steve Yemm (Mansfield) (Lab)
Today’s publication of Donna Ockenden’s report has laid bare absolutely appalling and systemic failures in maternity services in Nottinghamshire, with thousands of families suffering avoidable harm, and in many cases feeling ignored, dismissed or let down by the very institutions that were put in place to protect them. The report identifies profound failures of leadership, governance and accountability, and an inability to learn from mistakes. Given the scale of the failings and the repeated concerns raised in previous maternity reviews, is it now time for the Government to establish a full, judge-led, statutory public inquiry, with the power to compel witnesses, and examine whether wider NHS and regulatory failures have allowed these tragedies to occur over such a prolonged period?
James Murray
My hon. Friend raises the important issue of compelling witnesses to give evidence. Although many members of staff contributed towards Donna Ockenden’s review, I found the fact that so many senior leaders did not shocking, and I think it is unacceptable. We will change that by ensuring that the duty of candour, which is due to come in under the Hillsborough law once that is in place, will apply to future maternity reviews, including those taking place in Leeds and Sussex. As I said a few moments ago, there are different views among different families about whether they do or do not want a public inquiry, but I am not taking any options off the table.
Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Reform)
May I put on record my admiration for the 2,500 families across our county of Nottinghamshire who gave evidence to Donna Ockenden and shared what were undoubtedly the most personal stories that one could ever imagine sharing as a parent? I will never forget a family coming to see me at my surgery, who said they had been told that their time was up when they were sitting together with their baby, and they were asked to leave. They went to the café, and then they sat on the floor, on the kerb in the car park, and cried together. They said that it was like being shooed out of a restaurant by a rude waiter, not literally the most heartbreaking moment in someone’s life. I was very disturbed to read for the first time revelations about the mortuary service at Nottingham, which is frankly astonishing. It seems as if the right steps are being taken, but we all hope that those responsible for that feel the full force of the law.
Nationally, I hope that every hospital trust reading the report now treats the situation as the emergency it truly is. It is astonishing that the NHS is spending almost as much on negligence claims as on maternity services themselves, although of course the money is nothing compared with the misery and pain that has been inflicted on families. For our hospitals in Nottingham, improvements seem to have been driven by ensuring that there is now regular and high-quality training, which was sadly very absent for a long time. Can the Secretary of State assure me that mandatory and regular training is now ensured in all maternity hospitals across the country?
James Murray
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his remarks. The story he told was of yet another horrific and harrowing experience that a family has gone through in this scandal. He asked whether we want to prioritise a focus on regular and high-quality training across the country, and I think it is essential to ensure that such training is in place. Although I do not want to prejudge the action plan that the taskforce I am chairing will produce, I cannot imagine a world where training is not a key part of that. Having seen the report, and spoken to families and to Donna Ockenden, my strong feeling is that no single action will transform the system on its own, and that we need a comprehensive plan from every angle to truly transform maternity services across the country.
Jo White (Bassetlaw) (Lab)
My mum was a midwife, and as a child I lived vicariously the life on a maternity ward. She worked to the very highest standards possible, and used to come home and talk to me about sloppy standards, falling standards and insensitivity. What happened at NUH is the lowest of the low, and I send my thoughts and condolences, and pay tribute to the families, and to the staff who tried to whistleblow. The memories of the babies must never be forgotten; it is our responsibility to ensure that those memories live forever.
I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh). She came here with the dedication, commitment and desire to ensure that this report was done. So often she spoke to me about it, and so often she has had conversations with her Nottinghamshire colleagues about what she is doing. We have tried to support her all the way through, and I am so proud to be with her today. I believe this House should congratulate her on her commitment and dedication, to what happened to her child, and to the lost babies and the support she has given to those families. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]
My ask of the Secretary of State is to follow this through, so that the recommendations are implemented, reported on and monitored. I welcome his announcement that he will use the Hillsborough law to ensure that those who have failed to give evidence or to come forward are forced to do so.
James Murray
I thank my hon. Friend for her comments and I welcome her support for our decision to ensure the duty of candour introduced by the Hillsborough law will apply to future maternity reviews, such as those due to happen in relation to Leeds and Sussex. In terms of the process of what happens next and the implementation of the changes that we know need to happen, I reassure her that the national taskforce that I chair will produce, by the end of this year, a comprehensive plan of action that will be based on a consideration of all the recommendations that apply nationally in Donna Ockenden’s review, as well as the recommendations from Baroness Amos’s review and any other reviews that have issued recommendations on the subject too.
Sir Gavin Williamson (Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge) (Con)
I was not that familiar with the issue of neonatal and maternity services until my constituent, Mr Thomas Hender, contacted me about the tragic loss of his son, Aubrey. He highlighted the battle that he and his family had gone through, and that so many others had been going through. Sadly, these issues have happened not just at the NHS trust in Nottingham, but at those in Morecambe Bay, East Kent, Shrewsbury and Telford, Leeds and Sussex. Some six further reviews and investigations have been carried out. I value the fact that the Secretary of State said that he had an open mind about a public inquiry; I think we need to move in that direction. It was not until the review of care at the Mid Staffordshire NHS trust became a public inquiry that we were able to address some of the issues. The issues facing neonatal and maternity services are present not only in the areas that I mentioned, but they touch on many other corners of the country, and only a public inquiry can address that.
James Murray
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments and for telling us some of the story of Thomas and his son, Aubrey. On the need for action, I intend the taskforce that I chair, which will consider all the recommendations from Donna Ockenden’s report and other investigations into failures in maternity services, to produce a comprehensive action plan by the end of this year. That will ensure, as I said earlier, that these recommendations do not sit on shelves gathering dust and that they are put into action. I take on board his points about a public inquiry. I know that his views are shared by some of the families, but I am conscious that other families have different views on this matter. What unites them all is a desire for action, accountability and justice. We need to find the best route to deliver that for them, because that is, above all, the most important thing. However, I reassure him, as I have reassured other hon. Members, that for me no options should be off the table.
Juliet Campbell (Broxtowe) (Lab)
I pay tribute and give my admiration to the families who have fought so hard and who have been so strong at this time in their lives, when they have had to repeat what they have been through over and over again. Their fight for justice and accountability is truly fought. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), who has not stopped this fight and has continued the story, and I commend her for everything that she has done.
The findings of the Donna Ockenden review are harrowing. It is indefensible that babies, mothers, fathers and families in my constituency have suffered injury, death and lasting trauma under the care of the NHS. The Ockenden review has made it clear that mothers’ voices were not listened to and that families were not treated with the dignity, respect and compassion that they not only deserve but is expected from our NHS. The indifference that people have shown to families is indefensible. The public listening to the debate at home will understandably be wondering how we are here again and asking when things will change. I say to the Secretary of State: let us not treat these recommendations as just another set of recommendations to put on the shelf, but let us look at them as a catalyst for change and improvement, making sure that inequalities are addressed. Will the Secretary of State outline what immediate steps the Government will be taking on the most urgent recommendations in the review, and set out how they will be monitored and reviewed?
James Murray
I thank my hon. Friend for her comments about the role of the families in fighting for justice. She is absolutely right that the recommendations of the Ockenden report, Baroness Amos’s report, which is due shortly, and other reviews and inquiries into maternity services must not simply end up on the shelf gathering dust. That is why the process that I have spoken about today, whereby the national taskforce that I chair will produce a comprehensive action plan by the end of the year, is so important. That will give us the right forum to develop a plan across all aspects and from all angles on this horrific scandal, including the inequalities faced by different families from different backgrounds that my hon. Friend alluded to. I agree with her wholeheartedly that this moment and this process that we are now going into must be a catalyst for change.
Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)
I thank the Secretary of State for the way in which he delivered the statement and the apology that he issued, which I think will be received as sincere and heartfelt. Hearing the details in the report, I am not angry but ashamed—ashamed that women and babies have suffered so grievously in this country at their most vulnerable moment. It is a moment of shame for all of us. The report and the Secretary of State speak of failed regulation. I was shocked to learn that a “good” rating can be issued by the Care Quality Commission even when there are still ongoing safety failures at a trust. Does he agree with me that no trust should be labelled “good” if it still has the “requires improvement” rating for safety?
James Murray
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about regulators and our regulatory system. The report exposes how completely unacceptable it is that regulators have protected their own and what a serious matter that is. We need to ensure that the regulators are doing their job properly, that they have the right mandate to do so and that they have the right instructions about driving up performance in trusts across the country, because otherwise we run the risk of being in a situation in the future where we are again confronted with what he accurately described as shame.
James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)
I put on record my thanks and respect for the resolute campaigning of the Nottingham survivors, especially my constituents, Jack and Sarah Hawkins, who have worked so hard to bring these issues to regional and then national attention. They have made sure that baby Harriet’s death was not in vain. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) who was their MP for many years. As she is a Minister, she will not be speaking in this statement, but she deserves recognition for the steadfast support she gave to them as a family, as well as other families from Nottingham South.
I thank Donna Ockenden who, in addition to supporting thousands of families, invested so much time in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire MPs to ensure that we understood the systemic failings that she was working so hard to identify. This is undoubtedly a shameful day for the NHS.
Another fearless campaigner from Rushcliffe is Ashley Harper, who has been in touch with me about the maternity and neonatal taskforce and its perceived failure to recognise and support families who have been harmed. She would like to see a family expert for harmed children and a family expert for harmed mothers on the taskforce. I know that these asks have been raised by my brave and hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), who has done so much for the Nottingham families, but will the Secretary of State say whether that is something he is actively considering?
James Murray
Let me repeat what I said earlier about my humble admiration for Jack and Sarah Hawkins and their campaign for justice over baby Harriet. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to refer to the failings as systemic. This is not a handful of cases or problems; this truly is a problem that affects the entire system. The culture and the systems that are in place have let people down, and that is why our response must be so comprehensive.
My hon. Friend mentions the input of families into the taskforce and his constituent Ashley Harper, who raised that matter. I am very happy to discuss with him after this statement how we can ensure that the taskforce represents the views of all families.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
When whistleblowers tried to alert society to what was happening, was any action taken against them, and if it was, does that indicate that there needs to be strengthened protection for whistleblowers? At the other end of the spectrum, are those clinicians who refused point blank to take part in the review process going to be named?
James Murray
The right hon. Gentleman raises an important part of the dynamic that has been exposed through Donna Ockenden’s review: people not feeling able to challenge what is happening—feeling that they are being intimidated or forced to stay silent—even when they want to raise issues of great importance. We must ensure that the right structures and culture are in place not only so that women and their families can raise their concerns, but so that staff, midwives and others working in maternity and neonatal services have the confidence to raise their concerns through whatever mechanism is most appropriate in the circumstances. They must have confidence in the mechanism to raise their concerns.
The right hon. Gentleman spoke about clinicians who refused to take part in Donna Ockenden’s review in Nottingham. As I said earlier, although more than 800 members of staff contributed towards the review, I was appalled at the number of senior clinicians who did not agree to take part. That is why it is so important that we change the law—applying the duty of candour through the Hillsborough law to ensure that this can never happen again.
Amanda Hack (North West Leicestershire) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and the confirmation that he will expand the Hillsborough law to apply to those clinicians who did not speak but should have spoken. I also want to put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) for her leadership and courage, as well as my heartfelt sadness that so many families endured so much harm.
This report has been so thoroughly and expertly delivered by Donna Ockenden, and it has to be the watershed moment. A key feature of this report and every meeting with Donna and the families has been an overwhelming sense of failure at every single level: failure to listen, failure to react and failure to prevent harm. The experiences of the harmed families will stay with me forever. Will the Secretary of State outline how the immediate and essential actions, including the first one—listening to women and families—will be the catalyst for the change that we need? What steps will he take in his first day of taking forward this report to ensure that we do not have Nottingham repeated elsewhere?
James Murray
My hon. Friend asks about the immediate actions that the Government are taking in response to Donna Ockenden’s review. For me, above all else—above all the shocking, harrowing detail—the review highlights the fact that women simply were not listened to. That comes up time and again. I know that it comes up in other aspects of healthcare as well, but it came up so strongly in this report and underlined so many of the shocking failures that have occurred.
As a first step, extending Martha’s rule to all maternity services across the country means that when women or their family members are concerned that they are not getting the treatment or care they need, they can get a second opinion—an urgent, independent review. That is an important first step, but this must be a watershed moment that does not rely simply on one action or a small handful of actions. There must be a comprehensive plan to tackle this issue from every angle and to ensure that we have the systemic change that so many Members today have said is crucial.
Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Ind)
In the 25 months since Theo Clarke and I produced the first ever parliamentary report on birth trauma, and nearly four years since we discussed the East Kent Kirkup report in this place, we have seen more and more reports, more and more scandals, more and more heartbreaking stories, and several Health Secretaries. Campaigners are grateful to the brilliant Donna Ockenden but, frankly, expectations are pretty low about ending this crisis in maternity care all these years later. Does the Secretary of State agree that as well as training, we have to end this patchwork postcode lottery of care, and introduce basic, nationwide standards and accountability across all NHS trusts?
James Murray
The hon. Lady makes an important point about the fatigue, weariness and exhaustion of families at so many recommendations being made and accepted but not put into action. To pick up on the point made earlier by the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), we must now break that cycle to ensure that the recommendations do not simply get accepted and sit on a shelf gathering dust, but that they feed into the plan of action, which will then produce the change that we need to see.
As the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) said, the change must be nationwide. Although we are today rightly talking about what happened in Nottingham, we know that it is far from the only place where such failures in maternity and neonatal services have been seen. We know this is a national problem that needs a national solution.
Paulette Hamilton (Birmingham Erdington) (Lab)
May I start by saying that my thoughts are with the families and with the babies who have died?
I would also like to say to my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh): I am sorry you had to go through this. It should not have happened, and I am angry. I am a member of the Health and Social Care Committee, and the reason I am angry is that last year we did a follow-up review on black maternal health, and the same things kept coming up over and over again: racism, equality issues, women being silenced, a lack of governance, women not being heard, unavoidable deaths, and a lack of accountability. Where does it stop? There is a lack of training, and the system is failing our women; we have had over 70 recommendations, but that is what we found last year. Every time we say, “Enough is enough”, what happens? We have yet another review.
My daughter had a baby a few years ago. If I had not been with her, she would have lost that baby, because it was as if she was invisible. It was not until somebody else went into the room with her and said, “Enough”, that the people there were really willing to listen. These failures are systemic.
What worries me is that funding is not ringfenced for maternity services—it can go anywhere in the system. Once this review—or whatever it might be—has been done, what will be done to ensure that the funding follows the recommendations? It is no good having the funding there if it is being run by local organisations that are using it to plug holes. That has got to stop.
James Murray
I thank my hon. Friend for her comments, and for talking about the shocking situation with her daughter’s baby that she managed to avert. She spoke about the inequalities, the racism and the fact of women being silenced, all of which come through very strongly in Donna Ockenden’s report. As I have explained, the taskforce I chair will now consider the full set of recommendations from that report, as well as the recommendations from Baroness Amos’s national review and other reviews and inquiries into what has happened in maternity services. That taskforce will produce a comprehensive plan of action that will cover the whole range of actions that need to be taken, because we know it will take more than one action, or even a small handful of actions, to transform maternity services and make them as they should be. This is a problem that goes very deep; it is systemic, cultural and deeply embedded, and a comprehensive plan will be required to change that.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
The Secretary of State and the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Stuart Andrew), are both to be congratulated on the tone and tenor with which they have approached this most sensitive of issues—it is in the very best tradition of this place. It also indicates, I hope, a preparedness to work across the two parties to bring forward speedy solutions to the horrors we are hearing about and have read about in the report.
May I ask the Secretary of State two direct questions? First, the management of bodies post mortem seems to fall between his Department and the Ministry of Justice. We have talked far too often about how to regulate that space.
Simon Hoare
The hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards) is in agreement. Can the Secretary of State’s Department now grip that issue and drive it forward in order to give certainty to all our people that there is dignity and decency for all in death?
Secondly, this issue clearly affects Nottinghamshire most acutely, but there are expectant parents across England today who will be worried about the level of service they can expect and about the outcomes for themselves and their child. What is the Secretary of State proposing to do to communicate with those people, to say that the Government are aware of this issue and are gripping it—that a shake-up is taking place and better services will be provided—as well as to give them some indication of what they can expect, and to give them comfort and confidence in what should be the most exciting period of their lives?
James Murray
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his remarks, and for his tone and approach in encouraging cross-party working—he is absolutely right that that will be essential for making progress on this most important issue. I will consider the important point he has made about the Ministry of Justice and its remit in relation to what we have seen in mortuary services. As I said earlier, in a report full of shocking revelations, that inhumanity and lack of dignity left me truly aghast; it is almost unbelievable that it could have happened.
The hon. Gentleman also raises an important point about women and their families across the country using maternity services. While the conversation we are having today is of course about the failures in Nottingham, we know that most women will receive high-quality care, and the majority of the NHS workforce do an important job supporting them. We should make sure that is acknowledged in this difficult conversation. However, one of the changes we want to make immediately is extending Martha’s rule to maternity services right across the country, because we know it is something we can do now. Martha’s rule is a mechanism that has worked well in other parts of the NHS, and it will mean that when women and their families feel they are not being listened to, they will have a way to get an urgent, independent review of the care they are receiving.
Adam Thompson (Erewash) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for his statement, and extend my thoughts to everyone who has been a part of the Ockenden review. I also hugely thank my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) for her unending efforts in campaigning for the families we represent in our constituencies, who have been through so much. Of course, I also thank Donna Ockenden for her work, her amazing support, and her constant engagement with us as the local affected Members of Parliament and with our constituents.
In the past two years, I have met so many families who have been harmed in ways I cannot understand or comprehend, and have heard of and seen horrors that I can barely believe. In addition to those babies and mothers who lost their lives, it is important that we highlight children like our mate Ryan, who recently turned 18 but who will never be independent because of his acquired brain injury. Can the Secretary of State please reassure the House that he will do everything in his power to support children with acquired brain injuries, such as by recognising their conditions in education, health and care plans?
James Murray
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I was personally inspired by meeting Ryan’s mum Sarah when I visited Nottingham last week—she told me about Ryan, and showed such incredible strength and courage in advocating for the forgotten children in Nottingham. I can reassure my hon. Friend and the whole House that I will do everything in my power to support children with acquired brain injuries. We are working on an acquired brain injury plan at the moment, and I am also working with the Department for Education and NHS England on ambitious reforms to the special educational needs and disabilities system, including on the future direction of EHCPs.
Mike Martin (Tunbridge Wells) (LD)
Could I draw the Secretary of State’s attention to the Sir Jonathan Michael inquiry and report, which followed on from the David Fuller case at Pembury hospital in my constituency? It dealt with sexual impropriety with cadavers, so there is crossover here. Phase 2 of that report came out in July 2025, and it spoke to the lack of regulation of after-death care of bodies in mortuaries, hospitals that look after cadavers and other organisations. I do not know whether the Secretary of State is aware of that report, but are the Government planning on implementing its ready set of recommendations? Sir Jonathan Michael’s report seems to speak to a lot of the issues that happened in this case as well.
James Murray
I thank the hon. Gentleman for drawing my attention to that report. We will certainly ensure that any reports containing relevant recommendations are considered as part of the taskforce’s work, because one of the changes that I want to make sure we achieve is to not have so many different reports with hundreds of recommendations that then do not become a plan of action. That is a cycle we are seeking to break through the taskforce’s work by producing a plan of action by the end of the year.
Josh Fenton-Glynn (Calder Valley) (Lab)
In her remarks this morning, Donna Ockenden noted that maternal deaths are at a 20-year high, and total clinical negligence costs are greater than the money spent on maternity services. That should give us pause for thought. It is a national emergency, one that is causing unimaginable pain. The failure of the regulation is stark, so will my right hon. Friend confirm that we will tackle the culture of defensiveness across medical regulators that has caused such harm?
James Murray
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point to regulatory failure, which has been drawn out very strongly by Donna Ockenden’s report. For me, what is completely unacceptable is that in their response to what has happened in Nottingham, they have sought to protect their own. That is something we must change, because it is only through effective regulation that we can have true accountability, and it is only through true accountability that we can get action and change.
Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)
I thank Donna Ockenden, the hon. Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), and the Nottingham families for all the work they have done to bring us today’s report about what went on across Nottinghamshire. It is truly shocking. At the same time, they were also supporting Sussex families to get their own justice when those families were repeatedly begging the right hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) to appoint Donna Ockenden to review what happened in Sussex. I thank them for their support for other families right across the country.
When the Secretary of State was appointed to his role, I shared with him a letter I had written along with Sussex and Leeds MPs, asking for the duty of candour to be written into the terms of reference of the Leeds and Sussex reports. I am so grateful that he has announced today that the Hillsborough law will apply once it is enacted. That is very welcome, but that law has not yet been enacted, and it was delayed in the last Session. Does the Secretary of State know when the Hillsborough law will be enacted, and if he is not clear on that, will he commit to pushing at Cabinet to make sure it becomes law as soon as possible?
James Murray
I thank the hon. Lady for welcoming our decision about applying the duty of candour to future maternity reviews and inquiries, including those in Sussex and Leeds. We have always been clear that the Public Office (Accountability) Bill—the Hillsborough law—is an important priority for this Government. As soon as it is in law, we will ensure that the duty of candour is applied. Our commitment today is to ensure that NHS staff, current or past, cannot refuse to take part in what the lead investigator wants in future inquiries.
Ben Coleman (Chelsea and Fulham) (Lab)
The Ockenden report is shocking and its findings are repellent. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington (Paulette Hamilton) said, it is shocking how many of its findings also featured in a report on black maternal health that the Health and Social Care Committee, on which I sit, published last September. As she set out, women were not listened to. There was no accountability, weak leadership, a toxic culture, racial inequality, understaffing and poor data gathering. All those things are referenced in both reports, and my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn) pointed out that things have been getting worse over the past 20 years. It used to be the case that women who were black were 4.7 times as likely to die in childbirth or around childbirth as white women. The figure is now only 2.3 times. While we can welcome that, the sad fact is that it is not because things have got better for black women; it is because things have got worse for everybody else across the country. The Ockenden report and its findings on what happened are the culmination of problems that have been building for years.
I want to recognise my constituent, Louise Thompson. She suffered terribly giving birth, when the NHS would not listen to her about the care she needed. She is now running a powerful campaign for a maternity commissioner and improved maternal care. I hope she will meet my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) soon. The Secretary of State promises a comprehensive action plan to be formed by a national maternity and neonatal taskforce. That is welcome, but we have had action plans in the past and they have not delivered the change promised. Given that record, will the Government commit to publishing measurable targets and firm deadlines within the action plan and to report progress to Parliament at fixed intervals? We need to know, and women across the country need to know, what will really be different this time.
James Murray
I commend my hon. Friend on mentioning his constituent, Louise Thompson, who is campaigning on this important issue. He mentioned the impact of racism, discrimination and inequality in maternity services and their failures—all raised powerfully by Donna Ockenden’s report today. As I said earlier, the action plan, which the taskforce will be producing, will be published by the end of this year. We are determined to break that cycle where recommendations get accepted and then get left on the shelf to gather dust. We want an action plan that can be implemented. We want to make sure that delivery is set out and is progressed by the Secretary of State and the Department. That is a key part of the accountability in making sure that the delivery plan is put into action.
Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)
I thank Donna Ockenden and her team, the hon. Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) and all the Nottingham families who are involved in the development of this report. Today, I am angry and upset for all the families concerned, because this report reinforces what we already know: the maternity crisis must end and it must end now. Babies should have lived and mothers deserved better. The same systemic issues have come up again and again: unsafe staffing, lack of training, unchanging culture and a failure to listen to women. At the same time, we have increasing maternity negligence payouts of £2.5 billion. Following the report today, and bearing in mind the £2.5 billion of negligence payments, will the Minister commit to restoring the service development funding to support complex births and bereavement, after it was cut from £95 million to £2 million?
James Murray
I thank the hon. Lady for expressing how she feels angry and upset. I think that that feeling is shared by all of us in the House today. The publication of Donna Ockenden’s report today has exposed the lifelong suffering of those families. The details of the action plan will be published by the end of the year, because we want to make sure that recommendations are not simply accepted and then not implemented. The recommendations must go into the taskforce, and the taskforce must produce that clear action plan, which we can then implement, and people can see us doing so. That is the way to break the cycle of recommendations that do not get implemented and to make progress towards the justice, accountability and change that I understand from families is so important to them.
Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford) (Lab)
The whole House is appalled by the neglect, contempt, and sheer trauma that these families have faced. I commend their strength and the strength of my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), but these themes are chillingly all too familiar. The Secretary of State will be aware that NHS England has taken enforcement action against the Northern Care Alliance in recent weeks over multiple safety concerns. Indeed, staff and I raised serious safety concerns relating to the gynaecology department directly with the trust as far back as last year, demanding urgent action, but little happened. Will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss these issues, and will he outline what action he will now take to ensure that patient safety, adequate resourcing and safe staffing levels are urgently addressed at the trust?
James Murray
I thank my hon. Friend for raising the important issues that she referred to in her remarks. I am happy to make sure that either me or a member of my ministerial team will meet her to discuss them in further detail.
Mark Sewards (Leeds South West and Morley) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement today. It is a difficult and painful, but that is as nothing compared with what those families have been through. On the shocking details he shared with us about babies’ bodies being mistreated in mortuaries, I am sorry to say that that story will be directly relevant to two constituents I am representing. I would appreciate a meeting with him, however brief, to discuss their cases ahead of his Department’s publication of its decisions on the final recommendations from the phase 2 report of the Fuller inquiry. He will also know that Leeds families at the start of their maternity journey—Donna Ockenden is conducting an inquiry into Leeds maternity services—will welcome, as do I, his commitment to ensuring that the duty of candour will apply in that inquiry. Can he confirm for them and for me that all the lessons that Donna Ockenden and he have learned from this inquiry will be applied to the Leeds inquiry, so that those families get the answers they deserve?
James Murray
My hon. Friend speaks about his constituents whose experience might be relevant to some of the findings around mortuary services and their failings. I would be happy to ensure a meeting with either me or a member of my ministerial team. As I said earlier, the details of what happened in mortuaries leave me struggling for words, because of how dehumanising, disrespectful and abhorrent that was. I would be happy to make sure that his constituents’ points are picked up as part of that.
On learning the lessons from the review in Nottingham and applying that to Leeds and Sussex, we are fortunate that Donna Ockenden will be leading those reviews, having just completed the review in Nottingham. She will be in a strong position to ensure that she goes into that with the learnings she has made from the current review. One of those learnings that I am conscious of is how unacceptable it is that senior leaders refused to take part, for which I can see no justification whatever. I am pleased that, through the duty of candour that have we spoken about today, that will no longer be possible.
Jonathan Davies (Mid Derbyshire) (Lab)
Nottingham University hospitals NHS trust is one of the trusts that serves my constituents. For those who have been patients there, or who have had babies who have come to harm—I have met some of them—Donna Ockenden’s report is difficult reading indeed. In respect of the staff at that trust, many of them, often junior and low-paid, are on the frontline providing kind, compassionate, person-centred care, and they will be feeling raw today. We value what they do.
We have heard a great deal about the appalling practices in the mortuary. They are subject to a criminal investigation, but I want to reflect on the experience of one of the several constituents I have met who have been affected by what we are discussing today. She came to see me as part of Donna Ockenden’s inquiry, and sadly she had engaged with the trust on a number of occasions because she felt that she was experiencing complications with her pregnancy. She was told to lie down and have a fizzy drink and then have an early night, and, despite repeated calls, she was repeatedly fobbed off. Sadly, her baby died.
Behind that is a culture of a failure to engage. There was a very poor culture at the trust—so poor that “FOH” was written in patients’ medical notes and on whiteboards, standing for “F*** Off Home”. How could leaders not be more curious about the practices that were taking place on their watch, and where were the regulators? It is absolutely staggering.
We are making some very positive changes in the NHS, but I want to push the Secretary of State briefly on changes we are making to the mechanisms that allow people to feed back on their care. We are winding down the National Guardian’s Office and Healthwatch; we are also removing NHS England, which has a regulatory function—and we know that regulators have failed in the case of this trust. What steps can my right hon. Friend take to ensure that those feedback mechanisms will enable people to be heard and action to be taken, so that we can prevent this kind of scandal from happening again?
James Murray
I thank my hon. Friend for his comments, and for telling us what happened to his constituent. He asked about some of the wider changes that we are making in the NHS modernisation Bill. The aim is to bring the patient experience across the NHS into the heart of the new organisation that will arise from the merging of NHS England into the Department of Health and Social Care to ensure that the patient experience drives the decisions being taken about how NHS care is delivered, and is at the heart of what we do as a Department and a national health service.
However, as the report makes clear, the level of failure in maternity and neonatal services is truly devastating. It demands a specific response, which is why the work of the taskforce will begin and it will report by the end of the year. As my hon. Friend has said, this is not just a case of individual cases going wrong or individual members of staff making the wrong decision. It is endemic, and shows the incuriosity of leaders in maternity services about what is going on and what is going wrong in their services. It is a failure of regulators, it is systemic, and the response to it must step up accordingly.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
I pay tribute to those families, whistleblowers and campaigners who simply kept going, and to Donna Ockenden for her report and her approach. The report is damning, and my heart goes out to all the families who are having to relive their awful experiences as they see, in black and white, that their suffering and that of their loved ones was not only horrific and harrowing, but entirely avoidable, if only the leaders had been responsible and accountable, and had just listened. As we heard from my brave hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), this is a national disgrace that must not be repeated.
I welcome Martha’s rule, which gives patients the right to an independent second opinion. I also welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to using the Hillsborough law to ensure that those who avoid scrutiny are compelled to give evidence and are held accountable in the future, but may I ask him two questions? First, can he confirm that he is working across Government to ensure swift implementation of this law, with clear and transparent timelines, so that these families, who have already waited far too long, can finally see justice? Secondly, what will happen to those who shockingly avoided giving evidence and avoided accountability in respect of this review?
James Murray
My hon. Friend is right to emphasise quite how shocking it is that people in senior leadership positions refused to take part in Donna Ockenden’s review. I cannot understand how they could make that decision and think it acceptable. That is exactly why the law needs to change. It shows why the Hillsborough law is so important and why it was important to put it on the statute book, and also why it was important for us to decide now to apply that duty of candour to future reviews of the failures of maternity services so that never again can NHS staff, current or past, decide not to take part in the search for justice and accountability that it is so crucial for us to deliver.
Daniel Francis (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) for all her work. My heart goes out to those families in Nottinghamshire, and I pay tribute to their work as well. I cannot imagine what it is like to lose a child in those circumstances, but I do know what it is like to see your own child suffer a brain injury at birth. I work very closely with other families with children who have cerebral palsy or hemiplegia, because of what they have been through and what my own family have been through.
The reasons why such things happen are often connected with negligence, but they are often a result of other circumstances. In our circumstance, our children were born at 31 weeks, as twins. In other families, it is the fact that this woman is black or that woman is disabled that has caused those issues and that negligence. Will my right hon. Friend act on the recommendations of the Ockenden review and the review that is being undertaken by Baroness Amos, and work to ensure that those disparities are overcome when mothers have a greater risk of these things happening to them?
James Murray
I thank my hon. Friend for sharing with us his experience of brain injury in his own family, and for reminding us how some of the issues that we are discussing today touch the lives of many people in the House and across the country. We all have a responsibility to act on the basis of the recommendations of today’s report, and I assure my hon. Friend that those recommendations, along with those in Baroness Amos’s report, will enable the taskforce to produce a comprehensive action plan. A key element of that work—this concerns his direct point—will be ensuring that when people are at greater risk of harm, greater risk of being ignored, greater risk of being discriminated against, lied to or not being given the care that they need, that inequality will be addressed.
Laurence Turner (Birmingham Northfield) (Lab)
I was born in Nottingham City hospital, and while the Ockenden report was necessarily bounded by the last 13 years, I think it is important to record that women and children were avoidably harmed and avoidably died in those settings many years before, and the pain is not diminished by the passing of time. As I have listened to these exchanges, I have had at the forefront of my mind those friends and people I grew up with who, many years later, found themselves close to death in circumstances that could have been avoided.
As my right hon. Friend said in his compassionate and thoughtful statement, the description of what happened in Nottingham will be all too familiar to families well beyond that city. He will know that Sandwell and West Birmingham hospitals NHS trust is one of the trusts that are subject to particular attention as part of the national investigation. What assurance can he give people in cities such as Birmingham that this time, after these reports and their recommendations, things will change and NHS senior management will be held to account?
James Murray
Although the report that we are discussing today deals with what has happened in Nottingham over the past 13 years, my hon. Friend is right to point out that it has not just happened in Nottingham and it has not just happened over the past 13 years. When I have spoken to people about this report, even today, so many have shared their own stories from many years ago in all different parts of the country. That reminds us that although the focus of the report is what has happened to the families in Nottingham, this issue affects families throughout the country, which is why, as my hon. Friend says, it is “all too familiar” to so many people when they hear what has happened. That is why it is so important that we develop our plan, which will have a nationwide impact, in order to finally tackle this challenge head-on and ensure that we deliver the maternity and neonatal services that women across the country need and deserve.
Farming Road Map and Profitability Review
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Emma Reynolds)
With permission, I will make a statement on the Government’s farming road map, which the Farming Minister—my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan)—and I have published today. This 25-year farming road map is the first ever long-term plan for farming in this country, giving farmers the clarity and confidence that they need to make investment decisions. The plan backs farming, strengthens profitability and food security, and sets out a clear direction of travel for a thriving future for farming. The Government are also laying our detailed response to Baroness Batters’ independent farming profitability review.
Farmers feed our nation. They produce over 65% of our food, manage 70% of our land, and support an agrifood sector worth £153 billion every year. I know that many hon. Members on both sides of the House will have seen at first hand farmers’ dedication to feeding our nation and protecting our natural environment, and the farming sector has a long tradition of adapting to change over generations. It has survived war, disease, trade shocks and extreme weather—
Emma Reynolds
And Conservative Governments.
For too long, farmers have been asked to navigate profound change without a clear sense of the Government’s plan for the future. The pressures of fast-moving technological change, geopolitical instability, volatile global markets and climate change are real. I have met farmers across England, and they are not asking for protection from change; they are asking for the tools, the stability and the genuine partnership with Government that will allow them to adapt, grow and thrive. The Government have heard that message. The farming road map sets out our plan for farming up to 2050 and reflects immediate Government action to support our farmers to feed the nation.
I offer my huge thanks to Baroness Batters for her farming profitability review, which was published in December. We have benefited hugely from her incredible experience and expertise as a farmer, but also as a former president of the National Farmers’ Union. Her analysis was extremely clear, and her recommendations have shaped our road map.
The farming road map answers the farming industry’s calls for clarity over the long term. It brings together the most important policies and commitments under one coherent plan, because we understand that farmers have long planning timescales. For example, a farmer planting an orchard today will not see its full yield for a decade. That is why the road map is so crucial: it will allow farmers and land managers to invest in their businesses with confidence.
The road map is organised around three outcomes that we need to deliver together with the farming sector. The first is profitable and productive farm businesses. Food production is the primary purpose of farming and a matter of national security. The road map backs our farmers to grow, invest and compete, delivering year-on-year productivity growth; Government support to invest in innovative approaches; fairer supply chains that do not leave farmers carrying disproportionate risk; better market access, so that British food can reach more customers at home and abroad; smarter regulation that reduces the burden on farmers; more collaborative models, such as co-operatives, to help lower costs, spread risk and support stronger returns; and, most of all, the stability and certainty that investors and farm businesses need to invest with confidence. To that end, I can confirm today that we will launch a dedicated task-and-finish group to unlock private finance in sustainable farming. The new Farming and Food Partnership Board has started work on the first sector growth plans for horticulture and poultry, with more sectors to follow.
The second outcome is a sustainable farming sector. Healthy soils, clean water and thriving ecosystems are the foundations of strong food production. We will support the shift to lower-input, lower-emission farming, not by directing every decision on farms but by ensuring that the right incentives, advice and regulation are in place. Our environmental land management schemes, backed by £11.8 billion over this Parliament, are already delivering sustainable and profitable farming, now and for the future. This is the biggest budget for nature-friendly farming in our history. I can confirm that next week we will reopen the sustainable farming incentive for small farms and those without existing agreements. The total budget for this year will be £240 million, with £60 million ringfenced for those eligible in window 1. We will continue to refine our schemes in partnership with the sector. The road map gives equal importance to food security, profitable farming and a healthy natural environment, because they are all critical to protecting our national security.
Thirdly, and finally, we need a resilient farming sector that is ready for whatever comes next. We live in a volatile world. The pressure on fertiliser and fuel prices underlines why we need farming systems that are less exposed to global shocks. At the same time, climate change is reshaping growing conditions and technology is moving fast. The road map sets out how we will strengthen our climate resilience, ensuring that farmers are able to adapt and to tackle the impacts of droughts and flooding.
Today I can confirm that we are investing an additional £53 million in the farming innovation programme to help farmers harness new technology that can improve productivity, reduce reliance on inputs and increase long-term resilience. That brings the total investment in innovation funding to £123 million, which, along with £50 million in equipment funding, puts British farmers at the forefront of agricultural advancements.
To further secure the future of farming, we will invest in the skills and people the sector needs by supporting training and new entrants, so that farmers’ hard-earned knowledge is passed down to the next generation. Tenant farmers manage around a third of England’s farmland, and tenancies play a key role in supporting new entrants. We want a vibrant tenanted sector, and the road map commits to making schemes, policies and tenancy agreements work for tenants.
Upland farmers are also vital to our food production, land management and rural communities. They often operate in challenging physical and economic conditions. The road map sets out how we intend to improve access to schemes and support for upland farmers, and we have asked Dr Hilary Cottam to identify opportunities for upland communities to flourish.
The road map was not written in Whitehall and handed down; my team in the Department and I have visited many farms across the country, and many more farmers have travelled to speak to us at regional events, and we have listened. The road map reflects our extensive engagement with farmers, growers, land managers and the wider food sector. As I mentioned at the start of my speech, farmers have asked for a Government who create the conditions for farmers to succeed, rather than directing every decision. The road map sets out clear roles for the Government, farmers, supply chain actors and the wider sector to make that vision a reality. Where new approaches are untested or deliver a wider public good, we will put Government investment behind them—in skills, data, innovation, technology and infrastructure.
The road map has been developed in partnership with the industry, and we want to continue to work in partnership as we implement it. This Government are proud to work with British farmers as we grow the future of farming. Together, we are building a more profitable, productive, sustainable and resilient farming sector, and I am confident that there is a bright future ahead. I commend this statement to the House.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)
I call the shadow Secretary of State.
Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement, and I repeat my sincere thanks to Baroness Batters for her thorough report.
The Secretary of State presents a document for farming for the next 25 years, but this Government will not last even 25 days. Instead of using their 14 years in opposition to create this document, they have dithered and delayed for the past two years, but they did not dither and delay in making life harder for rural businesses. One of the first acts of this Government, of which Labour Members are all so proud, was to target family farms and family businesses with their death tax. As Labour MPs and Ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs voted repeatedly for the family farm and family business taxes, DEFRA Ministers shut down farming payments without notice, including the SFI.
Sadly, the record of this Government is rising food prices and a record number of farms closing. They broke the trust of farmers, and they have only themselves to blame. Yet the Secretary of State stands here today wanting to be thanked by rural communities for producing a document that could be shelved quietly by whoever comes next, just as the Government seem to have shelved the 10-year plan for the NHS. For all the talk—[Interruption.] Mark my words! For all the talk of the new SFI scheme and budgets, the fact is that they have cut the farming budget by £100 million.
In another leap from reality, the Government’s negotiations with the EU get barely a mention in this document, despite the enormous consequences they will have for farming businesses. CropLife UK has estimated that this EU reset could drain £810 million from UK farms and sacrifice almost 9,000 jobs from our rural constituencies. The Food and Drink Federation states that the wholesale handover of our food laws to the EU will lead to at least 400 regulations needing to be changed. So how will the Government ensure that UK farmers, including our tenant and upland farmers, can compete against heavily subsidised EU farmers? This matters because food security is critical in this increasingly volatile world. What reassurance can the Secretary of State provide that the next Cabinet will prioritise farming and food production?
We Conservatives view DEFRA as a vital economic Department, so we agree with its efforts to recalculate farming and food producers’ contributions to the economy. By the way, I note that Reform calls itself the farmer’s friend, yet there is not a single Reform MP in the Chamber.
Had the Secretary of State attended Cereals 2026 at Diddly Squat, she would have seen for herself that the sector is already driving innovation. The Government are therefore playing catch-up, but we hope that the intention to work with the Department for Business and Trade to deliver reductions in compliance costs and to focus on innovation and technology will actually happen. The plan to bring DEFRA farming services into one integrated service is much needed, and this reflects Conservative calls for quangos and the Department to be overhauled.
There are many questions still left unanswered in this report, and I hope that the Secretary of State will try to answer them rather than deflect, because that has been noticed. The plan looks to double the funding for Environment Agency inspections. Why are this Government focusing on bureaucracy rather than helping farmers survive? What does she say to the tenant farmer of a well-run dairy herd who has been told by the Environment Agency that they must invest up to £750,000 to guard against a “risk” that there “may” be a pollution event in 50 years’ time. As that tenant farmer said to me, there will not be a farm there in 50 years’ time, as they simply cannot afford that payment.
There is also no mention of closing the flag loophole on food packaging to help our constituents to buy genuinely British food and to back British farmers. Why not? The report says there will be no cut to food production, but it also says there will be a reduction of 9% in the land available to produce food. How can the Secretary of State guarantee that our food production will be protected when key tools, such as gene editing to develop drought-resistant crops, are at risk in the negotiations with the EU.
In her final act in this Department, will the Secretary of State please advise the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) that the first thing he must do is axe the family farm and family business taxes completely? Otherwise, sadly, this will be a road map to nowhere for struggling farmers and food producers.
Emma Reynolds
Oh, gosh, how do I follow that? Well, the first thing to say is that that the shadow Secretary of State is not in charge of reshuffles on the Government side of the House.
Let me outline where I do agree with the shadow Secretary of State. I agree that DEFRA is a really important economic Department of Government, and I have been focused on that since I was appointed to this role on 5 September. I also agree that Reform Members do not seem to care about agricultural farming, because they do not even bother turning up to such an important statement. So there are some things that she and I agree on, but that is probably where they end.
The shadow Secretary of State accuses us of dithering and delaying for two years, but her Government dithered and delayed for 14 years. We did not see any action such as this road map during the whole time that the Conservatives were in office. They sold farmers down the river with their Australia and New Zealand trade deals, and they could not be bothered to spend their own farming budget on the farmers who needed it, so I will take no lectures from the right hon. Lady.
The SFI scheme will reopen next week. I am proud that we have taken forward the recommendations in Baroness Batters’ review on reforms to SFI, including making it simpler and more cost-effective, and introducing a minimum hectarage requirement. We on this side of the House are serious about engaging with the farming sector, and we commissioned Baroness Batters, who has such great expertise—that was never done under the previous Government—to advise us on how to make the sector more profitable.
The shadow Secretary of State asks about the sanitary and phytosanitary deal, and I say to her that we are working very closely with the National Farmers’ Union and other farming stakeholders, because that deal is all about bringing down the barriers put up by the previous Government at the border that make it so much harder both to export raw ingredients and food, and to import.
I thank the shadow Secretary of State for what she said—this is one thing we do agree on—about both Baroness Batters and my saying that we must make sure the farming sector is more accurately measured. I think we need to reassess that, so that we do not just assess what is done on farm, but look at this from farm to fork, and therefore see the vital role of the farming sector in our economy.
The shadow Secretary of State asks about the Environment Agency. I will make no apologies for increasing the funding of the Environment Agency, which was so harshly cut under her Government. I will also make no apologies about having a plan, in this document and more broadly, for how we work with farmers to ensure that agricultural pollution is a problem we tackle together.
The shadow Secretary of State asks about gene editing and the SPS deal, and those negotiations are ongoing. However, we want to ensure that our farmers are able to use the best technology. We lead in agricultural technology in our country, and we want to make sure that it is harnessed by our sector. That is why there is such a big emphasis in the road map on the importance of innovation, and why we are dedicating Government funding to innovation, and on farmers sharing best practice so that they can become more profitable over time.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
First, I echo the Secretary of State’s thanks to Baroness Batters for this excellent report. She is also right to observe that Reform MPs have not bothered to turn up for this statement. She might also note that no Green MPs have bothered to turn up. They used to be interested in the environment, but sadly those days are long behind us.
On the sustainable farming incentive, can the Secretary of State tell us any more about how she will make sure that its new iteration not only is spent and gets to where it is needed, but is available for a wide range of farmers, including the family farms we speak so much about, and is not all snaffled by the major farm companies?
Emma Reynolds
That is precisely why window 1 will be open next week to small farms and those farms without an existing agreement. It is also why we have capped the agreement level per year to £100,000. We want smaller farms to benefit from the SFI.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
I thank the Secretary of State for early sight of her statement and I echo her thanks to Baroness Batters for her fantastic work on this issue. I also welcome the relatively new Farming Minister, the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), to his place.
The Liberal Democrats welcome the production of a long-term vision for farming and look forward to engaging with Ministers on the details. The road map rightly states that
“food production will remain the primary purpose of funding”,
but it continues to leave England as the outlier. It is now the only country in Europe with a farm payment system that does not actively support farmers to produce food. The consequences are as inevitable as they are inexcusable: the loss of farm businesses and the loss of food security at this dangerous time. I ask the Secretary of State to think again.
The road map also rightly observes the unfairness in the system, and that unfairness to farmers is a block to increasing output. Dairy farmers, especially, are right now being forced into ruin and despair because of unfair and sudden changes to farmgate prices, but there is no plan to strengthen or unify the Groceries Code Adjudicator and the Agricultural Supply Chain Adjudicator, two frankly weak and under-resourced referees with too few powers to protect our farmers from the abuse of market power from supermarkets and processors. Will the Secretary of State act, and if so when, to give us a strong referee to protect our farmers?
The reopening of the SFI is welcome, as is the update on the upland review, but still the Government insist on a first-come-first-served application process which always disadvantages our poorest farmers. On the uplands, the continued failure to provide support for common land is leaving our most precious landscapes, which make up 25% of the land mass of my constituency in the Lakes and the Dales at the risk of wildfires and biodiversity collapse, while our upland farmers sink into greater poverty. Is the road map not warm words but cold comfort for the uplands?
The review fails to put into practice the recommendations, in any serious way, of the Rock review on farm tenancies. [Interruption.] I will come to a conclusion. Does the Secretary of State not see that if tenants do not have protected long-term tenancies of at least eight years, they will have no chance of meeting the long-term environmental goals? Will she protect tenants from being evicted from their land in order to meet those goals?
Very finally, this is a report—
Emma Reynolds
I hope to give the hon. Gentleman some brief answers, but I would be very happy to have a discussion with him after the debate, because he has put forward a lot of different questions. Food production is the primary role of farmers, but in the road map we also talk about the transition to more sustainable farming and regenerative farming, so I do not agree with his analysis. Actually, the focus of the road map and some of our SFI actions on healthier soils will help to ensure that farms are more productive and less reliant on expensive inputs such as chemical fertilisers.
The hon. Gentleman talks about unfair charges. We are bringing the Groceries Code Adjudicator under DEFRA and we are looking at what more we can do to make things fairer for farmers, including in the road map, bringing down barriers and helping more co-operatives to be established, because that redresses the power imbalance he talked about.
I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman on the importance of uplands to the farming sector and to our countryside—I know he has a very beautiful constituency. We have increased the payment rates for upland farmers for some SFI actions and the road map talks about our plans to make it easier for upland farmers to access schemes. I am happy to have a longer conversation with him about that, including about commoners. As he knows, we have commissioned a review by Hilary Cottam. I think he has been working with her too, which is welcome.
A third of land is tenanted; it is a really important sector. We want a vibrant sector. I appointed the country’s first ever Commissioner for the Tenant Farming Sector, Alan Laidlaw. We know that a lot of tenants are very anxious about the shift away from long-term tenancies to shorter-term tenancies, so he is right to raise that. We have also commissioned the Law Commission to look at agriculture tenancy law. We are working with the sector to see what more we can do to ensure longer and more secure tenancies.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
I commend all the hard work that has gone into both the road map and the profitability review by the civil servants, the ministerial team and so many people across the sector, including Baroness Batters. Does the Secretary of State agree with me that in the interests of food security we really need to think hard about how we boost food production in this country? That, I think, will need an embracing of new technologies. It will also need the ability to build new facilities. In the poultry sector, the investment is there, but we need to explain to the public that new investment would not only boost food production but improve animal welfare, biosecurity and environmental outcomes.
Emma Reynolds
May I take this opportunity to thank my hon. Friend for all the work he did as Farming Minister? Indeed, some of his fingerprints are on the road map, so I want to thank him for that. He is right in what he says about food security and about innovation being central to it. That is why I announced extra funding of £53 million for the farming innovation programme today. At the second meeting of the Farming and Food Partnership Board, we talked about the two sector growth plans we are working on, horticulture and poultry. He mentioned poultry. We had a really good discussion on the barriers to further investment in poultry. Planning is one of them, but there are others too. That is a sector where we can make really good progress to ensure that we boost the production of poultry in our country.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
I remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
I welcome the publication of the farming road map. It may not have been rushed, but it is welcome none the less; all we need now is a revised food strategy, and the Secretary of State’s homework will be up to date. Is the implementation of the Batters review still being pursued as a discrete piece of work, or is it being subsumed into the farming road map? In as far as that relates to the operation of the market, why is she not involving farmers’ unions from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? The Secretary of State refers to DEFRA as a growth Department. Agriculture accounts for 0.6% of UK GDP at the moment, so if we follow the road map and she gives leadership to the industry, what would she want that figure to be in the future?
Emma Reynolds
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for marking my homework, and I look forward to having it marked in even more detail when I appear before his Committee. There is a separate document in which we have published our response thematically to the 57 recommendations of Baroness Batters’ profitability review. We are already working closely with the sector to take forward those recommendations. In December, we accepted a number of her recommendations: first, the Farming and Food Partnership Board; secondly, the sector growth plans; and thirdly, the trade missions. I suspect that I will be able to answer the right hon. Gentleman’s questions in more detail when I come before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.
Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)
For many years we have expected farmers to steward our environment and at the same time deliver food at rock-bottom prices to make up for the failure of politics to secure an affordable cost of living across the rest of society. That has made agricultural profitability increasingly difficult. Now, with the crisis posed by climate change to our national food security, we must pull every available lever to reverse that trend. At the general election, the Labour manifesto committed to a target of half of all food purchased across the public sector being locally produced or certified to higher environmental standards. Will the Secretary of State provide an update on progress towards that target?
Emma Reynolds
Farmers face lots of different challenges, one of which is volatile global commodity prices, along with some of things my hon. Friend mentioned. On public procurement, we are working to establish an accurate baseline of what percentage of the public sector gives contracts to our farmers. We are also looking at what more we can do to enable farming co-operatives to access those public contracts.
Sarah Bool (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
The UK-EU SPS agreement is going to be vital, and we need to understand its terms, particularly about the implementation period, as it will have an impact on our trading deals with other nations. Given that it is due to be implemented next year, and time is ticking, can we have more detail on the agreement, or can the relevant Minister come in front of the EFRA Committee to explain further details?
Emma Reynolds
As the hon. Lady knows, I am always happy to appear before her Committee. There is an ongoing discussion with the EU about implementation timelines. I cannot give her a running commentary, but I can say that we are working closely with the National Farmers’ Union about the implementation timelines. We want a smooth transition to what comes next. As I said in my statement, we know that farmers plan along longer timescales, and they are using products now that they have in the ground. We are looking at transition timelines, being careful about them, and engaging closely with the sector.
Markus Campbell-Savours (Penrith and Solway) (Lab)
I welcome the publication of the road map, and note from the section on environmental land management schemes that in 2027 there will be a need to support farms with legacy countryside stewardship and higher-level stewardship agreements in the transition to new schemes. However, many in this House, the EFRA Committee, the National Audit Office and farmers have questioned whether Natural England is sufficiently resourced to support that. Will the Minister reassure me that behind the words in this important report there will be the trained staff to support my farmers with the challenging transition?
Emma Reynolds
I think my hon. Friend is asking about the expiring agreements, because there are obviously many thousands coming to an end this year. As I have said in DEFRA questions previously, it is the Department’s intention that those whose agreements expire this year will be able to apply in window 2 of the SFI, which will start in September. It is just a technological change that we need to ensure we have pinned down so that farmers can do that through the Rural Payments Agency.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (North Cotswolds) (Con)
I think I am right in saying that the document, which is 70 pages long, mentions profitability just twice. Without profitability, which involves a hard-hearted look at agricultural economics—outputs less inputs—it will be much more difficult to achieve a number of the aspirations in this large document. Will the Secretary of State assure me that when she considers any changes to farming, she will at least consider profitability? By the way, I hope that she survives the reshuffle when it comes.
Emma Reynolds
That is very kind of the hon. Gentleman. I thank him for his best wishes, which were a little different in tone from the comments from the Opposition Front Bench. I reassure the hon. Gentleman that we have a separate document that responds to Baroness Batters’ review. Profitability is absolutely at the heart of the road map. There is a lovely diagram on page 18 of the road map—perhaps the words in it were not picked up in his search—showing what we are trying to do, which is to work towards a profitable, productive, sustainable and resilient farming sector. I absolutely agree with him that we need a more profitable sector, and that is the focus of this document.
Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)
The road map is a very welcome step forward that will give our farmers certainty for the future. I particularly welcome what the Secretary of State had to say on co-operatives, which could go a long way to redressing the current power imbalance in our food system. I hope we can begin that work at pace. We hear consistently from farmers that they feel that the planning system—made so much worse by the Conservatives—is stacked against them. Broiler chicken farmers, for instance, are expected to lower stocking densities but cannot get permission to expand their sheds to compensate, while farms in water-stressed areas are having to go through years of bureaucracy to build reservoirs. Does the Secretary of State agree that reforming the planning system will be key to freeing up trapped investment and getting us to the sustainable, prosperous future for British farming that this road map sets out?
Emma Reynolds
The short answer is yes—I could not agree with my hon. Friend more. That is why I am working closely with the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government on planning reform to ensure that those planning barriers are not holding back investment into the farming sector.
Charlie Dewhirst (Bridlington and The Wolds) (Con)
The Secretary of State seemed to ignore the question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) about the use of land and increasing food production, so I will ask specifically again: how are our farmers expected to increase food production if we are taking 9% of agricultural land out of productive use?
Emma Reynolds
As we set out in our land use framework, our intention in working with the sector is to ensure that we have more productive and profitable farms and multifunctional land use so that we maintain, if not increase, food production levels, alongside the land use changes that we need to secure a sustainable farming transition.
Jenny Riddell-Carpenter (Suffolk Coastal) (Lab)
Over the next 20 years we are set to see a 30% reduction in water availability for farms and producers across the country, much of which will affect Suffolk Coastal. I was glad to see that the road map talks about applying lessons from water management pilot schemes to help farmers to manage those water challenges. I want to flag the managed aquifer recharge trial in Suffolk Coastal, which has recharged for irrigation 20,000 cubic metres while complying with stringent Environment Agency conditions. I know that the Minister responsible for water and flooding is keen to visit my constituency to learn more about the scheme. I hope that the Department will look at these examples as an opportunity that could help to deliver water ambitions as set out in this very welcome farming road map.
Emma Reynolds
The extreme weather conditions we are facing at the moment bring into sharp relief the need for the sector to have access to better sources of water. I thank my hon. Friend for working closely with my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary on these issues and look forward to hearing more about the initiatives in my hon. Friend’s area.
Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)
Instability in the middle east is a stark reminder that food security cannot be taken for granted. British farmers are the best in the world and they get up every single day to put food on our tables. While I welcome the farming road map, it lacks real ambition for farmers and food security. Will the Secretary of State commit to a good food Bill that backs British farmers and puts long-term food security at the heart of Government policy?
Emma Reynolds
I agree with the intent of the hon. Lady’s question, which is that we need a focus on food production and to ensure that our farming sector is more resilient to global shocks, such as the kind she spoke about. That is why we are doing serious work on how we can help farmers to use fertiliser more efficiently and move away from chemical fertilisers towards more organic fertilisers. We have introduced a nutrient management tool, and many farms have now taken that on, which is helping them make more efficient use of fertiliser. I agree with some of the things that she said, but perhaps not the recommendation.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Questions are far too long. Show us how it’s done, Lee Pitcher.
Lee Pitcher (Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme) (Lab)
I wonder if the Secretary of State agrees that for far too long farming has been undervalued because we have focused only on what goes out of the farm gate. We should focus more on the holistic contribution of farming—that is when we get good policy and can take our success forward for farmers.
Emma Reynolds
I could not agree more. We have to look at the agrifood sector overall. It is a huge part of our economy, employing 4.1 million people, and its gross value added is equivalent to the automotive sector. My hon. Friend is right that there has been a tendency to underestimate the value of farming. We have to look at it in the wider agrifood ecosystem and in the context of the GVA that the sector brings to the economy.
Sir Geoffrey Cox (Torridge and Tavistock) (Con)
Once upon a time, it would not have been necessary for a Secretary of State for farming to come to the House to say that the primary purpose of farming was food production. The central recommendation of Minette Batters’ report was to make food security a national strategic priority. Does the Secretary of State not realise that unless her road map contains a commitment to make food security a national strategic priority, everything she says in that report will simply be like trying to fill up the bath with plug out? At a time when the generals are telling us that we could be at war in 10 years, surely it is time for the Government to commit to real, precise targets.
Emma Reynolds
Can I gently remind the right hon. and learned Gentleman of the previous Administration’s Brexit deal and the move away from basic payments to environmental land management schemes? The shift that he is talking about, which has led us to have to stress that food production is the primary focus of farming, was precisely because of the move that happened under his Government.
Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for coming to the House and showing her commitment to domestic food production. Supporting farmers should not just matter to those of us in this House who represent rural or semi-rural constituencies; it should matter to everyone, because it is so crucial for our national security. With that in mind, what support can we give to our farmers to ensure that they can buy equipment such as tractors from UK manufacturers and not have to rely on production elsewhere?
Emma Reynolds
I thank my hon. Friend for her comments. We do have capital grants to help farmers procure the kind of equipment she mentioned.
Robin Swann (South Antrim) (UUP)
The Minister said that the road map was not written in Whitehall and handed down, but it is an England-only document, despite Baroness Batters receiving submissions from Northern Ireland. All family farm structures in Northern Ireland are impacted by Treasury decisions, from the family farm tax to the cost of fuel. What engagement have the Government had with the devolved Governments to ensure that all UK farmers benefit and are supported?
Emma Reynolds
I recently visited the Balmoral agricultural show with members of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, and the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee was there too. We had a good old chinwag. I also met Minister Muir and the Ulster Farmers’ Union. We are engaging closely with stakeholders in Northern Ireland. We have close relationships with all the devolved Administrations and are already engaging with them about our road map, but as the hon. Gentleman says, the road map is for England.
Jim McMahon (Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)
Food security is national security, and the effort that the Government have put into this report is very clear. As chair of the Co-operative party, I am pleased that page 27 has a commitment to co-operatives and mutuals as part of the answer to this country’s food security.
Does the Secretary of State agree that one of the most significant things in this report will be allowing farmers to farm? Farmers say that so much of their time is spent trying to navigate a complex system of Government agencies, so the single system that is talked about could be a game changer.
Emma Reynolds
I agree with my hon. Friend. The focus of the road map is on reducing the burden of regulation and making sure that we have a simpler system, which is something Baroness Batters asked us to do.
As a Co-operative party member, I am delighted that we have references in the road map to the increased role of co-operatives. In other countries—I know the EFRA Committee was recently in New Zealand, which sounds like a nice trip—co-operatives play an even stronger role than they do here. I want to see what more we can do as a Government to boost the role of mutuals and co-operatives in agriculture.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
I, too, hope that the right hon. Lady remains in place, and I thank her for bringing forward the road map. On behalf of the livestock and arable farmers in North Dorset, Blackmore Vale and Cranborne Chase, what should they be looking for in this road map to support and enhance livestock farming and to lead to further investment in agritech, which will boost production while leaving a far lighter environmental footprint on their farming?
Emma Reynolds
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words.
There is a focus in the road map on innovation and on reducing the use of inputs and therefore the costs in farming, so that we can maximise profits for the farming sector. The farming sector faces huge challenges, as I have set out, whether from extreme weather or volatile markets. We all know the challenges, but the Government are here to smooth the path to a more innovative and productive sector.
Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
We welcome the focus in the road map on fertiliser resilience and getting away from volatile global fertiliser markets. North Yorkshire is home to the world’s only supply of polyhalite, a highly effective low-carbon fertiliser. Will Ministers look seriously at this in order to scale up our sovereign supply and back British fertiliser?
Emma Reynolds
We will, and I thank my hon. Friend for bringing this issue to the House. We need to be less reliant on imported fertiliser, and sustainable low-carbon fertiliser is to be welcomed. I look forward to working with him on that.
Adam Dance (Yeovil) (LD)
What steps is the Secretary of State taking now to help farmers manage the impact of this extreme heatwave on food production and prices for consumers in Yeovil? What steps are we taking in the long term to be more ready for such weather?
Emma Reynolds
The hon. Gentleman is right to raise that question. This week’s weather brings into sharp relief the Climate Change Committee’s report from a couple of weeks ago on the risks of extreme weather—not just higher temperatures but more flooding.
As Secretary of State, I am in charge of not only farming but climate adaptation. I reassure the hon. Gentleman that the Government are looking at what more we need to do in response to that report and ahead of the national programme that we need to bring forward in 2028, including at how every Government Department can make sure that we are adapting the public estate to the levels of extreme heat that we are seeing this week and the increased levels of flooding that we have seen in recent years.
Matt Rodda (Reading Central) (Lab)
Will the Secretary of State provide more detail on the innovation fund, particularly on how it will support increased profitability while, at the same time, driving reductions in the emission of carbon dioxide, methane and other dangerous, climate-damaging gases?
Emma Reynolds
We have announced additional funding for the farming innovation programme, bringing total innovation funding to £123 million. This is to back practical technology, including robotics, soil health and water management. It is about the shift to sustainable farming practices.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
Wiltshire farmers listened to Ministers at the Oxford farming conference and heard the Government’s pledge to support farmers during difficult harvests and supply shocks. They now find that they are in the middle of a supply shock, with many considering whether to plant their fields right now because of the price of fertiliser, about a third of which comes through the strait of Hormuz. If the pledge was more than rhetorical, is the Secretary of State able to say what practical measures the Government will be executing right now to assist the people I have just described?
Emma Reynolds
I will come to fertiliser, but let me first say to the right hon. Gentleman that we are cutting red diesel duty by a third, bringing it to the lowest level in more than 20 years. We are taking measures to help farmers with the increased costs of energy and fuel—[Interruption.] Gosh, there is a wall of sound here, such is the excitement on the Opposition Benches.
We have asked the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board to look at more frequent official fertiliser price reporting. We are also doing all that we can to help farmers move away from such high use of fertilisers to more efficient use, along with a longer-term plan to change fertilisers so that British farming can make use of more innovative practices.
Catherine Fookes (Monmouthshire) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for the excellent farming road map that she has laid out. I am really glad to see that supply chain fairness is at front and centre of the new road map, and I welcome the moving of the Groceries Code Adjudicator from the Department for Business and Trade to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as this will make things more joined up.
Farmers in Monmouthshire have raised with me so many times the issue of unfair practices; in fact, five dairy farms there—yes, five—have recently had their milk contracts cancelled. Does the Secretary of State agree that processors and supermarkets have far too much power, and that that power imbalance must be remedied?
Emma Reynolds
I do agree that we have to get much fairer contracts, which is why we are extending the fair dealing regulations that already cover dairy and pig farmers to other sectors. As she said, we are also transferring the Groceries Code Adjudicator from DBT to DEFRA to make sure that there is a more joined-up grip on food chain fairness.
Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)
On-farm reservoirs can really help to reduce flooding and the need for water extraction, yet the Minister for Housing and Planning was rather dismissive of this during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Will the Secretary of State commit to taking steps to review permitted development rights, and can she give us some timescales?
Emma Reynolds
We consulted on that issue—obviously, this falls under the MHCLG—in December. The Ministry is considering the responses, but I am working with the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure that we make it easier for farmers to establish on-farm reservoirs in order to give them more resilience.
Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)
I really welcome the ambition of the road map, particularly the focus on buying British and the nod to honest food labelling. We must now make that ambition real and focus steadfastly on the drivers of farm profitability, so that farmers are making more money from their core business of farming by the end of this Parliament than they were when it started. In that spirit, the Labour rural research group continues our calls for honest origin labelling for food. I hope the Secretary of State will back those calls and commit, as did her predecessor, to meeting the LRRG to discuss this issue further.
Emma Reynolds
I am always happy to meet my hon. Friend and the Labour rural research group, and I thank him for what he said about the road map.
I have an update for the House. The hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) is no longer in his place, but somebody has done some work for me related to question: “profitability” is mentioned in the road map 17 times, the word “profitable” is mentioned 27 times and “profit” is mentioned 52 times.
Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)
South Shropshire farmers wanted to see an action plan that prioritised food production. The road map does not do that, and it will not happen unless the Government decide to do all food procurement through supply chains that prioritise South Shropshire farmers and other farmers around the country. Will the Secretary of State commit to prioritising British farmers in the Government procurement process?
Emma Reynolds
We do want to see more British food in our institutions. As I said in response to a previous question, we are establishing a baseline—which was not established under the hon. Gentleman’s Government or ever before—to see what percentage of public sector contracts are going to British producers. That is the first step. May I also say that I am a big fan of the hon. Gentleman’s constituency? I spend some time there because my parents live in his patch.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call Callum Anderson; he has gone. I call Jack Robertson—[Interruption.] You know when you stare at something and you can see it, but you are incapable of reading it? I call Dave Robertson.
Dave Robertson (Lichfield) (Lab)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a long name; there are lots of letters in the second bit.
The farming road map that we have seen today sets out a long-term plan for fertiliser. That will be really welcome for farmers across Lichfield, Burntwood and the villages because, due to actions way beyond this Government’s control in the strait of Hormuz, we are seeing real cost pressures. Can the Secretary of State give us an idea of when that long-term plan might be ready, and whether it will consider strategic reserves and diversifying the sources of fertiliser? Can she tell us what that will do to ensure that we have the fertiliser we need?
Emma Reynolds
I think my hon. Friend’s name is very striking, Madam Deputy Speaker.
We are consulting on longer-term plans to change fertiliser rules so that we can diversify the sorts of fertilisers that farmers can use. We are also looking to see how we can ensure that fertiliser markets function more fairly, in the way that I have suggested in previous answers.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
When can we expect a resolution to the problems that are preventing payments in respect of commoning?
Emma Reynolds
It is in the road map, but I want to say, first, that I look forward to going on holiday in the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency at some stage—sounds like we get a great service! I will let him know when I am on my way. He is right to mention this issue. It is something that we are looking at, and it is mentioned in the road map. I know that there are real problems for commoners getting access to some Government schemes, so that is something he will see in the road map. Upland farmers and others really need to ensure that they can access the schemes that we have.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I fear that that is more about the bottles of champagne than the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency.
Jon Pearce (High Peak) (Lab)
I very much welcome the fact that this farming road map recognises the importance of upland farmers like mine in High Peak. Will the Secretary of State set out what support will be put in place to support my farmers, and will she meet me to discuss access to the SFI for those farming on common land?
Emma Reynolds
That is very similar question to that of the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne). I am always happy to meet my hon. Friend and other hon. Members. Upland farmers play a vital role. We have increased payment rates for upland farmers, and in the road map we talk about how we can make it easier for upland farmers and commoners to access schemes. As I said to the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), we have also commissioned Hilary Cottam to do some work on how we ensure that the communities in upland areas thrive.
Mr Andrew Snowden (Fylde) (Con)
Every farmer I speak to is angry and, at times, desperate. None of them thinks that anything has got any better over the last two years. Everyone thinks things are worse—whether it is the taxes, the grants or the allocation of non-farming lands. Members do not need to take my word for it: a recent poll showed that 0% of farmers would now vote for the Labour party. Has the Secretary of State genuinely reflected on why that may be the case?
Emma Reynolds
I have spent every minute of every day since I have been appointed rebuilding the relationship with farmers. I acknowledge that there have been problems, but I think we are in a much better place.
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
The Secretary of State says we need “better market access, so that British food can reach more customers at home and abroad”, but we know that they continue to face unnecessary trade barriers. It is a shame that the UK-EU summit is now being reorganised due to the Prime Minister’s resignation. Farmers and food producers are relying on this SPS agreement to reduce costs and bureaucracy, so can the Secretary of State commit that the summit will take place this year and give us a timeframe for when that will happen?
Emma Reynolds
It is kind of the hon. Lady to think that I am so powerful that I could have a hand in that. One person in the House wants me sacked, but I am glad that she thinks I have that power. I do not have that power, but I do want to see the summit take place. I agree that it is really important to reduce the costs and the bureaucracy that we were left by the last Government.
Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)
Farmers have been innovating since the dawn of time, and they really do not need a word salad document to tell them that it might be a good idea. I have listened carefully to the Secretary of State’s answers on fertiliser, both in terms of the current price shock and the impending additional shock, made by this Government, of carbon taxes on fertiliser. Surely, while there is lofty ambition for long-term innovation, there needs to be a direct answer and relief now on the shock that is going to come in January.
Emma Reynolds
If the hon. Gentleman looks at fertiliser prices, he will see that they have levelled off.
Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)
If the Government really believe that food security is national security, that must mean shortening supply chains and increasing local food production. The Secretary of State referred earlier to field to fork, but what new concrete steps will be taken under this plan to increase the proportion of food eaten in the UK that was grown here?
Emma Reynolds
In response to Baroness Batters’ independent farming profitability review, we have already established the Farming and Food Partnership Board, and are already working on sector growth plans for horticulture and poultry. In horticulture in particular, we have seen a reduction in the amount of domestic-grown fruit and veg that we consume in England. We are working out what more we can do to boost the production of horticulture and, indeed, poultry.
John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)
I was at the Royal Highland Show last week and farmers from across the UK were in their usual high spirits, but there is a real concern about the profitability and the future of farming. The SPS agreement, the price of fuel, red tape, the family farm tax and fertiliser are all big concerns. What specifically are the Government doing to address those concerns?
Emma Reynolds
I thank the hon. Gentleman for what he said about the show. I was not able to attend, but it is good that he and other Members were there. We are addressing all those different issues. On the SPS deal, as I said to the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden), we are very aware of the concerns of the NFU and, indeed, the farmers’ union in Scotland. I engaged with them only last month. We cannot give a running commentary, but I do want to see a smooth transition so that farmers are ready for that change.
Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)
The Great South West pan-regional partnership produced an agrifood growth plan which I commend to the Secretary of State. It was launched by Baroness Batters back in February. The south-west region accounts for one third of England’s dairy farms and makes an outsized contribution to the UK food system. How will the Government’s farming road map affect farmers in the south-west in particular?
Emma Reynolds
The farming road map is a plan for the whole of England. Obviously, each different sector of farming faces different challenges. I was glad to visit a dairy farm in my own constituency on Open Farm day—Lacey’s farm. I thank Will Lacey for showing me and my two young boys around. The road map is about helping farmers across England, including in the south-west.
Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)
While I welcome the farming road map, farmers in Somerset will be sceptical that this Government will deliver for them given their imposition of the family farm and family business taxes, which have undermined confidence and reduced investment in the rural economy. The Government closed the last SFI without notice, causing chaos for farmers. Will the Secretary of State undertake now not to do that again?
Emma Reynolds
I thank the hon. Member for welcoming the road map. We have certainly learned a lot of lessons from what happened last summer, and I would absolutely like to see no sudden stops to the system. We are learning the lessons, but also with the capital grants programme, we ensured that there were not the same issues. I cannot always predict the future, but I would like that to be the case.
Points of Order
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. During Prime Minister’s questions today, the Leader of the Opposition called the Secretary of State for Education a “spiteful class warrior”, and previously she has compared her to a Gestapo officer. I started working in Parliament when I was a teenager, and in 25 years of being involved in politics, I have never seen the atmosphere here in Parliament and outside to be quite so hostile and intimidatory, especially towards female elected representatives.
Words matter, and inflammatory language contributes to this hostility towards politicians, especially women. Could I ask your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, on whether the language used by the Leader of the Opposition today towards the Secretary of State for Education—a woman who grew up in poverty on a council estate, was raised by a single mother and was on free school meals, and worked her way up to the Cabinet—is appropriate to be used in the Chamber? I ask because not only does this language contribute to hostility, it puts off women from coming into this important profession.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I thank the hon. Lady for her point of order. Hon. Members are responsible for what they say in the Chamber, and we do not write the scripts for colleagues. “Erskine May” states:
“Good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language.”
I remind all Members that that is the way they should be conducting themselves inside the Chamber.
Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I seek your advice on how to ensure that named day written parliamentary questions are answered by the Department on time. My written questions 10935 to 10940 to the Foreign Office about a company called Siren Associates Ltd had not been answered by 22 June. They are of great personal and national importance, and we want to know when they will be answered.
Madam Deputy Speaker
I thank the hon. Member for giving notice of his point of order. It is important that Members who are sent here by their constituents receive timely answers to their questions. This is not a matter for the Chair, but I am sure that those on the Treasury Bench will have noted the hon. Member’s remarks and contacted the right Department so that he gets a response as soon as he can.
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The House may be interested in this following the earlier point of order. Earlier today, the Minister for Women and Equalities accused me of “racism” in reference to comments I made about the mass Muslim prayer in Trafalgar Square.
Although the Minister did not inform me that she would mention me in the Chamber, I gave her advance notice of this point of order, but she has chosen not to come to the House to withdraw her remarks. Given past precedent, I would like your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, on whether that is acceptable language for one Member to use about another. I also seek your guidance about the free speech of Members and those we represent. The Government’s Islamophobia definition is already being used to shut down legitimate debate over questions of religion, belief and public policy, as we warned it would be, and it falsely equates racial identity with religious belief. It is an Orwellian outrage. How do I ensure that the Minister for Women and Equalities withdraws her remarks, explains how she confused racial identity and religious belief, and apologises?
Madam Deputy Speaker
The hon. Member has got his point on the record. As I have already said, Members must take responsibility for what they say in the Chamber—
Madam Deputy Speaker
Of course, Mr Snowden, on both sides: “Good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language.”
The hon. Member has got his point on the record; let us see what happens next.
I will now announce the result of today’s deferred Division on the Customs (Tariff and Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 4) Regulations 2026. The Ayes were 323 and the Noes were 160, so the Ayes have it.
[The Division list is published at the end of today’s debates.]
Bills Presented
Ways and Means
Taxation (Energy and Vehicles)
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Dan Tomlinson)
I beg to move,
That provision may be made increasing the rate of the electricity generator levy to 55%.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Motion on income tax (mileage amounts)—
That—
(1) In the table in each of—
(a) section 230(2) of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 (approved amount for mileage allowance payments), and
(b) section 94F(2) of the Income Tax (Trading and Other Income) Act 2005 (appropriate mileage amount),
for “45p” substitute “55p”.
(2) In consequence of paragraph (1), in section 94F(3) of the Income Tax (Trading and Other Income) Act 2005, for “45p” substitute “55p”.
(3) The amendments made by this Resolution have effect for the tax year 2026-27 and subsequent tax years.
And it is declared that it is expedient in the public interest that this Resolution should have statutory effect under the provisions of the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act 1968.
Motion on vehicle excise duty (temporary rates for good vehicles)—
That—
(1) The Vehicle Excise and Registration Act 1994 has effect in relation to vehicle licences, other than trade licences, taken out in the period beginning with 1 July 2026 and ending with 30 June 2027 as follows.
(2) Paragraph 9 of Schedule 1 to that Act (rates for rigid goods vehicles exceeding 3,500 kgs revenue weight) has effect in relation to goods vehicles to which sub-paragraph (1), (2)(b) or
(3) of that paragraph applies and which are used in the course of a trade as if—
(a) in sub-paragraph (1), for “shall be determined in accordance with” to the end there were substituted “and not exceeding 44,000 kgs is £1.”;
(b) where sub-paragraph (2) applies in relation to rigid goods vehicles mentioned in paragraph (b) of that sub-paragraph, in that sub-paragraph for “basic goods vehicle rate” there were substituted “£1”;
(c) in sub-paragraph (3), for “£1,703” there were substituted “£1”.
(3) Paragraph 10 of that Schedule (rates for certain rigid goods vehicles exceeding 11,999 kgs) has effect in relation to goods vehicles to which sub-paragraph (1) of that paragraph applies and which are used in the course of a trade as if—
(a) in sub-paragraph (3), for “to be determined in accordance with” to the end there were substituted “£1.”;
(b) in sub-paragraph (7), for “£654” there were substituted “£1”.
(4) Paragraph 11 of that Schedule (rates for tractive units exceeding 3,500 kgs) has effect in relation to goods vehicles to which sub-paragraph (1), (2)(b) or (3) of that paragraph applies and which are used in the course of a trade as if—
(a) in sub-paragraph (1), for “shall be determined in accordance with” to the end there were substituted “and not exceeding 44,000 kgs is £1.”;
(b) where sub-paragraph (2) applies in relation to tractive units mentioned in paragraph (b) of that sub-paragraph, in that sub-paragraph for “basic goods vehicle rate” there were substituted “£1”;
(c) in sub-paragraph (3), for “£1,703” there were substituted “£1”.
(5) Paragraph 11C of that Schedule (rate for certain tractive units exceeding 41,000 kgs but not exceeding 44,000 kgs) has effect in relation to goods vehicles to which that paragraph applies and which are used in the course of a trade as if for “£10” there were substituted “£1”.
(6) Where subsection (2) of section 3 of that Act (6 month licences) applies in relation to a vehicle for which any of paragraphs (2) to (4) has effect, that subsection has effect as if, in paragraph (a), for “£50” there were substituted “£0”.
(7) Article 3(1)(b) of the Vehicle Licences (Duration of First Licences and Rate of Duty) Order 1986 (S.I. 1986/1428) has effect in relation to vehicle licences, other than trade licences, taken out in the period beginning with 1 July 2026 and ending with 30 June 2027 for vehicles for which any of paragraphs (2) to (5) has effect as if for “£50” there were substituted “£0”
And it is declared that it is expedient in the public interest that this Resolution should have statutory effect under the provisions of the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act 1968.
Dan Tomlinson
The Chancellor has committed to doing what she can to support families and businesses to be responsive in a changing world and responsible in the national interest. The measures before the House assist the Government in that objective.
The way that the current energy system works means that households and businesses pay more for their electricity when the gas price is high. The electricity generator levy already recoups some of the excess returns made by renewable generators when high gas prices push electricity prices over the current threshold of £82.61 per megawatt-hour. The Government have decided to increase the rate of the levy from 45% to 55% from 1 July. That will do two things: first, it will ensure that a large proportion of any exceptional revenues from high gas prices are passed back to the Government, providing a revenue stream so that money is available to support businesses and families with the impacts of the conflict in the middle east; and secondly, in the longer term it will support the new voluntary contracts for difference scheme, which was announced in April, by encouraging participation in the scheme.
In March, the Government announced a review of mileage rates for employees using their own vehicle for work and the self-employed who use the simplified expenses rates. In recognition of the pressures facing drivers as a result of the effects of the Iran war, the Chancellor announced in May the first uprating of mileage rates in 15 years, backdated to April, to provide immediate support to both groups. Mileage rates will increase for 2026-27 from 45p to 55p for the first 10,000 miles, and then 25p thereafter, with effect from 6 April. That represents the largest ever increase to these mileage rates, benefiting around 2 million employees and 1 million self-employed individuals, and saving over £120 a year for a worker doing 6,000 business miles.
It was a privilege recently to meet care workers and the Unison general secretary to hear directly about the difference that this uprating will make to those on the frontline. The general secretary said to me and the Chancellor that this measure is good news for people providing essential public services. It was an honour to meet those who work day in, day out looking after people across the country. I am glad that this measure will have a positive impact on those who do such vital work. Looking ahead, beyond 2026-27, the Government have already committed to a review of those rates and will set out further steps at the Budget.
The third measure recognises the key role that the road haulage sector plays in transporting goods across the UK and its disproportionate exposure to fuel costs. The Government are introducing a 12-month holiday from vehicle excise duty for the majority of heavy goods vehicles, which will save a typical HGV £600 on top of the savings from fuel duty. Fuel costs make up a substantial proportion of HGV operating costs, and this action will help to prevent cost pressures from the Iran conflict spreading across the economy.
The announcements on mileage rates and HGV VED were part of a wider package of measures announced in May, including on fuel duty. In total, the decisions taken since the 2024 general election to freeze fuel duty will save motorists 11p per litre, or £120 for the average car, £250 for the average van and over £2,000 for the average HGV, compared with the plans we inherited from the previous Government.
This Government are taking action to support the economy at a time of global economic uncertainty following the Iran conflict. Our approach of targeting support at those groups who are hardest hit by the conflict will ensure that the measures we take are effective, while protecting the economy from the effects of reckless borrowing that took place under the previous Government.
Dan Tomlinson
The hon. Gentleman says it was for covid, but he forgot to mention Liz Truss.
This Government’s record shows that despite that instability, our plan is working. UK GDP growth in the past two years was the second fastest in the G7. Real household disposable income per person has grown by more than 2% so far in this Parliament, compared with a fall of more than 2% in the last Parliament. Real wages have increased in every single month since this Government took office, with wages rising faster than inflation. These measures will continue that track record and demonstrate that this Government are committed to supporting working people.
Richard Fuller (North Bedfordshire) (Con)
I thank the Minister for his very clear laying out of the measures before us. May I say that sometimes there is no place for partisanship? Perhaps we have had a taste of that today.
I have a series of questions for the Minister. As I did not have a chance to brief him about them beforehand, as I wanted to, it is perfectly okay if he wants to get his ministerial team to reply in due course. I do not expect him to have all the answers straightaway.
The first of the three measures is on the electricity generator levy. I will probe three points in the written statement about it. It states that
“the 45% EGL rate will increase to 55% and will be extended past its scheduled conclusion in 2028. This will support the Government’s objective of reducing the impact of gas prices on businesses and households.”—[Official Report, 21 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 10WS.]
What is the Treasury’s estimate of the amount it anticipates to raise from this measure? Is it a straight-line assessment—essentially going from 45% to 55%—which will mean roughly £600 million? Is it the intention of the Government that the revenues that come from the EGL will be treated in the future as an established line item in the Budget, or will they be seen as a levy that will potentially go away in a short period of time?
Secondly, one of the concerns about the levy is the uncertainty and the effect that it may have on investments in electricity generation in general. What feedback has the Minister had? What feedback has the industry provided to the Government about this change? Does the Minister have a view about what the impact on industry investment will be? Surely, at this time, we are looking to extend the energy capacity of the UK at all levels that we can, so I am interested to know if the Government feel that there is a chilling effect on investment from these taxes.
Thirdly, why has the Minister not announced an end date for this increase? It was originally supposed to be a temporary levy. Indeed, not announcing an end date adds to the uncertainty in the sector. It would be helpful if the Minister could say something about that. This measure is temporary, but how long is temporary? I am interested to know whether the Government would consider a sunset clause, with a review or some other aspect that might provide additional certainty for the sector.
Let me move on to the mileage allowance increase from 45p to 55p per mile. We have no opposition to the change being made, but it would be worth while if the Minister could say a few words about the mileage allowance after 10,000 miles. The Government have decided not to change that at this time, so I am very interested to know what their thinking was. There are some people, particularly in rural areas and in certain types of jobs, who may well hit that 10,000 mile limit. What is the Government’s view on that?
As the Minister outlined, the allowance has not changed for a considerable period of time. Will he consider annual indexation? There are issues with that, because it is not just tied to the price of petrol or fuel; it includes issues to do with depreciation. Identifying some form of indexation therefore may not be straightforward, but I am interested to hear the Government’s view.
Finally, I think the Minister will recognise that the HGV vehicle excise duty holiday will probably have a limited impact, because it is just a one-year change. What sort of behavioural impact analysis did the Government undertake prior to introducing this measure? The industry is a little bit sceptical about whether it will actually change behaviour in the near term. However, I am very grateful to the Minister for laying the issues out so clearly and, as I said, I am happy to receive written answers to my questions in due course if necessary.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I do not intend to detain the House for long. I welcome the motion to increase the electricity generator levy, which—alongside the Government’s plans to encourage participation at a competitive price in long-term fixed contracts for low-carbon generators—will weaken the link between electricity and gas prices, with the overall effect of bringing down energy bills for my constituents and consumers across the UK, as well as for British businesses.
I also welcome the long-overdue increase in the approved mileage allowance for workers from 45p per mile to 55p. It is very noticeable that over the 14 years I was in Parliament under a Conservative Government, that rate stayed exactly the same, while the cost of petrol rose by around 33% and the cost of diesel by around 44%. Every single year, those workers were worse off than they had been the year before.
The motion to temporarily reduce vehicle excise duty is also welcome. Right now, HGVs pay about £1,700 on average per vehicle; the motion would change that to £1 this year. Last month, I visited Spectrum Freight in Chesterfield, where we discussed the challenges the industry is facing. It and other businesses in the industry will very much welcome the Government’s sensible approach to supporting the sector at this difficult time.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
Charlie Maynard (Witney) (LD)
The electricity generator levy is a windfall tax on UK electricity generation from nuclear, renewable and biomass sources, and it raised £0.7 billion in the last financial year. The EGL is a revenue-based tax that currently applies at a rate of 45% on exceptional generation receipts above a benchmark price of £77.94 per megawatt-hour, with an allowance of £10 million per company. In contrast, the energy profits levy applies to oil and gas production in the UK and the UK continental shelf, and raised £2.9 billion in the last financial year. We support the goal of seeking to fund cost of living support through emergency revenue measures during the gas price shock, but we also note that power wholesale prices are now around £90 per megawatt-hour, compared with a spike of £135 per megawatt-hour and a pre-Iran conflict price of £80 per megawatt-hour. How much is this measure likely to raise, given the move in prices? It feels like the horse may have already bolted, so I would be interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on that.
We recognise that this measure is a nudge to accelerate the shift of legacy renewable generators away from volatile wholesale prices and towards fixed contracts for difference, using a higher tax rate as leverage. If legacy renewable generators—those on the renewables obligation, not those already under CfDs—sign up to a wholesale contract for difference, they exchange their volatile wholesale revenues for a fixed strike price. That is obviously good news for consumers, who are insulated from future gas price spikes on that portion of generation because the generator is no longer passing through the wholesale prices, and the Government capture any upside via the Low Carbon Contracts Company when wholesale prices rise.
The second motion will increase the mileage allowance. Again, this seems a logical step, and one that we are happy to support. I note that the 45p rate has been frozen since 2011, so it has been 15 years without an adjustment. Over that period, the costs of fuel, insurance, tyres and servicing have all risen materially, so while 55p is a meaningful correction, it is questionable whether it fully catches up with accumulated inflation. This change will have a positive impact overall, not least for people in professions such as care work, who do a lot of driving between appointments. I refer again to the Lib Dem proposal to cut fuel duty by 10%—if the Chancellor took that proposal on board, it would combine with the increase in mileage allowance to make a significant difference in the pockets of people who often have to drive for work. I also note that the cost of this change has not been set out, only that it is
“subject to scrutiny by the Office for Budget Responsibility and will be set out at a future fiscal event.”
Personally, I do not think that is good enough. The Treasury team should set out the cost of any change in the tax take, whether positive or negative, when it is proposed.
Finally, the 12-month vehicle excise duty holiday for HGVs is a sensible and welcome measure, and we will not oppose it. Our hauliers, such as Chris Hayter in Witney, are critical. They are the backbone of our economy, and I understand that the Minister knows them well. We need to be honest about what this change is and what it is not. Our haulage sector was already in crisis before the conflict in Iran. Insolvency rates in road freight have been running at record levels. Margins were being squeezed by rising insurance costs, driver shortages and the lingering disruption of years of post-Brexit paperwork. The Iran conflict has simply poured fuel—at £1.85 a litre—on to a fire that was already burning.
The VED holiday saves a typical operator about £600 a vehicle. We welcome every penny of that, but against a fuel cost shock that is adding £1 billion a year to the industry’s cost base, it is by the Government’s own figures a quarter of the problem. Many operators will burn through that saving in a matter of weeks at the pump. What the sector needs alongside this is a serious long-term plan on fuel duty RPI indexation, which threatens to push costs higher again next April, on driver recruitment and retention, where the shortage remains acute, and on the transition to cleaner vehicles, where smaller operators have been left without a credible path to decarbonisation. We will support this measure through Parliament because the people driving these lorries deserve the relief now, not after another round of consultations.
Dan Tomlinson
I thank all those who have spoken, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) for his warm remarks. I will respond to the points made by the shadow spokespeople. I assume that this change will appear as a line item, although I would not want to prejudge any future decisions by the OBR on how it scores all these things and presents them in Budgets, as it is a specific tax head.
The Conservative and Liberal Democrat spokespeople asked how much this change will raise. It is difficult to know. As the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Witney (Charlie Maynard), highlighted, prices are coming down. They are at the moment slightly above the threshold in the system, but prices, as the shadow Energy Secretary will know, are volatile. In the usual way, the independent OBR will set out its estimate at the Budget for how much this change will raise and how much will be raised overall by the electricity generator levy. He is right to note that the levy does not raise billions and billions. It is a relatively targeted policy. We have increased the rate from 45% to 55%, but we have not changed the threshold and the routine uprating that takes place within it.
The Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller), asked whether there will be a review and whether this new higher rate is now the rate out into the future. That is something the Government are considering. He is right to highlight that we have not made a definitive announcement on whether that rate will last a short period or will go on into the future, but we will update in due course—it is not something that we want to leave hanging. I would expect that update will be at the Budget, if not before. However, that issue will be reviewed by the Chancellor and the Energy Secretary in the coming weeks.
Richard Fuller
I am grateful to the Minister for clarification that there is active consideration of an end date for that higher rate of 55%, but he will know that the 45% rate had an end date too. Will the review also consider announcing the end date for the levy overall, or has that not yet been considered?
Dan Tomlinson
As the shadow Minister will know, all tax rates, thresholds and the design of tax policy are considered in the round in the run-up to Budgets. With the key policy intention of the increase in the rate, and by extension the decision to continue the policy in any form, one of the things that the Government have been considering is the fact that having the rate in the system should change the incentives and encourage electricity generators to partake in the wholesale contracts for difference, which are being developed and which the Energy Secretary will bring forward in the coming months.
The shadow Minister asked about investment. It is always difficult to make changes in taxation, particularly outside of the Budget cycle. The Chancellor have been cautious about making changes in response to the conflict in Iran. We wanted to take a measured approach to ensure that we manage the public finances well, but also to ensure that we support businesses and households that have been particularly affected by the impact of the conflict washing up on our shores. It is worth highlighting that new investment is excluded from the electricity generator levy, so a business owner thinking of investing in renewables or nuclear in the UK should note that their new investments will not be affected by the increase in the rate.
Turning to the second measure, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson and my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield were right to point out that the mileage rates have not been changed since 2011. It is very disappointing that, although we saw plenty of inflation spikes, the previous Government did not take the chance to uprate them.
Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)
Could the Minister just remind us to which party the Chief Secretary to the Treasury between 2010 and 2015 belonged?
Dan Tomlinson
I am not sure. I have been in the Chief Secretary’s office in the Treasury, and there are many pictures on the wall of the countless Chief Secretaries who served under the last Government—especially towards the end, what with all the chopping and changing. However, both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives had ample time to make more than the one change that was made in 2011.
The hon. Member for North Bedfordshire asked why no change was made in the “above 10,000 miles” rate. We did of course consider that when developing the policy. A very significant proportion of those who drive for work drive less than 10,000 miles. As the hon. Gentleman pointed out, some will drive more, especially if they have long distances to drive or live in rural communities, but we thought that this approach—providing a significant 10p increase in the rate up to 10,000 miles while leaving the 25p rate unchanged—got the balance right between supporting people who need help right now and being fiscally responsible. The hon. Gentleman will know, and drivers will know, that the marginal cost of each extra mile driven will decline over time, because the up-front costs can be spread over more mileage. As for annual indexation, it is not the Government’s policy. I welcome the representation, but, again, that is not a policy that was pursued before. As he rightly observed, it would be a complicated process, given the volatility in petrol prices.
I should, of course, mention to the Liberal Democrat spokesperson that I am from Witney, and Chris Hayter Transport, the haulage company, is based just behind the housing estate on which I grew up. It is a very good local business, and I am glad to know that it will benefit from this measure. I take the points raised about the challenges facing the haulage sector, but I hope that our temporary and targeted change will benefit that business and businesses across the country.
Question put and agreed to.
Income Tax (Mileage Amounts)
Resolved,
That—
(1) In the table in each of—
(a) section 230(2) of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 (approved amount for mileage allowance payments), and
(b) section 94F(2) of the Income Tax (Trading and Other Income) Act 2005 (appropriate mileage amount),
for “45p” substitute “55p”.
(2) In consequence of paragraph (1), in section 94F(3) of the Income Tax (Trading and Other Income) Act 2005, for “45p” substitute “55p”.
(3) The amendments made by this Resolution have effect for the tax year 2026-27 and subsequent tax years.
And it is declared that it is expedient in the public interest that this Resolution should have statutory effect under the provisions of the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act 1968.—(Dan Tomlinson.)
Vehicle Excise Duty (Temporary Rates for Goods Vehicles)
Resolved,
That—
(1) The Vehicle Excise and Registration Act 1994 has effect in relation to vehicle licences, other than trade licences, taken out in the period beginning with 1 July 2026 and ending with 30 June 2027 as follows.
(2) Paragraph 9 of Schedule 1 to that Act (rates for rigid goods vehicles exceeding 3,500 kgs revenue weight) has effect in relation to goods vehicles to which sub-paragraph (1), (2)(b) or
(3) of that paragraph applies and which are used in the course of a trade as if—
(a) in sub-paragraph (1), for “shall be determined in accordance with” to the end there were substituted “and not exceeding 44,000 kgs is £1.”;
(b) where sub-paragraph (2) applies in relation to rigid goods vehicles mentioned in paragraph (b) of that sub-paragraph, in that sub-paragraph for “basic goods vehicle rate” there were substituted “£1”;
(c) in sub-paragraph (3), for “£1,703” there were substituted “£1”.
(3) Paragraph 10 of that Schedule (rates for certain rigid goods vehicles exceeding 11,999 kgs) has effect in relation to goods vehicles to which sub-paragraph (1) of that paragraph applies and which are used in the course of a trade as if—
(a) in sub-paragraph (3), for “to be determined in accordance with” to the end there were substituted “£1.”;
(b) in sub-paragraph (7), for “£654” there were substituted “£1”.
(4) Paragraph 11 of that Schedule (rates for tractive units exceeding 3,500 kgs) has effect in relation to goods vehicles to which sub-paragraph (1), (2)(b) or (3) of that paragraph applies and which are used in the course of a trade as if—
(a) in sub-paragraph (1), for “shall be determined in accordance with” to the end there were substituted “and not exceeding 44,000 kgs is £1.”;
(b) where sub-paragraph (2) applies in relation to tractive units mentioned in paragraph (b) of that sub-paragraph, in that sub-paragraph for “basic goods vehicle rate” there were substituted “£1”;
(c) in sub-paragraph (3), for “£1,703” there were substituted “£1”.
(5) Paragraph 11C of that Schedule (rate for certain tractive units exceeding 41,000 kgs but not exceeding 44,000 kgs) has effect in relation to goods vehicles to which that paragraph applies and which are used in the course of a trade as if for “£10” there were substituted “£1”.
(6) Where subsection (2) of section 3 of that Act (6 month licences) applies in relation to a vehicle for which any of paragraphs (2) to (4) has effect, that subsection has effect as if, in paragraph (a), for “£50” there were substituted “£0”.
(7) Article 3(1)(b) of the Vehicle Licences (Duration of First Licences and Rate of Duty) Order 1986 (S.I. 1986/1428) has effect in relation to vehicle licences, other than trade licences, taken out in the period beginning with 1 July 2026 and ending with 30 June 2027 for vehicles for which any of paragraphs (2) to (5) has effect as if for “£50” there were substituted “£0”
And it is declared that it is expedient in the public interest that this Resolution should have statutory effect under the provisions of the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act 1968.—(Dan Tomlinson.)
Ordered,
That a Bill be brought in upon the foregoing resolutions;
That the Chairman of Ways and Means, the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lucy Rigby, Rachel Blake, Dan Tomlinson and Torsten Bell do prepare and bring in the Bill.
Taxation (Energy and Vehicles) Bill
Presentation and First Reading
Dan Tomlinson accordingly presented a Bill to increase the rate of electricity generator levy and mileage amounts relating to income tax and to provide for temporary rates of vehicle excise duty for goods vehicles.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 103) with explanatory notes (Bill 103-EN).
Climate Change
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
19:33 - The House divided: - Ayes: 332 / Noes: 94 - Question accordingly agreed to.
19:47 - The House divided: - Ayes: 329 / Noes: 94 - Question accordingly agreed to.
19:59 - The House divided: - Ayes: 330 / Noes: 93 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Katie White)
I beg to move,
That the draft Carbon Budget Order 2026, which was laid before this House on 2 June, be approved.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
That the draft Climate Change Act 2008 (International Aviation and International Shipping) Regulations 2026, which were laid before this House on 14 April, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
That the draft Climate Change Act 2008 (Credit Limit) Order 2026, which was laid before this House on 14 April, in the last Session of Parliament, be approved.
Katie White
This week has been like no other. At this very moment, people across our country are experiencing another reminder of the world we now live in. If anyone in this Chamber still thinks that climate change is a problem for tomorrow, they should step outside today. Parents will struggle to get their children to sleep through sweltering nights. Farmers will look anxiously at weather forecasts and cloudless skies. Hospitals, schools and care homes will prepare for temperatures that would have seemed extraordinary in Britain just a few decades ago.
Parts of our country are facing temperatures of up to 38° this week, while experts warn that 40° days may arrive far sooner than anyone expected. Today’s debate is not taking place against the backdrop of climate change; it is taking place in the middle of it, and I cannot make it clearer to the House that this is not normal. A Met Office extreme heat warning is in place for parts of the UK today and tomorrow. In fact, it has just confirmed that today is the hottest June day ever.
In recent months the crisis in the middle east has felt like a ghost from the recent past. Once again, the world has found itself staring at a major fossil fuel-producing region and wondering what happens next. Once again, energy markets have been holding their breath. Once again, families, businesses and Governments have been reminded just how fragile the system can be. This is, of course, the second fossil fuel shock in barely half a decade. It is only four years since Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine and sent shockwaves through the global economy, four years since family budgets were shredded by soaring energy bills, and four years since Britain was reminded that when our energy system depends on volatile fossil fuel markets, a crisis on the other side of the world can land on our doorstep in a matter of days.
When faced with challenges of this scale, there is always a temptation to focus on the immediate crisis, to become consumed by the pressures of the day, and to postpone difficult decisions for another Parliament, another Government or another generation.
Katie White
I will make some progress.
Postponing difficult decisions has never been how our country has met its greatest challenges. We have always been strongest when we have looked beyond the immediate horizon, recognised the risks ahead and taken practical steps to prepare for them. That is what the carbon budget framework represents: a science-led budget to reduce emissions by around 87% between 2038 and 2042 compared with 1990 levels, including in international aviation and shipping. The framework is in line with the advice from the independent Climate Change Committee and is endorsed by the Environmental Audit Committee, which I thank for its rigorous scrutiny, including in the evidence session that it held with me last week.
Alongside the carbon budget framework, the regulations before the House today will formally include the UK’s share of international aviation and shipping emissions in carbon budgets from carbon budget 6 onwards, while the Climate Change Act 2008 (Credit Limit) Order 2026 will ensure that carbon budget 5 is met through domestic action, allowing the UK economy to capture the full benefits of the transition.
Katie White
I will keep going.
In determining the level of the seventh carbon budget, we assessed different pathways for Britain’s future. What the analysis showed was remarkably clear: whether viewed through the lens of economic growth, national security, public health or long-term prosperity, the benefits of continuing on Britain’s path to net zero significantly outweigh the benefits of abandoning it. Let me explain why.
The first reason is business uncertainty. This framework provides something every successful economy depends on and every serious business asks for: certainty. Investment flows not to the country with the lowest costs or the biggest market, but to the country with a plan. It flows to the country where business investors and entrepreneurs can look 10, 15 or 20 years into the future and have confidence about the direction of travel.
Yesterday, in a career highlight, I was proud to open the London stock exchange to mark London Climate Action Week. It also celebrates a remarkable finding in new analysis by the London stock exchange, which is that the global green economy is now worth more than $10 trillion. Its analysis has found that green revenues grew by 5.3% in 2025, despite energy shocks, market volatility and geopolitical tensions. Here in the UK, I am proud to announce that this Government have officially secured £100 billion of private investment in clean energy since taking office.
The message from investors could not be clearer: the race is on. Capital is flowing towards the countries that are building, planning and backing the industries of the future, and that is one of the great strengths of the Climate Change Act and the carbon budget framework. For almost two decades, that has provided a stable and predictable signal about where Britain is heading, giving businesses the confidence to invest, innovate and grow.
Katie White
I will keep going for a bit if that is okay.
This is a market solution to a generational challenge, providing certainty about the destination while allowing competition, innovation and enterprise to determine the journey, and the results can be seen across the country. On the day we laid this order before Parliament, new analysis showed that Britain’s net zero economy now supports more than 1 million jobs and generated £105 billion for the UK economy alone. We see that opportunity in carbon capture projects in Teesside, in new nuclear at Sizewell C in Suffolk, and in companies across the country building the technologies, supply chains and industries that will power the next chapter of British economic growth.
Indeed, as more than 75,000 people have descended on London for London Climate Action Week this week—taking part in over 1,300 events and helping to broker deals, partnerships and investments that will shape the global economy for years to come—they are doing so in a city that has established itself as the sustainable finance capital of the world. That is why support for this framework extends far beyond Government. The British Chambers of Commerce says these plans provide “greater certainty for…firms”. The CBI describes the green economy as
“a powerhouse of job creation and economic expansion”.
E.ON says that
“the prize is bigger than emissions alone.”
Business leaders, manufacturers and investors are all making the same argument. In a world competing for capital, talent and innovation, long-term certainty is not a burden on growth; it is one of the foundations of it.
Secondly, if the economic case for action is increasingly clear, so is the security case. Climate change has become a central concern not just for scientists and policy makers, but for our country’s military leaders, intelligence chiefs and security experts. On the agenda for the Munich security conference, climate change sits alongside geopolitical conflict and nuclear proliferation as one of the defining risks of our age. That assessment is increasingly shared across Britain’s own security establishment. Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston has said it
“threatens global resilience and our shared security and prosperity.”
Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former director general of MI5, has said it is clear that climate change is the “greatest threat” we face. Lieutenant General Nugee has said:
“Climate change is not an abstract environmental issue. It is now a core national security risk.”
These are not campaigners or commentators; they have served their country and are people who have spent their careers identifying risks before they become crises and preparing our country for threats before they arrive.
Climate change is often discussed as an environmental challenge, yet it is increasingly showing up elsewhere in conversations about food security, energy security, national resilience and the basic responsibility of Government to protect their citizens from foreseeable risks. The framework before the House is not just about reducing emissions; it is part of the long-term work of making Britain safer, stronger and less vulnerable in a more uncertain world.
Thirdly and finally, we should see this transition for what it really is: one of the greatest upgrade projects in our country’s history. Too often, debates about climate change become trapped in the language of targets, regulations and emissions, but when future generations look back on this period, they are unlikely to remember the technical details of carbon budgets or policy frameworks. What they will remember is that this was the moment Britain began upgrading the system that underpins modern life.
Every generation has had its national upgrade. Previous generations built the railways that connected our country, electrified our towns and cities, brought clean water into people’s homes, connected millions of households to the gas grid and transformed the way people travelled, worked and lived. Our generation’s task is no different. We are upgrading an energy system that leaves us exposed to volatile fossil fuel markets and replacing it with one powered increasingly by clean electricity generated here at home. We are upgrading homes and technology that allow families to generate, store and manage their own energy. We are upgrading transport, upgrading industry and upgrading infrastructure that in many cases was designed for a different century and a different economy.
That is not a marginal adjustment to the economy we have today; it is a fundamental upgrade to how Britain powers itself, and the prize is enormous. Our analysis shows that clean power and electrification could save families and businesses £445 billion in fossil fuel spending over the next 25 years. Cleaner air could mean up to 8,000 fewer hospital admissions every year by 2050 and around £80 billion in health benefits, while action to restore nature could deliver a further £50 billion-worth of benefits.
Katie White
No, I will make some progress.
Those benefits include greater protection from flooding, cleaner rivers and greater biodiversity.
But this is not simply about what we avoid; it is about what we build. Across the world, more than $2 trillion is now invested in clean energy every year—roughly twice the amount invested in fossil fuels. It is where global capital is flowing, where industries are being built and where future economic advantage will increasingly be won. I make no apology for Britain competing for that opportunity. I do not want our country watching from the sidelines while others capture the jobs, industries and investment of the future. I want Britain helping to shape that future and benefiting from it.
Let me finish by saying this. Long before I entered this House and long before I became a Minister, I was one of the many people involved in the wider effort that helped to build support for the Climate Change Act, which is one of the most significant and widely supported pieces of cross-party legislation this country has ever passed.
Katie White
Let me just finish.
Back then, it often felt like a cause that sat at the margins of politics, rather than at its centre. Progress felt slow; success felt uncertain. If someone had told me that one day I would stand at this Dispatch Box I might have struggled to believe it, but what that journey reminds me of is that real change is rarely the work of one person, one Government or one political party. It happens because people keep building year after year, Government after Government, Parliament after Parliament. Eighteen years ago, this House came together to pass the world’s first climate change Act. Seven years ago, it came together again to make Britain the first major economy to legislate on net zero emissions. Different Prime Ministers, different Governments and different political traditions have all helped to write that story.
Katie White
I will just finish.
History has many authors. As a result of that shared effort, Britain was the first major economy to cut emissions by more than half, while growing its economy by more than 85% between 1990 and 2025. We have helped to inspire around 60 countries to adopt similar legislation and we have shown it is possible to combine climate action with economic growth, energy security and national prosperity.
At its best, this House has always been capable of looking beyond the pressures of the moment and acting in the interests of future generations. I believe this is one of those moments, so whatever our differences on the detail I hope we can recognise what this debate is really about: the kind of country we leave behind and whether we upgrade it while we have the chance. That is a legacy worth building together. I commend these orders and regulations to the House.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the shadow Secretary of State.
Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)
Today, we are voting on something hugely consequential: a new net zero target that will allow Ministers and civil servants to control almost every part of the economy and the cost of goods in every aspect of people’s lives. It will affect the cost of energy, food, housing, heating, transport, holidays and shipping, and which industries will find it competitive to do business in Britain and which industries will not. Yet in this Chamber can anybody put a figure on how much more expensive this will make food or energy bills or family holidays?
Claire Coutinho
I will happily give way for the hon. Gentleman to cite the figure.
Jonathan Davies
Does the right hon. Lady not accept that the investment her Government made in offshore wind power has insulated British consumers against the fossil fuel price hikes we have seen as a consequence of the Iran war? That is evidence that investment in renewable energy is good for consumers and businesses.
Claire Coutinho
I note that the hon. Gentleman did not answer my question, because he does not have an answer. Let me answer his question: on an electricity bill, 25% of the cost is a wholesale cost, and 75% is a non-commodity cost. Bills have gone up so much partly because of the taxes, levies and policies that his Government have chosen.
Claire Coutinho
No, I will pursue my argument. The vast majority of the costs on an electricity bill are not to do with wholesale prices. The question that I asked the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Jonathan Davies) was whether he could tell us—[Interruption.] He should listen to this; he is not even listening to my point. I asked whether he could tell us what the legislation he is voting on today will do to the price of food, energy, and holidays for his constituents.
Several hon. Members rose—
Claire Coutinho
Let me try this question: how many Members present can say, hand on heart, that they have read the impact assessment for this legislation?
Claire Coutinho
The hon. Gentleman says that he has. Could he cite the number of jobs the legislation will create or lose in the overall economy?
Luke Murphy
The right hon. Lady’s argument would have a lot more credibility if she had not said, in 2023:
“Nothing will distract us from achieving net zero or driving forward renewables…I want people to feel nothing but unadulterated optimism…We are absolutely committed to our targets.”
The facts about climate change have not changed, yet the right hon. Member has changed her mind. Could that be because of those Members sitting on the Reform Bench?
Claire Coutinho
The hon. Gentleman also did not answer my question on jobs. I inherited my party’s position on net zero. I made it clear from the outset that my priority was affordability for Brits in this country, and that net zero should not impoverish consumers. In fact, I made some changes that meant that Labour called me a climate denier and a flat-earther. The hon. Gentleman now comes to this Chamber, not to scrutinise the legislation that will have a massive effect on his constituents, but to criticise me for scrutinising it, asking questions and changing my party’s position.
I am proud to have changed my party’s position, because I care about the consumer, about jobs, and about the price of food and energy. None of the Members on the Government Benches seems to care about those things, because if they did—[Interruption.] I will make some progress, because nobody is answering these questions. If they cared about those things, they would have read the Government’s impact assessment.
Claire Coutinho
Well, the hon. Gentleman could not answer the question on jobs. If he had read it, he would know that the Government’s own impact assessment admits that the modelling does not consider any upside, or downside risks, to the economy arising from the energy transition. It specifically says that it does not consider the impact on jobs. That means that Government Members are voting on legislation without any idea of what it is going to mean for the British worker.
The impact assessment is clear and explicit: the modelling does not analyse energy security. The Government do not know what the legislation will mean for the energy security of our nation. The head of Unite was spot on when she said at the weekend that the Secretary of State
“only seems to be interested in one side of the equation, rushing Britain to net zero with almost no thought for jobs, skills and national security.”
The transition has literally not been properly assessed. What is worse is that Government MPs want to make their political points, but none of them seems to care. Considering how much people are struggling and how much growth is flatlining, are Labour Members really happy to wave through those legal targets without the foggiest idea of what it will do to the economy, the cost of living or energy security?
Claire Coutinho
If the hon. Gentleman would like to tell us about the impact on jobs, he is more than welcome to do so.
Mr Perkins
I am happy to do so. Is the right hon. Member aware of the evidence from the Climate Change Committee that says that the cost of doing nothing is more expensive than the cost of everything that is needed for net zero? When she attempts to stand in the way of the transition, what she is actually doing is attempting to pile up the costs on British business and consumers, and on the sustainability of our country. She should understand the impact of her policies, rather than attempting to row back on one of the few things the previous Government should have been proud of.
Claire Coutinho
I will come to the evidence of the Climate Change Committee in a second, but first I note that once again, a Member from the Labour Benches cannot cite an overall figure on jobs—I would have thought that the Labour party would be able to cite a figure on jobs.
Several hon. Members rose—
Claire Coutinho
Look, I have given way to a number of hon. Members, and nobody has had an answer. Let me put this to them—
Peter Swallow
It absolutely will be about jobs—I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. The CBI—not the Government, but the CBI—has found that the net zero economy is worth £100 billion of investment in this country every year and supports 1.1 million jobs.
Claire Coutinho
Oh dear. So the hon. Gentleman has not read that report either, because it includes among those jobs waste, recycling and nuclear power—does he think we did not have those jobs before the net zero target? It also includes soil restoration and land management. It specifically says—[Interruption.] I am sorry; Labour Members do not seem to like this, but I have actually read these reports. They do not seem to realise that that report includes a huge range of things that have nothing to do with the net zero target.
I will press on. When the Climate Change Committee provides advice to the Government about what carbon budget target they should set, it uses its own costings and assumptions. Its analysis determines how billions upon billions—that is thousands and thousands of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money—is spent. I am afraid that is deeply problematic.
Why do I say that? Because the cost of offshore wind used to prepare carbon budget 7 was out by a factor of three. The Climate Change Committee said that offshore wind would cost £38 per megawatt-hour, but contracts were being signed by their Secretary of State for £82 per megawatt-hour, suggesting that something was clearly going very wrong on a key input for the exact target that we are voting on today.
When I wrote to the Climate Change Committee—
Several hon. Members rose—
Claire Coutinho
I will make this point. When I wrote to the Climate Change Committee asking it to look at this matter, it sent me a dismissive reply. So I wrote about it in a newspaper. What did the committee do? It reported me—a democratically elected politician—under the Independent Press Standards Organisation editors’ code and tried to get me to remove my opinion. I did not. Just a few months later, the Government updated their own costings, not to £80 per megawatt-hour or even to £90 per megawatt-hour, but to over £100 per megawatt-hour. That is the Minister’s own figure. That means that not only was I right, but offshore wind was now predicted to cost three times what the Climate Change Committee had said.
I do not know which is worse: that we are making huge decisions on the basis of such poor analysis, that nobody on the Government Benches thinks that this warrants any scrutiny, or that an unelected advisory body is using taxpayers’ funds to try to silence elected representatives rather than focusing on getting its costings right. Everybody in this House should think that is shameful. If the committee was wrong by a factor of three on offshore wind—something that we have better evidence for than pretty much anything else in the market—how can we trust any of the rest of its analysis?
Let us look at some of the committee’s claims. It claims that a low-carbon electricity supply is “cheaper per unit” than high-carbon electricity. Well, if your numbers are out by a factor of three, perhaps you might think that. It also says that
“most businesses will not be…affected by Net Zero”,
particularly in the services sector. How does it justify that? Let me assure the House, if net zero blocks the advance of AI in this country, that will have a catastrophic impact on our services sector. Here is another claim:
“a reduction in meat…and dairy”
will mean a healthier diet. Who are they to tell us what to eat and to give us nutritional advice? The committee makes claim after claim and sweeping statement after sweeping statement with nobody holding it accountable. Yet this advice—this target—will affect almost every part of normal life.
Hon. Members may argue that we need strict climate targets to provide certainty for jobs—that is what the Minister just said—but that is nonsense. The country doing the best at creating clean tech jobs is China, which is now the world’s largest polluter. Hon. Members may also say that this is about our moral duty to fix climate change, but I will remind them that every time a British factory shuts here, where we have some of the cleanest electricity in the world, and we import those same goods back from coal-powered China, we are not helping climate change; instead, we are increasing global emissions. Before Labour Members get on their high horse, I will remind them that the Conservatives are the only party to call for the measurement of the offshoring of emissions. Labour does not want to know because it does not care.
Here is the problem: Labour Members do not want to properly measure whether we are just trading emissions here for emissions abroad because they do not really care whether this target is actually good for the worker, or good for jobs, or good for the cost of living, or good for the environment. That is why none of them cared to read the impact assessment.
Several hon. Members rose—
Claire Coutinho
I have taken interventions from so many Labour Members, and none of them could give a figure—[Interruption.] I will happily give way.
Luke Murphy
Point 299 of the impact assessment says:
“The transition away from fossil fuels will lead to a net increase in job creation”.
I believe the right hon. Lady said a moment ago that it does not mention at all the impact on jobs. I invite her to correct the record.
Claire Coutinho
The analysis that the hon. Gentleman points to refers to TIMES modelling. That is used for the baseline. A few pages away, its says that the TIMES modelling specifically does not look at the impact of jobs on the overall energy transition. It is in there in black and white.
The hon. Gentleman might desperately google it now in the Chamber, but the truth is that no Labour Members read and scrutinised the impact assessment properly because none of them cares. Let’s be honest: they are all here to read their boilerplate speeches, which will all be exactly the same, to virtue signal how much of a good person they are. That is the truth. Most of them come from climate NGOs and green lobby groups—the Minister does too, I am afraid—and they care more about ideology than evidence. How many of them have ever had to turn a profit for a living? How many have had to work out how to pay someone else’s wages? How many have had to consider all the costs that go into manufacturing and selling something in Britain?
The thing is, we could do this so differently. We are 1% of global emissions; 99% are happening elsewhere. Those countries are not persuaded by Britain driving itself into poverty while the Secretary of State preaches at them from his pulpit. In fact, they are asking themselves why they should follow the path that Britain is taking when we are such an obvious example of what not to do. We are a country that is making its energy scarce and expensive, and deindustrialising and impoverishing its own citizens.
What is the solution? First, we must reject decarbonisation by deindustrialisation. Therefore, we must measure the offshoring of emissions and get rid of the unilateral carbon tax and the stringent targets killing off British industry by repealing the Climate Change Act.
Richard Tice
Given that we have reduced our carbon emissions by some 54% since 1990, perhaps the shadow Secretary of State agrees with me that we have led the way and done our bit. It is now time for others to do theirs.
Claire Coutinho
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. The question is, can we protect the environment, the economy and living standards? Is what the Government are proposing today going to help us do those things? I would argue that it is not. [Interruption.] Well, let’s talk about it: Labour Members will vote today to increase the cost of aviation and shipping when our competitors in Asia, the middle east and the US are not doing so. That is mad.
The first part of our plan is to save British industry. The second is to make electricity cheap. Just 10% of our emissions are in the electricity system; the vast majority are in transport, industry and buildings. Our electricity is clean. Does Labour even realise that? It is some of the cleanest electricity in the world. The problem is that it is too expensive and deterring electrification. I am not someone on the right who thinks that all clean tech is stupid, but I do think that cheap electricity and consumer choice should be king.
Thirdly, we should wholeheartedly embrace innovation and exports of British clean tech, whether that is the next generation of nuclear, software or consumer products. Finally, we should pay much more heed to nature—something that we were proud to do but this Government are much less keen on. Funnily enough, they are much more attracted to net zero than nature. Perhaps that is because the former gives them unlimited powers to dictate to people what they can and cannot do, and to tax people who do things that they do not like. That is, after all, a socialist’s dream.
I would bet everything that our approach is better for the British economy and the environment, but it would mean wresting this agenda away from the incredibly well-funded green lobby groups with vested interests, who provide these figures that Members on the Labour Benches all merrily cite without having actually read the reports. And, frankly, they do not have the balls to do it—they do not even have the balls to take on their out-of-control Secretary of State.
I will end on this. The public keep being promised cheaper energy and more jobs, yet those things are not materialising. If people want to know why Governments keep failing, they should look at this impact assessment, which I am afraid is mumbo-jumbo that does not tell the reader what the target will do to the cost of food or energy, or the cost of business. They should consider the fact that parliamentarians are prepared to wave it through today. The Minister did not even take any questions. This is meant to be a debate in which we scrutinise these important decisions, but she did not want to answer any questions.
Who in the public voted for this? Who in the public voted for more expensive food, energy bills and boilers? Who voted to increase our goods imports from China? Let us be very clear: this legislation takes control away from Ministers and gives it to civil servants, unaccountable bodies and activists who will tell Ministers that they cannot prioritise the cost of living or the economy, even if they were elected to do so.
The Energy Secretary might not be in post for much longer, but the legacy of his target will be to make us poorer and weaker. Ministers will be more bound by red tape and less able to deliver on their promises, but it does not have to be that way. This is the moment to take back control for our constituents and say that Ministers should not be bound by legislation waved through with no scrutiny—by Ministers who will not take any questions. Ministers should be bound by the democratic promises they have made to the electorate. That is how we fix this. That is how we put our constituents back in the driving seat, and that is why Members should vote to reject this legislation today.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
As colleagues will understand, this is a three-hour debate and a remarkable number of Members wish to contribute, so Back Benchers will shortly be on a speaking limit of five minutes. First, I call the Chair of the Select Committee, Toby Perkins.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I very much welcome the draft Carbon Budget Order 2026, which sets the level of the seventh carbon budget on the way to our long-term and previously cross-party aim to balance the UK’s carbon emissions by 2050.
I have to say that the speech we have just heard from the right hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) was quite remarkable because, at the most fundamental level, it failed to understand what we are doing today. The sixth carbon budget passed by the previous Government in 2020 only got its delivery plan in 2025. Today, we are debating our aim for 2038 to 2042. At this moment, it is not prescriptive about how we get there. That is why, at the most fundamental level, the shadow Secretary of State did not understand what she was debating, and why she failed to get answers to some of the questions that she thought should be answered. I am afraid that, at the most fundamental level, she was on the wrong path.
Peter Swallow
My hon. Friend is making an important point. I have been contacted by many constituents who have engaged with the “People’s Emergency Briefing” campaign. One of its key asks is greater public awareness of the effects of climate change. Does he agree that the Government should do more to make sure that people are aware of the effects of climate change? Perhaps we could start with the shadow Secretary of State.
Mr Perkins
That is a very good place to start, because the shadow Secretary of State suggested that the Climate Change Committee has attempted to silence her. It has not attempted to silence her. What it attempted to do, on a point of fact, was inform her of the basis on which her letter to the committee was wrong. This was not a matter of opinion; the Climate Change Committee was simply explaining to her where the cost of electricity comes from. My hon. Friend makes a good point.
The shadow Secretary of State talked about transparency, which is interesting because the fact that we are having a debate on the seventh carbon budget is completely different from what happened on the fourth, fifth and sixth carbon budgets. The sixth carbon budget, under the previous Government, was approved in 17 minutes in a Delegated Legislation Committee, far away from public scrutiny. These are crucial matters. I agree with the shadow Secretary of State that they will have wide-ranging impacts on all of us, and they should be debated on the Floor of the House. I welcome that this Government, unlike the previous one, have brought this forward and reserved time to debate it.
In debating this order, it is so disappointing that the political consensus that previously existed has evaporated. It lasted from the Labour Government’s seminal introduction of the Climate Change Act 2008, which was strengthened and updated in 2019 by the Conservative Government. With the introduction of the Climate Change Act and the pathway to net zero, Britain was world-leading in our ambition. The approach was so admired that, far from what the shadow Secretary of State said, it was copied by many other legislatures. How tragic that the Opposition should choose to jettison one of the greatest achievements in their 14 years in government in the face of a threat from the climate deniers in Reform.
The approach pursued by successive Governments is working. Since 1990, the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions have been cut by 54%. At the same time, the UK economy has grown.
Richard Tice
Will the hon. Gentleman just answer a very simple question, as this is in the Labour manifesto and the Secretary of State bangs on about it week after week? When will energy bills and electricity bills come down?
Mr Perkins
There are many different things that impact energy prices. We have seen £150 taken off the price of bills. I think there is more that can be done to reduce electricity prices, and I will come to that.
The reality is that the hon. Gentleman is an advocate of a greater reliance on gas and oil. If anything is explained to us, it is that we have no control over energy prices while we are reliant on gas and oil. Everything that has happened since 2022—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman puts his head in his hands. I say to him that the amount that the Government spent in 2022 to cover the cost of the increase in energy prices caused by the start of the Ukraine war was greater than the cost of everything that we will do on net zero between now and 2050. That is the reality: £44 billion pounds was spent propping up people’s gas, electricity and fuel bills at the time of that crisis. That is why we need to get away from that dependence.
As I was saying, since 1990, the UK economy has grown, partly powered by the green economy, which last year was found to be growing at three times the rate of the rest of the economy, providing jobs and growth across the country. The most recent CCC assessment found that the UK remains among the leading group of countries that demonstrate sustained emissions reductions. The transition is the pro-business choice. This year’s CBI and Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit report on the net zero economy found that green businesses and their supply chains generated £105 billion in gross value added for the UK economy, as well as supporting over 20,000 small businesses and a million jobs.
Dame Nia Griffith
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, with which I very much agree. I want us to tackle climate change as fast as possible, and to accelerate the bringing online of that cheap, clean energy that will help both households and businesses. Does he, however, understand the pressures on the automotive industry? Will he join me in asking the Minister to look carefully at a rescheduling of current targets so that we do not have a knee-jerk reaction, but instead have a long-term plan that industry can sign up to, which would provide the certainty that is needed in that particular sphere while we battle on with the other things we are doing to bring down emissions?
Mr Perkins
My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I will come to the zero emission vehicle mandate shortly. I agree with the shadow Secretary of State that we need to be careful that we do not just offshore emissions, so I will come to some of the stuff that we need to do about energy-intensive industries. None the less, I think it is important that we give business the certainty that it requires.
During the EAC’s inquiry into carbon budget 7, we heard time and again from business and investors that a long-term plan and policy certainty are needed. The forthcoming delivery plan and CB7 are exactly the sort of long-term planning that businesses need to have confidence about the UK’s direction of travel, in order to invest and innovate. As a world leader on clean energy, our approach puts Britain on the front foot in a globally competitive and quickly changing world.
The setting of the seventh carbon budget today is not just a technical milestone but a statement of our long-term ambition to secure the UK’s economic future and our competitiveness on the global stage, alongside a greener and healthier future for our children. The EAC analysis confirms that the pathway to CB7 is both credible and achievable. It is clear that, although they accept the overall figure, the Government will not adopt all the approaches suggested by the CCC, and the delivery plan that the Government adopt is what will dictate the success or otherwise of CB7. That is why the shadow Secretary of State was unable to get answers to all the questions she was posing. This provides an overall framework but it is not the Government’s delivery plan. It is within the delivery plan that we might expect to get some of the answers to the shadow Secretary of State’s questions, which she would have known if she understood what the carbon budget order process was all about.
The Climate Change Committee has said:
“The slow pace of electrification is putting the UK’s climate targets at risk and is a missed opportunity to enhance UK energy security in the face of rising threats, leaving the UK exposed to geopolitical shocks…Following the recent increase in fossil fuel prices, bills have increased almost four times more for a typical household with a gas boiler and a petrol car, compared to a household with a heat pump and an EV.”
People need to know how net zero will result in a stronger, more resilient economy, lower bills and greener and healthier places to live.
The EAC’s report is tagged to the debate today, and I would like to place on record my thanks to Committee specialist Dawn Amey for her work on that really important report. Our report identifies several areas in which further action is needed to achieve the seventh carbon budget. I would like to highlight just three. First, the Committee identified that bringing down energy bills and making electrification attractive and affordable was fundamental to making the green transition work for businesses and people. This Government are accelerating the roll-out of renewables in Britain and investing in grid and network infrastructure, both of which will have the effect of bringing down bills, but more action is needed. We recommended removing further policy costs from energy bills and putting them on to general taxation. This will improve the cost differential for making cleaner choices for households and industry.
Mr Perkins
Absolutely, Madam Deputy Speaker; I will move straight on.
Secondly, we heard again and again from businesses that long-term policy certainty and delivery across Government was crucial. Thirdly, we heard that fairness was key. The green transition is necessary and brings huge potential benefits, but it must be done in a way that brings people and businesses along. Decarbonisation must not mean deindustrialisation. Forcing production to relocate abroad weakens the UK’s industrial base and undermines support for decarbonisation while failing to reduce global emissions.
In summary, the path laid out by this order is credible and achievable. The goal is a vital one—indeed, this is the fight of our age—but it must be done in a way that allows our economy and our people to thrive, and ensures that it is fairly distributed so that it is accessible to all. The prize is not just a more sustainable future but quite possibly the future of our race on this planet.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
All Back Benchers will now be on a five-minute speaking limit, but first I come to the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
Pippa Heylings (South Cambridgeshire) (LD)
I thank the Minister and the Government for allowing a good length of time for us to debate and give due consideration to this issue of national security, just as it demands. On the day that we are debating the draft Carbon Budget Order 2026, which aims to balance our carbon emissions from 2038 to 2041, it has just been confirmed that we have surpassed the UK’s record June temperatures, which were set in 1976. The record has been surpassed in Charlwood in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan). The Met Office has also issued a red warning for extreme heat this week, with temperatures likely to hit 40°C, but once again the UK is woefully unprepared because we keep putting our head in the sand.
Climate change is no longer a future threat; it is here with us today and the consequences are already being felt. The shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), asked about costs. This week alone, hundreds of schools have closed. GCSE and A-level students are taking what may be the most important exams in their lives in sweltering conditions, in schools unfit for the current temperatures. Public transport is gridlocked and trains are being cancelled today. Telecommunications are down and the economy faces hundreds of millions of pounds of lost productivity and infrastructure failures.
Turning to the public health costs, last summer’s heatwaves contributed to an estimated 16,500 avoidable excess deaths across Europe, with 1,504 heat-associated deaths last year in the UK alone. We know that that is affecting our elderly and the most vulnerable.
Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) (Green)
The hon. Member is making an important speech. She highlighted the record-breaking June temperatures, and I heard Members behind me talk about how it is lovely and warm, but she highlights the very real human cost and the number of deaths per year that we are already seeing. Did she hear the Climate Change Committee highlighting that on the current trajectory, if we do not take action by mid-century, we will see 10,000 unavoidable deaths per year due to heat? Does that not show how serious the situation is?
Pippa Heylings
Absolutely, I agree with the hon. Member.
Let us no longer hide from this, but look it clearly in the eye: there are clear costs. They are no longer in the future; they are here now. There are costs to our economy, but also to our communities.
Let us talk about food costs. Food supplies are coming under increasing pressure. Three of the UK’s worst harvests on record have occurred within the last five years, hitting our farmers and driving up costs for families at every shop. Floods and wildfires are making homes uninsurable and putting lives and livelihoods at risk. But this is much more than a story about a few hot days. If we think that this week’s heat is uncomfortable, the difficult truth is that what today feels exceptional will increasingly become normal, and without purposeful climate action, it will keep on getting worse.
Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)
The hon. Member is making an important speech. Climate change is one of those issues that my constituents contact me about all the time, particularly my young constituents. This is something that really bothers them as much as it does us. Does she agree that climate change is something we are experiencing now—we know that when we step outside? Does she also agree that a dead planet with plenty of jobs is no good for any of us, so we need to focus on this and deal with it?
Pippa Heylings
Like the hon. Member, I regularly meet young people across my constituency. I find it hard to look my children and children in my constituency and beyond in the eye, because that is one of the things they talk about the most. I challenge any MP in this Chamber to say that they do not receive those emails or have those meetings in schools where this issue is brought up. I feel that responsibility deeply, and I believe that that feeling is shared across the majority of those in this Chamber.
Without action, we risk handing our children and the next generation a Britain where extreme heat regularly keeps children out of classrooms. Did we not learn from covid, during which the more disadvantaged were left behind because they were told to go home? They did not have large homes, cool gardens or broadband, and that is happening yet again this week. We will have a Britain in which thousands die prematurely each summer and in which water scarcity, with a deficit of 5 billion litres a day of public water, is a reality. In my constituency of South Cambridgeshire, which is one of the most water-stressed in the country, this issue is affecting growth right now, so we know how critical it is.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
We should add that water shortages are a real cause of conflict. Many communities will be displaced. Anybody who is worried about migration now should be deeply worried about migration in the future, because people will simply be displaced—
Wera Hobhouse
They will come, and you will shut the borders, but we will have wars over water shortages. We absolutely will. It sounds alarmist, but we can do something about it. We should not put our heads in the sand. Does my hon. Friend agree?
Pippa Heylings
I thank my hon. Friend, as always, for her passionate defence and her knowledge on this issue. I worked for 20 years in east Africa, southern America and the Caribbean on UK climate policy, including under the previous Conservative Government. I saw countries already facing water shortages and what that meant: devastating crops and economies, and putting countries into recurrent economic recession. We must be committed to net zero emissions by 2050 because the science when the former Government agreed this—
Claire Coutinho
The hon. Member is making an emotional speech, and I understand she cares deeply about this issue. This target is imposing costs on our businesses in Britain, which is driving them away from one of the cleanest energy systems in the world. Our refineries now pay more on their carbon tax bill than they do on their wage bill. What does that mean? It means we are importing back those same goods from countries such as India that have higher emissions—twice the emissions, in fact. Why should we set a target more onerous than that in other countries, driving production away, only to import goods with higher emissions? What does she think that will do for climate change?
Pippa Heylings
Perhaps I would contest the fact that we cannot equate the emotion with a rational mind as well. These are science-based targets that the hon. Member’s Government agreed to set. What is recommended in the carbon budget order is set by the independent Climate Change Committee, with robust figures, and the science has shown us that this is our best chance to limit warming to under 2°. Global collective action avoided—at least for now—a 4° warmer world, and as I understand it, the Treasury has accepted modelling to show that we have accepted a 2° warmer world. It means that every Department will have to look at what a 2° warmer world means and how we adapt to that. I agree, however, that the impact on our industry, with some of the highest energy prices, means that it is less competitive. Let us therefore work together and focus directly on how we can get energy bills down.
The Liberal Democrats welcome the seventh carbon budget, and we are glad that the Government have accepted the advice of the robust and science-based Climate Change Committee, which puts us on a consistent and achievable pathway to meeting net zero while building a fairer and thriving new economy.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
Does the hon. Lady agree that we will never persuade other countries to take action to reduce their carbon emissions unless we show global leadership? Will she join me in congratulating the Prime Minister, who went to COP29 in Baku, announced an ambitious nationally determined contribution of reducing emissions by 81% by 2035? That was real climate leadership. Having been at that COP, I know that there was such disappointment among other countries about the fact that the previous Government had stepped away from showing that kind of leadership.
Pippa Heylings
I very much appreciated the work that the hon. Member did in her former role, and we were together at that COP meeting. Yes, I congratulate the Prime Minister, but I also congratulate former Prime Ministers. I was working internationally, and I worked on the macroeconomic budgets of developing countries, particularly the emerging economies, and we saw what they could do to follow the UK’s lead and leapfrog technologies in their economies. I absolutely agree with the hon. Member, which is why it is disappointing to hear from those on the Conservative Front Bench that they want to delay science-led targets and oppose environmental action, which would lead the world in a more insecure and uncertain place, and leave businesses without the certainty they need. I urge them to help us rebuild the consensus that we need. It can only smell of a desperate attempt at political opportunism to join Reform and gamble with the lives and livelihoods of future generations.
Claire Coutinho
If the evidence is so science-led, will the hon. Member explain why the Climate Change Committee was out by a factor of three—300%—on the cost of offshore wind, which is one of the key inputs for the target that she will be voting for today?
Pippa Heylings
I will look forward to seeing its answer when you send a letter back—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. When she sends a letter back.
Pippa Heylings
When a response to the letter comes back. Let us talk about the economics.
Richard Tice
It is an excellent idea to talk about the economics. The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) could not answer this simple question, but perhaps the hon. Lady can instead: when will the bills come down?
Pippa Heylings
The answer to that is in two ways. First, we must take gas out of the system as much as possible. Secondly, we must fix a broken electricity market. The way we charge customers and businesses right now is broken, and we need to change that. I do not believe in what happened under a previous Government, when George Osborne as Chancellor reduced taxation on oil and gas companies three times. By the end of that we had negative receipts to the Treasury, because we were also looking at decommissioning exemptions. Until some of the windfall tax profits came in, negative receipts were coming into the Treasury at that point.
If we talk about the economy, let us talk about the transition. As we have already heard, research from the CBI and the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit shows that the green economy is already contributing more than £100 billion and over 1 million new jobs. Clean power and decarbonisation are about growing our economy, creating those jobs, lowering energy bills and strengthening our energy security.
Although we welcome the carbon budget, setting targets is the easy part; delivering them is what counts. That is why we look forward to the Government’s delivery plan and seeing the steps that will be taken, because we worry that there is a risk they will fall short. The carbon budget will take much more than decarbonising our power supply and cannot be delivered in a centrist way from Whitehall alone. We Liberal Democrats want to see more action and ambition from this Government, not a focus on energy alone.
Emissions reductions will be experienced in people’s lives, and not just environmentally but economically, through changes in how homes are heated, how people travel and how energy is used. Local authorities, communities, farmers and businesses will be required to be partners in delivering change. We will have to double our efforts to restore nature, which is one of our most powerful tools for tackling climate change, by more generously supporting our farmers to accelerate tree planting and peatland restoration. But please, we should not treat nature protections as a blocker to economic growth. I ask the Government to get rid of the lazy, reckless rhetoric that divides climate and nature, rather than seeing them as indivisible necessities. We will also have to increase powers and funding for local authorities and communities to implement credible local climate and nature delivery plans.
Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)
My hon. Friend knows well about the issues of coastal erosion on the north Norfolk coast and the existential threat to communities such as Trimingham and Happisburgh. There is hard work being done by our local authorities and our Lib Dem councils through schemes such as Coastwise, and there is much more to do in the future, but does she agree with me that everything being done to protect those communities will be undermined by the worsening climate emergency, which has sped up erosion and will cause it to worsen further?
Pippa Heylings
I feel deeply about what my hon. Friend says. He is a well-known champion for rural and coastal communities that are facing such an insecure future, not knowing whether their homes will still be standing and whether they will be insurable. That is definitely something we need to look at.
Most importantly for this carbon budget, as we have heard from Members across the Chamber, electrification across key sectors is the key to rapidly reducing emissions and helping households to cut bills. Today, the Climate Change Committee has warned that progress in electrification has slowed, with heat pump installations up just 7% this year compared with 56% the year before. What is more, the share of electricity in industrial energy use fell last year, so we must see greater acceleration of electrification.
Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)
On seeing a new development recently, I was dismayed that the developer said they were not putting in heat pumps because the cost of electricity meant that people would rather have gas boilers. Does my hon. Friend agree that if we removed the renewables obligation levy from electricity, so that we were fairly pricing electricity—currently, electricity is unfairly disadvantaged—we would incentivise far more heat pump installations?
Pippa Heylings
My hon. Friend often brings that issue up in the Chamber and in the Select Committee. We have to fix the broken system whereby households and businesses do not feel the benefits of cheaper renewable energy from solar and wind.
Finally, the Liberal Democrats believe that building public confidence in the transition to net zero requires people to see the benefits in their own communities. That means empowering those best placed to deliver change on the ground. Local authorities, community organisations and local leaders understand the needs of their areas, can bring people with them and are uniquely placed to turn national ambition into practical action. We need regulatory change so that community energy projects can sell energy locally, but those bodies can also take action on better public transport, warmer homes, nature restoration or street-by-street electrification.
Too often local climate action remains fragmented, underpowered and dependent on short-term funding. Critically, local authorities still have no statutory responsibility for delivering net zero for climate and nature duty. Such responsibility has been voted down every single time it has been introduced in devolution legislation. Will the Minister look at placing local authorities at the centre of delivery of the seventh carbon budget by legislating for a clear climate and nature statutory duty for local authorities, and by ensuring that they have the funding and powers needed to unlock these opportunities? Many Liberal Democrat Members have been local councillors and we know that local authorities can do that, together with local people. Climate change will not wait and neither should we—the time is now.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
With an immediate five-minute time limit, I call Olivia Blake.
Olivia Blake (Sheffield Hallam) (Lab)
I declare an interest as chair of the climate and nature crisis caucus. I also refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
It is a pleasure to speak in support of the Carbon Budget Order 2026. As I stand here, the UK is experiencing a frightening heatwave and a rare red weather warning, which means a risk to all, not just the vulnerable. That is how hot it is outside. Another heat record has been absolutely smashed. It was 36.1°C last time I checked, but who knows if it has gone up in the minutes that we have been sitting here? Surely Opposition Members cannot now bury their heads in the red-hot sand and deny that climate change is real. It is coming fast, and we are living through it right now.
Harriet Cross
This is incredibly frustrating. Scrutiny is not the same as climate change denial. Asking questions on behalf of our constituents, industries, households and businesses that will front the costs of this measure is not climate change denial. Will the hon. Member and the rest of the Labour Members here recognise that?
Olivia Blake
I wonder whether the hon. Member will vote against this measure. That would tell her constituents very clearly her view on this matter.
Back in 2008, under a Labour Government, the UK became the first country to introduce a comprehensive climate framework through the Climate Change Act, which set out the legally binding five-year carbon budgets that we have been reviewing and looking at. As has been said, with carbon budget 6 we did not get the opportunity for scrutiny that we should have got. That legislation was groundbreaking and ensured that Governments can be held to account for delivering long-term climate action. I thank the Minister for her efforts to bring that about.
Nearly two decades later, we can see the impact of that foresight. The UK has successfully halved its territorial greenhouse gas emissions compared with 1990 levels, as we have heard, with much of that progress driven by decarbonisation of the energy system. That is a significant national achievement that we should all be proud of, and it is evidence that ambitious climate policy can deliver real results. It is therefore fitting that it once again falls to a Labour Government to confront one of the defining challenges of our times.
The seventh carbon budget commits the UK to reducing emissions by 87% by 2040 compared with 1990 levels. If achieved, that will mark substantial progress towards our legally binding commitment to reach net zero by 2050. However, at present the UK is built for a climate that no longer exists. The economic impacts are staggering, costing the UK economy around £60 billion a year—about 2% of GDP and rising—through things such as flood damage, loss of crops and other forms of weather damage.
We should also be mindful of the growing environmental footprint of our digital infrastructure. As data centres expand across the UK to meet rising demand, their substantial energy consumption underlines why decarbonising our power system is not simply an environmental imperative, but an economic one. That would provide more opportunities in that space.
I welcome this budget. As we know, climate action is about more than meeting targets; it is about building a country where children are not exposed to toxic air, and where we have warmer, well-insulated homes, lower energy bills and greater energy security. It is about ensuring that future generations inherit a safer and more sustainable world.
However, support for the Government’s ambition should not mean complacency about the scale of the challenge ahead. We face many interconnected crises, such as the climate crisis, the cost of living crisis and the nature emergency. Families continue to face high energy costs, while communities increasingly experience the impacts of flooding and extreme weather. The answer is not to slow down the transition and make things worse, but to accelerate it in a way that delivers tangible benefits for our communities.
Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Reform)
The hon. Lady is making a very passionate speech. She seems to be an expert on this subject, so could she advise the House by how much it would reduce the Earth’s temperature if this country became net zero right this minute?
Olivia Blake
Obviously we cannot do this on our own, which is why the global leadership we show in this space is very important. We have international agreements that aim for 1.5°, but as we have heard, we are heading more towards 2°, 3° or 4°. Moving away from our own commitments will leave us further behind; globally, emissions must peak urgently and then decline rapidly. The UK’s influence has always exceeded its size—we have always punched above our weight, and I am proud of that—and our credibility depends on continuing to lead by example. That is why we must see this carbon budget not as a ceiling but as a floor.
The budget broadly reflects the direction of current Government policy, but it must be accompanied by the bold action necessary to deliver it. The Environmental Audit Committee, of which I am a member, has been clear that the UK’s climate credibility depends on not simply setting ambitious goals, but demonstrating how those goals can be achieved. The Committee has called on the Government to set out clearly how this budget will be met and how the policies that underpin it will be delivered, reducing emissions in the way it sets out to do. However, today marks an important first step, and I am proud to see something ambitious in front of us. If we are serious about meeting this budget, we must match ambition with action—accelerating clean energy, not abandoning it; upgrading our housing stock from what has historically been some of the poorest in Europe; supporting the industries of the future, which will provide jobs; and ensuring that communities across this country share in the benefits of this transition, leaving no community behind.
The prize is enormous—we should not listen to the naysayers. Lower exposure to volatile energy prices, greater energy independence, more skilled jobs, better security, cleaner communities and a stronger economy are within our grasp. Climate action is not a burden to be managed; it is a necessary opportunity to be seized. As such, I support the order that is before the House, but I also urge Ministers to see it as the beginning of the task before us, not the end. Ignore the naysayers—the science demands urgency, our constituents expect leadership, and the opportunity is before us. Demand that we are bold, and let us meet this moment with the ambition it deserves.
Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)
I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate, and I thank the Minister for the time she has given to such an important topic. In its report on this budget, the Climate Change Committee clearly stated that behavioural change is essential to achieving the carbon reductions we need. However, the seventh carbon budget prioritises emerging technologies and greenhouse gas removals, a strategy that courts failure if those technologies do not deliver. Equally as important, it runs the risk that large parts of the population will be left downstream. The public need to see direct benefits from decarbonisation, and they need to feel that it is something they can be part of—as the seas rise, there has to be space for everyone on the boat.
I would like to draw the House’s attention to one particular area that has already been mentioned by colleagues, which is the decarbonisation of our homes. In 2022, emissions from residential buildings accounted for one fifth of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, yet the Climate Change Committee has admitted that retrofitting existing dwellings is not going to be one of the easiest bits to shift. I speak on this topic as a member of the Environmental Audit Committee, as an officer on the future homes, skills and innovation all-party parliamentary group, and as an architect by trade. Decarbonising our existing homes is essential to achieving our carbon budget, and the public need incentives, clear information, consumer protection and accountable technical advice. The warm homes plan is a step in the right direction, but it already risks making some of the same mistakes that past Government-funded retrofit schemes encountered.
I have a doctor in my constituency who, with the best will in the world, tried to put external insulation on her home, only to find that it was damp. Before she even sent me the photographs, I knew exactly what the cause was, but what was really worrying was that she did not, and neither did her installer. Without sufficient knowledge, neither contractors nor occupiers can make the right decisions for their homes. If you were having a knee replacement, Madam Deputy Speaker, you would not expect to need to source your own surgeon, book your own operating room and then decide which implant material is the most appropriate, because that is a complex and expert-led process. However, so is retrofitting a home. That is why I am asking for technical support for those applying for Government funding, from an initial analysis through to installation support and final sign-off. We need people to trust in the decarbonisation process, or we risk alienating the communities necessary for its success. It takes only one horror story for the surrounding community to become nervous, and it takes only one media circus for that to spread.
The warm homes plan is a fantastic opportunity to realise significant change in one of the stickiest and most difficult areas, but if the seventh carbon budget is to succeed, retrofitting our existing housing stock must be an essential part of that. It cannot be left on the “too difficult” pile. It represents a threefold benefit: it decarbonises people’s homes; it reduces energy bills; and it improves quality of life. I would be delighted to meet the Minister to set out a plan for how we can make retrofitting viable and take it off that “too difficult” pile. For this carbon budget to succeed, we need a clear road map. We need those contingency plans, and we need to make sure that while this Government are leading internationally as an example to others, they are bringing the whole community with them.
John Whitby (Derbyshire Dales) (Lab)
It is fitting that we are debating carbon budget 7 on the hottest June day in our history. I am sure that there are a few contributory factors to the latest heatwave, but we all know that one of those factors is that there is simply too much carbon in the atmosphere as a result of mankind’s activities since industrialisation. I am pleased to say that there has been a great deal of activity in this space in the previous two years, in particular on renewables. Our territorial emissions, according to Carbon Brief, are now the lowest since 1872. We are now halfway to getting to net zero, but the low-hanging fruit has been picked and the harder-to-decarbonise sectors are still emitting.
Every tonne of carbon that we do not emit is better than having to remove it later, but it is increasingly clear that emissions reductions alone will not be enough. Some sectors will remain difficult to fully decarbonise. If we are serious about reaching net zero, greenhouse gas removals will have to play a crucial role. I am pleased to say that since coming to power the Government have commissioned the independent review of greenhouse gas removals, chaired by Alan Whitehead. The Whitehead review stated that greenhouse gas removals have
“a supplementary but essential role in achieving net zero”.
The Climate Change Committee has made it clear that we cannot get to net zero without greenhouse gas removals. It would be helpful if the Minister can say when the Government will respond to the Whitehead review and what their position is on two key recommendations from the report. First, the report suggests changing the sustainable aviation fuels mandate to become a net zero aviation mandate, using greenhouse gas removals to ensure that by 2045
“all flights taking off from the UK are made climate-neutral.”
With the Government not focusing on demand management and clearly looking at airport expansion, and not assuming the same level of behavioural change that the Climate Change Committee is expecting, even more weight should be thrown behind removals and specifically direct air capture.
To enable more greenhouse gas removals, the report recommends that the Government accelerate planned policies to enable non-pipeline transport. It states that the Government should also accelerate decisions on the future carbon capture, usage and storage clusters. We have one of those right on the edge of my constituency. The Hope valley is home to the Peak Cluster, the world’s largest cement decarbonisation project. If we are to build the 1.5 million homes that we need and all the roads, bridges and workplaces to support them, we will need cement, but it remains one of the most difficult industries to decarbonise, because much of the carbon dioxide is produced through the chemical process of making cement itself.
For that reason, carbon capture is not an optional extra; it is essential. By capturing carbon emissions from cement and lime production and transporting them for permanent storage, the project has the potential to decarbonise about 40% of UK cement and lime production, while protecting the thousands of jobs currently in the sector and adding new skilled green jobs. It will prevent 3 million tonnes of carbon from entering the atmosphere per year. Let me put that in context: it is about a quarter of the emissions from the counties of Derbyshire and Staffordshire. This is exactly the kind of project that shows how climate action and economic growth can go hand in hand.
I welcome the Government’s support so far, and the National Wealth Fund’s investment announced last year—that support has been important—but if we are to unlock the full potential of projects such as Peak Cluster, industry needs certainty, investors need confidence, and businesses need to know that there is a clear route to market for carbon capture projects beyond the existing track 1 and 2 programmes.
The carbon budget process makes the Government of the day think in the longer term, because addressing climate change cannot be done quickly, but we need to stick to the path for our food security, our national security, our public health and our economy. I encourage the Government to match their ambition with the urgency that this moment demands.
Lewis Cocking (Broxbourne) (Con)
Before entering this place, I worked in the energy efficiency industry. I know the potential that we have when we back our home-grown manufacturers across the United Kingdom, and I know how vital energy is to their success; but the Government’s policies on net zero are holding them back. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch) said during Prime Minister’s questions, the current Energy Secretary is
“putting up bills and killing jobs.”
I am proud that under her leadership, the Conservative Party is starting to be honest about net zero.
As the Conservative leader of Broxbourne Council, I never joined in the hysteria of council after council declaring a climate emergency, then sitting back and feeling good about themselves. In Broxbourne we focused on action, not words—planting thousands of trees, installing electric car charging points, and getting developers to put solar panels on new houses. Putting net zero into law by 2050 was exactly the same: there was no serious plan to achieve it then, but now Labour have come up with a plan, and we are starting to see what the true costs to our economy and to ordinary people’s lives will be.
Carbon budget 7 sets a target for reducing our emissions by 87%. According to the Climate Change Committee, to achieve that we must cut meat consumption by a quarter by 2040, and sheep and cattle numbers will have to fall by 38% by 2050. Some of these suggestions are completely unworkable. The Climate Change Committee has also said that people should be pushed away from driving to “alternative modes of travel”. That is simply not feasible in large parts of the United Kingdom, especially rural areas like parts of my constituency.
It is very frustrating to turn up at a local meeting about sustainable transport—about trying to increase the number of buses and trains—and then find that the person who is lecturing everyone about how we should all walk everywhere has driven there in their car. We need to come up with practical solutions that enable us to take the public with us. What do I say to my constituents who tell me, “I have to take two kids to school, and they are at different schools, then I have to go to work and do the shopping, then pick them up and go home”? Such targets are unworkable. It is not feasible to say, “Well, that’s fine—everyone can just walk everywhere.” The targets have to be sensible, and we have to take the British public with us, or we will not go anywhere towards achieving some of the stuff that the Government want us to achieve.
We are talking about an average overall cost of £11,157 per household. That is not a price that we should be willing to pay. We have made fantastic progress already, and we should always be committed to leaving a better environment for the next generation, but we also need to leave them a stronger economy and a stronger country, and that means, above all else, cheaper energy. Britain currently has some of the highest energy costs in the developed world. There is no way in which we can achieve the economic growth that people are crying out for throughout the United Kingdom if that remains the case, which is why we need to get Britain drilling and unlock the 2.9 billion barrels of North sea oil. According to this Government, it is okay to get oil from Russia if it is done through a third country, but we cannot use our own resources in the North sea. Obviously, oil coming from the North sea will produce less carbon dioxide than oil that has had to travel halfway across the world.
The Government need to set out a plan for delivery, and they really need to come up with common-sense approaches to deal with the impacts of climate change. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) said, the fact that we are scrutinising Government policy does not make us climate deniers.
Luke Murphy
Does the hon. Member not think that we would give more credence to the scrutiny that the Conservatives are providing if some of their claims could be found in the carbon budget on which we are voting? Could he tell the House where it says that everyone will need to walk and will not be able to use a vehicle?
Lewis Cocking
When I was leader of my council, I went to a number of meetings in my constituency and spoke to a number of constituents. Experts on transport come to meetings and say that everyone should walk everywhere, which is completely impractical. Some of the solutions that the Government have put forward are completely unworkable. They should come up with some common-sense solutions, because this is a serious problem that we need to deal with. Saying that most people should walk everywhere is not a serious solution to the problem that we face.
If the Government want us to reduce our carbon emissions even more, they should come up with serious, practical, common-sense solutions that allow us to take the British people with us and protect jobs in this country. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State has said, there is no point putting taxes on business here and cutting carbon here if factories then open in China, where they use coal to produce their electricity rather than what we do in the United Kingdom. That is completely unserious. The Government need to come up with practical solutions to this problem, and I urge the Minister to do so.
Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)
Madam Deputy Speaker, you will be delighted to hear that I am just about to throw away 22 pages of my 23-page speech in order to allow other Members to get in.
I want to quote the Climate Minister—or, rather, I want to misquote her: “Twelve years ago, in 2026, the Royal Meteorological Society held a conference to recall 50 years since the heatwave of 1976. That week was marked by record temperatures, and the Met Office delivered a forecast for 2056 that stunned the journalists and reporters who were present. Its forecast predicted 45° summer heat in England in 2056. Now, in 2038, as we stand at the beginning of the period of carbon budget 7, we know that 45° has already been reached, that the 1.5° threshold was passed nine years ago, in 2029, and that our carbon budget growth and development plan was simply not up to the job. The scientists were right. We, the politicians, were wrong.”
That is the speech that I want to ensure the Minister never has to make. It is why their lordships’ reasoned amendment in the other place last night was so ill conceived, and why today’s debate is so important. It is also the reason that the remarks of the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), were so ill judged, and I want to answer some of the questions that she posed. She will recall that, in 2023, her own figures put the number of jobs that would result from the net zero target at between 135,000 and 725,000. She said that there might be a decline of between 8,000 and 75,000, but according to the Climate Change Committee’s progress report on the net zero economy, the number of green jobs that has been reached is 650,000. That is the figure that the committee has come out with today.
The shadow Secretary of State also said how silly it was to talk about soil structure and waste, so perhaps she does not quite understand that soils and waste are actually emitters of carbon, and that if we want to achieve net zero and get a clean, green energy infrastructure, we have to think holistically.
Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)
Well, we are debating the carbon budget order, but I think we should rename it the job-destroying, industry-killing order, because that is essentially what net zero is doing. For the hon. Members who do not appreciate the economics of this, let us go on a little history lesson, shall we? Let us go back to the 20-year period between 1980 and 2000. Yes, our energy consumption increased by some 20%, and real GDP per capita—per person—increased every year by 3.2% per annum. Let me now take everyone forward to the last 20 years: our energy consumption has declined by about 15%, and guess what has happened to our GDP per person? Yes, it has collapsed to just 0.5% per annum. There is a direct link between the quantity of energy we consume—
Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)
Will the hon. Member give way?
Richard Tice
What a tragedy it is that the truth clearly hurts for the Green party; and, by the way, the Greens do not believe in carbon capture, which has been mentioned previously.
The simple fact is that there is a direct relationship between higher energy use per capita and higher GDP per capita—the richer a nation is. That is the fundamental point that everybody in this place seems to forget. As we have reduced our carbon emissions since 1990 by 54%, people seem to forget that carbon emissions around the world are increasing. Other nations are not admiring our net zero leadership; they are laughing at our utter stupidity, as they steal our jobs and our money. They are laughing at us.
Mr Perkins
Well, I think they might be laughing at him, but I do not think they are laughing at all of us. The hon. Member is talking about our climate leadership as though we should be ashamed of it, but the reality is that China installed more solar panels in 2024 than the entire world did in 2023. China is not ignoring the opportunity to transition; it is leading the way.
Richard Tice
And what labour are the Chinese using? Slave labour is what they are using—that is the reality. They are laughing as they sell us Chinese cheap solar panels to cover our brilliant food-productive farmland in Lincolnshire and elsewhere. It is insane.
Lee Anderson
My hon. Friend is making a passionate and very intelligent speech. Is he aware that we are also importing from China wind turbines—windmills, if you like—that are stuffed with asbestos?
Richard Tice
There we are. Apparently Labour Members want more asbestos, when we know that is dangerous—yes, it is in the wind turbines. The reality is—
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes) (Lab)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Richard Tice
I will give away shortly; I am doing well.
The reality is that industries across our country are being slaughtered and jobs are being destroyed—from pottery businesses to aluminium businesses, chemical businesses, steel businesses and oil refineries. Why? Because of our high energy costs. We have seen the brilliant, highly skilled, highly qualified jobs in Aberdeen being slaughtered because this Government will not allow more exploration of the North sea. This is the reaction, and this is the consequence of net stupid zero.
Melanie Onn
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I wonder whether he agrees with the Reform leader of North East Lincolnshire council, who has said that he fully supports the renewables sector. Given that he was working for the hon. Gentleman until recently, why is there such disparity between what Reform says here and what Reform says in its local patches?
Richard Tice
The hon. Lady makes a very good point. The renewables sector keeps saying that it is going to reduce the bills, yet the bills are going up. Indeed, only recently an energy boss said that even if the price of gas went to zero—clearly, it is not going to, folks—our electricity bills at the next general election, assuming that is in 2029, will be even higher. Why? Because of all the increased policy costs, increased levies, increased constraint costs and beyond.
Dr Chowns
Does the hon. Gentleman not recognise the reality that the main factor that has driven up energy costs in the last few years has been Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine? Policy costs are a small proportion of energy prices and gas determines the electricity price, which is the—
Richard Tice
Oh dear, oh dear. How desperately sad it is that the hon. Lady does not appreciate that the wholesale price of electricity, which some claim is driven by gas, is about a third, so it is not the majority—a third is less than 50%.
The simple reality is that there is a direct causal link between the growth of renewable generating capacity in the last 20 years and the growth of our electricity prices to the highest in the western world. That is the reason that everybody is feeling so much poorer. It is as simple as that. All the advocates of the renewables industry cannot answer the question: when are the bills going to come down? The answer is: they are not going to. The Government can try to cheat by putting it into general taxation, but the simple fact is that, actually, costs are going to go up. We have heard, for example, that the cost of more contracts for difference is going to increase by £4 billion, £5 billion or £6 billion by 2030, and that the extra cost to the grid is going to increase by some £10 billion a year by 2030. Per household—which is how people will want to understand it—that equates to about £500 per year extra on the cost of living because of the costs of net zero. Everybody needs to understand that point, as they debate and vote on this issue.
As we look to the future, having explained the history and the economics to those who do not seem to understand, we hear that the Secretary of State for Energy—he is rather absent at the moment; where is he?—wants to get rid of all our wonderful tumble dryers. No, no, we can’t have tumble dryers in the brave new world of the Secretary of State for Energy! Then we hear that, through this carbon budget, the Government want us to reduce our dairy and meat consumption by some 20%. We have had enough of this. We should vote against this ridiculous motion and scrap net stupid zero.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
Order. I am going to reduce the time limit to four minutes from the next speaker. Clearly passions run very high in this debate, but may I remind Members that debates should be conducted with good temper and moderation? When Members are either taking an intervention or responding to an intervention, that carries on through the Chair. Twirling around and facing the person behind you, or wherever they may be in the Chamber, means you will not be picked up by the microphones and it is extremely discourteous. I call Justin Madders.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Bromborough) (Lab)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will attempt to be moderate and not twirl.
The net zero transition is now a fundamental part of our economy, generating about £105 billion in value and, as we have heard, employing over 1 million people. Importantly, it is not focused in one part of the country, but spread all across the UK. Growth in the sector is expanding, with 400,000 jobs expected to be created by 2030. Given that productivity in the net zero sector is one and a half times the average for the UK, the potential is there for all to see.
As we head towards the future, we need to have in mind the protection of existing jobs. The order sets the carbon budget for 12 years’ time, but there is an area where I think the Government are letting the perfect become the enemy of the good: the zero emission vehicle mandate. This country has a long history of building cars that should rightly be regarded as some of the best in the world. We have a strong manufacturing base for electric vehicles—including at the Vauxhall Motors plant in Ellesmere Port, which has embraced the transition to net zero by becoming an all-electric plant—but the market demand for electric vehicles has not developed as quickly as anticipated. As of May, the market share for electric vehicles was only 26%, which is a long way short of the 33% required this year in the ZEV mandate.
The Climate Change Committee predicted that the market share for new electric vehicles would reach 55% by next year. Market share is going to need to double within a year for that prediction to come true, which is simply not going to happen. Its prediction that the proportion of electric cars and vans will reach around 95% of new sales by 2030 is not born out by experience to date, and needs revising down in light of the evidence.
Barry Gardiner
My hon. Friend is making a good point. Does he accept that the way that the previous Government changed the dates for the ZEV mandate may have had something to do with people’s confidence in being able to support an electric vehicle?
Justin Madders
My hon. Friend makes an interesting point, because there are a whole range of factors, which I will come to, in why people are not purchasing the vehicles. The industry is still keen to have a clear signal on where we are heading, but the speed and steepness of the incline is too much for it to bear.
We cannot ignore the fact that the figure of 26% relies heavily on subsidies from Government, which are pushing sales to about twice their natural level. I am afraid that there is deep concern among manufacturers about that. To fill the gap between demand and what domestic manufacturers are producing, the industry is already having to buy credits, in the order of hundreds of millions of pounds a year, which is clearly not sustainable. Meanwhile, importing manufacturers, including from China, can exceed ZEV thresholds here and sell their unused credits on to domestic manufacturers. That means that foreign manufacturers of EVs from China are not only taking ever-increasing shares of the market but profiting from exceeding ZEV thresholds.
To be clear, this is not an argument about having no ZEV mandate. It is important that we tackle the climate crisis and put an end to internal combustion engines, but what bigger fillip could there be to the climate sceptics than UK factories closing down because of a rigid approach to net zero—an approach that sees millions of pounds go to overseas competitors whose manufacturing is often far more carbon intensive than ours?
The ZEV mandate must be adapted to take account of the real-world market conditions, and the escalator must be changed to reflect them. It is clear that for many consumers, even with generous discounts, the cost of a new EV is out of reach. We need to be aware of limitations caused by cost, range anxiety and charging infrastructure. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) that we can do more in that area.
As a number of Members have said in this debate, we need to take people with us; we are clearly not bringing them to where we need them to be in order to hit the target. I welcome the Chancellor saying that the review of the mandate will be brought forward to this year, but that needs to start now, and we need to get the right answers within a few months.
On the subject of well-meaning policies that could actually be counterproductive, I raise a red flag about the proposed introduction of the deposit return scheme, scheduled for later next year. Most households already recycle their materials through kerbside collections. The participation rates for kerbside recycling are high: it works and it provides a revenue stream to councils. If we are changing that, the public will undoubtedly ask what problem we are trying to fix.
The practical reality of the scheme for many people will be a minor inconvenience that they are happy to participate in, but for parents, carers, disabled people, elderly residents and those without easy access to large supermarkets, it could be a significant nuisance. People with complex lives will simply not do it at all. Once again, there is a well-meaning policy here that risks alienating people and damaging our road to net zero, which, on this side of the House at least, we all want to get to.
John Milne (Horsham) (LD)
The effectiveness of any carbon budget relies on two things: accuracy and attainability. If the numbers are wrong, the budget is meaningless, and if the plans are unrealistic, the budget is undeliverable. If the public lose confidence in either of those things, they lose confidence in the wider environmental project itself. That is why I want to focus less on any individual target and more on the credibility of the framework.
When goals are repeatedly missed or look unachievable, there is always a temptation for Governments to adjust the assumptions, alter the methodology, or redefine success. That satisfies nobody: it frustrates environmentalists who want genuine emissions reduction and emboldens sceptics who claim that the targets were never realistic, and it leaves the public wondering whether we are solving problems or simply moving numbers around on spreadsheets. What we need is a reset to ensure that we are having honest conversations about emissions, environmental challenges and climate policy, based on sound data.
That is why I question the overconfidence in the budget in carbon capture and storage. The budget makes it clear that CCS plays a significant role in the pathway towards meeting future emissions targets, and I recognise that it does have an important role to play in industries that are genuinely hard to decarbonise, such as chemicals, cement and the heavy industrial processes. The Liberal Democrats have always been willing to support emerging technologies in such cases.
However, we should be honest about what is being assumed. Much of the proposed CCS roll-out is tied to large gas-powered infrastructure projects, which means that we are effectively locking ourselves into gas infrastructure for decades to come. The problem is that the North sea cannot possibly supply our gas needs, no matter how much we drill and no matter what we do. The more we rely on gas-backed CCS assumptions in the budget, the more we are locking ourselves into imported fracked LNG, mostly from the US. That contributes to global warming, whether it happens in Texas or Teesside. Yet UK carbon budgets are, of course, primarily territorial in nature—and that is precisely the sort of accounting contortion that can undermine public confidence. People are not interested in whether the emissions have disappeared from a spreadsheet; they want to know if they have disappeared from the atmosphere.
The same problem exists in aviation. The Climate Change Committee warned that aviation is likely to become one of the largest sources of UK emissions by 2040 because other sectors are expected to decarbonise more quickly. The committee stated that demand management remains the most effective way of limiting aviation’s impacts, but at the same time, we continue to debate expansion at Gatwick, Heathrow and Luton. Many people struggle to reconcile those two positions, and it is not hard to see why. Communities in my part of Sussex—in villages such as Warnham, Slinfold and Rusper—face the prospect of increased aircraft noise and new flightpaths. While the people bear the brunt, the industry is rewarded. We need stronger accountability within the aviation sector, including the creation of an independent aviation ombudsman.
If we want support for climate action to endure, honesty matters: honesty about imported emissions, honesty about LNG, honesty about airport expansion and honesty about the role and limitations of carbon capture and storage. The greatest threat to environmental progress is not ambition, but the loss of public faith that the targets and pathways are credible.
Steve Race (Exeter) (Lab)
I welcome the draft order and regulations laid before the House. The timing for this debate obviously could not be more apt; not only is it currently London Climate Action Week, with Exeter Climate Forum taking place next week, but here in the UK and across Europe we are currently experiencing extreme temperatures. Frankly, this is not normal. The science of this is settled; what we ought to be doing, and what we must continue to do, is limiting climate change, mitigating its impact and continuing to grow the economy.
This Labour Government are delivering world-leading climate action, driving jobs, growth and investment in every corner of the UK. Setting the target in this seventh climate budget is the goal, but the means by which we meet that target is what we will be judged on by future generations. If we are to meet the targets set out today, as well as our nearer-term 2030 commitments, we must now turn our attention to the acceleration of delivery at pace and at scale. Central to that effort is a new and enabling approach to climate technology.
Just this morning, I spoke at the Startup Coalition and British Business Bank’s energy innovation event with climate tech founders, investors and policymakers representing more than £10 billion-worth of scale-ups. We are fortunate to be home to firms at the forefront of energy innovation, not just in Europe but the world over. I am proud to say that the south-west is already leading the way. My home city of Exeter is home to the Met Office and the University of Exeter, both of which are pioneering in weather forecasting, ocean science, climate modelling, conservation and climate tech. Of the top 21 climate scientists in the world, five are based in the UK, and all of them are based in Exeter. The wider south-west economy already contributes £1.5 billion to our net zero economy, and the firms that make up this economy are at the cutting edge, from small modular nuclear reactors and tidal energy systems to low-carbon construction methods and sustainable food technologies.
Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)
While my hon. Friend is talking about energy in the south-west, I wanted to point out what is going on in Cornwall, with floating offshore wind in the Celtic sea. This green economy could bring huge numbers of jobs, as well as skills, down to places like Cornwall and the south-west, which have really struggled on that front in the past.
Steve Race
I absolutely agree; the Celtic sea has massive potential for the reindustrialisation of our peninsula as well. In Hull, my home town, wind power has provided a huge number of new jobs in lieu of others that were there in the past.
I want to talk about our innovators, who are too often held back by a system that is not keeping pace with the urgency of the challenges we face. Time and again, climate tech companies tell us that regulation is the single biggest barrier to scaling and deploying tech—not access to capital or talent, though those matter, but regulation. One founder I spoke to this morning said that he is deploying his tech in Estonia, Morocco and elsewhere, and that it was easier to do so in those countries than in the UK, despite his not speaking a word of Estonian or Arabic.
Our regulatory framework is, at times, more focused on managing legacy risks than delivering future solutions. If we are serious about delivering on this carbon budget, we must fundamentally change how the system works. Regulation should not simply be a system to police compliance; it should reward carbon reduction and enable innovation. That means embedding climate innovation outcomes into the mandates of our key regulators—Ofgem, the Environment Agency, the Office for Nuclear Regulation and others—and ensuring that they have the flexibility and tools to adapt in real time.
The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 was a welcome step, introducing statutory timelines and embedding net zero into the decision making, but on the ground progress is still too slow. Developers still face years of delay and inconsistent decisions across local authorities. If we are to meet the scale and pace required by carbon budget 7, we must go further. We should look at a national net zero test for planning decisions that provides consistency and clarity. We should also have a climate fast-track for essential infrastructure such as electric vehicle charging, solar power and battery storage. That could help to unlock projects that are critical to reducing emissions and lowering costs for consumers.
We must also address bottlenecks in emerging sectors such as nuclear. Small modular reactors can play a vital role in our clean energy mix, but the current licensing timelines, stretching to over a decade, are incompatible with the urgency of the challenges we face. By embracing digital licensing, fast-tracked siting, and regulatory sandboxes, we can significantly accelerate deployment while maintaining the highest of safety standards.
Encouragingly, we have already seen that that is possible. The creation of the Regulatory Innovation Office was a bold, forward-thinking step. Its sandbox approach is now helping regulators and innovators work in new ways, testing, adapting and accelerating solutions in real time. Feedback suggests that not only is this model effective, but it has been transformational. If it continues to prove successful—and I believe that it will—we should expand this approach across more sectors, embedding carbon reduction at its core.
The Government have set the destination, and this carbon budget provides a credible and vital milestone along that journey, but to reach it we must ensure that our regulation keeps pace with our best and brightest. Our climate tech companies can get us there, but only if we help them to help us.
Harriet Cross (Gordon and Buchan) (Con)
I will use my time to draw attention to parts of the impact assessment, because we are, after all, debating the carbon budget.
First, this budget allows for 37% of our energy consumption by 2040 still to come from oil and gas. The Climate Change Committee itself is allowing for oil and gas to be included in our energy mix into the years to come. On that basis, why are the Government still committed to banning new licences in the North sea? Why are they still committed to the energy profits levy? Why are they still stopping the permitting of Rosebank and Jackdaw? All that will do is increase our imports of more carbon-intensive oil and gas, which is not good for the climate, economy or jobs in the UK. That point can also be found in the impact assessment.
Secondly, reaching the carbon budget will require an “electrification of industry”. That means a reduction in our industrial capacity. The electrification of steel means a move away from blast furnaces, which will mean we lose our virgin steel capacity. Virgin steel is used for other industries as well, such as defence and civil nuclear, so we are going to hinder our civil nuclear capacity by reducing our virgin steel capacity.
Thirdly, the impact assessment—I hope Members have read it, but I am not so sure—says that
“a faster transition to renewables will not eliminate global supply chain risks.”
It is not true, no matter how often it is said, that reducing our reliance on oil and gas and upscaling renewables makes us less vulnerable to global pressures. It does not. This impact assessment says it does not. We must recognise that everything has a cost and a risk, including renewables.
I will bring my remarks to an end shortly, because I do not want to speak for too long. We must be realistic and pragmatic. As my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking) pointed out, this carbon budget assumes that we will reduce our meat and dairy consumption by 25%. It assumes that we will put a cost on households of thousands of pounds, which far exceeds any £300 saving on energy bills, were this Government to achieve it.
China is not putting these costs on businesses or households, and it is not closing down its domestic industries. China is opening 50 to 70 GW of new coal every year. It has almost 1,200 coal-fired power stations, which it is using to export its renewables technology to us—it does not make sense. China is responsible for over a third of global emissions, and we are responsible for 1%. We are not making a difference to global climate change by impoverishing our businesses, industries and households. We said that we wanted to lead, but there is no point in leading if nobody is following. The key players are not following.
Pippa Heylings
Can the hon. Lady confirm by when China said it will meet its net zero commitment?
Harriet Cross
I am sure the hon. Lady has a gotcha for me on that one. I believe it has either not set a target or it is 20 years, but I could not tell her which.
Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)
I would be grateful to my hon. Friend if she reminded the House by what share of the vote our hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden) was returned on a platform of increasing drilling.
Harriet Cross
My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden) was returned on 50% of the vote because of the people who actually feel this. The jobs of the residents of Aberdeen South and north-east Scotland are being lost, daily and monthly, because of the rundown of the oil and gas sector and because of the eco-zealotry of this Government, who want to hit their net zero target faster than anyone else. That is the reality, and it is costing jobs and livelihoods.
I have knocked on hundreds, probably thousands, of doors in Aberdeen South in the last month. I have met so many people in their 30s and early 40s, with young children, who lost their job because of this Government’s anti-North sea oil and gas policies. I do not call them anti-oil and gas policies, because the Government will happily take it from abroad. They will happily import liquefied natural gas and Russian-derived oil and gas products; they just do not want oil and gas products from the UK.
Until we get over the obsession with running down our own industries, and with meeting a target that no one else is aiming for, the UK will suffer. Our industries, skilled workers and future economy will suffer. No other country will follow us if we do that. No other country is looking at the UK as an example. They are looking at the UK as an opportunity to export more of their refined goods and their manufacturing, because they know we are running down our industries here, but they will not copy our lead on reducing emissions because they can see the impact it is having on our economy and our energy bills.
We are missing so many opportunities. Who is going to invest in AI and data centres here when we have four times the electricity costs of the US? They just will not, as there is no incentive. Driving down our agriculture to hit a net zero target is madness. We need food, which I hope is not controversial, but all we will do is import more. All that driving down the amount of our agriculture will do is free up more land for the Government to put solar panels on, which might help them with their target, but it is not going to help with our food production, and nor will it help our rural communities.
I will happily vote against these measures today. I have happily read the impact assessment, and I do not believe that this is best for my constituents, best for the country or best for the economy.
Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)
I declare an interest as vice-chair of the climate and nature crisis caucus.
It is time to put it plainly: if we fail to prevent man-made climate change from getting worse, we face an existential threat to the British way of life. As our weather becomes more extreme, we face the threat of repeated crop failures and the heat-related deaths of thousands of livestock. With our country built for a climate that no longer exists, the impact of storms and heatwaves on our roads, hospitals, schools and pylons will finish off the efforts of the previous Tory Administration to wreck most of our national infrastructure.
Iconic wildlife species, such as the curlew and the salmon, may disappear from these islands, and the British seasons will lose their traditional rhythm. Even our veteran English oaks will begin to vanish from our landscapes. It is bitterly ironic that the Conservative party, which takes our oak tree as its symbol, has abandoned in recent years its commitment to the protection of the environment in a way that puts that icon of our national identity at risk. It has given up conserving anything.
I fully support the Government’s determination to keep our country on track for net zero and to play our part in tackling the climate emergency. Failing to act would put 1,000 years of history and the prosperity of every generation to come at risk. Nevertheless, delivering the seventh carbon budget will be possible only if we face head-on the problems in our society that so often stand in our way.
As the Government’s impact assessment shows, there are huge potential benefits to becoming a more environmentally sustainable society: new export industries, better insulated homes that are more affordable to keep at a comfortable temperature and, with less pollution in our air, healthier lives. We will never realise those opportunities, however, if we do not work towards meeting our carbon budgets in a way that also addresses the deep inequalities across the UK.
With millions in our country already struggling for a decent standard of living, tackling climate change will be impossible if it becomes a threat to their jobs and livelihoods, and to their ability to pay rent, heat their home and put food on the table. The fight against climate change must also be a fight for full employment, decent wages, affordable homes and an end to fuel poverty.
The Government’s impact assessment for this carbon budget is clear: there is a risk to delivery if efforts to deploy new technologies outpace the capacity of industry and households to respond. If it takes up-front spending to invest in net zero technologies such as solar panels and heat pumps to play our part and to benefit from long-term savings, the Government must ensure that everyone is able to do so, regardless of income.
Similarly, for Ministers to secure public backing for the measures needed to deliver carbon budget 7, we must have a geographically fair approach that puts genuine decision-making power in the hands of local communities up and down the country. Once again, the impact assessment is clear that there is the potential for adverse ecological and landscape impacts from the delivery of net zero infrastructure. Rural communities such as those that I represent cannot just be told to lump it, and that is where I think the impact assessment is inadequate.
It is not enough to say that there will be net benefits overall, so it is okay that places such as Stocking Pelham in north-east Hertfordshire are being inundated with speculative proposals for renewable energy schemes. Unless we address the clear disconnect between the development of new infrastructure, how it is done, who it benefits and who experiences the harms, public backlash will continue to delay and frustrate the essential progress that we urgently need. Will the Minister not only make more of the obvious win-win opportunities, such as rooftop solar on commercial buildings and over car parks, but invest more resources in local area energy planning so that rural communities are empowered to decide what technologies they host in their local landscape, where, and at what scale?
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
It is 40°C outside in some parts of the UK. We are obviously not ready for what is coming, so there could not be a better day to discuss climate change and carbon targets. The seventh carbon budget should be welcomed—it is good that the Government have accepted the Climate Change Committee’s advice—but it falls far short of what is needed.
We are making good progress on renewable energy and I, for one, believe that is to be celebrated. However, I will not focus on energy because many other Members in the Chamber have done so already. Instead, I will focus on key sectors where we have seen pitiful progress, but which are absolutely central to meeting our emissions targets and making the transformational change needed to meet more ambitious, longer-term targets. This is not just about net zero; it is about making people’s lives better through lower bills, warmer homes and stronger, more sustainable communities, and it is about improving the quality of our lives as we struggle with the soaring temperatures and devastating floods—and doing so through more than just investing in renewables.
First, I will talk about farming. I welcome the reopening of the sustainable farming incentive, which we heard about earlier today. But yet again, it is a first-come, first-served subsidy that will work against the smaller, poorer farmers—the ones who need it most. The bigger operations will dive in first and get that money. We need long-term sustainable incentives for long-term sustainable agricultural planning.
We also need a land use framework, so that we can prioritise the most productive land for producing food and other less productive land for renewable energy. We should not be using our most productive agricultural land for solar power, but we need both and we have to have a land use framework to make that work. And yes, we also need to look at the carbon emissions from soils and peat. If we do not have healthy soils, we cannot produce food. Going back to what the shadow Minister said, perhaps she needs to think about the role of soil—
Caroline Voaden
No, because I do not have much time.
We also need massive progress on tree planting, and I commend my local district council for planning to plant one tree for every resident in the South Hams. It is making cracking progress.
Secondly, I would like to talk briefly about transport. If we do not have a major shift towards public transport, we are not going to get people out of their cars. That shift means buses in the south-west. The right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) has promised that he is going to revolutionise buses all over the country in the way that he did in Manchester, and I really look forward to seeing how he is going to do that in Devon, where many communities do not even have buses, let alone affordable buses.
We need to look at EV charging, especially for people who have to park on the road. That is a real challenge. We are certainly not seeing it where I live. I would also like to talk about active travel. Devon county council has told me that it will take five years to get a cycle path, even once it has been agreed by all the landowners. That is absolutely ludicrous. If we want to get people on bikes and walking to cut emissions and improve health, we have to cut the red tape and make this easier to achieve.
Lastly, the Climate Change Committee’s target for heat pumps for 2035 is 1.5 million a year, yet we are installing only a third of that. The cost of Heathrow expansion could pay for 4 million heat pumps to be installed across the country. Expanding airports while we are trying to cut emissions makes absolutely no logical sense to me at all. The economic benefit is not proven, the social impact will be catastrophic and the emissions impact on the climate will be unbelievable. I think we should take that budget and put it instead into helping households with heat pumps—
Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)
I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the environment, and I would like to thank all my constituents who write to me so regularly about environment issues. I also want to give a big shout-out to South Thames college and its net zero training hub, which has been built in response to so much demand for green jobs in our local area and is really helping to boost the net zero economy in south-west London.
I welcome the Government’s commitment to the seventh carbon budget in this London Climate Action Week, on this the hottest June day on record ever. This week’s heatwave is a stark reminder of what is at stake. Climate change is no longer a distant threat sometime in the future; it is here now, affecting lives, livelihoods and public services across our country, and especially in London. The question is whether we respond with the urgency that this moment demands and the long-term thinking that this carbon budget demonstrates. We are seeing the consequences of extreme heat in transport, in halting rail services, in pressurising our energy system and in forcing school closures, with more than 1,000 today alone.
Fleur Anderson
I am sorry, but I am afraid I will not.
This extreme heat creates unsafe working conditions, especially for those in physical roles, like my son who is on a construction site today. Food production is at risk, productivity falls, services stretch and working people pay the price too often. The human toll has not been talked about in this debate so far, but it is sobering. Last summer, the hottest on record, was linked to more than 1,500 heat-related deaths in England alone. Without decisive action, these consequences will only intensify.
Carbon budget 7 provides what we need most and what businesses need most, which is clarity. With a stable long-term direction, investment will follow, supporting jobs, strengthening supply chains and driving innovation. We are already seeing this in the UK’s growing net zero economy. It also delivers wider co-benefits, including warmer homes, lower bills, cleaner air and better public health. This is about improving lives—for example, by improving the air quality in Putney. It is welcome news that in London, deaths linked to toxic air have reduced by 40% in five years as a result of the policies brought in by the Mayor, including clean buses and the ultra-low emission zone.
Public support remains strong, but confidence in delivery is weaker. Too often, people cannot see that clear path to net zero, and that is why carbon budget 7 really matters. It does not just set the destination; it gives confidence in the journey. We need more affordable heat pumps, more car clubs, more trees and more council insulation projects. While I support the Government’s approach, I want to raise a serious concern about the expansion of Heathrow airport, which is projected to add 9 million tonnes of emissions each year. How does that square with what we are doing to reduce emissions across every sector? I draw attention to the Heathrow expansion national policy statement, or HENPS—not very snappy, but it is very important. The consultation was launched last week, and I hope that anyone listening, especially my constituents in Putney, will get involved in it. How does this align with our commitments under carbon budget 7?
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
Can I, through my hon. Friend, ask the Minister to look at the Heathrow statement, which seems not to align with the policies we are advocating today? Also, some of the factual evidence that has been produced as part of the impact studies that the Government have also published does not seem to be reflected in the statement accurately.
Fleur Anderson
I thank my right hon. Friend for that. We are looking at the science here. Carbon budgets are related to the science, and the statement about Heathrow expansion has to be related to the science and the evidence as well.
The carbon budget 7 is very welcome. It is necessary and urgent. I welcome the Government’s leadership, not only for us in our country, but in showing the way and leading other countries, and I have seen that in many places. If we get this right, we can deliver not just on climate, but on jobs, food security, national security, growth, health and resilience for decades to come.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
We will go down to a three-minute time limit after the next speaker.
Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) (Green)
I declare an interest as vice chair of the all-party parliamentary group for the environment and as a member of the Environmental Audit Committee. Green MPs will back these critical climate change orders and regulations. I want to recognise, as others have done, the strength of the cross-party consensus that has given us the historic and world-first Climate Change Act and then the net zero target. As the temperature outside soars to record highs, we must renew our commitment to working on the basis of evidence. It is therefore deeply regrettable to see attempts from the Conservatives and Reform to dismantle Parliament’s climate consensus. We must not go back to the days of denialism; neither must we tolerate any rowing back on climate ambition in response to a perceived electoral threat from the deniers and the delayers.
The Paris agreement committed the world to holding global temperature rise to well below 2°C. The science has only become more alarming since then. Global emissions did not peak when many of the international climate policy experts predicted; instead, they continued to rise. As a result, the remaining global carbon budget available to meet the Paris goals now faces an ever smaller window. I support the seventh carbon budget, but we should be honest about the challenge before us, and I would welcome the Minister’s reflections on that specifically.
I welcome the seventh carbon budget, but it is imperative that we move with the urgency that the climate reality demands. We are experiencing increasingly frequent and severe periods of extreme heat, with temperatures reaching levels that pose risks to public health and essential services. The Climate Change Committee is clear that we are not prepared in any shape or form for what is to come. Greens are today specifically repeating our call for heat-proofing measures: cooling for hospitals, schools, prisons and care homes, including air conditioning where needed; a maximum temperature limit for workplaces and classrooms; and a street-by-street programme to insulate homes to ensure that we keep them warm in winter and cool in summer. We need a long-term policy framework to support that.
Members of the Environmental Audit Committee have heard that mitigation and adaptation cannot be treated as separate challenges. Neither can climate action be separated from action on inequality and the cost of living. Nowhere is that clearer than in our continued dependence on oil and gas. Expanding oil and gas operations will not materially improve UK energy security or protect us against price shocks, and it will not lower household bills. The huge growth in renewables is hugely welcome, but the science demands that we avoid new oil and gas fields. I hope that the Government will take this opportunity to unequivocally rule out expansion at Rosebank, given that it would emit emissions equivalent to 28 low-income countries.
Caroline Voaden
The hon. Member rightly talks about our not going back to the days of climate denial, but does he agree that there are legitimate questions to be asked about offshoring, and that we need to include the carbon emissions of everything we import, as that will be a general reflection of the carbon that we as a country are consuming?
Adrian Ramsay
I strongly agree with the hon. Member on that point, and we must ensure that our emissions account for all our activities, whether that is offshoring, shipping or aviation. As she pointed out earlier, any Government plans for airport expansion could bust their own climate targets and need to be carefully reviewed.
Finally, nature is crucial to this debate. Healthy peatlands, native woodlands, salt marshes and restored ecosystems are among the most effective climate tools available to us, yet we are one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. I encourage the Government to recognise that in their carbon budget delivery plans. Not only can we build a strong resilient economy at the same time as restoring nature, but we will do so only if we successfully put nature front and centre. The science is becoming starker, the impacts are arriving faster, and the time for cautious incrementalism has passed. This House must back the seventh carbon budget, and we must all work together to increase our ambition to the level needed to protect the public.
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for the leadership she has shown on this issue, not just since taking up her role, but long before she came to this House—that is a powerful lesson at the heart of some of today’s debate. We have heard a lot from some Opposition Members about how inherently global this problem is, and that the UK decarbonising alone will not tackle climate change. They are obviously right—it is an inherently and intractably global problem that we cannot tackle alone—but they seem somehow to build from that to an argument that we will get other countries to go faster by going slower ourselves. The lesson that the Minister showed in a previous job by arguing for the Climate Change Act is that by showing global leadership, we can bring other countries along with us on this difficult journey. We brought in the Climate Change Act, and now 75% of the country’s GDP is covered by binding emissions targets. We know we need to go further, which is why the debate about how we meet those targets is so important—but it must be a debate about how we meet them.
There has been a lot of loaded language about climate denialism, and I accept that Conservative Members are not denying the existence of climate change. However, by denying the real and existential consequences of not meeting the science-backed targets, they are engaging in a subtler, but no less pernicious form of denialism. That is betraying our constituents and their futures by failing to recognise the existential challenge of climate change, and by failing to engage with the real and important debate that we should all be having about how we meet those targets and the policy trade-offs needed.
Claire Coutinho
I appreciate the hon. Member’s tone and the quality of his remarks, but does he not agree that denying that the Government are making electricity more expensive and deterring electrification—something the former Labour Prime Minister has acknowledged—and denying that we are offshoring emissions by putting extra carbon taxes on our businesses that other countries do not face, therefore increasing global emissions, is also part of the problem?
Alistair Strathern
The right hon. Member is right to highlight that we need to do more to drive down the costs of energy and bring others with us on the journey of decarbonisation, but that is not the debate we are having today. We are having a debate about scientifically binding and informing climate targets that will have existential implications if we do not meet them. By not engaging with some of the deeper policy conversations about how we get there, the right hon. Member is letting us all down. There will absolutely be areas where we can go further, because we have already shown that we can. Whether that is by renewing some of the renewable energy auctions to get better value out of the outcomes for consumers, by evolving the way we are delinking gas from electricity markets to deliver better outcomes for consumers and the environment, or by reforming some of the planning costs that have been holding back the new nuclear and clean energy that we desperately need to get cracking with, we have already made progress.
There will absolutely be areas where we need to go further, and many hon. Members have made good contributions to highlight some of them. That could be thinking about how we can do more to take policy costs off electricity to speed up the electrification journey, or how we can deregulate better some of the innovate start-up technologies that will make some outcomes possible in ways that we might not even be able to imagine today, or thinking carefully about how we manage the industrial costs and implications of the journey to net zero, to ensure that we are doing everything we can to protect the fantastic industrial heartlands that our country has relied on for far too long, and which we should be preserving long into the future. Those are big important questions, but that is not the discussion and argument that has so often been thrown back from the Opposition Benches today. That argument has denied the implications of failing to meet the target, and it is deeply disappointing, because it lets down our constituents and all our collective futures.
Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)
The real choice before us is whether we prepare our economy for the future or watch other countries seize the opportunities that we allow to pass us by. The UK has every reason to be proud of its record on international climate leadership and diplomacy. The Climate Change Act 2008 has become a model for climate governance around the world. Some 76 countries have followed the UK’s lead in developing climate governance frameworks and we have stood at the forefront of international co-operation on the issue, positioning Britain as a key player in securing the 2015 Paris agreement and COP26 in Glasgow.
We have shown that reducing emissions and building prosperity can be complementary: this is not just an environmental question but an economic one. Recent years have shown that the cost of our dependence on fossil fuels is serious. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit suggests that the energy crisis following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine cost the UK more than £180 billion, including a rise in food price inflation of 19%, whereas the economic opportunities are significant. Britain’s green economy now supports around 1.1 million jobs and generates more than £100 billion. It is one of the fastest growing parts of our economy, creating productive, well-paid jobs across manufacturing, engineering and technology. Whether Britain embraces the energy transition or not will not change whether the transition happens. The question instead is whether the jobs, the investment and the expertise are located here or somewhere else.
History rarely rewards those who cling to yesterday’s technologies when the world is investing in tomorrow’s. Members need not trust me on this point; they should trust the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. On 23 June 1914, Winston Churchill was being travailed in this House by MPs who were pursuing an old energy source in the face of a new one. On the eve of the first world war, Churchill pursued oil for powering the ships of the Royal Navy in the face of MPs who pressed the case for coal. This was long before Britain had access to our own oil, but Churchill could see that this new technology was going to change the way that the 20th century would be powered.
A century later, we are faced with another transition, from fossil fuels to clean energy generation. That is particularly relevant where I live in south-west England. Yesterday afternoon, I hosted the Great South West new nuclear futures event here in Parliament. This debate is ultimately about whether Britain chooses to lead or to follow. It is about whether we develop the industries of the future or allow others to forge ahead. The cost of inaction will ultimately be far greater than the cost of transition.
Sojan Joseph (Ashford) (Lab)
As the report makes clear, carbon budget 7 is one of the most important stages on the path to net zero. In previous carbon budgets, cuts in emissions came from more straightforward changes, such as moving electricity generation away from coal. As we continue along this path, this carbon budget will involve changes to the way we heat our homes, the way we travel and the technology we use. Delivering that will require behavioural and structural changes, and future emissions reductions will depend increasingly on the choices made by our constituents.
I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) when he warns that if the Government are to be successful in delivering carbon budget 7, they must have the support of the public. The policies to achieve net zero must therefore be fair and must avoid placing disproportionate burdens on those households with the fewest options. The Committee was clear that the continued pathway to net zero requires greater policy certainty and co-ordination, and more joined-up Government action. I would take this further and expand on a point that I made when the Climate Minister gave evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee last week. As this Labour Government continue with their mission of shifting power away from Westminster and into the regions, we should ensure that mayors and local authorities have the support they need to help to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Matt Rodda (Reading Central) (Lab)
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. He is absolutely right to point out the benefits of devolution and encouraging local authorities to do more. There are many local authorities, not just at mayoral level but among the smaller local authorities, that have a strong track record. I recommend my own local council, Reading borough council, but there are many others who have introduced swathes of solar and other measures.
Sojan Joseph
I was coming on to talk about my own local council, where we are facing problems. Local authority involvement is all the more important given the fracturing of the long-standing cross-party consensus. We now hear voices, particularly from Reform UK, who would simply abandon net zero altogether. Walking away from the challenge would not protect our constituents, but leave them more exposed to higher energy bills, energy insecurity and the growing impacts of climate change itself. Where there is opposition at a national, regional or local level, it is important that the Government are proactive in setting out the explicit case for the net zero agenda as well as the tangible benefits of particular policies.
Let me draw on an example from my own local authority. Last year, the Government made £25 million of funding available through the electric vehicle pavement channels grant. That funding was for local authorities to install cross-pavement channels to support residents without access to off-street parking so that they could charge their vehicles at home and benefit from cheaper domestic tariffs.
I had concerns about how the grant was being used in Kent, so I wrote to Kent county council. In response, the Reform-led administration said that the council had decided not to submit an application for the grant. As a result, of the £667,000 of funding that could have been available to the people of Kent, the council received only £50,000. That represents a shortfall of well over half a million pounds of funding that could have been used to help my constituents. That is deeply disappointing at a time when the Labour Government are putting forward practical support to help households with the transition to net zero.
Mr Perkins
What my hon. Friend has just revealed is absolutely shocking. Does that not show that even at a local authority level, Reform will put its ideology in the way of helping businesses and individuals to bring their bills down?
Sojan Joseph
I absolutely agree. Hundreds and hundreds of constituents would like to drive an electric car but have no access to home charging, and they would have benefited from that funding. Yes, we are talking about taxpayers’ money, but by not becoming an energy-secure country, we are only helping countries like Russia.
Given the urgency of meeting our national emissions targets, it is essential that no opportunity for progress is left unused. Will the Department work closely with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, as well as other relevant Departments, to take a more proactive and co-ordinated approach? That should include identifying barriers that prevent local authorities from applying for funding, improving communication about available schemes, and providing practical support where needed.
In particular, will the Government consider measures such as offering targeted guidance or even establishing a more strategic framework to ensure that funding reaches all parts of the country effectively? By strengthening collaboration across Departments and supporting local authorities more directly, we can help to ensure that councils are fully equipped to access the funding available to them and, in doing so, maximise our collective ability to deliver on the UK’s climate commitments.
Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)
Last year was the worst on record for outdoor fires in Dorset. A part of my constituency burned for weeks on end, with many fires starting before others had been brought under control. I am really concerned that if we do not prepare better, we will be unable to manage the changes ahead.
The Government’s resilience framework, which was published last year, mentions climate change less than six times. Perhaps that explains why the Climate Change Committee has repeatedly warned that UK preparedness is inadequate. Will the Minister look again at the resilience framework?
Home-grown energy is a key way to adaptation and mitigation. Earlier this month, I called for offshore wind projects to be accelerated in Dorset, but we are told that those projects are a decade away—a decade in which average temperatures are expected to have increased by another quarter of a degree and in which well-paid, green jobs and associated economic growth in Dorset will be lost to our community. I must ask the Minister to look again at how we share green energy jobs around the country.
My biggest concern is this: tomorrow is the final day of the planning appeal for another incinerator in Dorset. At a time when the Government have committed to a circular economy and expanded recycling, it is totally contradictory to continue to approve these plants. Government policy published in December 2024 stated that only plants with a clearly defined waste management need should go ahead, yet documents released this week on the Canford incinerator suggest that only 20% of the burned waste will come from the two council areas in Dorset. Furthermore, the carbon capture and storage facility pledged at the time of the development will not be built; there is just a commitment to regular updates on potential future feasibility.
We are due to meet our net zero target in just 25 years, yet this incinerator will be burning waste for 40 years. That is 40 years in which we will be reducing waste and will need to bring waste from further afield to feed the monster. How can we claim to be serious about achieving net zero while enabling business models that depend on the long-term combustion of waste?
When I visited Bearwood primary school last week, children urged me to do more to protect marine life. When I attended the national emergency briefing in Wareham last month, I was touched by the concern of residents about what they were seeing, sometimes for the first time. When I write back to those children next week, I want to tell them that this House listened, and when I speak at the national emergency briefing in Wimborne next week, I want to tell the people there that we recognise the scale of the challenge and the opportunity that is before us. I ask the Government to please pause decisions on new incinerator development so that we can achieve this carbon target, and to ensure the national emergency briefing reaches a wider audience with a prime-time screening by the public broadcasters.
Martin Rhodes (Glasgow North) (Lab)
I very much welcome the opportunity for this House to debate the seventh carbon budget, but as important as this debate is, it cannot be the only place in which this discussion is held. I welcome the Government’s recognition of this in their clean energy mission, which states that that mission
“will only succeed if we take people with us.”
That means not just having this debate, welcome as it is, but making sure that we reach out to communities. If we do not, the space will too quickly be filled with misinformation and false narratives that undermine public trust in the need for carbon reduction and a better environment. We must continue to make that case so that support is broad, durable, and rooted in the everyday experiences of communities across the country.
To do this, we must combine arguments with policies that improve the lived realities of communities across the UK. This means ensuring that the costs of decarbonising our economy do not fall disproportionately on less advantaged communities. We must work with, and in, communities and industry to ensure that the benefits for UK jobs and incomes are delivered. This mission is based on scientific evidence, and it needs a technical and practical set of solutions, but we will not succeed if we limit the debate to the scientific and the technical—we need to recognise that it is rooted in the values of social justice. The interconnected causes of environmental, social and economic justice are the challenge of our time.
It is clear that bringing people with us may be becoming more difficult. Much of the progress made has been on the things that were easier to do; what is left to do is perhaps more difficult. Not only is the task ahead more difficult in itself; the consensus on progress has sadly fractured. But this is not a time to retreat. It may be a time to reflect on how we build, and I look forward to the Government’s publication of the delivery plan for this carbon budget, but it cannot be a time to retreat. The challenge is no less urgent; in fact, it is more pressing. Scrutiny is important, but it is not enough, and making the case for clean energy cannot be done through words alone—it must be done through actions that deliver for working people and for all our communities. Talking about a just transition does not in itself deliver a just transition. If we act, continuing to turn our words into deeds, the clean energy revolution will not simply be a policy programme; it will become a lasting national achievement.
Cat Eccles (Stourbridge) (Lab)
In 2026, the question is no longer whether we act on the climate crisis, but how fast we do so. Most people accept the science, which shows that the Earth’s average surface temperatures have increased significantly over the past century. It is hard to deny this in a week where the UK is yet again experiencing record-breaking heat, although one climate sceptic told me online recently that “it’s just weather”. Yes, there have been hot periods in recent history, but these are becoming more frequent and more prolonged, with global temperatures set to rise by 1.5°C to 2°C by 2050. While that may sound like a small number, these increases will lead to farmers’ crops failing more regularly, threatening food security. People’s health will be impacted. Sea temperatures will further increase; this will melt ice sheets and release massive amounts of carbon and methane into the permafrost, further increasing temperatures.
The net zero brand, however, has become toxic, failing to clearly communicate what must be done and why. Measures to deal with climate and the environment are not “nice to haves”—they are essential to protect the country’s ecosystem, agriculture and infrastructure. It is no longer about whether we can afford to take action; it is about whether we can afford not to do so. If we do, our economy will actually benefit. We must confront the misinformation directly and put forward credible, practical solutions. The populist right promotes the misleading claim that the UK can secure its energy by drilling more oil and gas in the North sea, but in reality, projects such as the Rosebank oilfield would deliver only a relatively small supply of oil and be subject to global price shocks, all while causing significant environmental damage and giving more profits to oil giants. True energy security and lower costs will come from sustained investment in renewable energy, not from doubling down on fossil fuels.
Some 37 years ago, Margaret Thatcher stood before the UN General Assembly and warned of the dangers of rising carbon emissions and their impact on the Earth’s climate. At the time, the Conservatives respected that evidence and engaged seriously with the science, but today the party is a pound shop version of its former self, more preoccupied with chasing Reform votes than offering serious solutions to the challenges facing our country.
We urgently need to tell a better story on climate change and to show the public how policies will benefit them where it matters—in their pocket. During the last heatwave a few weeks ago, more than 80% of the energy in the grid came from renewable sources. That is a fantastic news story, and the public are set to reap the benefits from the planned decoupling of gas and electricity prices. Across the UK, we are already seeing warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers, but this is not a task for DESNZ alone. A golden thread of safeguarding our environment for future generations must run across all Departments.
Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)
I support these measures. Contrary to what some have said in the Chamber today, the UK Energy Research Centre has found that two thirds of the increase in electricity bills since 2021 has been driven by wholesale gas prices. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey) was right, when he was Energy Secretary, to play his part in leading the UK to becoming the world leader in offshore wind. He was right—as, to be fair, was the Prime Minister—to oppose the reckless and illegal war in the middle east, which has driven up prices. It is crucial that we break the reliance on gas to bring down our energy bills. Our Liberal Democrat plan to halve energy bills in 10 years depends on doing just that. Our essential energy guarantee would discount half of bills right now, but we need to do more.
Tidal range could have been generating more than Hinkley C, had the previous Conservative Government supported that proposal when it came up. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings) was absolutely right to say in her excellent speech that community energy could be playing a much bigger part. One thing that Reform and the Conservatives have not talked about today is that their alternatives do not just mean more and more burning of oil and gas, despite the global warming we are experiencing today; they also want to frack our beautiful countryside to burn even more gas. Near my constituency in Somerset, shale gas licences were obtained, including for Quantoxhead and around Brent Knoll, just 16 miles from a nuclear power station and not far at all from my town of Taunton. The Reform party said that it would be negligent not to frack. Under their current leader, the Conservatives have recently opened the door to fracking, saying that it will form part of the mix, just as Liz Truss did during her short period in office.
Fracking in Lancashire, let us remember, triggered 200 seismic events of magnitudes up to 2.9, which were felt across the whole Fylde coast. My neighbours in Taunton and Wellington want nothing to do with fracking, and certainly not just outside our town. Any proposals to restart fracking pose real dangers to Somerset, and constituents of Taunton and Wellington would bear all the risk: the earth tremors, the industrialisation of our rolling hills and the threat to the River Tone, while the financial gains would flow only to the oil and gas executives and to their backers.
The seventh carbon budget provides the continuity of trajectory that lower bills and a stable climate depend upon, but we must go further. We must reject the dangerous alternatives from the Conservatives and Reform, and say no to fracking our wonderful countryside.
Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)
Since the last election, great strides have been made by this Government in confronting the ongoing climate crisis. There should be no doubt at all about us being in a climate crisis—we only need to step outside to feel it. We have heard from many Members already that this is one of the hottest days on record.
I welcome the Government’s clear acceptance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recommended reduction of carbon emissions. That is an issue that my constituents care deeply about. After all, it is about their children’s future, and when I say this, I mean that all children deserve the right to breathe clean air. This Labour Government have made historic investments in clean energy and rewilding projects across the country. Those achievements have not only worked to decrease our dependence on fossil fuels and build our national energy independence, but brought with them further private investment, training opportunities and high-skilled sustainable employment, reinvigorating our communities and building the foundations for a greener and more sustainable economy.
The Government’s focus on environmental policy is demonstrated by the carbon budget, which will improve people’s lives now and for years to come. It will rebuild our natural environment, and it will save lives. In previous years, 4,000 premature deaths were linked to poor air quality in London alone. That is not acceptable. It has affected my constituency directly with the tragic death of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah in 2013, following which, for the first time in the UK, air pollution was listed as a cause of death. I applaud her mother, Rosamund, who campaigns relentlessly for clean air.
For far too long, Governments in Westminster have failed to take the dangers of air pollution seriously, and I am glad that that is no longer the case. Thanks to vital work on the part of the Mayor of London, enormous progress has been made to clean up our air. The implementation of ultra low emission zones—which are popular with some and unpopular with others—has removed high-emission vehicles from our streets, which, again, is to be applauded.
This progress shows a Labour movement working together at local and national level to change lives. I congratulate the Government on their acceptance of the carbon budget and the emissions reduction target, and I look forward to continuing to support the work that is taking place in the UK and globally to tackle the climate crisis. However, I ask the Government to look further at the stripping of minerals from the seabed. As the Minister will know, deep sea mining puts at risk genuinely irreplaceable biomes, and may lead to the remobilisation of carbon emissions that have long been dormant on the seabed.
Jonathan Davies (Mid Derbyshire) (Lab)
Owing to the three-minute speaking limit, I will do my best to summarise my speech. I also apologise to the constituents whom I told that I would raise specific issues on their behalf, because I may not be able to cover all the points that I had hoped to make.
The last Labour Government made huge strides in respect of climate change, introducing the first legislation in the form of the Climate Change Act 2008 and the first carbon budget. That was taken up by other countries across the world. I also pay tribute to past Conservative Governments—David Cameron and Theresa May took that work forward—and I hope we can find a consensus across the House on the way ahead.
Climate change affects so many aspects of our lives in the United Kingdom. We have made good progress, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by about 50% since 1990, but the scale of the challenge is great, and it is having a massive impact on the economy. We are on a fossil fuel rollercoaster as we pay more to support people with health problems. We may see such problems today—and perhaps I should declare an interest, as someone who would get sunburnt under a 40-watt lightbulb. We are also seeing threats to our national security as access to natural resources is challenged, and that will be a driver of conflict.
While we have a moral obligation to adapt, we are also presented with a huge opportunity for our economy. The green industries of the future are already creating growth here, and creating some fantastic jobs. It is important to bear in mind that the suggestions made by the independent Climate Change Committee are just suggestions, and that it is up to the Government of the day to pursue them. For example, we have heard some talk of banning meat and dairy products. I happen to know that the Secretary of State for Energy is very fond of a bacon sandwich, as is the chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee, so I do not think we will find ourselves in circumstances in which meat is banned.
Let me refer to some of the opportunities that we have. The Government’s progress with the Rolls-Royce small modular reactors is fantastic news. I understand that they will be able to power nearly a million homes, and this is good news for jobs in the sector as well. The warm homes plan will help to deal with the cost of living crisis, but it also means that people who heat their homes using gas, for example, will use less of that product.
I want to impress on the Minister the importance of nature-based solutions, especially in relation to flooding, which imposes a huge economic burden on businesses and homes. I should also like her to bear in mind green hydrogen, which presents a huge opportunity for the economy. Some great work is being done in Sweden. However, a huge amount of electricity is required for the electrolysis that is needed to produce green hydrogen. If we can do more with the SMRs, I believe that we have a viable opportunity to deliver with green hydrogen.
It is a shame that time is so tight in such an important debate, but I shall have to leave it there for today.
Lola McEvoy (Darlington) (Lab)
The temperature right now in London is about 35°, compared with a perfect 25° in Darlington—so take me home! I want to put on the record my thanks to all the staff working to support us today, especially the armed police and the Doorkeepers in their three-piece suits. The effects of this heatwave will put huge pressure on our public and essential services, and we should all spare a thought for any woman giving birth today, for the families living in overcrowded accommodation, and for anyone with medical vulnerabilities. This weather is deeply dangerous and, in proposing inaction in the face of this climate emergency, the Conservative party must be living on another planet.
I may not be a climate change expert—my brother is a geography teacher, so I am under serious pressure—but I do know my regional economy. I know that the net zero project has delivered incredible impacts and huge investment in my area, and the Minister has shown excellent leadership on this issue. Although today’s extreme weather makes her point for her, the Government have been working hand in glove with industry to ensure that we reap the economic rewards of the transition to net zero. At the G7 last week, the Government secured £1.3 billion for battery energy storage systems so that we can end the ludicrous practice of curtailment of our wind farms.
In recent weeks, we have seen a co-ordinated effort by the once-credible Conservative party to paint decarbonisation as anti-jobs, anti-growth and anti-industrial communities. Although I absolutely back the calls from the trade unions to ensure a proper, equitable career transition for those working in the oil and gas industry, saying that this Government’s commitment to net zero is bad for our economy is for the birds.
In my region, we have a world-leading carbon capture project, the East Coast Cluster, which includes the net zero Teesside power plant. The plant, which is powered by gas, will capture 2 million tonnes of CO2 annually and create enough power for 1.3 million homes. This technology will be globally significant, boosting our ability to support other countries that are looking for solutions to their transition, which we can sell. The technology is backed by a £22 billion investment, alongside the green hydrogen on Teesside and many other innovations. Our region is powering ahead. We have huge innovations through the Northern Endurance Partnership, and Low Carbon Materials, which is a local start-up, was shortlisted for the Earthshot prize.
Net zero jobs are 40% more productive than the national average, with wages 15% higher than the UK norm. In other words, these are not just more jobs; they are better jobs. That is the assessment of the CBI, not the Labour Government. Whether it is the electric trains being built at Hitachi or what will soon to be the largest wind farm in the world at Dogger Bank, our region is home not only to the best people in England, but to the most net zero businesses per head in the country.
I say to the Minister: all clean power to your elbow. Industry is investing and innovating. The public support action and want subsidies, with two thirds wanting action on climate change. Carbon-intensive industries, and workers in these industries, are calling for equitable alternatives and for the same pay and progression as other sectors.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
The effects of climate change cannot be ignored in my city of Portsmouth. We are an island city, and rising sea levels will pose a growing threat if we do not get a grip on the climate crisis. The climate crisis affects my constituency every day. It is fitting that we are debating this motion during a record heatwave, in which people are struggling to cope in homes that are poorly equipped for increasingly frequent extreme weather. This is not just about reducing emissions; it is about rewiring our economy for a more sustainable future. Climate action is driving jobs, growth and investment across the UK, and we are already seeing that in Portsmouth.
Earlier this year, I visited four constituents with Aura Retrofit. They had all received heat pumps through the Government’s warm homes plan, at no cost to themselves. They told me that these improvements have transformed their lives by keeping them warm through the winter, reducing their energy bills and, indeed, giving them money back. The Conservatives say that the public do not support the transition to net zero, but I do not know who they have been talking to, because 77 people surveyed by the Government’s public attitudes tracker said that they were concerned about climate change and its impact, and seven out of 10 voters say that they want to support Government action to reduce climate change. However, they know there is an issue that we must address.
At a recent community event, it was evident that many people were afraid to discuss climate change and net zero for fear of attack and a pile-on following the misinformation spread online by some politicians. Despite heat pumps being available in my city, only 4% of households in Portsmouth North have taken them up, making us 483rd out of 650 constituencies for adoption. For some residents, the offer may simply sound too good to be true. Previous scams in the clean energy sector have damaged trust. In summing up, can the Minister consider how we rebuild confidence so that more residents can benefit from what one constituent has described as “kinder energy”?
As a proud naval city, Portsmouth understands how global events can affect the cost of fuel, energy and food. That is why we must continue to invest in renewables and nuclear energy to free Britain from the rollercoaster of fuel prices. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes) noted, we must bring the country with us, and people must see it, hear it and feel it. We should reject the false choice between restoring nature and reaching net zero, because we need both. Nature recovery and climate action are not competing objectives; they are mutually reinforcing.
One area of concern I would like to highlight is the role of the shipping industry. Portsmouth international port’s shore power infrastructure, supported by Government funding, allows ships to connect to the electricity grid while berthed rather than running on diesel, making the air cleaner around the city and meaning that the income received from the municipal port is not costing local people their health. However, this port now faces serious challenges. The cost of electricity makes using the infrastructure more expensive than marine diesel, which is threatening to undermine the investment. I urge the Minister to work with Ministers across Government to find a solution. Our port wants to contribute to net zero, but the current system is holding it back.
If we do nothing, we do not keep things as they are, but lock in more flooding, more extreme weather and greater energy insecurity. In the words of our own national treasure, David Attenborough:
“If working apart we are a force powerful to destabilise our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it.”
Luke Murphy (Basingstoke) (Lab)
As many Members have mentioned, the temperature outside the Chamber has been climbing towards 40°C and a red heat health alert is in force. Fifty years ago, the summer of 1976 left a mark that many people still remember. We are living through that kind of summer again, except that now we know it is not a freak, but a pattern. We are seeing the impact in that schools have closed, transport has been disrupted and hospitals have cancelled appointments. Indeed, we have already seen a critical incident declared at a hospital in Portsmouth.
None of this is a forecast; it has already happened, and it is happening faster than we were told, but I do not believe that we need to trade in despair, because it is not warranted and it is not useful. We still have time to act and we know what to do. That is the whole point of the seventh carbon budget that we are debating, and it is in that spirit that I support it.
This is something Britain is good at. We were the first major economy to write a binding climate framework into law. We have cut our emissions faster than almost any comparable nation. This is not a burden we should carry grudgingly, but a race in which we are leading from the front and, indeed, bringing on other countries to act as well.
A child starting school in my constituency this September will be in their 20s when this budget period ends, and what we decide in this Chamber writes the world that they grow up in. We must leave things better than we found them, and we cannot hand the next generation a wrecked inheritance and a bill, and call it prudence. So to those who say we cannot afford this, I say that the reverse is true.
The Conservative party rightly talks about scrutiny, but scrutiny works both ways. I heard very little about the costs of inaction—flooding, wildfires and heatwaves—or the cost of not capturing the huge economic opportunities. Indeed, the impact assessment, as we have discussed, shows that transitioning away from fossil fuels will lead to a net increase. It mentions not being able to quantify exactly the impact on jobs post 2030, but it very clearly says that that is because of the context: it depends on things such as automation, AI and, crucially, policy.
I agreed with the speech of the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), in 2023, because she rightly argued—I did not agree with everything she said, but she made this central point—that while she agreed with the target for net zero, policy would be crucial to shaping whether it worked for families and business. However, rather than doing the hard work of designing policy to ensure that, the Conservatives have abandoned the target completely.
We still have time, and we have the framework, the evidence and a national habit of leading when it counts. We should not duck this moment just because it has got difficult, and I urge the Government to keep Britain leading from the front.
Katie White
The temperature has certainly gone up outside, and at times it has gone up a little in here. This has been a very passionate debate, which I really welcome. I will probably not have time to go through all of the points that were raised, but I am happy to meet anybody to discuss them. Constructive engagement is really helpful on this issue. I think most of our constituents want us to tackle climate change and bring bills down, and this is an opportunity for us to work together.
I will reply initially to the right hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho). As she knows, this issue is about setting the trajectory towards 2050. It is not about 2050; it is about the budget. I listened really carefully and she makes some valid points, but I was a little confused at times. She challenged us on not having enough scrutiny, but this is the first time that we have had proper scrutiny of this budget. Under the previous Government, you never once voted on the carbon budget on the Floor of the House. You discredited, or you tried to discredit, the Committee on Climate Change—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
Order. The Minister is better than that.
Katie White
The right hon. Lady used the Committee on Climate Change to discredit some of the figures and questioned food bills, but she knows that bills have already gone up by £361 as a result of food inflation. She talked about planning and referred to China’s innovation, but I would say that its planning system is a little bit more forthright than ours.
The thing I was most unsure about was this: if the right hon. Lady is so clear, why did she not do that when she was in office and she was in my place? Actually, she did take this through when she was in charge. It is only in Opposition that she has changed her position entirely. I am from Yorkshire and we say things fairly directly. My advice has always been that we want to save carbon and make cash. I think that is a fairly blunt way of saying that this is about growth in the economy.
I pay tribute to and thank my hon. Friends the Members for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), for Sheffield Hallam (Olivia Blake), for Derbyshire Dales (John Whitby), for Mid Derbyshire (Jonathan Davies), for Brent West (Barry Gardiner), for Ellesmere Port and Bromborough (Justin Madders), for Putney (Fleur Anderson), for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern), for Ashford (Sojan Joseph), for Darlington (Lola McEvoy), for Portsmouth North (Amanda Martin) and for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy).
I would also like to thank the hon. Members for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings), for Chippenham (Sarah Gibson) and for Horsham (John Milne), my hon. Friends the Members for Exeter (Steve Race) and for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff), and the hon. Members for South Devon (Caroline Voaden), for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord), for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos), for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross), for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking) and for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice).
I understand that the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness drives a Tesla, but his party wants to scrap the electric car grant. I understand that he put solar panels on properties owned by his former company, but Reform councillors are cancelling solar projects on public buildings. I understand that his former company invested in EV chargers and solar power, but Reform says Britain should slow down the green energy transition. I understand that he says he backs business, but he threatens to rip up green investment deals and send investors running for the exits. Some 91% of properties in the Boston and Skegness constituency face some level of flood risk. He talks about adapting to climate change, but he will not tackle what is causing it.
I ask the hon. Members who have questioned the motions today: what is the alternative? I am very happy to have those conversations. Should we tell black cab drivers to give up their electric taxis and go back to paying more at the pump? Should we look constituents in flood-risk communities in the eye and tell them, “Sorry, we’re not going to tackle the causes of this?” Should I tell the gentleman I met in Makerfield, whose solar panels have helped to reduce his energy debt by £800, that he was better off without them? Should I tell the investors at the London Stock Exchange that Britain is not interested in its share of a $10 trillion global green economy? Let us be clear: that is the choice.
In the middle of an unprecedented heatwave, perhaps we should all try to take the temperature down. This should not be a partisan issue. At its heart, carbon budget 7 is a pro-business, pro-investment framework. Let us choose resilience over risk, let us choose investment over stagnation, and let us choose the opportunities of the future over the comforts of the status quo. I hope that I have provided the reassurance that Members require. I urge colleagues across the House to support the orders and regulations before us today. I commend them to the House.
Question put.
Business without Debate
Petitions
Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)
I rise to present a petition from residents in my constituency of Arundel and South Downs in West Sussex. Hundreds of signatures have been gathered from local residents who see at first hand what feels like a constant attack on our countryside and country pursuits by this Government. For example, just in the past couple of weeks, we have seen the removal of plans for fast broadband fibre to thousands of rural homes. The petitioners therefore request
“that the House of Commons urges the Government to bring forward measures to actively support rural areas, farming, traditional country sports, including trail hunting and shooting, and the equestrian sector.”
Following is the full text of the petition:
[The petition of residents of Arundel and the South Downs,
Declares that the UK’s rural traditions and heritage are of great importance in preserving our natural landscapes and the wider economy.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to bring forward measures to actively support rural areas, farming, traditional country sports (including trail hunting and shooting) and the equestrian sector.
And the petitioners remain, etc.]
[P003212]
Adam Jogee (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)
On this hot day I rise to present the petition of residents of the constituency of Newcastle-under-Lyme. I also draw the House’s attention to the declaration of interest from the new leader of Newcastle-under-Lyme borough council at the cabinet meeting yesterday.
The petition states:
The petition of residents of the constituency of Newcastle-under-Lyme,
Declares that the land to the south east of Junction 16 of the M6 should not be released from its green belt status for development as this would have a significantly detrimental impact on Audley residents; further declares that the proposed employment site represents a loss of 6% of the parish’s green belt, which would devastate the rural character of the conservation area; further declares that the proposed development would likely favour commuters over local people, increasing pressure on the A500/M6 roundabout and disrupting nearby rural lanes used by local people; further declares that the development is expected to cause poor air quality, noise, litter, 24-hour illumination and loss of habitat, while severely impacting views across the Cheshire plains and North Staffordshire; and further declares that, as the local planning authority tasked with producing the Local Plan, Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council has a responsibility to listen to the overwhelming concerns of its residents and ensure the long-term protection of the green belt by removing site allocation AB2.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to encourage Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council to remove site allocation AB2 from its Local Plan and not to permit the release of green belt land for this development.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
[P003213]
Bramhall High School: Condition of Buildings
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Tom Morrison (Cheadle) (LD)
I thank the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), for attending this debate. He may recall that I wrote to the Department for Education last July and outlined that Bramhall high school is a fantastic institution that provides not only an excellent education, but a wealth of wider opportunities for young people in my Cheadle constituency. Despite the extremely poor state of its buildings, the school has continued to deliver for its pupils.
I have seen at first hand the challenges that the school faces. The site is simply not fit for purpose. One of the blocks has no access to water or toilet facilities, the corridors are extremely narrow, meaning movement between classes is a constant battle for teachers, and pupils have been using temporary cabins since November 2023. So no one will be surprised to learn that the school was extremely pleased to be invited to be part of the school rebuilding programme, which offered everyone a fresh start and an exciting opportunity to create something that matched the school’s incredible ambitions.
The school was presented with a number of options, including a full rebuild. That option would best serve the ambitions of the school and the wider community, and avoid further costly and disruptive work in the future. Rightly, the school hoped that this would be the way forward. We all believe that Bramhall high school could become a flagship project for the rebuild programme, with a legacy where long-term thinking is prioritised, students and teachers are empowered, and true potential is invested in.
When I met the school’s leadership team a few months ago, the headteacher, Mr Williams, told me how proud he was that Bramhall high school provided a true, comprehensive education, where students’ skills, passions and talents would be catered for and everyone was given the chance to succeed. A new school would allow this to continue and enhance the fantastic offer that is already available, but sadly the Government have blocked Bramhall high school from receiving a full and complete rebuild, despite it being completely within the budget.
I would like to set out in detail the problems that Bramhall high school faces and the disappointing experience that the school has had with the school rebuilding programme. The school’s buildings suffer from many significant design flaws and large parts cannot be used due to the risks of RAAC—reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. John Peckham, an ex-headteacher of the school who now works for School Improvers UK, says that it currently rates as the least inspiring education building in the country. He says that the design of the estate is poor and that repairing and refurbishing it simply would not help. John wrote to me to say that generations of children have been deprived of the opportunities and inspiration that can be promoted through good school design, and that the day-to-day lives of teachers were much more difficult as a result.
The block with RAAC is over 60 years old and was last significantly invested in by Cheshire county council in 1974. The other block is ageing rapidly: built in the early 2000s, it will soon need serious investment and, as I mentioned previously, has no running water, kitchen or toilet facilities. Money has been spent on rewiring, new heating, asbestos removal and disability access, but none of those have addressed the fundamental issues that the school faces. A rebuild is more than 30 years overdue. We should not be at this point, the teachers should not be at this point and the pupils in the building should not be at this point.
The school eagerly completed the school-specific brief and associated work under the assumption that it would get a complete re-build due to the state of the whole school site. The appointed contractor agreed that a complete rebuild would meet the criteria of the school-specific brief and also meet the school’s vision, all within the budget that was set. The contractor also emphasised reservations about a partial rebuild. But sadly, the Government have pushed for the partial rebuild, despite the evidence, specialist advice and budget showing that a full rebuild was the most sensible option. The leadership team and governors at Bramhall high school are dismayed and disappointed, and so am I. The partial rebuild does not meet the requirements of Bramhall high school-specific brief, it fails to meet the school’s vision and will not meet the school’s requirements or needs in the long term.
Throughout the process, Bramhall high school was consistently told that funding would not be the main driver of the project. It was told that the project would be based on the needs of the school, its teachers and students, but clearly that is not the case and funding is indeed the main driver behind the Government’s decision. I ask the Minister: if effective use of the public purse is a driver behind the programme, why refrain from a full rebuild when it will make the estate more sustainable, help the school evolve to meet future challenges, create an estate that can last for decades and save costs going forward? A partial rebuild will cost the public purse more in the long term as it will end up being a sticking plaster, covering up cracks that really need to be filled in.
The Government have a real opportunity to showcase how targeted, sensible capital investment can save money in the long term while achieving incredible results for our young people. They need to take this opportunity, but instead they have chosen minimal savings and a bigger cost down the line. That is short-sighted and will not achieve the goals of the rebuild programme.
Another issue with the partial rebuild is that it will leave one block standing—the block without running water. Despite investment going into the school site, we will end up with one new, fresh block fit for the modern world next to a block that is falling apart and unable to function. It will leave parents wondering why only half the school can be given the best chance. When parents see the plans, they will be disappointed.
It is not just the buildings that are the issue. We now know that the Government will not provide essential equipment such as new technology, desks and chairs, despite the allocated budget allowing for that. Bramhall high school will have to make up the shortfall of £650,000, and that does not include costs such as CCTV and other infrastructure. All Members across this House know that schools are operating on extremely tight margins with no surplus, and we all know that years and years of under-investment from the last Government has led to that.
Mr Williams told me that he has to think carefully about replacing staff if they leave while also making cuts to department budgets to ensure that they still function, as with so many other schools. How is the school then supposed to pay more than £500,000 for desks, chairs and teaching equipment? The school has no choice but to appeal to the community for help. We find ourselves in a position where, despite the promises of a new school and the opportunities it would bring, Bramhall high school is having to go cap in hand to businesses and residents to source money so that pupils can have a seat. That is ludicrous.
The root cause of the problem is a lack of long-term thinking, planning and investment. The previous Government oversaw a 48% decline in capital spending for education, and the National Audit Office reported that, as of October 2024, there is a £13.8 billion maintenance backlog in English schools. That is a really dire picture.
The Government are showing a lack of ambition. We should be celebrating the plans that saw a full rebuild of this magnificent school, met the brief and, importantly, came within budget, but instead we find ourselves demoralised and trying to solve problems that did not exist until the Government made the wrong decision. That really leaves a bitter taste. The school and I are saddened and deeply disappointed by the Government’s position.
Bramhall high school had hoped that being part of this new approach to rebuilding schools would set it up for the next 60 years at least. The headteacher told me that this is about the message sent to teachers—those who must deal with a declining block and adjust their lessons accordingly while looking out the window at a better block, unsure of why only half the school deserved better. When I spoke to him before writing this speech, he said that he would like to ask the Minister, “Are you really, truly trying to rebuild our schools?” We need a Government who plan for the future—for 20, 30 and even 40 years down the line. As the Chancellor stated last June, this is about showing children that their education matters and their future matters.
Changes in policy and legislation also need to be accounted for. The Government’s proposed special educational needs and disabilities reforms ask mainstream schools to do more, but if they are not given the investment to create more space and resources, that simply cannot happen. For example, Bramhall high school is having to fund a SEND room for students, which will cost around £75,000, but it wants to do that to meet the educational needs of its students, now and in the future. That is a challenge it willingly accepts.
At the beginning of this speech, I talked about how proud the teachers are of the curriculum they offer. They want to provide classes and experiences for children of all passions and skills, and that includes technology, design, drama and music—the subjects that create a fully rounded education. Any new build needs to have that at its very core. On top of that, any new school design must keep pace with new policies and legislation. Phone-free schools mean that there must be phone storage on site.
It feels like the Department for Education is not in lockstep with the school and that this rebuild is being done to the team at Bramhall high school, not with them. That is a real shame and a missed opportunity. The potential benefits are never-ending; there is no shortage of research to confirm that investing in children’s schooling and education makes a better future for all. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that school spending can increase test scores and positive outcomes in the long run.
I believe it is not too late for Bramhall high school; I believe that the Department has the chance at this moment to reconsider. It is not too late to give Bramhall high school the full rebuild it needs. The case is clear, and we know that the budget is there.
If the Minister cannot agree to reconsider the decision today, I have three asks on behalf of Bramhall high school and schools across the country. Will he commit to improving the school rebuilding programme, to ensure that decisions are made hand in hand with schools and are not done to them, as seems to have happened with Bramhall high school? Will he update building regulations and design so that they keep pace with recent policy changes while ensuring that facilities match the vision and aims of the school? Finally, will he meet me and the school’s leadership team to discuss financial support for Bramhall high school in meeting the shortfall of equipment needed in the proposed new block and to hear at first hand their experiences of dealing with the programme? I look forward to the Minister’s response.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Josh MacAlister)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr Morrison) on securing this debate and on his advocacy for Bramhall high school. As a former teacher myself, who spent years standing in front of young people in Oldham and in Stockport, I know from first-hand experience that spaces around lessons really do matter—the classroom environment speaks to children before any lesson begins. That is why tackling our crumbling school estate is imperative: to show children that their education matters and their future matters.
Now, as a Minister in the Department for Education, I am proud that we are calling time on RAAC and rebuilding Bramhall high school, so that children and staff have the high-quality classrooms they deserve. This Government are doing things differently to fix the failures of the past. We published a 10-year infrastructure strategy, which—coupled with long-term capital budgets, the modern industrial strategy and a commitment to investing in skills and training—presents a lifetime of opportunities. Investing in infrastructure will drive growth and raise living standards in every part of the UK. Infrastructure will support our modern industrial strategy, and it will improve public services by taking a long-term approach to improving the fabric of our country. That, of course, includes our schools and colleges.
We are maintaining public investment at the highest sustained level in four decades, supported by an increase in departmental capital spending of over £120 billion over this Parliament, compared with previous plans. This was only made possible by the decisions this Government have taken about the fiscal rules, which have supported a necessary step change in investment. We will increase and prioritise investment where it is most needed through maintenance, renewal and rebuilding programmes, and that is what we are doing for our schools. That is why we increased overall capital investment in education to £38 billion up to 2029-30—the highest level since 2010, when Labour was last in government.
With over 22,000 schools and colleges in England, the education estate supports 10 million children, but we inherited from the previous Government the RAAC crisis and years of decline in the school estate. After years of under-investment, too many children are learning in buildings that have deteriorated and are in need of repair. For too long, schools have had to patch and mend buildings that have already deteriorated beyond repair, instead of undergoing the rebuilds they needed at an earlier point. We are turning the page on years of decline in the school estate, fixing a legacy of neglect and removing RAAC for good. At the core of our strategy is a shift to more proactive management, long-term maintenance, and more renewal of the existing estate. That comes alongside rebuilding more schools and making sure there are high-quality places from early years to post-16.
Our 10-year plan for the school estate, which I published a few months ago, is backed by unprecedented long-term funding. By 2034-35, we will be investing almost £3 billion per year in capital maintenance to improve the condition of the school and college estate, rising from £2.4 billion in 2025-26. We are investing almost £20 billion through the school rebuilding programme. Over 500 schools are already in that programme, with well over half in delivery. Some 59 schools have already been rebuilt through the SRP, with 47 of those completed under this Government, and we will select a further 250 for the next stage of the SRP at the start of 2027.
The renewal and retrofit programme, backed by £710 million to 2029-30, will improve the condition of schools that are coming towards the end of their life, but where deeper renewal and retrofit can extend that considerably. RAAC has been permanently removed from 80 schools and colleges, and we have set out a clear plan to finish the job. By 2029, every school and college in England that is not being fully or substantially rebuilt will be RAAC-free, and every school with RAAC that needs to be rebuilt through the SRP will be in delivery by that point. That includes Bramhall high school.
As the hon. Member for Cheadle has set out, Bramhall high school has faced building challenges, with parts of the estate dating back to the 1960s and the presence of RAAC. However, what stands out is the positive and determined way in which the school community has responded to those challenges. It was a major operational challenge, but the school, Stockport council and the Department worked together to keep pupils learning safely and to minimise the disruption to pupils as much as possible. I recognise that achievement. Through excellent joint working between Stockport, the headteacher and the Department, all RAAC mitigations are in place. That means that pupils can once again use the spaces safely while we get on with the job of rebuilding the school.
This is about not just resolving a building condition issue, but delivering a lasting legacy for pupils, staff, families and the wider Bramhall community. I am pleased to say that delivery is under way with real momentum behind it. Willmott Dixon is the appointed contractor, and it has worked closely with the school and the Department to design an ambitious new build. We expect to have spades in the ground later this year, but it is more than just a construction project. The rebuilding work will also provide valuable T-levels and placement opportunities and support apprenticeships, creating local jobs.
A new modern three-storey building will give Bramhall high school the facilities it needs for the decades ahead. Every building apart from the maths block will be replaced. That building was built post-2000 and has solar panels on the roof and other modern features. Detailed surveys have been conducted, which show it is in good condition and does not warrant demolishing or rebuilding. We are working with the school to remodel the block to integrate it with the new buildings that will be created.
In response to the hon. Member’s point, 90% of the school will be rebuilt. I understand that when there is a new school project like this—I have visited a number of them—the desire is to have the whole shebang and for the whole school to be completely rebuilt. In the context of a schools estate of 22,000 schools across the country, it is important that public funds are not used to replace buildings that are still well within their lifespan. I regularly look at lists of schools from the ’60s and ’70s that are not yet in any school rebuilding programme. They are well beyond their lifespan, and we are doing the job of clearing up that backlog. It does mean, however, that we need to prioritise investment in those buildings that absolutely do need to be replaced.
Through the school rebuilding programme, Bramhall high school will benefit from 25 general classrooms and a full range of specialist teaching spaces. That includes 10 science laboratories, computing and ICT rooms, workshops, a drama studio and an art and design classroom. The plans include a dedicated area for pupils with special educational needs. Sports and leisure provision will also be improved with a new four-court sports hall, activity studio and changing facilities. That includes two multi-use games areas—one for school use and one intended for community use. This is a substantial and exciting investment into a school that is modern, energy-efficient and designed to support excellent teaching, learning and sport.
The hon. Member mentioned the fixtures and fittings of the school. All fixed furniture, fixtures and equipment are provided in a school rebuilding project. That means that schools receive a huge amount of money for new furniture and equipment. For example, the school will get a new kitchen, all classrooms will be integrated with ICT equipment, drama will get the lighting rigs that it needs, and so on. However, we do not normally provide new standard loose furniture, such as tables and chairs, as schools should have an ongoing programme to replace them as they reach the end of their life. That is part of a school’s normal management of capital.
I acknowledge the strong partnership that has driven progress so far. I thank the headteacher, Paul Williams, and his staff; the chair of the school’s governing body, Sarah Brown; Stockport council; and Willmott Dixon for the work they have done together alongside the Department’s programme management team.
I reassure the hon. Member that this Government remain committed to delivering a safe, modern and high-quality school in Bramhall. Together we have moved from the challenge of RAAC and fear about the future of the school building to delivering one of the most exciting school rebuilding programmes in the country, which the people of Stockport and his constituents rightly deserve. More important than anything else is ensuring that pupils have the inspiring classroom facilities they need for the future. I am sure that there will be matters that he will continue to want to raise with me, and I will be glad to speak to him. This is a good example of the investment that we are making as a Government and as a country because of the choices we have made.
Question put and agreed to.
Deferred Division
Deferred Divisions
The House divided: - Ayes: 323 / Noes: 160 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Draft Local Government (Structural and Boundary Changes) (Control of Disposals etc.) (Amendment) Order 2026
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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The Minister for Local Government and Homelessness (Alison McGovern)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Local Government (Structural and Boundary Changes) (Control of Disposals etc.) (Amendment) Order 2026.
It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. This statutory instrument was laid before the House on 14 May 2026.
The order makes a small but important change to existing arrangements that govern significant financial decisions made by councils during local government reorganisation, including those on land disposals and contracts. The Government’s programme of reform, as set out in the English devolution White Paper, will move power out of Westminster and strengthen the foundations of local government. A key part of that programme is local government reorganisation, replacing two-tier councils with single-tier councils that are simpler, clearer and more accountable to the communities that they serve.
The Government’s long-term aim is to create local government structures that make it easier for residents to understand what group is responsible for local services and decisions, while enabling more strategic choices that support growth and improve public services. To meet that ambition, the transition must be orderly and legally sound, and must properly protect the public interest. Existing councils must continue to discharge their functions while new councils are being established, and decisions taken during that period should not undermine the position of the successor councils.
For that reason, the framework includes safeguards, which are set out in section 24 of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007. Those provisions allow the Secretary of State to issue directions that control certain land disposals and significant contractual commitments. Where a decision could have implications for the successor council, councils may, in certain situations, be required to secure consent before proceeding. In practice, that consent will usually come from the relevant shadow council. Those controls ensure that major financial decisions taken during the transition will not adversely affect successor councils. Specific consent will be required for larger decisions, while general consent can be used to enable day-to-day activity to continue.
The order, made under section 29 of the 2007 Act, makes a targeted change to the way that those safeguards apply. As the framework currently operates, councils may need to take account of previous land disposals and contractual dealings when assessing whether the relevant financial thresholds have been reached. The starting point of that aggregation period has remained fixed at 31 December 2006, which could require authorities to examine almost 20 years of historical activity. That was not the intention of the policy. The controls were intended to focus on recent and relevant activity in the period leading up to reorganisation, rather than to create unnecessary retrospective burdens.
The order updates the beginning of the aggregation period to 31 March 2025, to ensure that the framework captures relevant activity without requiring unnecessarily extensive historical analysis, while leaving the underlying safeguards on disposals of land and contractual dealings unchanged. The Committee should note that the order does not represent a change of policy, and does not alter the underlying safeguards.
Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)
I am a little unclear on the implications of what the Minister just said. If, for example, Barratt Redrow and the Jockey Club submitted a planning application, under the new national planning policy framework, to flatten Kempton Park racecourse to build 2,000 homes on that land, would no one be able to consider what had happened in retrospect? Would they be allowed to consider only what happened under this Government’s current NPPF?
Alison McGovern
The hon. Gentleman asked about a specific example, which sounds like it relates to a specific concern.
Alison McGovern
He is nodding, which is helpful. In that case, I will write directly to him about that important local issue. I am not overly concerned that the example the hon. Gentleman raised is engaged by this change, but I will write to him to confirm that, because it sounds like an important issue in his constituency.
The clarification in the order is designed to make sure that the existing safeguards operate as intended and can be applied with greater consistency across councils. The order preserves the balance between enabling councils that are due to be abolished to continue to operate effectively, and protecting successor councils, residents and taxpayers’ money.
Although the amendment in the order was first identified through engagement with Surrey, it has been tested more widely with local government representatives, including engagement with the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy and the Department’s local government reorganisation advisory group, which brings together senior officers and experts from across local government. It is therefore not a measure designed only for Surrey, but an update that will apply across the local government reorganisation programme.
This statutory instrument supports a legally robust transition by reducing uncertainty in the operation of the framework and promoting consistent application across the reorganisation programme. It makes a small but necessary technical change to ensure that the safeguards that govern significant financial decisions during transition work as intended, thereby supporting the whole local government reorganisation programme.
Alison McGovern
I am afraid I am finishing.
The SI reflects engagement with councils and wider consideration with local government representatives, and will help to support the safe, orderly and effective delivery of our programme of reorganisation. I commend the draft order to the Committee.
The Chair
Before I call the shadow Minister, may I suggest that Members should not be tempted into a wider debate about the merits of any particular boundary changes or council abolitions?
David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers.
As the Minister set out, the order makes a relatively straightforward technical change, but I have a couple of questions arising from it that relate to the specific circumstances in which the legislation is coming forward. Historically, the policy has been that local government reorganisation would take place where there was unambiguous local consent for that to happen. We are all conscious that, as part of the devolution priority programme, some disputes are already arising—which I think the legislation is designed to address—between the new authorities that are coming into being and the prior authorities that are being abolished.
Local authorities operate to a specific financial process that is quite tightly controlled in legislation, and that is where my questions for the Minister arise from. First, the provisions in this legislation set out that the Secretary of State will designate a person who will be required to give consent, or will have the opportunity to give or withhold consent, when transactions covered by the legislation are envisaged. It would be helpful to understand what process will be followed when there is a dispute. My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne gave an example of where the disposal of an asset might be seen by one authority as hugely beneficial because of a capital receipt, and by another as hugely controversial because it pledged to protect it from excessive development. We need, then, clarity about how disputes of that nature will be resolved.
The process is significant because many of the capital sales that will be caught by the provisions are also determined by other processes. Will the Minister set it out for the Committee, in particular regrading authorities that are subject to exceptional financial support rules? If a local authority in Surrey—such as Spelthorne or Woking, which have very significant capital debts—has entered into an agreement with the Government to undertake a programme of disposal of assets, and the disposal of those assets is opposed by the successor authority, how will a decision come to be made, given that the outgoing authority is effectively obliged to undertake those asset sales but the new authority may not wish to do that?
A good example of where the nature of the assets may be material to the dispute is car parks, which are an asset to the parking-revenue account of a local authority, so are ringfenced from its general fund. One authority may see a car park as an opportunity to raise revenue, whereas another authority may see it as a capital asset to be disposed of to secure a capital receipt. Especially where there is a capital programme over many years with, in some cases, the capital expenditure having already taken place, to be funded from future asset disposals, there will need to be a process to ensure that the budgets can be balanced. We will all be aware of local authorities in our own areas that have borrowed to build new leisure centres or new schools, or to invest in public transport hubs, parking or whatever it may be—important public assets to be funded from the future sale of those sites for disposal. We therefore need that sense of clarity.
Can the Minister tell the Committee how the provisions will be dealt with when the assets in question arise within an arm’s length management organisation for housing that is owned by a local authority trading company—such as Brick by Brick, the housing development company in Croydon, of which there are a number of alike organisations across the country—to which assets have been transferred for development or disposal? There is no explicit clarity, certainly not within this legislation, about how that will be managed.
What about asset disposals within a programme relevant to the Department for Education? These may be school sites or non-school sites whose asset value is designed to support the development of school sites and which sit within the dedicated schools grant. Would the decision to determine who gives consent to that process be a matter for the Department for Education, rather than the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government? I think especially of situations in which a school has been transferred under the standard 99-year academy lease. Who will be the decision maker if the academy trust wishes to dispose of all or part of that site?
I would like to put the question about how overage clauses, which will exist in many of these agreements, will be treated. Clearly, the upside of some of these disposals, which are often controlled both through the planning process and through the original transaction, will say that, in the event that the acquirer of the site returns to gain planning permission for a higher-density development, or something that yields a higher amount, they have to pay a proportion of the increase in the value of the site to the local authority that disposed of it. That is designed to avoid a situation in which a site is sold for 20 houses and ends up with 150 flats on it, and the developer basically cleans up. That is a common clause contained within site disposals by local authorities. To whom would the benefit of that overage clause accrue? Especially in circumstances where the benefit was intended to be taken into account as part of that prior capital programme, what provisions will there be to resolve those disputes in the event that they arise?
Sadik Al-Hassan (North Somerset) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I support this technical but important correction. Section 27’s anti-avoidance provisions exist to prevent authorities facing dissolution from disposing of assets to avoid scrutiny, but their value depends on the reference date staying current.
My constituency of North Somerset is a useful illustration of why this matters in the long term. It has been a unitary authority since 1996 and, even 30 years on, legacy questions around assets, contracts and historical boundary decisions can resurface. Updating the baseline in section 27 from December 2006 to 31 March 2025 is sensible housekeeping, which ensures that the consent regime keeps pace with present-day restructuring, rather than the baseline being tied to the 2008-09 wave of unitarisation. It is the kind of provision that must be kept under continual review so that it does not drift out of date in the same way a second time.
Lewis Cocking (Broxbourne) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. The Government are bringing forward logical proposals to deal with new councils, but my concern is that I am not sure that this measure goes far enough. It talks about protecting new councils from existing councils’ decisions about their finances, but what we do not talk about in this—and what I think the Government need to consider—are existing councils that are going to be forced to merge.
That is important because, if we look at my constituency, I have a council with money in the bank and a council without money in the bank. This legislation talks about protecting the new authority from financial decisions that the existing authorities have made—I completely support that, and I think the Government are taking a logical approach—but we need to explore whether it is fair for all the money to go into the same pot. Is it fair for people who have had good councils, with money in the bank, to see their taxpayers’ money spent elsewhere in the authority, where they will not see a benefit?
We should explore what financial information, constraints or regulations we can give to new councils when they are created, rather than just putting all the money into the pot. The councils to be merged will not have the same financial footing. They will not have the same services or the same money in the bank. If we think that it is important to protect the new council from decisions that the existing authority has made, it is right that we look at protecting specific areas within new councils that have had good financial management over the short to medium term.
As I said, there is an example in my constituency: Broxbourne council has about £50 million in the bank but East Herts council has none. What I do not want to see if we have to go through local government reorganisation is all that money going into the pot and then being spent on paying someone else’s debt. It is right for constituents that I represent in the borough of Broxbourne to say that there should be some guidance outlining that that money should at least be spent within the existing boundaries of that authority, even if it is under the new council.
The Chair
Order. The Member is straying a little from the scope of the proposal. Will he conclude, please?
Lewis Cocking
Thank you for your guidance, Mr Vickers.
This is an important piece of legislation that the Government are bringing forward. I wonder whether the Minister could explore some of the points that I have raised in this debate.
Alison McGovern
I thank members of the Committee for their contributions to this debate. Before concluding, I want to address some of the points raised.
The shadow Minister asked about disputes between councils. I want to be explicit that councils remain responsible for their decisions during the transition and must act in line with their legal duties. We expect councils to act transparently and have regard to their fiduciary duties and wider public responsibilities when taking such decisions as local authorities do week in, week out—and local authority officers know that. Decisions regarding ongoing service delivery and the medium-term financial strategies of existing councils should not compromise the future sustainability of new councils—I say that just for clarity.
We have published an explanatory note to councils undergoing reorganisation about financial decisions before reorganisation and we continue to work with councils to support orderly and effective transitions. However, decisions on individual assets are the responsibility of local authorities. I will happily circulate the explanatory note to members of the Committee if that would aid them. The officials in my Department are in touch with councils on a regular basis. This framework tries to create safeguards to make sure that significant actions taken during transition do not adversely affect successor authorities.
Alison McGovern
I will do so in a moment.
The shadow Minister makes a very reasonable point on councils in receipt of exceptional financial support and the disposal of assets. He knows that the number of councils in EFS is a great concern of mine. We liaise with those local authorities week in, week out to do all we can to support them. It serves none of us to have exceptional financial support become normalised, and we are in touch with them.
Alison McGovern
I will give way to the hon. Member for Spelthorne and the hon. Lady in a moment once I finish responding to the shadow Minister.
On arm’s length management organisations and academies, this depends on the specifics of the contract and the transfer that has taken place. Again, we are working actively with councils. On the value of sites and the issue that the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner mentioned with developers being able to garner extra value from their sites, we have provided councils with checklists and much information about things that they should be wary of. Nevertheless, I thank him for raising it. I will double check that it is on the checklist.
Lincoln Jopp
I am so grateful to the Minister for giving way. I am also conscious of the Chair’s prohibition on stretching the envelope and referring only to the Minister’s own words. She said that the purpose of this whole procedure today was to make local government reorganisation easier for residents to understand and for a safe, orderly and effective transition. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne for his expertise in this area.
The Minister and I have privately discussed the powers of shadow unitary authorities and their ability to propose name changes: in my case to the “West Surrey”, and if I had my way, “and South Middlesex”, unitary authority. Would she like to put on record the fact that, if the newly elected shadow unitary authority makes a proposal with a majority for the renaming of that unitary authority, she would be bound to accept it?
The Chair
Order. That is way beyond the scope of the order before the Committee, but if the Minister wants to comment on it, I will allow her to do so.
Alison McGovern
You are very generous, Mr Vickers. The hon. Member knows that I am sympathetic; it is a matter for the authorities themselves, of course, but he makes a good case.
Zöe Franklin
The Minister spoke about exceptional financial support. I was interested to hear her say that we do not wish EFS to be normalised. I suggest that we are in circumstances in which it is normalised, given that so many councils require it and so many of them expect to have to use it. A lot of councils are struggling to balance their annual budgets on that basis.
Alison McGovern
I thank the hon. Lady for raising that important point. I will happily come to this House and spend hours talking about local government finance any time anybody wants—
Alison McGovern
I fear that it would test your patience, Mr Vickers.
Let me make a final point to the hon. Member for Broxbourne. He makes a reasonable point, but the issue is that local government finances are in such a state—I am thinking particularly about the situation in Woking. All of us, up and down the country, will pay the price for that, so there is a sense in which responsibility is always collectively shared. I will say nothing further, Mr Vickers, in case you tell me off.
In conclusion, the draft order will make a small but necessary technical amendment to ensure that existing safeguards on disposals operate effectively during local government reorganisation. I hope that the Committee will join me in supporting it.
Question put and agreed to.
Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Decisions and Appeals) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 (SI, 2026, No.457)
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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The Committee divided: - Ayes: 11 / Noes: 3 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Decisions and Appeals) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 (S.I., 2026, No. 457).
It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. I appreciate that it is incredibly warm in here, but bear with me, because this is an important debate. I want to sound the alarm about the statutory instrument: it hands the Government sweeping discretionary powers, with too few safeguards and too little scrutiny, by allowing the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to extend the length of fixed-term personal independent payments.
The measure is intended to tackle the backlog of award reviews following covid-19, but we believe it takes us backwards, not forwards. Under the previous approach, people’s awards were regularly reviewed to ensure that they received support that reflected their actual circumstances, yet under the new approach, most claimants will get only two checks in 10 years—one review period will last four years, with subsequent reviews lasting six years. That is just not good enough. Taxpayers deserve confidence that support is being targeted correctly. Previously, 77% of PIP awards were for up to two years, according to the Department for Work and Pensions, so many people will experience substantial extensions to their review periods.
We must acknowledge the serious problems with PIP caseloads, which shot up after covid. At best, however, this secondary legislation is a blunt tool to fix a difficult situation; at worst, it grants the Secretary of State discretionary powers that are wide open to future misuse. It moves us away from proper oversight towards a system where awards can continue for ever longer periods without appropriate checks—in simple terms, more benefits, less scrutiny.
The Government’s answer to that objection appears to be little more than a reminder letter. If reviews are pushed further apart, Ministers will rely more heavily on claimants to self-report changes in their circumstances, but given the longer timeframes, will people have a genuine incentive to report changes that could lead to their award being reduced or withdrawn? It is easy to loosen the system, but far harder to tighten it. Once rules have been relaxed, people adjust their expectations—the horse has bolted.
One day, the backlog may be cleared—we hope—and the Department may seek to increase the frequency of reviews again, but if that happens, I worry that claimants will quite understandably resent the return of more frequent checks. There has been no public consultation on this secondary legislation, because it is supposedly a mere administrative tweak to support the delivery of PIP. Labour is in effect using this opportunity to extend assessment periods by the back door.
Responsible welfare reform means building a system that works as best it can for those who need it most. For many, PIP is a lifeline; it helps them to live independently, to stay connected and, for some, to remain in work. In many cases, people with the most severe and lifelong disabilities already receive longer awards, where appropriate—the system already contains that provision.
To maintain confidence in the system, PIP and other welfare entitlements must be accurate and fair. People’s health situations change, circumstances evolve and some conditions naturally worsen, but others improve. For those with less serious needs, this measure will reduce the opportunities to review whether the support being offered is still appropriate. That is not reform; it is retreat—a retreat to the la-la land of ever more state handouts and ever less oversight.
I know that some will say that regular reviews create anxiety, and I understand that. Of course, no one wants unnecessary stress, but we must remember what reviews are for—they are there not to catch people out, but to ensure that support is going to the right people, at the right level and for the right reasons. In fact, for people who continue to have genuine needs, reviews can provide certainty by extending existing rewards. In cases where someone’s condition has deteriorated, they can also lead to higher levels of support.
We believe that this statutory instrument is merely a symptom of a wider problem. As my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) has said, we are becoming far too quick to sign people on to welfare and far too slow to help them into work. We are seeing a passive and permissive approach from this Government when what this country needs is an active and ambitious one.
Oliver Ryan (Burnley) (Lab/Co-op)
The reassessment changes that we are introducing through this statutory instrument and other measures will save something like £2 billion by the end of the Parliament. I am sure we all agree that would be welcome, given the increasing size of the welfare bill. Why is the hon. Member opposing that saving, and how would she fill the gap instead?
Rebecca Smith
Of course we want to save money, but we do not think that this statutory instrument is the right way to do it. We think that it will just reduce the opportunities for people to have those reviews—the assessments that need to take place. Arguably, more money can perhaps be saved if those reviews happen within a quicker timeframe, because there are many people who, if the right things happen, can be moved off benefits much more quickly than we believe the statutory instrument allows for.
Over 4 million people of working age are now on sickness and incapacity benefits, nearly half a million of whom are under 25. One in four people in the UK now report as disabled. At the same time, the Secretary of State has made it clear that the Timms review of personal independence payment is not designed to deliver welfare savings, something that I find extraordinary. How can that possibly be an effective review if it refuses to tackle the elephant in the room—our ballooning benefits bill?
Real compassion means not abandoning people to a life on benefits. State support must act as a springboard, not a destination. As the official Opposition, we believe in supporting the vulnerable, but we also believe in fairness to taxpayers—fairness to those who get up every morning, go to work and expect the welfare system to be properly managed.
The Government’s own rationale regarding work disincentives is also deeply inconsistent. PIP awards will be extended only for claimants aged 25 and over. The Department argues that unemployment can have “long-term scarring effects” on younger people. Therefore, those whose health has improved should not remain on PIP any longer than necessary. Of course, younger claimants are more likely than older claimants to see improvements in their functional capacity, which helps explain why they are exempt from these longer review periods, but the logic just does not hold up, because unemployment can have scarring effects at any age. If regular reviews are important for younger claimants because circumstances can change, why should that principle suddenly cease to apply when someone reaches 25? Either regular reviews matter or they do not. The Government cannot have it both ways.
Speaking of work incentives, Members are being asked to trust the Government with a significant new power under the statutory instrument, but why should we place that trust in Ministers when they cannot even tell us the scale of the backlog in Access to Work? I have been told by the Department that it does not hold information about average waiting times between the approval of an Access to Work application and when support actually starts, because—so it says—it would require a painstaking manual review of individual records. If the Government cannot easily access that kind of basic data, is it any wonder that they have been so reluctant to grasp the nettle on other areas of welfare reform?
The Chair
I encourage hon. Members to bob if they wish to speak. Hon. Members can still decide to contribute, even if they had not already been considering it— a good debate is a good debate.
John Milne (Horsham) (LD)
We hear lots of talk in politics and the media right now about the need to cut benefits. Of course, control of spending is always a priority, but the first question that we should ask about any benefit is whether it is doing the job it is supposed to. A PIP is a lifeline, not a luxury. It is designed to support disabled people with the extra costs of daily living resulting from their disability. It is not specifically an in-work benefit, but in practice it does help many people keep their jobs, which is, of course, what we want. That is why, as Liberal Democrats, we believe that any change to how PIP awards are managed must put the needs of the claimant first, not the administrative convenience of the Department.
We are deeply concerned by the DWP’s admission that it has been extending PIP awards on an ad hoc basis without clear statutory cover—that was potentially unlawful. Disabled people deserve a system that operates within the law with proper safeguards, not one that has been quietly patched up in a Heath Robinson fashion, and which is only now being regularised through secondary legislation.
The regulations were introduced without a vote in Parliament and without referral to the Social Security Advisory Committee. Yet changes of such significance, which affect hundreds of thousands of disabled people, deserve proper parliamentary scrutiny, not secondary legislation slipped through without a vote. We welcome Government assurances that the regulations cannot be used to shorten existing awards or to cut the rates paid, and we welcome the retention of appeal rights, but the fact that the regulations are necessary at all is not positive. If we had the proper capacity to carry out PIP reviews on schedule when they were required, there would never be a need for extensions.
Oliver Ryan
The hon. Gentleman talks about the types of assessment and the way in which the assessment is done, and he is right to talk about capacity. Just before the election, the previous Government signed new contracts that said 80% of new assessments would be done virtually. The changes to reassessment in these regulations will save money and move more of those assessments from being virtual to face to face, which will better serve people on PIP. Does the hon. Gentleman not support the introduction of more face-to-face assessments?
John Milne
I agree with the hon. Member and entirely accept that the issue is not of this Government’s making, although as ever it is this Government’s obligation to sort it out. The regulations are a positive move in the right direction, but I am lamenting the state of affairs in general, not necessarily blaming it on Labour Members.
The SSAC has rightly raised concerns about the impact on claimants who have worsening conditions. Such claimants may now go longer without a reassessment and could therefore miss out on a justified increased award. That is why simply taking no action is not a satisfactory position; we have to do something.
We have consistently called for PIP assessments to be made more transparent and for unnecessary reassessments to be stopped. Properly implemented, longer award periods could reduce claimants’ anxiety and the bureaucratic burden on them, but only if there is a clear and accessible route for people whose needs have changed to request a reassessment without potentially having to wait years for it.
In conclusion, we support the measure, as a matter of legal necessity if nothing else. It will put PIP extensions on a legal basis, although we regret that that was not already the case years ago.
The Minister for Social Security and Disability (Sir Stephen Timms)
I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. Thank you for permitting us to take our jackets off. I thank hon. Members who have spoken in the debate.
As we have heard—my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley made the point absolutely correctly—this statutory instrument amends regulations to enable the best use of the assessment resources that we have available. It will help us to repair the broken system that we inherited, which needs to be repaired, and provides a much-needed safeguard against potential future challenges, in order to protect payments to vulnerable people.
As mentioned by my hon. Friend, under the contracts with assessment providers that were negotiated by the last Government, we can call on only a finite volume of assessment capacity. We could, as the last Government did, use a large chunk of that capacity for frequent reassessments of PIP claimants whose circumstances most likely have not changed at all, or we can use that resource in a more productive way. That is what we have chosen to do.
We want to do two new things. First, we want to recommence, properly, reassessments for the work capability assessment, which provides a gateway to the health premium in universal credit. The situation we inherited is that work capability assessments are carried out when somebody makes a new application, and after a period that person is due a reassessment. The number of reassessments that it has been possible to carry out has been lamentably low. The hon. Member for South West Devon commended PIP reassessments—if only the Conservatives had carried out the work capability reassessments. We want to switch some of the assessment capacity that was being used ineffectively by the last Government, so that it will be used effectively in future.
The second thing we want to do, as my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley referred to, is to increase substantially the proportion of assessments that are carried out face to face. Almost all of them used to be face to face, then came the pandemic, and for reasons that we all understand, they switched to being phone-based or occasionally video-based assessments instead. But once the needs of the pandemic had passed, face-to-face assessments were never properly switched back on. Telephony was retained as the main channel, with just a small number of face-to-face assessments restarting in 2021. In our view, that is not good enough.
John Milne
As the Minister knows, I sit on the Work and Pensions Committee. About a year ago, we heard evidence that in fact there was little statistical difference between the approval rates for face-to-face interviews and for remote interviews. The figures may have been updated since, but that is the evidence we heard then. I am in favour of face-to-face interviews—they seem intuitively better—but there may not be quite the difference that everyone might reasonably expect; that is what the figures show.
Sir Stephen Timms
There certainly has been data along those lines; I think it was data along those lines that made the previous Government think that they need not start face-to-face assessments again. I agree with the hon. Gentleman: to build confidence in the system, not least on the part of the people being assessed—I was speaking to somebody yesterday who said, “I wish that I’d had a face-to-face assessment”—and to make sure that the correct decisions are being made, we do need face-to-face assessments.
By the time of the general election, only about 7% of work capability assessments and PIP assessments were being carried out face to face. We want to do a great deal better than that. It was not just that the resources for face-to-face assessments were not provided in the assessment contracts, although that was certainly part of the issue; the other factor was that the previous Government walked away from large amounts of the assessment estate so there were no longer enough places where face-to-face assessments could be carried out. That is a pretty fundamental problem. The hon. Member for South West Devon spoke about la-la land, but frankly, that is where the Government who she supported left us.
We are therefore mounting a major rebuilding task to regain the capacity for face-to-face assessments that the last Government threw away, because our view is that these assessments should be done properly. We have started to rebuild the capacity that the previous Government threw away. We have increased the proportion of work capability assessments and PIP assessments carried out face to face, and we are on our way to achieving our target that at least 30% of both will be face to face. To achieve that, we need additional assessment resource; this measure is a key step in enabling us to obtain that.
Oliver Ryan
As the Minister is reading out his list of achievements, may I add to it? Does he think it is a good thing that we have put nearly £1 billion into support for the sick and disabled? That will partly come from savings from this and other measures, which we hope will save £1.9 billion by the end of the Parliament. As he says, the act of government is about making these difficult decisions and trade-offs in order to provide people with more support in the long run.
Sir Stephen Timms
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I have not yet got to that bit in my list, but I am coming to it—I am looking forward to that part of my speech.
The Conservative party is telling us that it would maintain its failed approach, with hardly any assessments being carried out face to face. That does at least have the benefit of consistency, I suppose, but we do not think it is good enough, and we will make the changes necessary to do far better. As my hon. Friend correctly highlighted, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, this change that we have announced will reduce benefits spending by almost £2 billion—£1.9 billion—over five years.
We inherited an assessment system that was not equipped to do the job. The previous Government agreed contractual limits that meant at most 20% of assessments would be face to face. That was written into the contracts they signed, but there was not nearly enough capacity even to meet that level. We are having to fix a broken system, and we are making good progress, with the measure we are debating being an important step.
The purpose of this straightforward change is to provide the Secretary of State the power to extend personal independence payment awards in a limited set of circumstances, where it is deemed necessary to do so to safeguard the efficient administration of benefits. Before the amendment, a decision to extend an award of PIP required either a new claim for PIP, evidence of an error or mistake in the first decision, evidence that the claimant’s circumstances had changed, or the completion of a report by a healthcare professional appointed by the Secretary of State. In many cases, that would involve a claimant undergoing an assessment. Where such a decision could not be taken before an award expired, claimants would cease to be entitled to PIP until a further decision was completed. They would remain so until a further decision on entitlement could be made.
The amendment grants a specific discretion, making it possible to extend only the length of an award, and only where doing so is necessary for the administration of the benefit. As well as allowing the more efficient use of assessment resources, the discretion protects vulnerable claimants who would risk losing entitlement to PIP if, as in the pandemic, circumstances threatened to limit the state’s capacity to administer it. We are ensuring that the Department can lawfully maintain benefits payments to the most vulnerable people.
The new power will be used initially to increase the length of existing awards in line with the policy on award lengths for new awards, for which the Secretary of State already has the power. Existing claimants’ awards will be extended so that most first-time awards for those over 25 will be reviewed after three years, and most subsequent awards will be reviewed after five. Only awards deemed to be appropriate for those durations will be extended. The Committee may well be interested to know that the average annual increase in the PIP caseload has slowed under this Government: it fell from an increase of about 13% a year in 2019-20 to 2024-25, to a forecast average of about 7% a year over the subsequent five years.
The hon. Member for Horsham made a point about the Social Security Advisory Committee. I think he said that the committee had not looked at this; that is not correct—the committee has looked at it. It looks at all the regulatory changes that we propose, and it does a very good job. It plays an important role, and we welcome its scrutiny. As the hon. Gentleman said, the committee asked questions, and we were happy to set out the purpose of the regulations and the reasons for them. The committee accepted the information that we provided, and it chose to take the regulations on formal reference. I think the hon. Gentleman can be reassured about the committee’s view of this change.
I am grateful for the points that have been made and the opportunity for scrutiny that the debate has provided. The changes we are making enable the Department to make more efficient use of limited assessment capacity, to reduce assessments where they are not needed in order to focus on where they are needed, and to allow PIP awards to be extended in an emergency or crisis, as emerged during the pandemic, thereby protecting some vulnerable people from unnecessary hardship.
This is a measured amendment to ensure the effective administration of the benefits system. I hope that the hon. Member for South West Devon will not press the motion to a Division, but I fear she probably will—her party issued a press release before this Committee to say that Conservative Members would vote to annul the amendment, possibly before they realised what exactly was going on. If that is the case, I urge the Committee not to vote against the amendment.
Rebecca Smith
I assure the Minister that we did know what was going to happen. We will not change our minds on the position that has already been set out.
We believe that this instrument moves us in the wrong direction. I appreciate the points that were made by the Minister and, indeed, by the hon. Member for Horsham, who highlighted that there was apparently little difference between in-person and online reviews. That highlights that the issues that we have raised have not really been addressed—the Minister certainly has not.
Sir Stephen Timms
The hon. Lady makes an important point. Will she clarify her party’s position? Does the Conservative party think that more than 7% of assessments ought to be carried out face to face, or is it not really bothered about whether they are carried out face to face or over the phone?
Rebecca Smith
Clearly, face to face is good, where possible. The 7% figure that you commented on was from the pandemic and from when you picked up. We know that we had a huge backlog to deal with—
Rebecca Smith
Did I say “you”? I am sorry, Mrs Hobhouse.
Obviously, where possible, face to face is good, but we are not convinced that it is the right trade-off—that it makes it acceptable not to see people as regularly as there should be an ambition to see them. As I highlighted, and the Minister has not addressed this, certain people will no longer need any support from PIP within that three-year period, and some might need more. If this instrument is purely about administrative convenience and enabling the backlog to come down, rather than having proper oversight, we feel that that is watering down the system and weakening the public’s confidence in it.
It is also true to say that the regulations lack real ambition, because they have no end date; they just give the Secretary of State completely discretionary powers with no finish point. There is no ambition to say, “By x date, we want to have dealt with this backlog and then we will refresh.” Indeed, they give powers for a future emergency, when we seemed to manage perfectly well in the previous emergency, so we think it is not right to use that as a reason for these unending powers.
We also believe that the measure risks locking more people into welfare, when we should be helping more people into work. I know that the Minister thinks the same, so I am surprised that this is the tool being used. For those reasons, we urge the Government to think again and we urge Members to reject this statutory instrument.
Question put.
Draft Lifelong Learning (Fee Limits) Regulations 2026
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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The Chair
Before I call the Minister to move the motion, any hon. Member or official who wishes to take off their jacket has my permission to do so.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Josh MacAlister)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Lifelong Learning (Fee Limits) Regulations 2026.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. The draft regulations were laid before the House on 18 May. This statutory instrument is the first of three pieces of secondary legislation needed to implement the lifelong learning entitlement, or LLE, which establishes a new system of tuition fee limits for higher education courses and modules that begin on or after 1 January 2027.
The LLE is a major reform to student finance, creating a single flexible funding system for levels 4 to 6 across further and higher education. It will support people to learn, upskill and retrain throughout their working lives, and will deliver one of the core commitments in our post-16 education and skills White Paper, underpinning the growth and skills missions. The concept of a lifelong learning entitlement stems from the recommendations made by Sir Philip Augar’s independent panel to the post-18 education and funding review back in 2019. Primary legislation enacted in 2022 and 2023 by the previous Government established the framework, and these regulations are the next step in delivering it—this is a true cross-party effort.
The regulations set out how tuition fee limits will apply under the LLE. A tuition fee limit is the maximum amount that a provider can charge per year if it is subject to a fee cap. Currently, that limit is £9,790 for standard full-time courses. Those fixed annual fee limits suit traditional degrees, regardless of the volume of study undertaken, but do not work for shorter courses or modules. The regulations introduce a credit-based system to change that.
Credits are a widely recognised measure of learning, with one credit typically equivalent to around 10 hours of learning. To illustrate that, the standard fee limit for a typical higher education course in the 2026-27 academic year is £9,790, and a full year of study usually comprises 120 credits. Dividing £9,790 by 120 produces a per-credit fee limit of around £82. The regulations mean that tuition fee limits can be apportioned in line with the credit size of any given course. That does not change overall fee caps—most students will not see any difference in what they pay—but applies them more fairly across full courses and shorter study, linking fees to learning volume.
Subject to Parliament’s approval of the regulations, we intend to lay two further instruments needed to establish the LLE. Those instruments, on student support and repayments, have been published in draft to give the House full visibility and to help the sector prepare. Both will be subject to the negative procedure. As they depend on the regulations before the Committee, they will be made only if these regulations are approved.
The regulations mark an important step in delivering the LLE and transforming our skills system. They put in place the new approach to applying fee limits, which is needed to support a more flexible approach to student finance that better serves young people and adult learners. That will allow people to study in ways that fit around their lives, support providers to respond to evolving skills needs, and help individuals across the country to access the education and training that they need to succeed.
Jack Rankin (Windsor) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank the Minister for introducing the debate. His Majesty’s most loyal Opposition will support the regulations.
Giving people the chance to access education and training flexibly throughout their working lives supports social mobility and personal aspiration, and helps employers to secure the skills that they need. That is why we Conservatives are proud that the previous Government supported the independent Augar review recommendations and introduced the primary legislation necessary to create a single lifelong learning loan allowance that learners can use to upskill and retrain flexibly over their working lives. We therefore support the principle behind the lifelong learning entitlement and the move to a credit-based system for calculating tuition fee limits.
I would like to press the Minister on the importance of face-to-face teaching time. If we want to tackle low-quality provision and ensure that the lifelong learning entitlement lives up to our hopes, we must ensure that learners receive the highest-quality teaching possible. Too often, students receive limited face-to-face teaching time, limited supervision and a higher education experience that falls short of what they were promised. Learners who enrol in the modular courses and training that will become available from January next year will reasonably expect to be able to ask their teacher a question, and to interact with their fellow students, in person.
Just as we must stop unnecessarily pushing young people into courses that offer minimal face-to-face teaching, in return for huge debt and little prospect of employment at the end, we must ensure that new modular courses and training opportunities deliver the highest-quality provision possible. I would therefore be grateful to hear what the Minister is doing to encourage and raise the bar for face-to-face teaching time across the higher education sector, whether for degree courses, modules or training.
I have two brief questions for the Minister. First, how does the Department intend to monitor the impact of the new credit-based tuition fee limit system on providers and on learners? Secondly, given that providers will occur familiarisation and administrative costs as the changes are implemented, and in the light of the wider financial pressures facing the higher education sector, what support will be available to help minimise those burdens?
The Opposition support the regulations. We all hope that introducing tuition fee limits for modular learning will encourage more people to pursue higher-quality training and upskilling opportunities throughout their working lives. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
Ian Sollom (St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. The Lib Dems have long supported the principle of a flexible credit-based system that lets people study in smaller chunks across their working lives, rather than in one fixed block at 18 years old. We are glad to see that direction reflected here today. I am afraid we cannot endorse the instrument, however, for reasons that I will put on the record.
The first reason is substantive. The instrument, and the package that it leads, relies entirely on a loan-based model to drive take-up among exactly the cohort it claims to serve—adults who are already in work, with mortgages, dependants and a shorter working life over which to repay any loan. A loan that looks like a reasonable proposition for an 18-year-old starting a three-year degree looks very different to a 45-year-old weighing up retraining against existing financial commitments.
When that issue was raised directly in the other place during the passage of the enabling legislation in 2023, the Government’s response was essentially to defer the question to the detail. The instrument is that detail, but the question has not really been answered. The Department’s 2021 pilot of loan-funded short courses, run jointly with the Office for Students, planned for more than 100 courses and 2,000 students, but only 17 courses launched and 125 students enrolled, of whom just 41 took out a loan. That direct, real-world test of the model that this instrument now extends across the entire post-18 system did not generate demand. Will the Minister tell us what assessment has been made of whether the LLE risks repeating that outcome at scale? Has a grant-based supplement, of the kind that the Liberal Democrats have proposed, been costed and considered?
The second reason is procedural. This instrument is subject to the affirmative procedure, but the two remaining SIs in the package—the student support regulations and the repayment regulations—will be laid under the negative procedure, meaning that they will become law without a vote and without the parliamentary scrutiny warranted by a package of this complexity and long-term consequence.
The student support and repayment arrangements are not peripheral details. They are the mechanisms that will determine whether the Government have addressed that loan-aversion issue, whether maintenance support is adequate and whether repayment terms are fair. What if the fee system fails to generate the take-up that the Government are predicting or hoping for? The review is not planned until 2031-32, five years after launch. I suggest that those two instruments should be upgraded to the affirmative procedure so that we can properly scrutinise what follows.
I have a number of more specific questions for the Minister. First, the instrument carries forward the £5,760 lower fee cap for foundation years in subjects such as humanities, business, law and social sciences. That cap was set in 2023 and is unchanged since. Every other major fee category in the instrument receives an uplift in the second tranche, from August 2027. The lower fee foundation year rate does not. For many people without a traditional academic pathway, foundation years are the entry point into higher education. That route runs disproportionally through colleges and lower-tariff institutions, serving the students whom the Government say they most want to reach. Can the Minister confirm that this is simply a continuation of the 2023 cap with no independent review for the instrument, and that, unlike every other fee category mentioned, it does not rise in August 2027?
If the policy rationale for that is to keep fees down to protect access, which is reasonable, is there any compensating mechanism—direct institutional funding, for example—to ensure that providers can keep delivering that provision as costs rise around a frozen fee? The risk is that we are quietly trusting institutions to absorb an indefinite real-terms cut in exactly the provision that is most likely to serve disadvantaged learners.
Regulation 9 requires providers to notify in advance the Secretary of State of the number of credits attached to a course year, and to repeat that notification whenever activities change mid-year. Has the Department made any assessment of the cumulative administrative burden that that will place on smaller providers and FE-based higher education providers, which, again, are precisely the institutions best placed to deliver the flexible, bite-sized provision that the LLE is meant to enable?
The two-tier higher and basic fee structure in the instrument imports the existing access and participation plan mechanism from full-time undergraduate study. APPs were not designed with part-time modular or older learners in mind. Has the Office for Students been asked to assess whether APP commitments, as currently framed, are fit for purpose in a credit-based lifelong learning context?
Regulation 19 ensures that courses designated for lifelong learning purposes are not treated as designated under the pre-existing Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 regime. Can the Minister confirm that no student currently part way through a course will risk falling between those two designation regimes and losing eligibility for support as a result?
On a minor point that is still worth highlighting, the explanatory memorandum states that the per-credit rate is £81.58, but dividing the £9,790 headline figure by 120 credits gives a recurring decimal, meaning that, at the stated rounding, 120 credits produces £9,789.60, rather than £9,790.
Ian Sollom
Well, I am a mathematician by trade. It is a small point, but every fee limit in the system is derived from that per-credit calculation, so will the Minister confirm the correct rounding convention, and that the providers and the Student Loans Company are working from the same figure?
We support the direction of this reform, and will not stand in its way today, but the loan-only design and the inadequate scrutiny afforded to the two follow-on instruments are real concerns. I hope that the Minister will address them.
Damian Hinds
Like everyone who has spoken, I support the principle of the lifelong learning entitlement. I welcomed it in Sir Philip Augar’s review, which reported while I was at the Department for Education. I was pleased that it was brought in by my erstwhile right hon. Friends for Chichester and Harlow. It is true that higher education in this country has been too rigid for too long. The lifelong learning entitlement eliminates the “do it now or do it never” problem. It makes the most of talent, and it means that people can move into growing sectors in the economy, or just new areas of interest, and learn what they need to learn. For all those reasons, it is also good for productivity.
This statutory instrument is not about the existence of the lifelong learning entitlement, nor is it about the existence—or the level—of the fee; it is just about the modularisation of that fee. I have a couple of short questions to put to the Minister. The first touches on what the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire was just saying: there is a question of debt aversion. That did not happen, as was widely predicted, after the Vince Cable reforms in the early 2010s—the great risk of debt aversion among young people did not turn out to be true. However, this is mostly about an older demographic, with different sets of responsibilities, at a different life stage. What research has been done about that?
I wonder whether the Minister might say a word about the levels of enrolment in the pilots that the Department for Education undertook, and what we have learned. Is there a risk of people being reluctant? There is a psychological barrier if there is a fixed lifetime maximum. What do we know about people’s possible reluctance to eat into that at a certain level, rather than leaving it intact? Has there been any research on that? Conversely, is there a risk of overselling the modules, given the terms of the loan and what may seem to many people—low earners in particular—quite low risk in taking one out? Are there specific risks of gaming from moving to a system in which providers will be paid according to a number of credits? As my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor rightly said, there are particular questions around that for online courses.
Credits and modules have long existed in this country, but breaking up a course or stretch of study, or moving from one institution to another, has not been nearly as prevalent in this country as in others, whether in Europe through the Bologna system or indeed the United States. What will the Government do to ensure that the amounts that are involved in this statutory instrument will represent value for individuals, with comparability of the modules, full recognition when that module is taken somewhere else, and a culture change in our higher education system?
Josh MacAlister
I thank Committee members for their contributions to the debate. I will endeavour to answer as many questions as I can.
The first set of questions came from the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Windsor, about face-to-face teaching. The system allows for credit funding flexibility, which is down to providers, but I recognise the importance of face-to-face teaching. That is one of the reasons why, earlier this week, my noble Friend the Minister for Skills set out the intention to link the outcomes of the teaching excellence framework scores to future access to fee increases. That is why, over different Governments, we have built a system that allows competition so that students can pick and select from a range of providers and, in essence, shop around for the best option. Greater visibility of the quality is important, and that should come from the teaching excellence framework.
A number of Members asked about the various impacts of the changes. Impact assessments have been published as part of this process. I will ask for copies of them to be sent to Members in the coming days. I hope that they will answer a number of questions.
The hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire and I have had several exchanges about student finance and student funding. I have a great deal of affection for the Liberal Democrats, but it is a system that was partly designed by them in office. His Majesty’s Opposition had affection for the Liberal Democrats at a certain point in time as well, so perhaps that is something that we can share.
The changes described are cultural for the country, affecting how adult learners look to access lifelong learning and do courses that will be shorter or compressed. The regulations allow for that. I think they will take some time to bed in, so it seems reasonable to give a five-year time horizon, but of course there will be a great deal of scrutiny from Parliament and elsewhere on their implementation.
I am happy to come back to the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire on foundation degree fees and our plans for them. The question on credit fee amounts was very detailed, and I thank him for his scrutiny of the rounding convention that we are using—there may well be a future dormant asset fund to be raided by a Government in 20 or 30 years’ time as a result of it. Again, I will write to him about why we are using a different figure from the one that he mentioned.
Finally, the former Secretary of State for Education, the right hon. Member for East Hampshire, was heavily involved in the inception of this measure and the review that led to its recommendation. Again, I am happy to share the Department’s assessments of behavioural impacts.
The Committee will know that this SI is a critical step towards delivering the lifelong learning entitlement. It will bring further and higher education closer together and support the growth of more flexible modular study. It sets tuition fee limits for LLE-funded courses and modules, marking a transformation of our higher and further education systems that will start this January. The changes aim not to overhaul the entire system but to tackle a key weakness in the current model, which is too rigid and focused on the traditional three-year degree, limiting opportunities for adults to retrain or upskill across their working lives. I commend the regulations to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Westminster Hall
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North Sea Oil and Gas
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Bradley Thomas (Bromsgrove) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered North Sea oil and gas.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. Energy security is a matter that impacts all of us. It allows us to reliably meet daily demand without concern for supply disruption or price spiking. It ensures that families can heat their homes, that schools and hospitals can continue to serve the community, and that drivers can stay on the road.
Energy security is intertwined with everything we do. In a state of emergency, it guarantees a resilient power source, allowing essential service operations to continue unimpeded, and upholds our national security—indeed, energy security is national security. It should not be controversial to say that our energy security should be a high priority for the Government, yet here we are, turning our back on the North sea oil industry, all in the name of ideologically driven targets, irrespective of global context or the will of the British public.
Time and again, it has been highlighted that the UK emits less than 1% of the world’s global emissions, while the top three nations together emit over 50%. Rather than acknowledge that context, the Energy Secretary continues to push a deadline that is 10 years ahead of the largest emitter and that precedes the third by 20 years, before the second has even set an official target. Twenty years! That time could be spent on ensuring a balanced transition that does not push the UK into a scenario where energy demand exceeds supply capabilities.
Instead, the Energy Secretary insists on maintaining our weak bargaining position by pursuing his relentless targets, ignoring our preparedness levels and dismissing the genuine needs and wants of the nation. From the opportunistic solar farms being sprung up at the expense of our agricultural sector and rural communities, to reaching strike prices of £90 to £95 per megawatt-hour in the latest wind auction, which far exceeds the wholesale gas price at £55 per megawatt-hour, the sacrifices being made, including the interests of the British people, evidently know no bounds.
The argument is not about whether oil and gas will still be needed for years to come, because the Climate Change Committee and the Government themselves have already acknowledged that. Instead, it is a question of where our oil and gas come from. Believe it or not, a Government should support domestic production. A Government should be against deindustrialisation, especially at a time of rising political tension and subsequent volatility. Energy security and economic stability are two sides of the same coin.
Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)
I fully support more drilling in the North sea and the granting of more licences—I believe that is important for energy security—but I think it is important to be straight with the British people. As things currently stand, that would not lower their bills, because the oil and gas are sold on the international markets. Would it not be better to follow the example of Norway and put this under public control, which actually would lower people’s bills?
Bradley Thomas
I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman supports continued activity in the North sea, and I will address that point later on in my remarks.
Increasing reliance on imports and blaming unstable global markets regardless of the product, when we have the ability to produce it domestically and help stabilise the market, is not just reckless; it is madness. That is not to mention the fact that offshoring our carbon emissions, such as importing from the US, does not help the planet; it simply allows the UK to portray lower emissions in national statistics, while facilitating the generation of three times higher emissions via this method of supply. We should be supporting any domestic production that reduces product cost, generates jobs and has the potential to add billions more into our economy.
It is no secret that households across the country are struggling with their energy bills. The UK currently has the highest industrial energy prices among developed nations and the second highest domestic electricity prices in the developed world. That stark fact is evident to anyone paying energy bills, and it is about to get worse. The Ofgem cap for July to September has risen by 13%, reaching £1,862, which is £294 more than when the Government came into office in July 2024. I am not sure where the Energy Secretary’s promise to decrease energy bills by £300 has gone, but it looks like he actually meant an increase. There is nothing complicated about these figures. The cost of energy is rising, and households and businesses across the country are feeling the impact.
A recent poll found that, although 60% of people across the UK support reducing emissions, 68% of those supporters believe that reducing energy bills should be the first priority. That result was echoed in another poll, which found that 71% of people who support reducing emissions do so on the condition that it does not increase their energy bills. The undeniable fact is that these inflexible targets are driving up energy bills.
As a democratically elected entity, the Government’s first priority should be to represent the nation and act in its best interests, but the public are being hung out to dry. It is not only the bill payers paying the brunt; thousands of oil and gas workers are also on the chopping block. Giving rising unemployment, it would be reasonable to presume that the Government would abandon any policy that compounds the issue further, but of course that is far too sensible a suggestion. They appear to prefer to allow 1,000 jobs a month to be lost from the oil and gas sector in places that rely on the industry such as Aberdeen, rather than admit they are on the wrong path.
I take this opportunity to welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden) to his place. He emphatically won a by-election last week with almost 50% of the vote, which is a vindication of the fact that the public—particularly workers in places dependent on the oil and gas industry for employment—reject the pace and scale of the Government’s net zero agenda.
Douglas Lumsden (Aberdeen South) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the clear message that the people of Aberdeen sent last week was that they support the oil and gas sector and the jobs that come with it, and that it is much better that we produce oil and gas ourselves? It is much better for our jobs, our economy and the environment if we produce more in this country, rather than relying on imports.
Bradley Thomas
I thank my hon. Friend for his first spoken contribution as an elected Member. He is already demonstrating his resoundingly strong voice on behalf of the people of Aberdeen South, many of whom are employed in the industry and terrified about what the scale and pace of what the Government are doing represent for their futures.
It appears that the Government would rather ignore warnings that their refusal to replace the energy profits levy is putting 200,000 jobs at growing risk than delay their ideology for even a few years. They would even rather ignore the Scottish Affairs Committee’s warnings that clean energy jobs are not keeping pace with oil and gas job losses, rather than give up on this net zero legacy.
I have one question for the Government: what do they say to the thousands of workers who risk losing their jobs or have already lost them? The Government will claim that clean energy is providing 100,000 jobs, but have they shared the detail on the quality of those jobs and the pay cuts that the workers are having to take? Why has that not happened? Because it means that the Government would have to take responsibility for a mess that they are compounding.
The bottom line is this: if we want to support those workers, we must support the North sea oil and gas industry. The ban on new oil and gas licences is leaving at least 2.9 billion barrels of oil in the ground—billions in monetary value that could be added to our economy, thousands of jobs that could be secured and millions of homes powered.
I predict what the rebuttal point will be: it does not matter how many barrels come from the North sea because it is all sold on an international market and therefore will have no impact on our energy prices, which are dictated by global pricing.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
About 90% of the reserves in the North sea have already been extracted. Has the hon. Gentleman looked at the analysis of how expensive it is to reach the rest of the reserves? One reason they are still there is that it is far more expensive to extract them. Has he seen whether there is an economic case for doing so?
Bradley Thomas
Underpinning so many of the decisions taken by the Government is a fundamental lack of appreciation for how businesses take investment decisions. They are not incentivised to do so. Allow the market to operate by restricting regulation and financial pressure on it, and businesses will innovate. They will invest to extract resources that are viable because they can be sold on the international market. It is basic economics that the more product they have to meet demand, the more substantial the price reduction. Scarcity drives cost. The Labour party loves to argue that our North sea industry produces too little to have a significant impact on the global market, but less than 1% of global carbon emissions appears significant enough to dictate our national energy strategy. Why, then, is a 1.5% share of the global market considered too small to be worth pursuing? The answer is that it does not serve the “net zero by 2050 at any cost” narrative.
The fact that our energy security and our North sea industries are in a crisis is not new information. We all know it. Members across this House know it. Tony Blair knows it. Even the Energy Secretary himself knows it; he just will not admit it. It is time to put personal ambition and ideology aside. People need their bills reduced and jobs secured now. They are tired of being left to the whim of global market fluctuations, when the Government are not acting to stabilise the market by increasing supply and securing jobs. It is time to do what is best for our country and support the North sea industry that provides employment, helps to regulate global pricing and protects our national energy security.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss. I thank the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) for introducing the debate and support his ambitions to take this issue forward. It is no surprise that the hon. Gentleman and his party have been at the fore in pressing it, including the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie). I thank them and add my support to what they do.
It is a pleasure to see the Minister in his place. He always has a quiet demeanour and a smile. He sometimes even gives the answers we wish to have, even though we may not entirely agree. We thank him for acting in a way that endears him to all of us—that is quite a talent, and he does it well.
I want to highlight our real concerns about the oil and gas industry and the fact that we are highly reliant on international supply at a time, as the Holy Bible says,
“of wars and rumours of wars”.
That is clearly where we are now. The pastor at my church told us before Christmas that there are 67 wars in the world.
I speak for the hard-working families of Northern Ireland and the wider United Kingdom. We face a defining choice for our energy future. The North sea is not just a great geographical basin, as some seem to think, but a cornerstone of our national security and an economic engine, protecting our people from foreign reliance. Yet we hear voices in the Chamber demanding a premature end to domestic drilling. They want to shut down our fields and leave our resources in the ground. With respect, that approach is reckless economic self-harm.
I welcome the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden), whose campaign was clearly fought on this subject. His resounding victory in that by-election indicates how people think, and we should take note. I say that with great respect to anyone else.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
On the issue of what people think, does my hon. Friend agree that the vast majority of people across the UK are keen to see us move towards net zero? What they are not keen to do is to pursue a net zero eco-fanaticism that means we must have it today or tomorrow, rather than there being a gradual move towards it that does not impact on the household and business costs of everybody in the United Kingdom.
Jim Shannon
My hon. Friend and colleague brings forward the exact motivations of many people who speak to me. I endorse what he says, as I am sure others will.
When it comes to our national future, security must always come first. Global instability proves that we cannot simply rely on foreign regimes for our oil and gas. If we abandon the North sea, we hand total control of our energy bills over to unpredictable international markets. We must remember the workers; I say that as a non-Labour man, but I mean it.
Martin Vickers (Brigg and Immingham) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is making a compelling case for the domestic industry. Does he agree that, in this troubled period of world history, our refining capacity in the UK should also be maintained? As he will know, Lindsey oil refinery in my constituency was recently closed, although some operations continue. Does he agree that we have to maintain capacity across the industry?
Jim Shannon
The hon. Gentleman underlines the issues. He is an assiduous and hard-working MP; his constituents should be proud of what he does. Those problems are happening not just in his area but elsewhere. The by-election result is an indication of that, for those who take note. Tens of thousands of highly skilled British jobs depend directly on this vital sector. Furthermore, we must confront the import myth: importing foreign fuel creates higher global emissions than extracting our own safely right here at home. The benefits cannot be ignored; that is an advantage of our own oil and our own drilling capacity.
We need to support a common-sense transition that values realism over rhetoric. We must secure our baseload energy before transitioning to unproven new technologies. I am committed to protecting the Union; I know that the hon. Member for Bromsgrove is as well, and I thank him for that. Protecting the Union means understanding that a strong, self-reliant United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland requires utilising every single national resource available to us. Ultimately, domestic oil will fund the future, as the tax revenues generated from it are exactly what we need to finance our future green infrastructure. My hon. Friend the Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) referred to the fact that we are committed to net zero, but there has to be realism about how we approach that.
The Democratic Unionist party stands for energy independence. We stand for the British worker. We stand for a pragmatic, common-sense strategy that keeps the lights on and the bills affordable.
Seamus Logan (Aberdeenshire North and Moray East) (SNP)
The hon. Member says that the oil and gas belong to the Union, but it is Scotland’s oil and Scotland’s gas. Can he explain why Scottish bill payers are paying the highest bills in the UK when the oil and gas is being extracted from the North sea?
Jim Shannon
I do not entirely agree with the hon. Member’s comments, but he is my friend and I take his intervention along those lines. We talk regularly about many things but we do not always agree, and we do not agree on this issue. The oil in the North sea belongs to everybody in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, not just Scotland. It also belongs to Northern Ireland, Wales and England—it belongs to us. Why? Because we are part of the Union. What we produce in Northern Ireland is also for the benefit of those in Scotland. Sometimes those things are forgotten about. We will agree to disagree.
We must continue to support the North sea industry, secure our borders and protect our United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We need our Government to do the same. Families throughout the United Kingdom cannot afford the cost of living increases, many of which are due to energy prices being passed on to heat homes and to the rising cost of goods and services.
If we are ever to allow disposable income to rise, which lifts the local economy, we have to get on top of the energy issue. Although we should look to renewables and continue to work on those projects at speed, until they are ready to be of any use, we must be sensible, pragmatic and honest, and use the resources at our disposal. Our families—my constituents in Strangford and those across Northern Ireland—are calling out for help. Let us give them the help they need. With that in mind, I look forward to the reassurance that the Minister will give to me and many others in the Chamber.
Steve Yemm (Mansfield) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss.
I welcome this debate because it goes to the heart of two vital national priorities: tackling climate change and maintaining secure and affordable energy supplies. I support the transition to a low-carbon economy. The science is clear and the need to decarbonise and adapt is urgent, but if we are serious about delivering a just transition—as is the case with the electric vehicle mandate, which I have spoken about at length—we must be equally serious about protecting the workers and communities whose livelihoods depend on the North sea.
Thousands of workers right across the UK are employed directly and indirectly in the oil and gas sector. When I talk to those workers, they are not opposed to change; they are asking a very reasonable question: what are the equivalent jobs, with equivalent pay, conditions and security, that are supposed to replace those that are being lost? At present, I do not hear a convincing answer, while, at the same time, the UK becomes more reliant on imported oil and gas. That uncertainty does not reduce demand; it simply exports jobs, economic activity and tax revenues.
In an increasingly unstable world, energy security matters. It is hugely important, and recent international events have shown just how vulnerable global energy markets can be. We should be cautious about increasing our dependence on imports from countries that may have lower environmental and labour standards. That is why projects such as Rosebank and Jackdaw should be considered in the contexts of jobs, industrial capacity and energy resilience alongside our climate commitments.
The choice should not be between net zero and good jobs; the challenge for Government is to deliver on both of those things. That requires a clear industrial strategy, investment in new industries, a “North sea 2” vision, strong domestic supply chains and genuine job-to-job pathways for workers affected by the transition. A just transition cannot mean managed decline; it has to be planned, funded and delivered in partnership with workers and trade unions such as Unite and GMB, which have been doing great work representing their members. I urge the Government to ensure that energy security and decarbonisation go hand in hand and to demonstrate clearly how North sea workers and their communities can be protected as we make the transition to a cleaner energy future.
Graham Leadbitter (Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your leadership today, Ms Furniss. I commend the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) for securing this important debate.
The North sea oil and gas sector is of critical importance for the many of my constituents who work in the sector. Businesses across the north and north-east of Scotland—and far beyond—either directly operate facilities or provide specialist services and a very substantial supply chain. The oil and gas industry lost 70,000 jobs under the previous Conservative Government, and it continues to lose them under the current Labour Government. It is a complex challenge, and there are far too many people who, like the Tories, are backing full-scale oil and gas extraction with little to no focus on renewables or, like Labour, have a full-on focus on renewables while forcing the decline of the oil and gas sector and ongoing mass job losses. Neither of those extreme positions provides a solution to the challenge. While we must strive to substantially reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, there will still be a need to use oil and gas for many years to come.
Harriet Cross (Gordon and Buchan) (Con)
Can the hon. Member confirm the SNP’s position on this issue? Does it unequivocally support new licences in the North sea?
Graham Leadbitter
The SNP backs new licences with the normal environmental assessments and everything that goes with that, which, the hon. Lady will understand, is part of the regulatory process that the previous Conservative Government also followed. Every Government would have an appropriate regulatory and licensing regime.
The roads infrastructure, the foundations of installations, the fuels currently relied on by vessels transporting offshore wind towers and turbines, and even composite turbine blades rely heavily on oil and gas production. More significantly, the skills required to deliver the renewables revolution that will be at the heart of Scotland’s industrial economy are the same skills currently utilised in oil and gas. Those who wish to force the decline of the North sea without creating renewable jobs will do to the oil and gas communities what the Tories under Thatcher did to our coal and steel communities. That would be unforgivable.
Douglas Lumsden
Draft 1 of the Scottish Government’s energy strategy was released over three years ago, with a presumption against new oil and gas. Does the hon. Member agree that that is damaging, and that it is time the SNP scrapped that policy?
Graham Leadbitter
The hon. Member probably needs to keep up a bit because that position has already been scrapped. That was articulated by the First Minister.
Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)
Given the bombshell news the hon. Gentleman has just delivered to the Chamber—that we have a new energy strategy from the Scottish Government—when will that be published?
Graham Leadbitter
I think that the hon. Gentleman is not keeping up with the current debate because the question was about the SNP’s policy. The strategy will be published in due course.
Those who believe that we should drill, drill, drill with little to no investment in the renewables transition are simply pushing the cliff edge further away without dealing with the cliff edge itself. That would also be unforgivable. The industry is clear that it needs the Government to protect oil and gas jobs while building up the renewables sector to transfer those jobs to—a focus not on one or the other, but on a transition from one to the other. It is abundantly clear that neither the Tories nor Labour has a serious focus on that transition.
A new report out from the Energy Transition Institute at Robert Gordon University—a highly respected Aberdeen institute—makes for stark reading. The report predicts a further 18,000 job losses in the north-east of Scotland by 2035—1,600 jobs every single year. Crucially, the report then points to the huge benefits that can be achieved from a strong transition to renewables. The report’s author states:
“That is not a marginal advantage. It is a structural head start that few other regions in the UK or Europe can match.”
He goes on to say:
“The priority must be to prevent these losses in the first place, not simply to manage the consequences after the fact.”
What this needs now is the investment, policy, alignment and co-ordination to match. That is really simple. Scotland has enormous opportunity to reindustrialise with renewable energy technologies, but to do so requires existing North sea jobs to be protected, or the loss of those vital skills will stall that transition to renewables. There is a so-called “Goldilocks zone”, where growth in renewable jobs more than matches reductions in oil and gas jobs, but crucially, only if the transition is embraced and the oil and gas sector is protected through that transition.
Other scenarios have devastating consequences for jobs and the people and communities of north-east Scotland. Pragmatism and pace must be the watchwords on energy policy if we are to make the most of this enormous renewables opportunity in front of us and ensure a future for the workers of the north-east. It is abundantly clear that mass job losses under the Tories and the undermining of those vital jobs by Labour are leading to economic and social pain across the north-east of Scotland.
The people best placed to support the transition in Scotland and protect jobs and communities are the people who live and work in Scotland. That is why Scotland must have the full powers and control of energy policy that come with independence.
Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I thank the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) for securing this important debate.
I also congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden) on his recent win. Of course, his was not the only big win in Scotland in recent times. In Na h-Eileanan an Iar—the Western Isles—the Labour candidate Donald MacKinnon won a historic victory after 19 years of SNP neglect and complacency. What we did in Na h-Eileanan an Iar we did against the political tide: despite the polling and without the magic of Makerfield, we created a new king of the north. In short, we won because of Donald MacKinnon’s island credentials. Our local identity trumped the SNP’s artifice of a national identity. I know that we will be one Scotland tonight in Miami, but in reality, Scotland has many different communities and many different voices.
A large part of our island identity over the last two generations has been the North sea. The issues that anchored the by-election in Aberdeen South were currents that ran through the Western Isles during our May election as well. The fortunes of the North sea have shaped my village in Lewis and many other communities on the west coast and in the north. It has sustained us for two generations now. It is not just the men who have made that contribution; women are effectively running single-parent families because of the two weeks on, two weeks off or three weeks on, three weeks off pattern of the North sea.
The North sea has become part of our identity. Its shifts, weather and fortunes ripple through the Hebrides just as much as they do through the communities of our Doric cousins. It is not appreciated by many in this debate on the transition away from the North sea that our identity, a sense of belonging and who we are because of where we work are a big part of this.
The UK is undertaking one of the greatest economic and industrial transformations of our time, from fossil fuels to renewables and nuclear power. I wish the SNP Scottish Government, although apparently they now have a new industrial strategy, would show some maturity on nuclear power and recognise that it has a role in our future as oil and gas diminish. We should be clear-eyed about why we are moving out of the North sea. It is a mature and declining basin, and at the same time we face—as we do outside today—the undeniable reality of a warming planet. We have a responsibility to meet these challenges and a duty to those who will inherit the world after us to act.
The transition away from the North sea and into renewables is not the same as abandonment. This Labour Government are not, and must not be, in the business of switching off the North sea. We must not allow a justifiable drive to renewables to lead us into decisions that as a nation we may later regret. There remains lots of work to be undertaken, revenues to be generated and energy to be produced in this sector. As long as this country requires oil and particularly gas, and that can be produced and processed domestically, we should carry on working in the North sea. We should make more of tiebacks, and I would like to hear about Ministers doing so. The industry knows what that means—using existing infrastructure to explore and extract extra resources from the basin—but the public do not, and I call on Ministers to make more of tiebacks.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
The hon. Gentleman comes to the crux of what we mean by a transition. The difficulty for the Government is that, on the current trajectory of development, we risk reducing at a speed that means we will lose the critical infrastructure and end up pushing the whole industry off a cliff. If we do that, we will have no just transition.
Torcuil Crichton
I thank the right hon. Member for that intervention. I hear him and I hope Ministers hear him as well. In that transition, we on the west coast and he in the Northern Isles have a privileged vantage point. We look eastwards to the North sea and the jobs and fortunes that it has provided to our islands, and we look westwards into the Atlantic and see the wealth of wind, the promise of renewable energy and the next chapter of our country’s story.
The Minister knows that we in the Western Isles have the highest concentration of community-owned renewables anywhere in the UK. I believe that communities should have a big share in that new industry and in the renewables fortune. The Select Committee on Energy Security and Net Zero, of which the hon. Member for Bromsgrove is a member, recently recommended that community power schemes should have priority access to the grid.
Communities and councils should have the right—indeed, they already have the right; it is just that it has not been enacted—to take a 20% stake in any commercial renewables scheme in their area, onshore or offshore, and commercial wind farm companies ought to be incentivised through the planning system to see communities as partners, not just as peanut beneficiaries of their schemes. In that way, my community and those across Scotland that have earned a fortune for this country and for commercial companies in the North sea will have a share in the future and the fortune of renewable energy.
Let me be clear that I support a pragmatic transition in which we utilise domestic gas production rather than importing it, and support Scottish skills and jobs as we move the workforce into renewables and elsewhere. I accept that, as the hon. Member said, there may not be a like-for-like match between existing jobs and emerging jobs. The North sea is one of the most dangerous environments to work in anywhere in the world, and the pay reflects that.
But this is not just a question of pay. It is not just a question of economics, climate change or tax regimes, important as all those things are. It is just as much a question of who we are—a question of identity and belonging, and the relationship that we have with place and our place of work, which is a powerful political emotion that we should take note of. And as my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) said, it is not an either/or. Our task is not to choose between the two, but to manage the transition from one to the other responsibly, pragmatically and in a way that protects the country’s energy security and, crucially, ensures that we enrich the communities that have already powered this nation for two generations.
Steve Yemm
On a point of order, Ms Furniss. In my contribution, I neglected to draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in particular the donations that were made by Unite and GMB to my election campaign. I would like to put that on the record.
Harriet Cross (Gordon and Buchan) (Con)
It is wonderful to speak under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) for securing this debate, and I welcome my great friend—now my hon. Friend—the Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden) to this place; he has been by my side pretty much from the day I joined the party, and it is fantastic to finally have him here alongside us, particularly in this debate.
I have spoken a lot about oil and gas, particularly North sea oil and gas—UK continental shelf oil and gas—in this place, because it is so important. We cannot overestimate just how important it is to Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and north-east Scotland, and the by-election result in Aberdeen South is a testament to that. We are not naive; we do not think that 50% of Aberdeen South voters suddenly have a huge love of the Conservative party—although I am sure they will eventually—but this was a referendum on oil and gas, and my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South put the point across perfectly that we must protect the sector and its jobs, the tax and investment that it returns, and our energy security.
I have been knocking on doors in Aberdeen over the last four to five weeks, and the number of people I spoke to who have lost their job is tragic. They are very willing to talk about the job they had and the struggle they now have of finding a new one. Many of them are looking to move away because there is not a replacement job in Aberdeen. Many of them have young children, who will also have to move away. That is ruining friendships, it is ruining the future skills of Aberdeen, and it is changing the demographics of our region.
This does not have to happen. We do not have to run down the North sea as quickly as we are. The Government do not have to ban new licences—that is a choice. The Government do not have to keep the energy profits levy—that is a choice. The Government do not have to keep delaying on Rosebank and Jackdaw—that is also a choice, and it is a choice that they keep making the wrong decision on.
Once we get a new Prime Minister and undoubtedly, we hope, a new Energy Secretary, those choices will be different, because the public want the position to change: three quarters of the public support North sea drilling and North sea production if it means we will import less. The stats show that if we maximise production from the North sea, we could be using only 6% liquefied natural gas by the mid-2030s. On the current trajectory, we will be using 46% LNG. Again, that is a choice that this Government are making. LNG is more carbon-intensive, so it is worse for reaching our climate goals; it costs a huge amount of money; and it is supporting foreign jobs, not UK jobs. Again, those are all choices that the Government are making. It is up to them to change direction. I am delighted by, and very grateful for, the number of Labour Back Benchers who are here today and who tell me in private that they want the Government to change their position, because they recognise that there is a pragmatic path and we need to be on it.
The impact is not only directly on jobs in the oil and gas sector. I have met hauliers and people who work in other industries in my Gordon and Buchan constituency, such as cafés and other hospitality businesses on the high street, who have seen footfall and trade decrease because of the decrease in the oil and gas sector. This impacts everybody, and not just in the north-east of Scotland.
Mary Glindon (Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend) (Lab)
Yesterday we had the AGM of the all-party parliamentary group for the British offshore energy industry, of which the hon. Lady is a member, and I hope that the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden) will join us on it. Does she agree that the effect of these job losses is nationwide—not just in Scotland but across the whole of the UK, including the north-east—and the people of Aberdeen have amplified how people feel across the country? Does she also agree that if the very biggest companies pull out of the North sea altogether, as they are looking at doing, that would have an even more devastating effect?
Harriet Cross
The hon. Member—I call her a friend—is a huge champion for this sector and her constituents, and she is completely correct: these job losses impact everybody and all our constituencies, so we should all care about what is happening to the sector.
This is not just about the big producers or operators; it is about the supply chain, too. Companies in the supply chain are UK-wide, and they must be protected UK-wide. They are also vital for the roll-out of other renewable technologies and nuclear. Without the supply chain, our future energy security will be so much poorer —we will have less energy security.
Adura has submitted the additional information that is needed on Rosebank and Jackdaw. I appreciate that the Minister will probably say something about “quasi-judicial”, but can he make the commitment that there will not be any unnecessary delay? The decision does not have to be delayed for a new Prime Minister or a new Energy Secretary. These companies and the industry need confidence; they need to know that the projects will go ahead as soon as possible.
The Government’s decision to write the ban on new licences into law via the energy independence Bill is an absolute kick for the sector. They had already said they would ban new licences, but the decision to put that ban into law drains any confidence that investors might have in the sector. Will the Minister think again and not include that awful policy in the Bill?
Uma Kumaran (Stratford and Bow) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) for securing a debate on such an important issue. I put it on record that I am the chair of the APPG on climate change.
Frustratingly, the British public once again find themselves at the mercy of the latest chapter of the geopolitical crisis. Our constituents are looking at their energy bills and wincing at yet another increase, as people up and down the country pay the price for an energy market that is exposed to global conflict. The fact remains that the hard-earned money of British taxpayers and bill payers is lining the pockets of fossil fuel giants, which want us to believe that drilling oil is the only way forward. As long as the UK relies heavily on oil and gas, global conflicts and supply disruptions will continue to lead to price hikes. That is why we need to focus on cleaner energy sources. Those hikes are driving fuel poverty in every corner of our country, leaving less money in the pockets of workers and pensioners alike.
For too long—we have heard this in the debate—climate action has been pitched as a zero-sum game in which economic activity will somehow be hampered, but it is not at odds with economic security or prosperity. There is a case for moving away from oil and gas and towards clean energy not only for our planet, but for British bill payers. Energy bills cannot and will not be brought down by North sea oil and gas. Our constituents are better protected from energy shocks by investment in renewables than by further exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets.
The British taxpayer has been subsidising a hugely polluting industry for too long. Oil and gas companies enjoy an effective tax subsidy of £3 billion every year, when we should instead be investing in the industries of the future, such as renewable energy projects that deliver wealth back into our communities, building global leadership and growing global markets for clean energy technologies. I worked globally on such initiatives with nearly 100 countries in the United Nations. Countries are successfully shifting away from fossil fuel production. That is happening—it is a reality.
Kerry McCarthy
Something that has been missing from this debate is the opportunity we have to be the leading exponents of offshore wind, including floating offshore wind, hybrid assets and energy connection. When I was a climate Minister, I held the international energy brief, and whether it was from talking to Azerbaijan about what it can do in the Caspian sea, to countries on the Black sea, to countries on the Baltic sea or to the governors of states on the west coast of America, I saw that everyone is interested in what we are doing and that there is huge potential. Does my hon. Friend agree?
Uma Kumaran
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend.
We are talking about communities that are dependent on this industry. As a proud member of the GMB, I absolutely understand why workers must be at the heart of this. North sea oil and gas reserves are in terminal decline. They cannot provide a secure future for workers, and there is no long-term future in them. We have heard that just 10% is left to be extracted.
Mr Carmichael
Much of what the hon. Lady says is correct, but she is setting oil and gas up in opposition to the development of renewables, when they absolutely are not. I do not believe there is a long-term future for the oil and gas industry, but we will need oil and gas in the future. We are talking not just about the long term, but about the short to medium term. That is the whole point of a transition: it is about how we get from here to where we want to be. There is no way of getting to the renewables future without going through oil and gas first.
Uma Kumaran
The right hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. I cannot say that I agree with all of it, but we need all voices around the table.
Mr Carmichael
Each time, the hon. Lady says, “Instead of that, it’s this.” It is not an either/or; it is an “as well”.
Uma Kumaran
The oil industry and fossil fuel lobbyists want us to believe that we need to take them on the journey with us. The case for renewables is there. At the moment, however, the voices for the renewables industry and more sustainable energy sources are being drowned out by those who want us to preserve the system that we already have.
Uma Kumaran
I will not give way; I will continue.
I am making the case for growing clean industries, ensuring that British workers are at the heart of the cutting-edge change that every country is now facing, for the jobs of today and the future.
Workers need a credible transition plan, which means proactive planning, serious investment and putting their voices first. That is exactly what this Government are doing. This is about ensuring workers’ jobs and livelihoods so that they can pay their bills, rents and mortgages. These are the challenges that people are facing now. We are not talking about hypotheticals; people have bills to pay now, this month and next month. This is not a hypothetical scenario or an abstract discussion; we must take workers with us.
We cannot allow the pipe dreams peddled by those with vested interests in fossil fuels to blind us to the realities in front of us. This is an industry already in decline. We know what a botched industrial transition looks like.
Uma Kumaran
I will not give way; I will continue.
We also know what success looks like. Countries in the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, ranging from Denmark to Costa Rica, are committed to ending reliance on oil and gas, so this issue is already being discussed globally.
I find it interesting that Conservative Members here are passionately making the case for oil and gas today, because it was their Government that presided over an unmitigated collapse in jobs in the oil and gas industry. Half the jobs in the North sea disappeared in the last decade under a Conservative Government. We did not hear anything from the Conservatives at the time, so let us remember why so many of them are talking about oil and gas today. They are masking what they are saying as standing up for workers, but the truth is that they are fighting climate deniers on their own Benches and Reform’s climate sceptics on their right. They are using the industry as a tool in their own political fights here.
Uma Kumaran
I will not give way; I will carry on.
The case that I am making is backed by science. We heard earlier that a 1% increase in global warming would be catastrophic. We are already seeing extreme temperatures. The news right now is that France has just hit 44°, we have sweltering temperatures in Britain, and people are pooh-poohing the idea of a 1% rise in global temperatures. They continue to deny the reality of the climate crisis. Yes, this debate is about jobs, energy security and our future, but it is also about protecting the planet from the present and very real threat of climate devastation. The simple reality is that North sea production is not compatible with Britain’s climate commitments.
Uma Kumaran
I will continue.
Rosebank could produce the equivalent of 70% of the UK’s annual emissions of carbon dioxide. That is not compatible with the UK’s international climate obligations; they are international agreements, but they are obligations. These are treaties that we have signed up to and they reflect the deeper moral case that every country has a part to play in ensuring that we meet the global call to action.
I want to take this opportunity to urge the Minister to continue along the path that the Government are already on and do everything in their power to continue to limit the expansion of fossil fuel production. That includes ensuring that Rosebank does not happen.
We cannot abdicate responsibility at this vital moment. New oil and gas production in the North sea is not a solution. It will not bring down our constituents’ bills, it will not meaningfully diminish reliance on imported gas, and it is not delivering prosperity. However, it will risk further climate disruption, which is destruction that can never be undone.
The solution is not inaction. It is a plan for a future that backs British workers, believes in British industry and ingenuity, and backs a transition to renewable energy sources. That is everything that we should be focused on delivering.
Brian Leishman (Alloa and Grangemouth) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss, and I thank the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) for securing this debate.
Let me say at the outset that we should not rewrite history. We know that under the Conservatives there were mass job losses in the oil and gas industry. It was also interesting to hear in the last 20 or 25 minutes that, after decades of not having a plan for the industry, the SNP now does have one. I look forward to hearing more about that in due course. Then, of course, there is Reform. Its Members just want to carry on regardless and to hell with the environmental consequences. Their absence from this debate shows their contempt for workers and working-class communities.
But in all honesty, I do not care about any of those parties, because I am a Scottish Labour Member, and there is no doubt that right now our oil and gas policy has left voters incredibly worried. My congratulations go to the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden). It was an excellent victory last week, and I commend him and his party on it. That by-election result in the north of Scotland really was telling for the Scottish Labour party. Even though we had an excellent candidate, we finished fourth. As a party, we often say the right things: that oil and gas will be part of the energy mix for decades to come, that we must detach ourselves from relying on the volatile fossil fuel market and, crucially, that we want to provide a just transition for the highly skilled workers of this industry. So far, however, all of that is just words. Scotland judged Scottish Labour in the Holyrood elections and in Aberdeen last week.
Put simply, if one set of jobs is lost and a new set of jobs is not available, that is the very definition of an unjust transition. That is clear and obvious. People want evidence of what a genuinely just transition would be and how we can provide it, but most importantly, what people really want is action. There has not been nearly enough of that. It was 16 months ago this week that the Prime Minister promised £200 million for Project Willow and a bold new industrial future to be homed at Grangemouth. So far, we have had the MiAlgae and the Celtic Renewables announcements, and I welcome them, but again, those jobs are for the future—they are not for the now. Workers need jobs.
An unjust transition means an exodus of skills and talent, with workers and their families having to leave the local area—the place they grew up in and call home. That means that communities then become poorer. I do not how many times I have asked the Minister this, but I will ask again, in the hope that he will give an answer: when will we see these new industries come to Grangemouth? When will my people in my community, who I am here to represent, see the change that they desperately need? They need jobs and reindustrialisation. Will the Government take at least some form of ownership of these new industries, which they will definitely need for decades—centuries—to come?
Finally, in a party political moment, I say to the Minister that the electorate in Scotland do not know what the Scottish Labour party is about any more. In providing a genuinely just transition for workers and communities, we have the chance to say exactly who we are and who we are for, and to re-establish ourselves as the political voice for workers and communities. My constituency needs reindustrialisation, and so do the constituencies of many other hon. Members and right hon. Members. We have a blank canvas in Grangemouth. We could create something special that would transform my community and Scotland for generations. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has to shape up and deliver that, and it has to do it quickly.
Gill Furniss (in the Chair)
I call the Minister. [Interruption.] Sorry, I call Pippa Heylings—I will learn how to do this one day; I blame it on the heat.
Pippa Heylings (South Cambridgeshire) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss. I am sure that the whole country joins you in finding it difficult to deal with this heat and to perform to the best of one’s ability. I am thinking about those students who are sitting GCSE and A-level exams this week.
I thank the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) for bringing this debate to Westminster Hall. We have heard how seriously we are considering our current and future jobs for oil and gas workers in the North sea and in the new renewable energy sector. Families across the country and businesses are struggling with skyrocketing energy bills. We are also seeing hits to our economy and avoidable deaths from a warming planet. This week, we have had the first red alert under our new UK Health Security Agency alert system, alerting us to the climate impacts of global warming.
Less than a month ago, families and households received the news that, once again, their energy bills are going up, this time by an average of 13.5% or £221 a year—what we could call a Trump tax. We know that rising energy bills are one of the biggest worries facing households and businesses. They bring stress, anxiety and uncertainty, and they are plunging more and more people into unaffordable debt. Right now, energy debt in the country is about £5 billion, and it is due to rise exponentially. Also, our businesses are seeing some of the highest industrial energy prices, making us as a country among the least competitive, which is hitting our economy. Families, too, will now be bracing themselves for the next price cap announcement and wondering how much they will have to pay through the colder winter months. The reason for these spikes in our energy bills is clear: our dependence on the rollercoaster of volatile global fossil fuel markets.
The energy crisis is an oil and gas crisis. Just as with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the middle east conflict shows how a single geopolitical escalation can send energy prices soaring, leaving households and businesses exposed to shocks entirely beyond their control. That is not inevitable. In Spain, an increase in renewables has seen the Spanish electricity market go from the 10th most expensive in the EU to among the cheapest.
But as we have heard in this debate, a transition will not happen without a careful, concentrated and accelerated focus on the oil and gas we need today, on the renewables that we need to scale up, on the infrastructure, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) mentioned, on the jobs and, as the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Torcuil Crichton) mentioned, on the culture and identity involved in this change.
We need a serious and honest debate about this transition. Even proponents of the “Drill, baby, drill” argument from the Conservatives and Reform have recognised that further expansion of oil and gas production in the North sea, a mature basin from which we have already extracted 93%, will do nothing to cut people’s energy bills. Any oil and gas extracted is sold on the international market to the highest bidder.
Mr Carmichael
My hon. Friend has come to a point of some interest. We talk about oil and gas as if they are one commodity, but they are very different things, of course, and she will know that the gas that is to be extracted in the North sea and also to the west of Shetland is brought ashore and goes straight into the UK market. The point about a global market and a global price for oil is well made, but oil and gas are different.
Pippa Heylings
I thank my right hon. Friend. We have many discussions about this issue, and he is absolutely right to point out that it is complex. We know that if we extract beyond what has already been licensed, the UK can contribute only a tiny fraction of global supply, particularly of oil, even if new licences are given. It will not cut bills, and it will not shield us from global price shocks.
The next argument is about UK energy security. On that point, Members from across the House have admitted that most of the UK’s recoverable North sea oil and gas has already been extracted.
Mr Carmichael
I am keen to emphasise the great breadth of agreement between myself and my hon. Friend on this matter. She is absolutely right about the future of jobs. She knows that I chair the all-party parliamentary group on marine energy. Marine renewable technology is developing and will be able to provide jobs for my constituents and others in the future, but it is important that we keep the critical mass of the oil and gas industry, because if these people lose their jobs now, they are not going to sit on their hands and wait for AR9, AR10, AR11 or whenever it is that we can actually get commercially exploitable marine renewable energy.
Pippa Heylings
Once again, I thank my right hon. Friend; I will be coming on to exactly that point.
For more than a decade, the previous Government had a policy of maximising North sea oil and gas extraction and of removing and reducing taxes on oil and gas companies. With the issuing of hundreds of new licences in a maturing basin, what we have seen produced after 14 years is little more than a month’s worth of gas to date.
Energy security is national security. We know, and have admitted in the debate, that we have to reduce our dependency on gas and come to a transition. The Liberal Democrats recognise not only that we will need oil and gas for decades to come, but that the North sea’s most productive years are behind it. That is why we support a managed and just transition away from North sea oil and gas, with investment in renewables at its heart, and strong support for the workers and communities most affected.
Those working in the North sea are skilled workers. They have kept our lights on and have contributed enormously to our economy. They deserve our support through transition—not just words—and honesty about the future. That is why the Liberal Democrats are calling for the creation of a just transition commission and an acceleration of the clean energy jobs necessary. Under the Conservatives, jobs in the oil and gas industry fell by 70,000, and at that time we did not hear the cries that we hear now about what is happening or how those workers are being supported.
I grew up in Hull, a city that knew the devastation of unmanaged transitions—from coal and from the cod fisheries—and through my father’s work as a GP, I saw the human cost of industries collapsing without a plan. We cannot repeat those mistakes. No community should be left behind. In Hull today, when I go back, I see what success can look like: the manufacture of offshore wind turbines by Siemens; the Humber region pioneering the offshore wind industry; investment creating skilled, well-paid jobs now and for the future. Confederation of British Industry economic data has shown that beyond Hull, across the country, the new green economy underpins the jobs of 1.1 million workers throughout the UK, generating £105 billion in gross value added. That is the model we should be scaling up towards, with our skilled oil and gas workers and the supply chains front and centre of the transition.
Finally, in this sweltering heat, with this first ever red health alert for danger to life from extreme heat, we must recognise the costs of failing to tackle climate change. This week has shown us the future we face if we do not act—lives lost to extreme heat, schools closed, fields parched, transport networks gridlocked and economic costs spiralling. Climate breakdown is a national security threat, driving instability, displacement and economic shocks. It is incumbent on us to do all we can to avoid worsening climate shocks, so we must find a way forward through electrification that balances cheaper energy bills and security of energy supply, and meets our climate commitments.
The future of the North sea plays a vital role in that endeavour of transitioning from being a net exporter of oil and gas in the past to becoming a net exporter of home-grown green energy—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) said—again trading in the EU internal electricity market and joining North sea countries in meeting joint offshore wind investment goals, while decarbonising the gas production we will still need for decades to come. I therefore ask the Minister to clarify whether he agrees with the Liberal Democrat proposal: a just transition commission, acceleration of clean energy jobs, and our essential energy guarantee, to ensure that all families have their basic energy needs met.
In addition, the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Torcuil Crichton) talked about the identity and culture of the communities that have to face this transition. That, too, is crucial. The sooner we embrace the transition and the sooner we can deliver a secure and affordable energy system, the sooner we can finally give families the lower, stable bills that they deserve.
Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I begin by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne—sorry, I mean my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas)—for securing this important and timely debate, although I think his call for personal ambition to be left aside at this time is a faint hope. Given what is happening on the Government Benches, this is surely a time for personal ambition to come to the fore, and I am sure we will see a lot more of it in the next few weeks.
In that regard, I take this opportunity to welcome the newest Conservative party Member of Parliament to this House. My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden) secured an incredible majority in his constituency last week, in a referendum on the future of our oil and gas industry that was won by those of us who support its continuance, by those of us who support the jobs being maintained in this country, that city and that region, and by a real champion for that part of the world. I am sure that his voice, heard already in this Chamber this morning, will be heard loud and clear over the next few months and years as he continues to champion that great city and that great industry.
I thank the hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for Mansfield (Steve Yemm), for Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey (Graham Leadbitter) and for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Torcuil Crichton), my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross), and the hon. Members for Stratford and Bow (Uma Kumaran) and for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman) for adding their voices to this debate. It was interesting that three of the four Labour Members spoke in favour of a change of policy on oil and gas.
Although I have a lot of time and respect for the hon. Member for Stratford and Bow—indeed, I like her—I disagree considerably with her. She is a passionate advocate for what she believes, and she is right to stand up in this House and make those arguments about the UK contributing to the battle against climate change, but when she describes those of us who care passionately about the existing oil and gas industry as climate deniers, she is somewhat insulting the thousands of people in my constituency, and constituencies across the country, who rely on that industry for their income and have the very skills that will be relied upon by those developing the technologies of the future. It is supply chain industries based in Westhill, Portlethen, Banchory and Blackburn in my constituency, and in places around the country, including the north-east of England, that will develop the offshore wind or floating solar technologies of the future, or whatever it might be. It is people in Na h-Eileanan an Iar and across the United Kingdom that the hon. Lady will need and want to build more quickly.
Uma Kumaran
The hon. Gentleman is making his case very eloquently, but let me correct him on what I said. I am not in any way accusing his wonderful constituents of being climate deniers; I am simply pointing out the case made by some of his colleagues. I absolutely agree that we need to bring communities with us, and I am sure the whole House shares that aim.
Andrew Bowie
Absolutely—I could not agree more. We do need to bring communities with us.
While I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove for securing the debate, I find it increasingly frustrating that we have to return to this House and platforms across the UK to make the same arguments. One of my constituents said just the other week, “It is like banging your head against a brick wall.” None of us understands what this Government need to see or hear from experts, trade unions, former leaders of the Labour party, leaders of Scottish Renewables and RenewableUK or the chairman of Great British Energy, which this Government established less than two years ago, who are all clamouring for a change of position on the UK’s oil and gas sector.
My constituents, and people across Scotland and the United Kingdom, just do not understand why the Government, at this time of constraint on our economy, are voluntarily giving up a potential £13 billion of additional revenue over the next decade. They do not understand why the Government insist—and, indeed, are about to legislate—on a ban on new licences in the North sea while increasing imports from Norway, which has just issued more licences in its sector of the North sea, adding to the burden on climate change and undermining our economy, with British jobs lost in the process.
People do not get why the Government say on one hand that they are passionately committed to tackling global climate change and want to be global leaders in ensuring that this world is a safer place for our children, and yet on the other hand are seemingly blind to the increased emissions produced by importing more of the oil and gas that we will need over the next 30 to 40 years from places such as Qatar and the USA. They do not get why the Government are seemingly treating workers in Aberdeen, the north-east of Scotland, Fife, the Northern Isles, Na h-Eileanan an Iar and the north-east of England—everywhere that has been mentioned—with callous disregard, given that there is no transition evident.
There is a slow-down in the deployment of renewables, which is being driven by the accelerated decline in the oil and gas industry. The Port of Aberdeen, which invested millions of pounds in developing South harbour to take advantage of what it expected to be the boom in floating offshore wind less than 10 years ago, is laying off workers because the boom has not arrived. Some 63% of the harbour’s profit is generated from the oil and gas sector, and less than 2% from renewables. The decline in oil and gas is being driven too fast, and the uptick in renewables is not there.
It is a cruel irony that we are having this debate at the very moment that Swire House, a multimillion-pound global energy headquarters building, which opened a decade ago to great fanfare in the city of Aberdeen, is being demolished. That is symbolic of this Government’s approach to our energy industry, oil and gas industry, the city of Aberdeen, the north-east of Scotland and those who worked proudly in the North sea, but are now looking overseas.
As much as the Government like to say that they will increase funding and expand the transition fund, those workers are skilled workers; some of them have spent decades honing their skills in a specific, global industry, an industry that, in every country bar this one, is booming. Those skills are in high demand in the middle east, Australia, the Gulf of America—or Gulf of Mexico; take your pick—South America and Canada; basically, in every country with an oil and gas industry that does not have the current UK Energy Secretary in charge of energy policy.
That is why those workers are taking the difficult decision to uproot their families, leave the communities where they have lived all their lives and go overseas, taking with them those vital skills needed by the technologies of the future and leaving the economy of the north-east of Scotland and the United Kingdom weaker as a result. We need to see a change of policy; surely the result last week in Aberdeen South demonstrated that.
People are fed up and want change. Yes, they agree they want to get to net zero—overwhelmingly, people believe that we must tackle climate change—but this Government’s callous disregard for the industry and its workers speaks volumes about where their priorities lie. If last week did not demonstrate that, I do not know what will. I say to the Minister, “Please, please scrap the energy profits levy. Do not legislate to ban licences. Give the people of Aberdeen and north-east Scotland, and all who work in the oil and gas industry, hope for the future that the Government understand, are listening, recognise and will invest in that industry.”
The Minister for Energy (Michael Shanks)
It is a pleasure to serve in this debate, Ms Furniss. I thank the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas); at least I know his constituency, even if the shadow Minister does not—so much for being an hon. Friend. I also thank those who have contributed to the debate; the shadow Minister reeled off all the constituencies, so I do not have to, and I am eternally grateful to him.
I warmly welcome the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden). I was also a by-election MP and know what it feels like to arrive in this place without a cohort of 100 other new people. I wish him the best of luck finding his way around this building. I got on hugely well with his predecessor and appreciated his contributions—at the risk of misleading the House, I must say for the benefit of Hansard that that was sarcasm, but I welcome the hon. Member none the less. I also welcome the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is ever charming and kind to us all. We could all do with a daily affirmation from him in our debates. I certainly appreciate it.
This debate has been helpful for a number of reasons. The shadow Minister and I know each other’s arguments well enough by now, so there was nothing hugely illuminating in his speech, and I suspect there will not be for him in what I have to say. It was illuminating to hear from Scottish National party that it now has an energy strategy, but it is being kept secret. I hope we will see that strategy published soon, because for three years we have not known the SNP’s policy on oil and gas and a whole range of other things.
That matters for the industry that the hon. Member for Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey (Graham Leadbitter) says—and I believe him—that he cares about. It will help the industry to have clarity on the SNP’s policies. On devolving energy policy, many of the things he calls for, including further investment in renewables, have been driven by the strength of being part of the United Kingdom, of pooling and sharing investment in those hugely successful projects in Scotland, which I suspect would not be possible—[Interruption.] He is about to intervene to tell me how it would be possible, if they were devolved, to fund all those renewable projects and a whole series of other things, and how the electricity market would work in an independent Scotland. I am sure he will briefly explain that to us.
Graham Leadbitter
That is not the reason for my intervention. If there is such a drive to get investment and renewables in Scotland—there is some, though it is not nearly fast enough—why did it take two years to make a decision about Ardersier? After two years, the rug was pulled from underneath that with a simple no. If that was the decision the Government were going to come to, surely it could have been made sooner, and the project could have moved on and had some investment. That has the potential for 1,500 jobs on site and a further 4,500 in the supply chain.
Michael Shanks
I have made my position very clear on that project. We were carrying out national security assessments, which should always rightly take priority. The First Minister of Scotland has been briefed on the security grounds for doing that. He is aware of why we reached the decision that we reached. I am obviously not going to comment further on that. Our national security always comes first.
Something that I have always said in this role is that our domestic production in the UK does matter. It sustains jobs and it delivers tax receipts and the gas that flows into our pipes every single day. We are not a Government that are for turning off the taps, and we never have been. But we are for recognising that a transition is under way and that investing in what comes next is critical. I am afraid that that is at the heart of the problem with the argument put forward by the Opposition, because they say that we need to build up the jobs that come next, but then oppose all the decisions that drive forward that investment. They criticise that there are not enough jobs coming from renewables but then say that we should not invest in the renewables projects that create those jobs. That is not a coherent argument to have.
Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
The Minister knows that I am a fierce champion for the new clean power jobs that we are getting on Teesside. We are seeing some of those opportunities scaling up now, but we cannot see mass unemployment in the offshore industry while those opportunities are still nascent. What assurance can the Minister give that every worker will have the opportunity for a genuinely just transition?
Michael Shanks
My hon. Friend is right on that point, and I will come to it in a moment because it is the main thrust of my speech.
I will start with what my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Torcuil Crichton) said and also welcome Donald MacKinnon into his place. I know he will be a strong advocate for the western isles. My hon. Friend rightly recognised that this is about a sense of identity. Yes, it is about a job and a pay packet at the end of the month, but it is also about a sense of belonging to an industry that many people have worked on in incredibly difficult circumstances for a long time.
Since I came into this job as Energy Minister two years ago, and as a Scottish MP and someone who has friends and family working offshore right now, I have always said that getting the transition right for those workers is central. We have seen too many failed economic transitions in the past, so we have to learn the lessons from that. As hon. Members have made very clear today, we must also see the huge potential that comes from the projects that we need in the future, not least in the supply chain that will build many of the projects that we need as part of our transition to clean energy. That will come from those very workers, so it is hugely important that we put them at the centre of all of this.
We also have to recognise that this did not somehow just start happening in July 2024. We have been in a period of transition for decades now. A third of jobs in the industry have been lost in the past 10 years, and we cannot accept that failed status quo any more. Burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the realities of the need for us to fund this transition properly will not protect a single job, nor will it create a new one. Nor will abandoning the sector entirely and turning off the taps as others would seek to do. I notice that this is yet another energy debate where no Green MPs—who have the most extreme positions on this issue—have bothered to turn up.
It must never become a binary conversation. The North Sea Future Board, which I chair, has just produced a statement on what we are seeking to do to drive forward this transition. That says that, at the heart of it, that transition is not about one industry being pitted against another. It is about stewarding the future of the North sea through collaboration and through managing all the opportunities that come, as well as an obligation to work together. There is always rightly a lot of heat in these debates, but I honestly believe that underneath it all there is a lot more consensus about the need, not for one or the other, but for all the energy that we can get and for all the jobs that come from it.
I will briefly say what our position is on the North sea. Gas has been flowing into this country for more than 60 years and is continuing to flow into this country 24/7. I was pleased to be at Bacton gas terminal a few weeks ago to see the skilled work that they do to manage up to a third of this country’s gas. It will continue to be a vital resource for decades to come, but it is also a basin that has been in decline. The most accessible oil and gas has been extracted. Production has been in decline for a quarter of a century, and it reduced by approximately 75% between 1999 and 2024. That did not begin in July 2024.
Harriet Cross
On that basis, why do the Government feel it necessary to ban new licences? The Minister says that production is declining, so why do they need to ban them?
Michael Shanks
Because we want to steward the future of the basin and have a strategic plan that industry can get behind. Very few of the licences that have been issued in the past few years have come to production, so they are not the route to that, but the process had so far not had clarity from the Government. That is why we said what we said on licences.
The second part of our manifesto commitment, which is often ignored in this conversation, is that we will continue to manage existing fields over their lifetime. We are not rescinding any licences—we are not saying that new production could not come forward in existing licensed fields—or rescinding any projects that currently exist.
My hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar made a point about the importance of tiebacks. This is the pragmatic approach that industry has called for, recognising that the most economically viable route to sustaining the fields is to have a tieback to an existing field that produces new oil and gas. That maintains the critical infrastructure and supply chains, as well as prolonging jobs. That is what industry called for, and that is the pragmatic approach we took in the North sea future plan.
Mr Carmichael
How confident is the Minister that he can maintain the infrastructure in the North sea and to the west of Shetland, so that oil and gas can be brought onshore, as well as through floating production storage and offloading units, without new licences?
Michael Shanks
The right hon. Gentleman raises an important point about what the stewardship of the basin has to look like, and he made another important point earlier about not conflating oil and gas. Equally, the story we tell about the North sea is often what the North sea looked like 30 or 40 years ago. It has changed significantly; the operators in the basin have changed, but so too has the structure of many of the operations. The North Sea Transition Authority has a role in planning the future of the basin and identifying issues relating to sustainability and infrastructure. It also has a role in looking at how we can do more around, for example, the electrification of platforms, so that we can reduce emissions from the platforms wherever possible and tie into offshore wind projects where possible.
Let me turn to the critical issue of the workforce. Under the North sea future plan, we will introduce a statutory objective for the North Sea Transition Authority to consider workers, communities and supply chains in its decisions. The NSTA has been looking at how it can support the transition for a long time, but this gives it a statutory objective to do so. This is not just about production and infrastructure. It is about people and places; it is about the workers who built the North sea success story, and with it the success of the British economy, the communities that supported it and, crucially, the supply chains that go with it.
We will also extend employment rights and protections to offshore renewables workers, and I hope that everyone in this House will support that. Coming to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm), we recognise that the clean energy workforce of the future has to have strong and fair protections, be trade unionised and have good, well-paid jobs. That is partly why, for offshore wind, we have driven forward the fair work charter as part of the clean industry bonus, so that rights are at the heart of these jobs and that, wherever possible, workers can transition from oil and gas into these jobs with good terms and conditions. That was opposed by some Conservative Members when we took it through Parliament recently, but I hope that they will rethink, because it is hugely important.
The hon. Member for Bromsgrove made a point about energy security, which is absolutely right. Our energy security is our national security. It is perhaps more important now than in recent years that we recognise that, in an uncertain world, our energy security is a hugely important part of how we build much more security at home. The point made about refinery capacity was right. We lost two refineries in this country, and I regret hugely that we did not do more to prevent those closures in the years leading up to them. We have now to protect our four refineries, which are hugely important sovereign capacity. In a global fuel crisis, those refineries have been key to ensuring that Britain has not suffered fuel shortages. We have to continue to support them.
On the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman), we committed to invest £200 million in the future of Grangemouth, and other projects are coming through. I gently say to him that we had to pick it up with no planning done in advance, and I am afraid it is not possible for us to get projects off the shelf, invest money in them and get them built immediately. We need business and industry to come forward with propositions, and the Government have an open door to engage with them directly on how we can deploy that money to Grangemouth. I meet them regularly to make sure that is happening, and we will continue to do that.
Again, I thank the hon. Members who have participated. It is hugely important that we talk about these issues. I hope we can also find a way, at some point, of reaching some consensus on how we can have an all-energy approach to the future of the North sea. I recognise that needs a pragmatic position on our side, but it also needs a pragmatic position from those who, in recent years, seem to have become anti the very investment that will drive forward the future of the North sea.
It is not possible for us to secure the long-term future of the North sea purely by calling for new licences in oil and gas. Anyone who believes that is the long-term answer is ignoring the reality in front of us. Oil and gas is hugely important, but the transition works only if we also invest and build up what comes next. We need both of them. A fair, managed and prosperous transition means investing in all of that—in offshore wind, carbon capture, long-duration energy storage in Scotland and elsewhere, and in supply chains so that we are building energy in Britain again, not towing it in from somewhere else and offshoring the jobs. That is the opportunity in front of us.
None of this will be easy. We will have to wrestle with some real challenges, but if we move fast to invest in the future and take a pragmatic position, I believe the North sea has a strong future ahead of it. I do not pretend that it is straightforward or that that will somehow give comfort to the workers who are facing it just now, but I am absolutely committed to making this work, and so are the Government. I thank the hon. Member for Bromsgrove for securing the debate, and I thank everyone who participated.
Bradley Thomas
I thank all hon. Members from all parties across the House for participating. There is clearly lots of passion and enthusiasm for this topic, as well as much concern. The debate was conducted in a very pragmatic fashion, which recognises that there is no climate denial across the House. Members recognise that there needs to be a fair transition that supports existing oil and gas jobs, and does what it can to strengthen those jobs and to ensure that the UK maintains an energy security position where we are able to tap into natural resources while focusing on the jobs of the future.
I was pleased to hear jobs, taxation and the importance of prosperity in Scotland emphasised in the debate, given the role that the region plays in our national security. I was pleased to hear the emphasis on refining. I implore the Minister to reflect on his words about the opportunities that have been missed in the past to strengthen the refining sector.
I hope that the Government will take on board what has been said across the House today as they think about the role that North sea oil and gas can play going into the future. There was an emphasis on ensuring that drilling can continue, abandoning the energy profits levy, and doing whatever the Government can to work with industry and workers who currently have those jobs, so that we do not have a moment of regret in the future and wish that we had done more now to prevent job losses and a further reduction of our energy resilience.
Gill Furniss (in the Chair)
I thank everyone for a very respectful debate. It was important that it happened as it did.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered North Sea oil and gas.
Animal Shelters: Regulation of Euthanasia
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Reform)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the regulation of the use of euthanasia in dog and animal shelters.
It is a pleasure once again to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to raise an issue that is of deep concern to animal welfare organisations, rescue centres, veterinary professionals and millions of animal lovers across the United Kingdom: the regulation of the use of euthanasia in dog and animal shelters, and the wider challenges facing animal welfare across this country.
Before I begin, I pay tribute to my dear late friend, Sir David Amess. Sir David was one of Parliament’s most passionate champions of animal welfare. Throughout his distinguished parliamentary career, he consistently spoke up for animals—God’s creatures—who could not speak for themselves. Whether campaigning for stronger welfare protections, raising welfare concerns in Parliament or supporting charities working on the frontline, his compassion for animals was unwavering, and I am determined that his legacy on animal welfare will live on, hence this debate today.
I would also like to recognise the work of his daughter, Katie Amess, who has continued that commitment with great determination and dignity. Through her engagement with rescue organisations, campaigners and welfare charities, she has ensured that these issues remain firmly in the public consciousness. Those working tirelessly to improve animal welfare across our country are grateful for her continued advocacy.
Sir David understood a simple truth: the way a society treats its animals says much about the values it upholds. It is in that spirit that I bring this debate before the House. The issue before us is not simply one of euthanasia; it is about transparency, accountability, responsible ownership, animal welfare and whether our current systems are equipped to cope with the pressures they now face.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
First, I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this issue forward. I spoke to him beforehand, to make him aware of my intervention. He will not be aware—indeed, nobody will be—that my wife has been a volunteer in animal shelters for a great many years, so we have had the cats and dogs that could not be homed living in our home, and they became, as they often do, family members. Does he agree that we must implement strict, legally binding regulations that mandate compassion, force transparency and ensure that destruction is only ever a last medical resort?
Andrew Rosindell
The hon. Member is, of course, absolutely correct. The laws in this area are completely inadequate, and as I will go on to say later, this is something that people across the British Isles care deeply about. We are a nation of animal lovers, and there is no greater animal lover than the hon. Member. He speaks very passionately for the people of Northern Ireland, and I thank him for his intervention.
Across the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, rescue organisations report that they are overwhelmed. Shelters are full, waiting lists are growing and charities are being forced to make impossible decisions as increasing numbers of dogs and other animals are abandoned, surrendered or left as strays. The RSPCA has reported significant increases in abandonment in some areas, and rescue organisations throughout the country consistently warn that they are operating beyond capacity. The consequences of the cost of living crisis, combined with irresponsible breeding practices and impulse pet purchases have created what many in the sector now describe as a genuine animal welfare crisis.
When shelters are full and rescue spaces cannot be found, local authorities and contracted kennels face a difficult decision. Under existing legislation, once a stray dog has completed the statutory holding period and remains unclaimed, authorities may rehome the dog, transfer it to an appropriate establishment or euthanise it. The law therefore clearly provides alternatives to euthanasia, but campaigners, rescue organisations and those working directly with council pounds have serious concerns about how the system operates in practice.
Many local authorities no longer operate their own pounds. Instead, they contract the service to private kennels or commercial providers. Those facilities often have limited space and resources and significant operational pressures. As a result, many do not conduct the full behavioural assessments and adoption processes required for direct public rehoming. The practical reality described by many rescue organisations is that once the seven-day statutory holding period expires, the race begins to find a rescue space before a healthy dog loses its life. Volunteer groups known as pound pullers spend countless hours attempting to find rescue placements for dogs facing euthanasia. Rescue organisations report that they are frequently contacted to take dogs from council pounds, but many are already operating at full capacity.
One of the most troubling aspects of the issue is that we do not actually know the true scale of it. There are no centralised systems recording how many healthy or treatable animals are euthanised by local authorities, contracted kennels or veterinary practices. Freedom of information requests often produce inconsistent results, records vary significantly between local authorities, and veterinary practices are not required to report such figures centrally. There is no direct knowledge of what is really happening on the ground.
The absence of data is a serious problem. Good public policy demands that evidence is provided, and depends upon it, yet there is a remarkable lack of transparency in this area. We cannot properly assess the scale of the issue, identify trends or develop effective interventions if the information is not collected. I therefore urge the Government to consider establishing a national reporting framework for healthy and treatable companion animals euthanised in the stray dog and shelter system. Such a measure would not seek to criticise local authorities, rescue organisations or veterinary professionals; rather, it would provide transparency, improve accountability and ensure that future policy decisions are informed by evidence rather than assumption.
The Government should also review whether the current seven-day holding period remains fit for purpose. Rescue organisations argue that seven days is often insufficient to locate an owner, complete necessary assessments or secure an appropriate rescue placement. Given the unprecedented pressures facing the rescue sector, it is reasonable to ask whether a framework established decades ago remains adequate for today’s circumstances.
Although euthanasia is the issue we are debating today, it is not the root cause of the problem. The real question is why so many animals are entering the system in the first place. Time and again, rescue organisations tell us the same thing: there are simply more dogs than there are homes available for them. The reality demands action.
First, we should examine whether it is appropriate to continue issuing large numbers of new breeding licences when shelters and rescue centres are already struggling to cope with existing demand. Responsible breeders have an important role to play, and this debate is not about penalising those who adhere to high welfare standards. However, when rescue organisations across the country report that they are full and that healthy animals are being put at risk due to lack of capacity, we must ask whether the current rate of licensed breeding is sustainable. The Government should therefore consider temporarily restricting or reducing the issuing of new breeding licences until pressure on shelters and rescue organisations has eased.
Secondly, all animals rehomed through shelters and rescue organisations should, where medically appropriate, be compulsorily spayed or neutered and microchipped before adoption. Many reputable rescue organisations already operate in that way. Introducing a consistent national standard would help reduce unwanted litters, improve traceability and prevent future generations of animals from entering the shelter system unnecessarily.
Thirdly, we should continue strengthening laws on animal cruelty and abandonment. Animals are sentient beings, not disposable commodities. The law must reflect that principle. Stronger enforcement with tougher penalties for serious cruelty offences, and greater support for prosecutions, would help deter neglect and abandonment while reinforcing the responsibilities that accompany pet ownership.
Fourthly, the Government should establish a central national database for stray, abandoned and lost animals that is accessible to local authorities, shelters and authorised welfare organisations. At present, information is fragmented across multiple systems, charities and regions. A unified database would improve communication, reduce duplication, increase opportunities for reunification and significantly improve the efficiency of rescue efforts.
Fifthly, every stray animal should be routinely scanned for a microchip upon entering a veterinary surgery, local authority facility, contracted kennel or rescue organisation. We desperately need a more unified approach here. Surprisingly, there is no single microchip database for those organisations to check. I understand that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is working with the 11 databases of the Association of Microchip Database Operators to build a single point of search, but what happens with the 14 databases that are not AMDO members? Furthermore, although some databases are free of charge, some are now charging one-off amounts. Others are starting to charge subscription fees, which I am concerned will create a financial barrier to a legally mandated obligation on owners to microchip.
I commend to the Minister the work of Vets Get Scanning, an organisation established by the late Sir Bruce Forsyth and his fabulous daughter Debbie Matthews, who has been campaigning for this for many years to stop pet theft and return animals to their rightful owners. I invited Sir Bruce Forsyth to the Houses of Parliament some years ago to promote this very cause. He met many Members of Parliament at that time, including Sir David Amess, to promote the importance of all veterinary surgeries scanning animals when they are brought in, to check who the real owner of the pet is and to ensure that stolen dogs are returned to their rightful owners.
This recommendation carries a particular significance because of the tragic case of Tuk in 2017, which exposed serious shortcomings in the identification process and highlighted the devasting consequences that can occur when procedures fail. I must also pay tribute at this point to the hon. Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris), who has championed this cause.
Routine and repeated microchip scanning would be a simple, practical and cost-effective safeguard that could prevent similar incidents in the future while increasing the likelihood of lost pets being reunited with their families. Taken together, these proposals would not require vast new expenditure. They are simple, preventive measures that address the causes of the crisis rather than merely responding to its consequences. By reducing the number of animals entering the system, improving traceability, strengthening accountability and supporting responsible ownership, we can reduce the circumstances in which euthanasia becomes necessary.
I want to acknowledge the extraordinary work undertaken by rescue charities, volunteers, local authority officers, kennel staff and veterinary professionals. Those on the frontline of animal welfare frequently face heartbreaking decisions. They do not do so because they lack compassion, but because they are operating within a system and are under immense strain.
This debate is not about assigning blame, but about identifying solutions. Sir David Amess often reminded us that animals cannot speak for themselves. It therefore falls to us as legislators to ensure that their welfare is properly protected. The measures I have outlined today would increase transparency, support rescue organisations, encourage responsible ownership and reduce the number of healthy animals at risk of unnecessary euthanasia. Most importantly, they would tackle the underlying causes of the crisis rather than merely its symptoms. In doing so, we would not only improve the lives of countless animals across the country, but honour the legacy of Sir David Amess, whose lifelong commitment to animal welfare inspired so many, and support the continuing efforts of Katie Amess and others who work tirelessly to ensure that vulnerable animals are given the protection, dignity and compassion that they deserve. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Stephen Morgan)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Furniss. I congratulate the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) on securing this important debate. He has championed animal welfare for many years in this place. I also thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for his insightful intervention.
I pay tribute to Katie Amess, who has campaigned strongly on this issue, as we have already heard, and to her late father, Sir David, who was such a passionate advocate for animal welfare. He is sadly missed in this place. I would also like to pass on my appreciation to the array of animal rights and welfare charities that do so much to support our nation’s well-loved animals and pets.
This has been a good debate on an important and sensitive subject, and I welcome the opportunity to set out the work the Government are doing to address many of the issues that have been highlighted. Let me state from the outset that the Government believe that every stray dog deserves care, dignity and proper consideration for its welfare. Our focus is on reducing the number of dogs entering the system in the first place, improving reunification and rehoming outcomes, and ensuring that euthanasia is only ever used as a genuine last resort.
Local authorities play a central role in the system, and we are backing them to carry out their responsibilities effectively. Councils have a legal duty to deal with stray dogs, whether they are lost, stolen or abandoned. Each year, they handle tens of thousands of cases. They collect dogs quickly, check for injury or neglect, and make every effort to identify the owner through microchips and tags. If an owner cannot immediately be found, dogs must be held for at least seven days to give people the chance to come forward. After that point, authorities work to reunite, rehome or transfer dogs to rescue organisations wherever possible. The outcomes data shows that this system does work for the majority of cases: most dogs are either reunited with their owners or passed on to rehoming centres.
But we know that much more needs to be done, particularly as rescue organisations face growing pressures, as the hon. Member for Romford identified. The cost of living and the legacy of the pandemic have led to increased abandonment and stretched capacity. That is why the Government are actively working with the sector, through our animal welfare strategy, to understand the pressures and support high welfare standards, and we are preparing to consult on proportionate steps to strengthen the system further.
We are also taking practical action to improve the rates of reunifying pets with their owners. Microchipping has been mandatory for a decade. Although uptake is high across the general dog population, it remains too low among stray dogs and too many records are out of date. We are working directly with database operators and welfare organisations to drive up compliance, improve data accuracy and give local authorities faster, easier access to the information they need. This is about getting more dogs home quickly and reducing the need for further intervention.
Alongside that, we are updating the Government’s guidance on stray dogs. It will set a much clearer expectation that euthanasia should only ever be considered in exceptional circumstances and as a last resort. That principle will be at the heart of the revised guidance that we will develop with councils and animal welfare groups.
We must also tackle the root cause. Too many dogs enter shelters because of preventable issues, including irresponsible ownership, lack of training, and poor breeding practices that result in serious health problems. That is why we are now taking forward the recommendations of the responsible dog ownership taskforce to strengthen enforcement, improve education and support better behaviour and training. At the same time, we are acting on low-welfare breeding, with plans to consult on tighter standards, better genetic health monitoring and measures to reduce the harmful practices that leave dogs and owners struggling.
Finally, I want to address the issue of euthanasia directly. It is of course a deeply sensitive matter. There will be cases in which an animal is suffering from severe illness, trauma or behavioural distress and euthanasia may, with clear veterinary advice, be the most humane option, but these decisions are never taken lightly. They will weigh heavily on the professionals involved and must never become routine or default practice. The Government are taking a clear and active approach. We are strengthening guidance, improving systems, supporting the sector and acting to prevent dogs from entering shelters in the first place. Our aim is simple: more dogs reunited, more dogs rehomed, and far fewer dogs reaching the point where euthanasia is even considered.
I am grateful to the hon. Members for Romford and for Strangford for raising these issues, which I will certainly take back to the Department and raise with the Minister responsible, and I thank the hon. Member for Romford for the specific points he raised in his speech. I look forward to continuing to work with colleagues across the House and with partners outside it to drive forward improvements in animal welfare.
Question put and agreed to.
Elections: First Past the Post
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Karl Turner (in the Chair)
On a housekeeping matter, I should say that it is terribly hot in Parliament today, so Members and officials are very welcome to remove their jackets.
Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the use of first-past-the-post in general and local elections.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner, and to be in an environment with such great air conditioning.
“I am committed to proportional representation…I think it would change the political culture. I don’t see how first past the post and the point-scoring inherent within it lifts Britain out of the doom loop it is in.”
Those words could have been spoken by any Liberal Democrat Member, in this Chamber or beyond, but they were not: it is a direct quote from the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham), who is believed to be the Prime Minister-elect.
The quote not only highlights the need for proportional representation but underscores the limitations of first past the post, which the new right hon. Member for Makerfield identifies as causing political instability. The Liberal Democrats and the Liberal party before us have called for fair votes for a century, and I am delighted that the advocacy for change has a new voice in Parliament in the newly elected right hon. Member for Makerfield. The view should not be controversial among his colleagues, either: more than two thirds of the Labour party membership have voted in favour of adopting a system of proportional representation for UK elections. I look forward immensely to prospective new leadership in the Labour party representing the views of its members and finally ensuring fair votes for all.
Of course, support for change is not confined to the Labour party or the Liberal Democrats, but shared across the House. In December 2024, my ten-minute rule Bill sought to introduce a system of proportional representation for parliamentary and local government elections. It passed in the main Chamber with cross-party support, including from 59 Labour MPs. It was a historic moment in the House, as it was the first time that the Commons had voted in favour of reforming our electoral system to bring in a fairer and more representative process. However, my Bill spent a year and a half awaiting its Second Reading before ultimately falling, because the Government failed to make time for it in the previous parliamentary Session.
Concerns are often raised to me that a change of electoral system will benefit Reform UK and other right-wing parties. Ironically, of the four Reform MPs who voted on my Bill, one voted against change while Reform’s leader, the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), abstained. In an era of multi-party politics, many parties are likely to benefit from a more proportional system. However, the Liberal Democrats are perhaps perfectly placed to neutrally make an argument in favour of the principles of proportional representation, as we received an almost exact proportion of votes to seats at the last general election. At last month’s local elections, the Liberal Democrats won every single seat on my local Richmond upon Thames council, but we won only 51.5% of the vote share. While the councillors will take every step possible to ensure that all residents are represented, the voting system produced results that disregarded 48.5% of voters in the borough. To repeat: the Liberal Democrats want electoral change on principle.
To address the increasing lack of public trust in politics, it is essential that the electorate know that their voices matter equally, wherever they are in the country. First past the post has not been fit for purpose for decades, but it has perhaps never been more outdated than it is now. The growth of the multi-party system in our politics means that some constituency seats are being seriously contested by five, six or even seven different parties. A system that encourages competition from just two parties leads only to tactical voting: more than ever before, people are voting against a party that they do not want to win rather than for their first preference. With a fairer electoral system and more democratic institutions, politicians and parties will have to be more focused on the things that really matter to people. We will have better public services and a fairer society as a result, and people will feel more engaged with politics if they feel that their voices are being heard and represented.
One of the leading arguments in favour of first past the post used to be that it produced stable Governments—I think that argument has fallen by the wayside. I could poke fun at former Conservative Governments, or even the current Labour Government, but it is important to highlight that the first-past-the-post system has proven to contribute to instability. This Government won 411 seats at the last general election with just 33.7% of the vote. The consequence of that has been clear: two thirds of people did not vote for a Labour Government, and, although the Government have made decisions that have not helped them, public opinion was against them from the start.
It is obvious that our electoral system needs to change. The man we believe will be Prime Minister is in favour of proportional representation and the Labour party is in favour of proportional representation. The House voted in favour of my Elections (Proportional Representation) Bill, and the last decade of governance has done nothing to convince me or the general public that first past the post produces stable governance. Our politics is not fit for purpose, and reform can begin with changing how we elect Members of Parliament to ensure that UK residents’ views are fairly represented in this place.
I understand that the Minister cannot commit to changing our electoral system, but I ask her whether that could be considered by a future Labour Government, or even the one set to continue under new leadership.
Euan Stainbank (Falkirk) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I thank the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) and congratulate the Richmond Liberal Democrats on their universal victory in last month’s Richmond upon Thames council elections. I declare an interest as a member of the all-party parliamentary group for fair elections.
Increasing political participation in a democracy is not just a nice thing to have; it is an imperative that all of us must focus on in the service of our constituents. In the years to come, I genuinely believe that it will be the difference between a politics that serves and engages all and one that continues to obscure decision making from communities, fuels rather than addresses discontent, and pushes reasonable people in the United Kingdom to lose faith in democracy and seek increasingly radical solutions.
Progress has been made to increase structural participation, with the Government bringing forward votes at 16 in the Representation of the People Bill, finally aligning the voter age in general elections to that of Scottish local and devolved elections. Among other measures, the Government are taking steps in the Bill to strengthen our democracy. However, I believe that there is an omission in it: an acknowledgement that serious questions are now being asked about how we elect people to this place.
Look at the general election results: turnout is decreasing. I may have won my mandate to this place by trebling my vote share in Falkirk, but that was possible only because my second-place opponent halved their vote share. The diminishing threshold for electing MPs and Governments demands a more pluralistic politics, or at least one that gives a greater number of people something to vote for instead of against.
First past the post structurally embeds negative political campaigning into how we participate in democracy; it enables parties, the media and the public to crystallise in our subconscious pretty early on that only two people have the chance to be the victor in a majority of seats in the country.
Gordon McKee (Glasgow South) (Lab)
Like my hon. Friend, I have constituents who use proportional representation to elect people to local government or the Scottish Parliament. Does he agree that we have to learn lessons from both the positive and the negative elements in those electoral systems?
Euan Stainbank
I completely agree that there is a wider point about the culture of politics, especially in how we should drive everybody in this place and local government to work together collaboratively, rather than pursuing the most populist option or blaming every problem on previous Governments. That has to be broader than simply reforming how we elect people to places, but I believe—I will bear this out later in my speech—that that is an essential first step.
In preparing this speech, I recalled bemused family members handing me SNP leaflet after SNP leaflet, desperately shoved through their letterbox, that warned them to vote SNP to avoid electing a Tory MP. I believe that even the most optimistic Scottish Conservative in Falkirk would have found that a pretty remote possibility in 2024, or at any other time. But when normal people who do not spend all their time obsessing about politics read that, it tends to turn them off a wee bit.
If we spend our entire time campaigning in general elections against a proposition and defining ourselves against a particular political party or perspective, we fail to lead our campaigns with our solutions to the problems the public face and want us to address. We diminish the opportunity for genuine scrutiny of our propositions, out of fear that the party or person we are running against will use it against us. It tends to encourage us to hide from debate, to reduce the utility and quality of public discussion and to disengage those people do not vote in our elections from that discussion.
It is irrelevant how those of us with the privilege of sitting here as Members of Parliament may personally view the politics of certain political parties; when they are voted for by millions of people and they see only a sliver of representation in Parliament, it closes people off from this place, and it feeds into toxic populist narratives that can be weaponised by those parties against those of us who sit as MPs. They are able to pit us as for the system and pit those excluded from it as outside of the system. It also allows them to avoid a proportionate level of scrutiny that reflects the amount of support they have in the country. A system that enables voters to see their views, and the views of those with similar political allegiances, proportionately reflected in this place will go a long way to addressing many of those issues.
My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South (Gordon McKee) touched on the more pluralistic electoral system used in local elections in Scotland and how it works to reflect views more broadly. Councillors of different political parties are often elected to serve the same people. Although that should culturally compel people to work together more effectively in communities, that is still a political challenge that we must address in tandem while we seek to replace the first-past-the-post system.
Populist opposition for opposition’s sake is still rife. The relentless assignation of a problem’s cause to a sole person or political party in a particular office at a particular time creates a reductive and inadequate political debate that would be better spent evaluating multiple proposed solutions to the problems that people rely on democratic structures to resolve—especially because, out there in the real world, there is a substantially greater consensus on what problems we face as a country than would be suggested by the tone of conversation in this place, in council chambers and in devolved assemblies when they are evaluating the solutions.
Whether the debate is on immigration, taxation or the defence of the realm in the House of Commons, or schools, bins or housing in Falkirk council chamber, a proportional system gives us a better chance to compel political parties to use their privileged elected positions to put forward competing solutions consistently. Our desire to strengthen democracy should lead us to create a crucible that enables multiple proposals to compete and for us to come to the best resolution. Our constituents would be better served by a voting system that empowers us all to do better than lazily harass from the sidelines those who happen to be in a particular office at any particular time.
A cultural change is clearly needed, which cannot be achieved by simply replacing the electoral system, but replacing first past the post is an essential step. However, and this could be a point of contention, if we are to replace first past the post, we have to acknowledge that there is not currently an elected mandate to do so. There is also no consensus on which system should replace it, but we can see in the country that the current system is no longer commanding adequate participation to sustain a healthy democracy. That is why I and the members of the all-party parliamentary group support a national commission on electoral reform to be set up by the Government. I encourage the Minister to put that in the Representation of the People Bill when it returns to the House.
Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I thank the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this important debate and the hon. Member for Falkirk (Euan Stainbank) for setting out so clearly that this is not an issue that sits on party lines. It is about the fundamental quality of our democracy and the fundamental question: are voters being adequately represented by our system? It is clear that the first-past-the-post system is broken. We have a problem with political trust in this country, and the voting system is part of that.
Why is first past the post broken? It is clearly fundamentally unfair. In general elections, it has generated a two-thirds majority on just one third of the vote; in some local elections, as the hon. Member for Richmond Park set out, it can generate a 100% majority on just half of the vote. That clearly leaves far too many voters unrepresented, in the sense that their voices are not heard by the people who are elected to hold power and who have influence. That is something we can and must fix, because what principle could be more basic in a democracy than the principle that everybody’s vote counts equally? If we believe in that fundamental principle, we have to recognise the urgency of moving to proportional representation.
First past the post is not just unfair because it leads to completely skewed results; it is also unpopular. According to the latest British social attitudes survey, only just over a third of voters now want to retain the system. Why is that? It is because they perceive how the system is poisoning our politics—how this binary, polarised, winner-takes-all politics means that we do not have the politics that people want.
Time after time voters say to me on the doorstep that they do not want the bear-pit politics they see at Prime Minister’s questions. They want a politics in which people with differing ideas sit around a table, have a decent, grown-up conversation, put all the good ideas into the pot and work out what is best for the country—a politics in which policies are motivated by the public interest, not by party political interests, and certainly not by the choices that so many seem to be forced into in our current system, in which policies are put forward on the basis that they will appeal to a certain small proportion of voters in a certain small proportion of seats at the next general election.
Such short-termism poisons and undermines our politics, which is why voters themselves recognise that it is time for change. A majority of people who support every single one of the five main parties in the UK now say that it is time to shift to proportional representation. A majority across all five parties is a degree of political consensus that we as politicians should listen to.
The next reason why first past the post does not work is that it does not work on its own terms. Back in the day, decades ago, it was argued that first past the post leads to stable government and stability in policy making, but that is completely belied by the experience of our politics, which we have seen year after year, week after week, day after day—indeed, this week. We must recognise that first past the post does not work in a multi-party political system. And we are in a multi-party political system: we are no longer in the old two-party system, and there is no going back to that. We need to recognise that, respond to what voters and the public want, and move forward.
All that is why proportional representation offers the solution. It is the antithesis to first past the post. Where first past the post is unfair, proportional representation is fair, because every vote counts equally. Where first past the post is unpopular, proportional representation is popular, because people recognise that it will ensure that their voices are heard. And it is effective, which is why it has been adopted across the vast majority of OECD countries. This country is an outlier in sticking with tired, old and broken first past the post.
Proportional representation yields politics, a political culture and governance that require people to talk to and listen to each other, and that require us to seek the common ground. Just last week, the House was celebrating the memory of Jo Cox. Her words—that there is more that unites us than divides us—should be a lodestar for all of us in politics, reminding us that we need to work to seek the common ground, emphasise where we can work together, and not be constantly putting ourselves in binary opposition to one another, creating polarisation and deepening our difficulties.
We can change our political culture by adopting proportional representation. It is not a silver bullet to transform every part of our politics, but it will certainly make a key difference.
Gordon McKee
The hon. Lady is making a very passionate speech, and she is certainly right that we have to change our political culture, but I would slightly challenge her. We have a slightly more proportional system in Scotland, but it has not led to a different culture in the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Government get elected on 30-odd per cent of the vote and pretend they speak for the entire nation, unilaterally. Does the hon. Lady agree that although proportional representation could be part of how we resolve the issue, a wider change in culture is required as well?
Karl Turner (in the Chair)
Order. Interventions need to be a bit shorter. Thank you.
Dr Chowns
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that changing the voting system will not in itself transform our political culture. We need to do many other things, including get big money and disinformation out of politics, but changing our voting system is a key plank of that.
I recognise that, as the hon. Member for Falkirk mentioned, the Labour party does not feel that it currently has a manifesto mandate to implement proportional representation—I am deeply saddened by that—but it has a manifesto mandate to take strong action to tackle the breakdown of trust in our politics. As a Green, I would like there to be no more elections under first past the post in the UK, but it would be hugely dangerous to go into the next general election under that system, because we face the very real prospect of a Government being elected with a huge majority of MPs and a small minority of votes. That should concentrate the minds of everyone in this Chamber.
Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)
This is quite a serious point. There are people arguing for PR to be introduced before the next general election, for the reason the hon. Lady outlined, but she must accept, as a democrat, that we cannot change the electoral system because we are worried about a certain outcome. We have to look at the bigger picture, take our time and do it right.
Dr Chowns
All the arguments I have made in the last five minutes have been about the systemic, principled reasons for change; they are not views about one particular party. I will be absolutely clear that I hugely fear the prospect of a Reform Government, and I will do everything I can to stop that. It would be hugely dangerous for this country. But the argument for proportional representation is about the representation of everybody, including people with whose views I completely disagree. If they have a degree of support in the country, they should be represented in proportion to that. The point is that under a proportional system, those of us who want to work together for the common good of the country would be able to do so.
The principle of proportional representation is core to the Green party’s DNA. I have campaigned for it for many years, and I welcome the fact that so many in Labour and other parties campaign for it, too. But there are specific things that this Government can do right now. There is a cross-party call for a national commission on electoral reform, which the Government could take forward today. That would enable us to have a national conversation about how to make our democracy genuinely work for everybody, involving citizens’ voices and the voices of those with expertise, who can bring ideas from international counterparts.
We must have that conversation. We cannot stay asleep at the wheel, drifting into ever-more polarised politics, ever-less representation and ever-poorer electoral systems that do not serve the fundamental principle of democracy that we should all hold dear: every vote should count equally.
Several hon. Members rose—
Karl Turner (in the Chair)
Order. I am going to impose an informal five-minute limit on speeches.
Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I apologise for giving you late notice of my intention to speak. I start by acknowledging that although I am not a fan of PR, it is right that all of us MPs do a great job representing every one of our constituents, whether they voted for us or not.
In Scotland, we have three elections over each five-year period. Two of them use PR and one, the general election, uses first past the post. I want to talk about the single transferable vote system that we use for local authority elections in Scotland, and my lived experience of it as a councillor. I was elected via the STV system back in 2017. I came second out of three councillors who were elected, and was elected thanks to transfers from Green voters. Even though some transfers also came from elsewhere, it was the Green voters who got me across the line, so I always felt an obligation to make sure that those few people were very well represented.
I worked alongside two Conservatives in the ward over that three-year period. The council had 63 councillors in total. An SNP-led administration was formed, supported by Labour in a coalition, but it tended to be Green votes that got things across the line, so those three parties tended to work together. I have to say that the Greens back then were a bit more sensible than they sometimes are today. I hope the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Dr Chowns) is not offended by that.
I must pay tribute to my ward colleague Jason Rust, who is still a councillor in the Colinton, Oxgangs and Fairmilehead ward. He has been there for a long time and he is a fantastic, hard-working councillor—despite being a Tory.
In 2022, I stood for re-election, and on that occasion I managed to come first under the STV system, which was a huge privilege and honour. The SNP managed to take one of the Conservative seats. The SNP candidates’ tricky strategy was that they went around looking for people who were voting for me and asked whether they would give them their second votes. I thought that was quite sneaky, but it got the party across the line. That is evidence that PR leads to a different way of campaigning, in that people look for alignment between parties during the election, not just afterwards.
The formation of the council was a bit trickier in 2022: 63 councillors were elected, and only 13 were Labour councillors. However, Labour managed to run the city, and is still running it, as a minority administration—if my memory serves me right, there are now 12 Labour councillors out of 63—largely because, given the tensions among the other parties, they find ways to support us from time to time. Again, that is a different kind of politics.
I convened the transport committee from ’22 up until I was unexpectedly elected as an MP. On my committee were two Labour, two Green, two Tory, two Lib Dem and three SNP councillors, all elected via the STV system. Each report we had to pass meant creating an individual coalition of votes. By and large, that meant that the other parties, if they were to support my proposals to the committee, wanted something added or taken away.
Reflecting on that after two years, I would say that every deal I did with the other parties made what we were proposing better. Ultimately, I was elected only by a minority of people, even in the STV system; the other councillors were elected by people as well, and it was important that their views were taken on board. The outcome was fairer, and it created a better kind of politics in the council. I am not saying that there were not disagreements—if I am honest, there was sometimes was quite bad behaviour from councillors—but PR works in Scotland.
The results in England show the brutal way in which first past the post treats council elections—it looked like cavemen trying to start politics up and get democracy working. Some of the results were anomalous, and we have to reflect on that.
PR for general elections would have to come via a manifesto commitment and a referendum—a manifesto commitment would not be enough. I support the call for a national commission, but I do not think there is any appetite among the public for another referendum on anything. The APPG for fair elections recently had a meeting with John Curtice. He said there was a consensus that the only way to move the UK to PR in a general election would be if a coalition was formed and one of the partners demanded PR in return for the stability of the coalition. Of course, we saw that in the past, in the alternative vote referendum, which I think it is fair to say was disastrous. We heard the other day that the Lib Dems held up the submarine-building programme. The failure to deliver PR back then is a real issue, and we should reflect on it.
Although there is a huge hurdle to installing PR for general elections, we could move much faster on council elections in England. We could consult and then deliver. I have two final points—
Karl Turner (in the Chair)
Order. Quickly, if you do not mind. We have an informal five-minute limit.
Dr Arthur
I apologise; I have not been looking at the clock.
First, we are the only country in Europe that uses first past the post, and we should reflect on why that is. Secondly, in Scotland we use the d’Hondt—or Jefferson—system for PR for the second votes. Nobody really understands how that works, and we have to be careful about that. We have to be able to communicate how the result has been reached. I apologise for overrunning, Mr Turner.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I thank the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney).
I will shed some light from a constituency that operates PR for local government and Northern Ireland Assembly elections. The hon. Lady—I spoke to her already—and I will have slightly different opinions on this matter, but I respect her greatly. Indeed, I respect all my colleagues on the Opposition Benches—[Interruption.] And on the Government Benches, by the way—sorry, but I corrected myself quickly. We may have differences of opinion, but there are many more things that we agree on.
I will put forward the point of view from Northern Ireland. I say gently and respectfully to the House that the DUP and, indeed, the people of Northern Ireland speak on this matter with a unique form of authority. We are not better than anybody else; it is just that we have done this for a great number of years. We do not just look at alternative voting systems in theory or on academic balance sheets. Through the single transferable vote, we live it, operate within it and contest it in every single local government mandate and Northern Ireland Assembly election. STV is the law of the land.
First, I want to look at the undisputed champion of stability—forgive me, those close to me who may not agree with this—the first-past-the-post system used for our UK general elections. First past the post delivers what the British public value above almost all else in Governments: clarity, accountability and a direct, inseverable link between a Member of Parliament and their constituents. When the voters of Strangford sent me here, they knew exactly who was responsible for standing up for local schools, roads, hospitals and many other issues—farming, fishing and immigration. There is no hiding behind a party list. There is no passing the buck to three or four regional members. The buck stops with the constituency MP.
For the record, whenever I have been elected as an MP—that has been five times—I have always said in my election speech that I thank everybody who voted for me and those who did not vote for me, because I am still their MP and I will work for everybody to the fullest of my ability. I fought seven council elections and five Assembly elections, including for the Forum for Political Dialogue. This is my 41st year as an elected representative; it has been a long time. I started with hair and now I have none, so maybe that is the reason—I do not know.
First past the post provides a clear outcome. It allows the electorate to decisively choose a Government or throw one out. I believe that it prevents the sort of backroom political horse-trading we see perpetuated across Europe, where coalitions are cobbled together weeks after an election has finished, rendering the manifestos that parties fought on and the public voted for completely meaningless. I point Members towards the Republic of Ireland, where partnership or coalition Governments are cobbled together each and every time. In doing so, parties have to water down what they set out to the electorate in their manifestos.
Let us contrast first past the post with our experience back home in Northern Ireland. We use PR via STV for councils and the Assembly. Although STV was introduced as a tool to ensure cross-community representation in a deeply divided society, let us be honest about its practical realities. First, it is complex. Sometimes it is confusing. Every election shows that many people, no matter how many times they are told how the PR system works, still spoil their votes by marking six or seven Xs, or by writing one, two, three, four, five and six in different columns. Someone might put ones, twos or even threes for everybody; the PR system is confusing for them.
STV also fundamentally dilutes the democratic mandate. Counting goes on for days. Fractional transfers of votes decide who wins the final seats. Candidates with a minuscule share of first-preference votes can end up being elected on the 10th or 11th count, not because they were anybody’s first choice but because they were the least disliked one. A candidate someone disliked the most could still be elected, even though they did not want them to be.
I am very conscious of time. First past the post has preserved the integrity of this Parliament for centuries. It ensures that Governments are robust and that the Union remains anchored by a strong, understandable and decisive democratic process. We must never trade a system of proven stability and direct accountability for one of permanent compromise, fractured local representation and endless coalition haggling. I strongly urge the House to reject this proposal—although, of course, we will not vote on it—and to maintain the strength of first past the post, the best system there is. Let us continue with it.
Mr Tom Morrison (Cheadle) (LD)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this important debate. Some months ago, I was in this room on the International Day of Democracy, and the concerns I raised then matter now more than ever. I have not seen a political discourse that is so polarised as it is today. Tensions have risen, divisions are deepening, and the public is losing faith in our democracy.
I am proud that my constituency is a diverse community, bustling with local campaign groups and organisations. I love my work with those groups, building strong relations across all faiths, ages, ethnic groups and with people from all political backgrounds. However, I am not blind to the fact that more people voted for other candidates in the last general election than voted for me.
The first-past-the-post system is a brutal way to determine the future of our country. It often creates a situation where winning candidates need only a small section of a community to back them, leaving many votes pointlessly cast and making some constituencies more important for determining the direction of our country than others. First past the post distorts our democracy leaving many unrepresented, unheard and disillusioned. It creates a winner-takes-all system that incentivises parties to work against each other and encourages those who want to divide our communities rather than unite them.
We are at a crucial moment where progress can be made and where we can build a stronger, cohesive community. We have to make the right choice; we have to make proportional representation the default. We must strengthen our democracy and make people feel seen and heard. We must empower local people to shape their societies and build a politics that works for them. We must encourage politicians to work in collaboration. There will always be disagreements—that needs to be encouraged—but finding common ground and moving forward is the only way we can solve the huge questions that our country faces.
The other option is to do nothing and carry on as we are, watching our politics become even more fractured and polarised. We could carry on with a system where parties chase the votes that will make them the winner and the others the losers, and where bad-faith actors are encouraged to divide our communities in an effort to secure the win. I hope that all Members in this room know which option is the right one and what the right path for our country is.
We need proportional representation for a healthier, engaged and united society. This Government have made progress, but more needs to be done. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 was an opportunity for the Government to enact true electoral reform for local elections, but they chose not to do that. We must choose proportional representation as our default electoral system. I ask that the Minister reflects on the arguments made today and makes the right choice.
Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this important and urgent debate.
We have a crisis of trust in our democracy. Under first past the post, 70% of votes do not actually count. In a safe seat any extra votes cast for the winning candidate are effectively pointless, as are any votes cast for the other candidates. It is no wonder that so much of the electorate feel that they have no real voice or influence. We may be told that electoral reform is not a doorstep issue, but I wonder how many colleagues here have heard constituents say, “I am so pleased that I finally voted for somebody who won. I feel like I now personally have a representative in Westminster.”
At the last general election, the current Government got 30% of the vote, 60% of the seats and they now have 100% of the power. How can that be fair? In effect, that means that 70% of votes have no power. As a Lib Dem who regularly traipses through the opposite voting Lobby to the Government, I know how that feels.
Looking forward, I am even more worried about the next general election. The system that we have now was essentially designed for a two-party system and we now have seats being fought by five, six or even more viable parties. If we combine that with declining voter turnout, the results of the next general election could look like a random number generator. I cannot see that that will do anything to enhance trust in our democratic system.
First past the post encourages parties to focus their policies on core marginal seats that they want to influence. That means the kind of policies they present and whether they suit a constituency will depend largely on the postcode and political history of that constituency. As other colleagues have mentioned, the winner-takes-all system creates a similar adversarial tone in our politics. We only have to look at today’s Prime Minister’s questions where there seemed to be a special amount of nastiness from the Leader of the Opposition. Mr Speaker, not in connection with that, reminded us generally that the way we conduct ourselves here sets the tone for public discourse across the whole of the country. We lead by example, and at the moment that example is not good.
There is a deeper argument to be made about power and agency. We hear from so many parts of the country that communities feel left behind, voiceless and unrepresented. That voicelessness—that powerlessness—is creating fertile ground for people and parties who come along promising to give back control, whether or not they actually mean it. That, frankly, terrifies me, but I want to keep this a clean discussion about voting systems. We are not trying to create a system that favours one party or another; we want a genuinely democratic system.
On the systems used in different elections, it was welcome that the Government reintroduced supplementary vote for mayoral and police and crime commissioner elections. It corrected a deliberate act of Conservative vandalism in the Elections Act 2022, but it is still not proportional representation. I wish the Government had gone further and introduced alternative vote for those single-position elections.
The proof is in the result. In last year’s mayoral elections, the Mayor of the West of England won with just 25% of the vote. That is clearly not democracy. If first past the post is not fit for purpose in mayoral elections, the Government should be honest and admit that it is not fit for purpose anywhere.
I have some specific asks. We should move from first past the post to a form of PR, and I would love that to happen in a rigorous, transparent and democratic way, starting as we mean to go on, with a citizens’ assembly, fully selected by sortition, and the national commission on electoral reform serving as its secretariat. It should be fully livestreamed and available to anybody who wants to watch it. That would help hit the reset button on our democracy and restore faith that the Government truly represent the will of the people.
Karl Turner (in the Chair)
Order. Before I move on to the next speaker, can I just say something about housekeeping? If a right hon. or hon. Member intends to mention another Member of this House—specifically, the leader of His Majesty’s loyal Opposition—they should inform that Member. I am sure it was done inadvertently, but I say that just in case other Members wish to make mention of it.
Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this important debate.
Our politics is not fit for purpose and is not working for people up and down the country. It is becoming increasingly adversarial and divisive. The first-past-the-post system actively encourages parties not to work together, which allows the Government to avoid accountability and ignore the voices of the people who put them into Parliament. I have heard from so many of my constituents in Wokingham who are sick of feeling ignored by politics in Westminster and feel that the system—and, therefore, the Government—does not work for them. People in Wokingham and across the country want to know that they will be represented in Parliament by somebody they have an affinity with, and they want their vote to have counted.
As a very young teenager, still at school and unable to vote, I witnessed the general election of February 1974. I wanted the Liberals to win. They increased their vote to 18%, and their seats in the House of Commons increased from eight to 14. If the result had been proportional, they should have had 110 Members, and it would have been a properly balanced Parliament, which I am sure would have dealt with the issues of the day better than the Wilson and Callaghan Governments. I saw that as a massive injustice, and it helped to drive my interest in politics.
My Lib Dem colleagues and I have long called for fair votes through proportional representation. As a party, we have spearheaded the campaign for electoral reform in Parliament. Electoral reform is by no means a panacea for this country’s problems, but a much better, more democratic electoral system is a fundamental step towards politicians representing the country properly. That is why this Government must replace the first-past-the-post system with proportional representation for both general and local elections in England.
Democracy can be revived by strengthening our democratic institutions and by taking the big money out of politics. The Government need to cap donations to political parties and stop foreign oligarchs and crypto billionaires interfering in our democracy. How can anyone think that a £5 million gift with no strings attached, or whatever the reason for the gift is, can be nothing to do with anyone except the recipient? These attitudes in our politics are very dangerous.
Politicians should represent and be accountable to their constituents first and foremost—not some millionaire, or even billionaire, who may or may not pay UK taxes. Politicians cannot afford to take voters for granted as successive Labour and Conservative Governments have. We need to repair the damage of years of sleaze, cronyism and rule-breaking and end the era of neglect. We need a political system with fair representation that makes politics work for all our constituents again.
Susan Murray (Mid Dunbartonshire) (LD)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairship, Mr Turner. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this debate. The House of Commons Library has called the 2024 general election the least proportional election in British history. Labour won 411 seats out of 650—almost two thirds of the Commons—on a third of the vote. The problem is not that a party can win power; the problem is that first past the post inflates that power beyond what the public voted for. A system that turns one third of the votes into two thirds of the power and a massive majority is not representing the public’s choice; it is warping it. As we have all seen, it allows wildly unpopular policies to be forced through with little pushback.
I may not agree with Reform, but they came third on vote share with around 14% and won just five seats. The Greens won roughly 7% and returned only four seats. The truth is that my own party, the Liberal Democrats, took 72 seats on around 12% of the vote. The system rewarded us where our support was concentrated. That means that under first past the post, where you live decides whether or not your vote counts. We have all been told that this gives us a strong and stable Government. Clearly, that is not true. A system that hands enormous power to one party on a minority of the vote does not produce consistency; it produces lurches. One Government builds solutions; the next tears them down and creates their own.
I represent the Scottish seat of Mid Dunbartonshire. Scotland shows both how far reform can take us and why it must go further. The Scottish Parliament has used a form of proportional representation since its creation in 1999. Of its 129 Members, 73 are elected to represent 73 constituencies and 56 from regional lists using the D’Hondt system. That is a complicated system of proportional representation that very few voters fully understand. Last month at the Scottish elections, the SNP won 58 seats and was the party with the highest number of seats. Following a deal with the Scottish Green party, which had 15 seats, the Scottish Government are calling for the UK Government to agree to a second independence referendum. However, taken together, pro-independence parties now hold 73 of the 129 seats on around 43% of the vote.
Euan Stainbank
Does the hon. Member that if we are to move to an alternative system in Westminster, parties should agree not to game the system, as the Scottish Greens do when they fail to stand in constituencies such as Strathkelvin and Bearsden or Falkirk West and focus their campaigning on the regional seats, which leads to the iniquitous outcome of the 2026 Scottish parliamentary elections that I think she is suggesting?
Susan Murray
What we need to aim for is a system where our constituents feel properly represented and that their vote counts.
The parties that want Scotland to remain in the United Kingdom won a majority of the votes at 56.7%, but a minority of the seats. As a litmus test, that result shows little change from the result of the 2014 independence referendum, which rejected independence by 55% to 44%. The votes cast in the 2026 Scottish election are not a mandate for a second independence referendum, despite what the First Minister might have us believe. That clearly demonstrates why it is so important that our democracy reflects voter intention. Instead, the case for independence has been thrust back to the centre of Scottish politics, taking attention away from the real issues such as our broken schools and hospitals.
In 2022, Labour’s own conference voted for a proportional system. Its own national policy forum has recognised that the flaws in the current voting system contribute to the distrust and alienation that we see in politics, and it is widely acknowledged that we need to restore trust in politics. I ask the Government, at the very least, to agree to examine the system seriously, including how we elect Members and how a fairer system could be introduced. People should be able to use their vote to vote for something, not against something. Evey vote should carry the same weight, wherever it is cast and whoever it is cast for, and the only way we can achieve that is proportional representation.
Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this debate, for her passionate opening remarks and for her courage and nobility in potentially being willing to sacrifice the North Korean-esque majorities that our party achieved in the recent local elections.
I fear that, given the heat, there would be frayed tempers if I made my speech about the relative merits or otherwise of alternatives to first past the post. Instead, I shall make the case for how change could make a major contribution to fixing our politics, because so much of what is holding our country back is one party or another—it does not really matter which one—having undiluted power, and not having other parties in government to be the voice of conscience, alternative ideas and challenge.
That is one of the reasons why we have yet to make progress on social care, despite innumerable reviews and commissions on how we should resolve that very challenging issue. As other hon. Members have said, first past the post has not succeeded in delivering political stability over the last decade, because we have had seven Prime Ministers in 10 years. We also see the phenomenon manifesting in other ways: stop-start decisions on transport or various Governments enthusiastically advocating for different devolution models, rather than as many of us as possible uniting on one.
When researching for this debate, I wondered what fuels our apparent fear of moving away from first past the post. Nearly all the other countries in the world that have that voting system are former parts of the British empire. That shows a positive thing about Britain in the sense that the empire and its legacy have helped to introduce democracy, or at least forms of it, to large parts of the world. However, some former members of the empire have found themselves able to make progress and move on. Australia and New Zealand are two countries that we greatly admire, and they have decided to ditch first past the post in favour of something else.
In the meantime, we have to ask ourselves whether proportional representation is really so bad. We seem to think it is not in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so what is it about introducing a proportional voting system that has England trembling in fear and terror at the very idea? It is almost as if we think civilisation would end if England were to embrace some of these concepts. We are already seeing how parties can work together when there are fractured election results, as recent English council elections have shown that we have the capability to have multi-party negotiations and multi-party local governments. We should embrace that maturity and hope to have it in this place one day as well.
The current Prime Minister’s love of first past the post was shown in a remarkably clear answer when I asked him recently whether he thought it can still deliver strong and stable government. He gave me a three-word answer: “Yes, I do.” I suppose it remains to be seen whether the next Prime Minister, whoever they may be, will agree with him.
Looking to the future, as well as the prospect of a new Prime Minister and perhaps a new way of thinking on these topics, we do not need to debate which voting system to choose to replace first past the post. That is not the next best step; a national commission for electoral reform could properly look at the pros and cons of the options and think through the matter. We saw the support for that in the 143 signatories to an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill tabled by the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel): 81 Labour signatures, 48 from the Liberal Democrats and the rest from many other parties, though interestingly none from Reform UK, despite its past commitment to proportional representation. That might be another issue where it finds itself embracing establishment thinking, despite telling us that it is the radical saviour of our future.
For now, it is over to the Labour party, which is commanding a remarkable 18% support in opinion polls, to determine our future. [Interruption.] That is the polling average, I say to the hon. Gentleman speaking from a sedentary position. We should only look at polling averages, never individual ones. I conclude with a direct appeal to whoever is the next Prime Minister. There seems to be a lot of reporting on who that is likely to be but, as I have not notified that individual, I shall avoid naming them.
Let us hope that the expectation and hype around the possible next Prime Minister are justified, because this is about changing our politics for the better and for good. It is about embracing the most meaningful change for transforming our political culture: proportional representation. We need that for social care, political stability and empowering our region.
Karl Turner (in the Chair)
Thank you for the entertaining contribution, Mr Morrison.
Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Turner. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) on securing this vital debate. Like many colleagues, we have both been vocal, proud advocates for political reform. This debate builds on the important work of my hon. Friend in the previous session, when she won a vote on the Second Reading of her Bill to bring PR to elections for national and local government in England. That was a clear sign that the demand for reform exists across the House and continues to grow.
In her excellent opening remarks, my hon. Friend mentioned the newly re-elected right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) whom I have told I would mention. He is not alone in his support for proportional representation. The right hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell), the deputy leader of the Labour party, has said that she has always supported electoral reform. From a different side of the political spectrum, the Conservative London Assembly member Emma Best has said her party should start thinking seriously about proportional representation. She speaks compellingly, making a strong Conservative argument for PR.
When voices across the political spectrum are saying the same, the Government should listen. I am proud to sit as vice-chair for the all-party parliamentary group for fair elections, which is the largest APPG and shows clear cross-party support for replacing first past the post with a proportional system. It is good to see several members of the APPG here today. We have heard from a number of them, so I will reflect on some of their comments. My fellow vice-chair, the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Dr Chowns), reminded us that PR is fair. We are in a multi-party political system and first past the post, which was set up for two parties, is no longer fit for purpose.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur) talked in detail about his experience on the city council, and how PR in Scotland works. My constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mr Morrison), said that despite being elected on a minority of votes, he represents well his whole community. That is an urgent issue, to ensure that people have trust in our system. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) talked about how the voting system shapes the way we campaign, focusing on a core number of marginal seats and a group of voters in them. My hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) reminded us that PR is not a panacea—he is absolutely right to do so—but it is a fundamental step in the right direction towards a fairer, better system.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dunbartonshire (Susan Murray) reminded us how PR shapes how we campaign and what we choose to do and not do with our resources. My hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover)—while doing an impression of my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle—gave us examples from overseas and of parties working together in local government. He also reminded us that sorting out the voting system would better enable us to sort out our country.
I know that objections are made to reform. We are told that PR means weaker coalitions, constant instability or Members who answer to a party list rather than the people they serve. To those who have those concerns, I point to the weakness, instability and chaos, frankly, that we have seen over the past decade. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made his case, as he often does; he had a very good go at making arguments that I disagree with, but I am sorry to say that he failed to convince me on this occasion. Seven Prime Ministers in 10 years is not what a well-functioning system looks like.
Our current system is failing, and we have such a great opportunity to push forwards and make positive reforms. Some may look at each change of Prime Minister as a story about one person, one party or one bad week in Westminster, but that just does not cut it. When a pattern repeats again and again, it stops being about individual issues, personalities or failures and starts reflecting the system that produces them. First past the post manufactures large majorities out of modest vote shares, and those majorities are built on such shallow foundations that they can collapse as quickly as they were built. Instability is not a glitch in our multi-party system; it is a feature of it.
There are various forms of PR. I will not try your patience, Mr Turner, by ranking them in order of my preference—I will save that for the Lib Dem conference—but, suffice to say, the Liberal Democrats support the single transferrable vote. It keeps a strong direct link between Members and the place they represent. Constituents have local MPs to turn to, but they would have a real hand in choosing them. That is the price of different voting systems.
Mark Sewards (Leeds South West and Morley) (Lab)
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way, especially as she is my friend on the armed forces parliamentary scheme. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I am sorry I was not here at the beginning of the debate; I was at a really important statement on Nottingham maternity services in the main Chamber. Does the hon. Lady not agree that, even if some commission came forward and said that STV was absolutely the way to go and that we should adopt it in future, this country should adopt it only if the electorate validates that through a general election where a majority of the parties making that promise win a majority in Parliament, or through a referendum?
Lisa Smart
I am not personally a fan of a referendum. They can be quite divisive and they return one of two answers, so I would not support one. The Liberal Democrats have had a fairer voting system in our manifesto since the foundation of our party. I believe that the current Government, whose party the hon. Member is a member of, have put forward some other suggestions that were not in their manifesto in 2024, so it is possible for situations to change. It is possible for the world to move on, and for people of good will to work together for the betterment of our country.
Single transferrable votes for the House and for local councillors in England would mean that communities would not be written off because they were a safe seat, and nobody would feel that their vote was wasted. We could also introduce more nuance into a debate than can be delivered via the medium of bar chart. Consider the previous general election: the Labour party won about two thirds of the seats in the House on roughly one third of the vote. A system that can hand near-total control of the Commons to a party that two in three voters did not vote for cannot honestly claim to speak for the country.
The Liberal Democrats have argued for fair votes for decades, because a democracy in which every vote counts is a better democracy. I do not want to spend my time today just listing what is broken, because the more important point is that we have in front of us a genuine opportunity to put it right. The appetite for reform is no longer confined to the Liberal Democrat Benches; it is growing across the House and across the country. We need to fix our politics so that we can fix our country. An amended Representation of the People Bill could be the vehicle to deliver it and to give this country a voting system worthy of the people it serves. I hope the Minister will tell us today that the Government are ready to take that chance.
Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I genuinely thank the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this debate on our voting system. She and I do not always agree. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that we more often than not disagree vocally, although in good spirit, I hope. Although I do not share her views on electoral reform, I recognise and respect the sincerity with which she holds them. Her persistence in bringing the issue before the House reflects her commitment to the causes that she champions. She beat me in another forum on Times Radio’s “It’s a Constituency Knockout” for the good people of Richmond Park. And I lost a battle on her private Member’s Bill, but we will see about round three.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) is my only ally in this debate, barring what the Minister might say. I am happy to have him as an ally, because he is one of the most respectful Members of this House. He is a braver man than me, as he is surrounded by my old Bill Committee adversaries.
We can all agree on one thing, though: electoral systems shape our politics. It is important that the method we use for catapulting representatives into high office is robust and secure, easily understood by voters, and provides strong local accountability. I believe, as my party has always believed, that the first-past-the-post system achieves that better than any other.
I do not often pay compliments to my Liberal Democrat colleagues, so they are in for a shock this afternoon, but one of their skills is mobilising voters to go to the polls. I have seen that myself on my home patch, much to my and my councillors’ annoyance. One of the clearest criticisms of first past the post is the impact that it has on eroding voter confidence in the electoral system and therefore suppressing turnout. However, I do not believe that that is the case. Voter turnout has been on the decline for generations, but not consistently. It is fair to say that we are unlikely to see the levels of the 80% turnouts of the 1940s and 1950s. Growing voter apathy is a problem, but I do not think that the electoral system is to blame per se. The blame is with us as politicians—all of us. I sincerely believe that if we inspire, we make others aspire. We can all raise our game in this House and as political parties.
I find it slightly bizarre to keep revisiting a debate that the British public have made clear they do not support. First past the post has proven to be the fairest and most effective way to elect representatives, ensuring clear accountability, stable governance—I will come back to that—and a direct link between elected officials and their constituents. We want a system that forms a single alternative Government rather than the more fragmented alternative often seen under proportional representation systems. I think that is not just a theoretical point.
In countries where proportional representation is used, we can see the consequences of fragmentation very clearly. For example, in Belgium, proportional representation has contributed to fragmented Parliaments and lengthy coalition negotiations where no single party is able to present itself clearly as a Government in waiting. Clarity of outcome is an important feature in our democratic system.
As Members of Parliament, first and foremost our roles are to represent our constituents and our constituencies here in Parliament. First past the post creates a clear and direct link between Members of Parliament and the people we represent. It provides the voter with clarity over who represents them, whose surgery they can go to, who they can hold to account and, importantly, who they can remove at a general election. Such clarity is a democratic strength and a crucial part of maintaining voter trust.
Why would we adopt a system that weakens the direct link between voters and their representatives? Proportional voting systems where members are elected from long party lists make that relationship less direct and less clear. That direct constituency link is not only a practical strength of the system, but part of a much longer tradition in our parliamentary democracy. I think many advocates for an alternative voting system overlook the historical significance of first past the post. It has been in place since medieval England, and it is the bedrock of our democracy. Changing the way we elect Members of this House is not a minor administrative matter. It is not a decision that should be taken lightly, nor should it be driven by dissatisfaction with a particular electoral outcome.
Olly Glover
Given the hon. Gentleman’s faith in the first-past-the-post system, does he have any theories as to why turnout in our elections tends to be significantly lower than in comparable western European countries?
Paul Holmes
I believe I have already addressed that point: it is because of us, as politicians. I absolutely agree with many of the comments that Members across the House have made today about trust in politicians and the level of discourse, but we need to improve our game. I do not believe that there is a direct correlation between the voting system and turnouts at general elections; I genuinely think that it is normally about whether a voter feels good or not. If the hon. Gentleman’s only issue is voter turnouts and he wants to have a conversation about compulsory voting, then I am up for that debate, but I do not believe that we should move to another system without looking at whether voting should be compulsory or by choice.
It is worth recalling, as I lightly touched on, that the British public have previously been asked whether they wish to move away from the existing voting system for Westminster elections. That was in 2011, and it was a condition of the Liberal Democrats being in government from 2010 to 2015. A clear majority voted to retain first past the post rather than adopt an alternative system. In fact, only 2% of local counting areas wanted rid of first past the post.
Lisa Smart
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the alternative vote is a preferential voting system, not a proportional system?
Paul Holmes
Absolutely, and we can talk about that, but that was the system that the Liberal Democrats proposed in that referendum, and they lost the argument when they were in government. When they were last in government, they put a question on reforming the voting system to the country and it was resoundingly rejected. I agree with the hon. Lady; I am not in favour of referendums a lot of the time. But I believe that we have put the issue of reforming our voting system to bed for the foreseeable future—that is, unless a Government come in with a manifesto commitment to change the voting system, in which case we can have that discussion, even though my party would still oppose it.
It is worth saying that 2% of local counting areas voted against the last referendum. I struggle to see why we would reopen a question on which the public have already expressed a clear preference. That, in my view, is the crux of the matter. This debate is not fundamentally about voter understanding or participation; it is about dissatisfaction with how support for certain parties translates into seats under the current system.
Many Members make the case that we should switch to a proportional representation system in order to follow the example of other major democratic nations. I do not accept that. This country has consistently delivered stable Governments—which is slightly ironic, given the last week or so. I also remind Members of the comments made in previous contributions: we vote for Members of Parliament, not for Prime Ministers. That is the key point about the system in our country. The right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) has been spoken of as the Prime Minister-elect. We do not have that. We elect Members of Parliament, and the party that has the most MPs forms a Government. If they do not have a majority, they try to form a coalition—that has happened in recent history. We do not vote for Prime Ministers. That is why I do not think that argument pushes the case forward for proportional representation.
This country has consistently delivered stable Governments, in contrast to a number of European systems, which rely on complex coalition arrangements. That is not to suggest that we need to compare systems like that to justify our own, but it is clear that first past the post prevents smaller and more extreme parties from having undue influence, which is a respected element of the UK’s democracy. I refer Members to some of the parties elected to the Israeli Parliament, which has a proportional representational system.
In conclusion, first past the post is not a perfect system, but it is a proven one. It delivers a clear link between constituents and their representatives. It provides voters with identifiable accountability, and it ensures that Governments are formed with a clear mandate from the electorate. I utterly respect the case made by the hon. Member for Richmond Park, and I utterly respect the fact that we are likely to see calls for electoral reform in a future Liberal Democrat manifesto, but I dearly hope the voters reject that option. For the reasons I have set out, I believe first past the post is the system to form strong and stable Governments in the United Kingdom.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Samantha Dixon)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I thank the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for calling the debate, and all hon. Members who have contributed to it. The Government recognise the strength of feeling expressed today regarding our voting system, which after all sits at the heart of our democracy. We welcome open and constructive debate on the voting systems we use and their effectiveness, whether by long-standing Members or more recently elected Members. As set out in our manifesto and our strategy for modern and secure elections, the Government believe that strengthening our democracy, upholding the integrity of elections and encouraging voter participation are key priorities and fundamental responsibilities for Government.
Our Representation of the People Bill, which is currently before Parliament, contains a range of measures that will deliver on those commitments. As the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) mentioned, that includes protecting elections against foreign interference. It also means moving towards more automated voter registration, strengthening the resilience of our electoral processes and opening up democratic participation for the next generation by removing barriers to increased participation. Those are substantial electoral reforms, and the Bill represents the boldest and most ambitious change to our democracy for decades. It will help to keep our elections secure, build public trust and encourage more people across society to engage and participate.
Turning to the specific matter of this debate, the Government recognise that different voting systems can be better suited to different types of polls and elections. We believe that the first-past-the-post system works where people are elected to a body, such as a council or Parliament, where there is a mix of representatives from different parties and platforms. Although it is not perfect, the first-past-the-post system provides a robust, efficient and secure way of electing those representatives. It provides for strong and clear local accountability, ensuring a direct link between elected representatives and local constituents, as so ably demonstrated—and dare I say, embodied—by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). The first-past-the-post system is also well understood by voters, and as such we do not want to make any changes just for the sake of it. At present, therefore, the Government have no plans to change the electoral system for UK parliamentary elections or local council elections in England.
For single-person executive positions, such as mayors or police and crime commissioners, the same reasoning does not apply, as they exercise their powers as individuals. We therefore believe it is appropriate to use a different voting system—the supplementary vote system—which allows voters to express a first and second preference, and which requires the winning candidate to receive the majority of the votes counted.
Sarah Olney
In this place, we have recently changed the voting system for metropolitan mayors. Can the Minister comment on whether the voting system for the London Mayor will be changed before the 2028 London mayoral election?
Samantha Dixon
I will write to the hon. Member on that point, but I would say that the supplementary voting system ensures that mayors have a broader base of support from the people they represent.
SV was the system used when the roles of mayors and PCCs were first established, and it was changed to first past the post following the Elections Act 2022. The Government have been consistently clear about our intention to revert the system back to SV. I refer the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr Morrison) to the fact that we have already passed the necessary legislation to change it back in some cases. The change for other mayoral systems and police and crime commissioners will occur in due course, once the relevant measures in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 are commenced.
The forthcoming mayoral election in Greater Manchester will therefore take place under SV, which we have always been clear is the most appropriate system for electing mayors. However, the electoral system we use is just one part of ensuring trust in our democracy. We are also strengthening the postal and proxy voting system to make it more resilient and responsive. We are introducing tougher political finance rules that will give electors more confidence in how political parties are funded and protect UK politics from foreign interference. And we recently launched a democratic engagement fund to provide £2.5 million to increase democratic participation.
Turning to the points raised by other hon. Members, trust in our elections is important to everyone in this House, as referenced by the hon. Members for North Herefordshire (Dr Chowns), for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) and for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart). That is central to what we are trying to do in the Representation of the People Bill. The Government recognise that our voting system is of fundamental importance in ensuring trust between elected representatives and the public. Although the first-past-the-post system is not perfect, it is a way of ensuring that elected representatives have a strong connection with their constituents.
My hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Euan Stainbank) talked about disengagement from voting. I would gently suggest that that was not borne out by the recent by-election in Makerfield, which saw high levels of participation. In reference to his remarks and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur) regarding the devolved Governments, we work closely with them; indeed, I met Ministers from Scotland and Wales yesterday to discuss our proposals for legislation and bringing them forward, so that we can learn and work together across our country.
I think I have covered the comments about trust and involvement. Several hon. Members—including the hon. Members for South Cotswolds, for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) and for North Herefordshire, and my hon. Friends the Members for Edinburgh South West and for Falkirk—asked about a national commission on electoral reform. We have no plans to set up such a commission and do not believe that doing so is appropriate or necessary at this time. The important reforms we plan to introduce as part of the Representation of the People Bill will ensure that our democracy remains secure and robust in elections going forward.
To summarise, the Government are content that first past the post is the appropriate system for use in UK parliamentary elections and local council elections in England, and that the supplementary vote system should be used for single executive positions. We currently have no plans to make any further changes to that approach. Although I appreciate that that is disappointing news for many hon. Members in the room, we will continue to welcome discussion and feedback on this important topic. In closing, I thank the hon. Member for Richmond Park for securing this important debate, and all hon. Members who have contributed.
Sarah Olney
Thank you for your chairing the debate, Mr Turner. It is interesting that the majority of voices in the room have argued against first past the post, when all of us are here because we were elected under that system. That shows how even those of us who have—dare I say—benefited from the system recognise its flaws and are here to make the case for change. That is because we operate in the system that first past the post has built, and we all recognise that it forces us to behave in ways we do not feel comfortable with and creates obstacles to achieving the change we want.
I want to pick up on the remarks of the hon. Member for Hamble Valley (Paul Holmes). First, I thank him for reminding me that I demonstrably have a better constituency than he does. He made a point about turnout. He was trying to make the case—I am not sure how well it landed—that it is all our fault that turnout is not better because we need to be better politicians. I put it to him that we behave in the way we do because our voting system forces us to do.
I want to particularly mention the hon. Member for Falkirk (Euan Stainbank), who made the case really powerfully in his speech. I thank all other hon. Members who contributed, but particularly my hon. Friends the Members for Cheadle (Mr Morrison), for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage), for Wokingham (Clive Jones), for Mid Dunbartonshire (Susan Murray) and for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover), and the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart). They all made excellent speeches.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur) taught us all a great deal more about Edinburgh council than I think we were aware we needed to know, but I am grateful for it. The Member for North Herefordshire (Dr Chowns) commented on the “bearpit” of PMQs and how badly that actually goes down with our constituents, and that point was also picked up by my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds.
This is a topic to which the Liberal Democrats certainly intend to return. I thank the Minister for her comments and hope we will meet again.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the use of first-past-the-post in general and local elections.
Public Libraries: Bournemouth East
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Karl Turner (in the Chair)
I will call Tom Hayes to move the motion; I will then call the Minister to respond. I remind other Members that they may make a speech only with prior permission from the Member in charge of the debate and from the Minister. As is the convention for a 30-minute debate, there will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up.
Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the future of public libraries in Bournemouth East constituency.
It is an honour to speak under your chairpersonship, Mr Turner. This debate is the third that I have called since my election. My first was on playgrounds all over our country; my second was on playgrounds all over my constituency. Sadly, today is not the third playgrounds debate, but just like “Back to the Future”, that trilogy will conclude.
Playgrounds are a lot like libraries. They take us back to the future. They are two sides of the same coin of a healthy and happy childhood. In my constituency, many families visit Springbourne library and the play area beside it, bringing a packed lunch in the summer. That is so important for our families.
Since 2008, playgrounds have been debated four times in Parliament. I have doubled the number of those debates. This is just the fifth Commons debate on libraries since 2008. When I banged the drum for playgrounds in this place, we began to make progress, with smoke-free playgrounds enshrined in law, protected playgrounds codified in planning policy and the first dedicated funds since 2008. In two years, this Labour Government have made better half the number of playgrounds made worse by Conservative Governments over 14 years. I know the positive steps that can arise when I bring my constituents’ hopes to Parliament, and I hope for the same for libraries.
I wish to begin, here in Westminster, with Charminster. Charminster library, which opened on 7 January 1932 and closed on 22 December 2025, has now been padlocked for six months. I am fighting alongside Labour councillor Sharon Carr-Brown, Louise Norman, who is the secretary of the Friends of Charminster Library, and our community to reopen that library. There was a successful and packed demo there recently. In February, Labour’s plan to put £500,000 into Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole libraries was put to the administration. Every party but Labour voted against it. Now, those parties campaign to reopen Charminster library without saying how they would make the money available, although there is now £5 million in extra council tax flexibility for BCP council because of the Government’s support.
Often, a fight for something entails a fight against something, but I want to be clear to my constituents that in fighting for Charminster library, fighting for library users and fighting for Bournemouth East, I am not fighting BCP council, I am not fighting the Liberal Democrats and I am not fighting their independent allies. Charminster library’s closure lies in 14 years of austerity that cannot be reversed in five minutes. The neglect that ensued was exacerbated by Conservative council leaders burning through £90 million of reserves on vanity projects.
In our politics, there is so much to feel angry, feel upset and feel let down by, all at once. That is made worse by a technological revolution that puts the world’s information in the palm of our hand and simultaneously spreads fear, fake news, bile and hate. Rarely have we needed libraries, temples of reason and sanctuaries from menace like today.
Another bug of modern politics is the rarely resisted urge to think only of the place, the building, the resources and the books. As any librarian or library user knows, those are but the building blocks. What matters most and is mentioned least is the people—the life force of people joining together, the hope and happiness that springs from spontaneous meetings of strangers often enough in the same shared space to form friendships and create connections.
Charminster library created the space for these things to happen all at once, nearly every day: the toddler who falls in love with words before they read them aloud; the child with no computer at home who masters the technical means and enjoys a warm place to do the homework that they would otherwise have nowhere to complete; the jobseeker—in truth, the seeker of dignity and purpose—who gets on, because of the online connection, to complete their applications; the widowed pensioner living alone, with few reasons to leave the house, who will have a conversation, read a newspaper, hear laughter they would not hear at home and have a community to belong to and feel part of; the tired and nervous mum who never knew how much she needed a way to meet other new parents and learn everything that nobody teaches you when they hand you a newborn.
So what is the solution? I have set countless council budgets and taken tough choices, as a councillor and deputy leader for a decade. I respect the creative councils that worked around Tory austerity rather than passively accepting the cuts, so I ask BCP council to show some vision, to grow our local economy by seeking investment and to develop the homes we need by setting out a local plan. That would not merely create the good that Bournemouth needs, but generate income so that the council can do more, rather than just protest in a passive state. That is what I did when I secured tens of millions of pounds in investment in green infrastructure and, with it, significant council developer contributions. I call on BCP council to just fight for our community.
I thank my constituents who have taken the time and care to stand up for Charminster library. I want to put some of their views on the official parliamentary record. For new parents, it was clear that the library was a social lifeline. I think of Roxanne of Ashling Close, Harriet of Charminster Avenue and Helen of Mortimer Road. Helen says:
“I made lifelong friends at Wriggle and Rhyme, and I was so grateful for these sessions as an isolated single mum.”
I think of Victoria of Portland Road, Sarah of Richmond Wood Road and Wendy of Beatty Road. Wendy speaks for many when she says that the library
“has been the hub of the local community for at least fifty years.”
Carl of Brackendale Road, Iris of Meon Road and Mark of Strouden Avenue spoke about the importance of ending isolation and loneliness. Carl says:
“There is too much social isolation, and losing this much-loved library will only add to it.”
Stuart of Hambledon Road and Catherine of Charminster Avenue called the library
“a godsend to the elderly and children”
and
“a place where older people get patient, free help to get online.”
Charminster library is one of the last places that people can spend time without spending a penny. That was true for Vanessa of Mallard Close, Anne of Bartlett Drive, Glynis of Uplands Road and Rebecca of Chatsworth Road. Vanessa tells me:
“The library services literally keep our family functional and bringing in an income. We cannot afford other types of paid childcare.”
In a cost of living crisis that we seek to abate in the face of another energy price shock unleashed by President Trump’s recklessness, we need more libraries as a solution, not fewer.
Charminster library sits within walking distance of six schools and hundreds of children. Denisa of Parkway Drive, Amy of Feversham Avenue and Emma of Pine Road have all written with concerns about their children. Of her daughter, Emma says:
“The routine of popping in to borrow books, take part in activities and meet friends has been completely taken away. She is devastated.”
Pamela of West Way, a special educational needs teacher, and George of Court Road agree.
We need to think about the voices of children. A voice that I need to bring to this place is that of the schoolchild Sabong of Queen’s Park Avenue:
“It is not just about books. It is also a quiet place where I can do my homework and meet my friends. We need the library back.”
I was pleased to receive a letter from Lily and James of Strouden Park, who wrote to raise their concerns and say that they just want their library reopened. When a child writes to their Member of Parliament to ask for their library back, we adults need to do one thing: sit up and listen.
We rightly worry about children lost to their screens. Kenelm and Amy of Bradpole Road see the library as a solution to that problem because of the role of books. Constituents also see the library as an answer to another—indeed, the opposite—problem, which is summed up by Adil of Charminster Road, who says of his childhood at the library:
“I didn’t have any access to the internet or computers at home. Charminster Library let me have free internet access, borrow books, and join the reading challenge.”
Olivia and Angela of Branders Lane remind us of the scale of the challenges that libraries help to overcome. Angela says that
“a third of the nation are not online because of poverty, age, disability or ill health.”
In all our libraries in Bournemouth, volunteer tech buddies support customers with learning how to use a computer, set up emails to apply for jobs and help with applications for a blue badge or universal credit. So many council services are now digital by default, but libraries offer a human being—a person who can support and refer citizens on. We cannot say that we will end digital exclusion and then let the buildings that fight it stay closed.
A phrase ran through the letters I read: libraries matter because they offer a vital “community hub”. That much was true for Jenny of Homeside Road, Christine of the Grove, Andrew of Chatsworth Road and Gerard, who all said the same. For Christine, the library is
“a children’s meeting place, an information centre, a landmark, and a treasured asset to the town.”
On the theme of the beauty of the building, with which I strongly agree, David of Brackendale Road, Richard of Queen’s Park Avenue, Erik and Joanna all cared about this treasured asset. Richard describes the library as
“an oasis of calm, with high ceilings and amazing light.”
Nicola and Laura of Mavis Road and Bernadette of Beatty Road are among the many to celebrate the most important part of the library: the librarians. As Bernadette tells me, the staff ran four book clubs, and
“whenever I visited the library, it was always well attended.”
When I visited, I always had a very warm welcome. As the Member of Parliament for Bournemouth East, I say clearly and proudly that the library is a community space that is brought to life only by the people who use the services and the people who work there, who committed years of service and who cared about each other and about their community. They deserve our thanks.
I have worked closely with Councillor Sharon Carr-Brown and Louise Norman, and a plan is starting to form. A first phase of work is under way to remove the significant asbestos found in the roof space, and the hope is that with the first phase drawing to a close, we can begin to move towards the second phase. However, that does not guarantee the reopening of the library. This debate is therefore significant in keeping the pressure on and ensuring that local people feel heard.
With Charminster library now closed, five libraries are open in my constituency. They have undoubtedly suffered from the worst hardships of austerity, and more than most. On the latest figures, the average total open hours per week for the six libraries was 26 hours, compared with 35 hours in England.
Unsurprisingly, the most consistent issue raised in a survey that I launched after I secured the debate was limited and inconvenient opening hours, which were highlighted by Jonathan of Saint Mary’s Road, Kathy of Webster Road, Clare of Leaphill Road and Sarah of Broughton Avenue—the list went on. Elaine in Springbourne calls for more evening and weekend opening, so that working people can access services, while Lorraine of Petersfield Road and Jenny of Percy Road say clearly that opening hours do not reflect the needs of our modern society. Adjusted for inflation, spending on BCP libraries has fallen more than in England overall: by 52% since 2010, compared with 47% nationwide.
Despite the challenges facing the libraries, they are strongly praised by hundreds of my constituents. Seren of Parkwood Road describes Boscombe library as
“somewhere we all wanted to go and hang out.”
Annette on Seafield Road highlights the same in relation to Pokesdown and Southbourne library, while Julie of Sunnylands Avenue reflects that Tuckton library is brilliant but could become even more of a community hub. Jenny on Leeson Road describes Springbourne library as a true community hub, while Isabelle on Seagrim Road highlights Castlepoint’s support and advice services.
Children’s development and free family activities emerge as significant priorities. Emma of Uplands Gardens values Castlepoint library for
“helping children enjoy reading and learning.”
Fay of Southwood Avenue describes Pokesdown and Southbourne library as nothing less than a “lifeline” for children without access to resources at home. Tom of Bennett Road sees Springbourne library as a “warm, safe community space”, while Cathryn of Gloucester Road highlights the importance of children’s activities, alongside social connection, at Boscombe library. Emilia of Heathcote Road stresses that libraries are especially important for children and families. Alice of Seagrim Road links children’s learning directly to safe community spaces, while Victoria of Twynham Road makes the case that schools should actively encourage library use.
Libraries give people access to digital inclusion and services that they would get nowhere else. Lucynda of Gladstone Road West and Jake of Boscombe Grove Road both emphasise the importance of Boscombe library’s free internet, computers and digital support, and Julie of Sunnylands Avenue highlights the role that libraries play in helping people to access training, benefits and local services. Alex of Knole Road and Jennifer of Boveridge Gardens point to the importance of libraries as places where people access practical support and information.
More broadly, libraries across my constituency are seen for what they are: non-profit third spaces. Michelle lives near Castlepoint library and sees it as
“a lifeline…a second home”.
Catherine lives on Castlemain Avenue calls the wonderful Tuckton library
“safe, welcoming, warm and free”.
Emma on Gloucester Road described Pokesdown and Southbourne library as a “safe and supportive” space “for children and adults”. Emilia on Heathcote Road speaks of “free, accessible community spaces”, while Averil on Norwood Place describes her library as a peaceful centre for learning and advice.
Castlepoint library will be especially busy at the moment, as it is exam season. It is an especially important space for children, particularly on Saturdays and in the summer, with there being three secondary schools, at least six primary schools, hundreds of children and many homes nearby. The Saturday morning Lego club is popular, with many families becoming friends as a side benefit of play and creativity.
Emma on Uplands Gardens, Nathalie on Cecil Road and Lorraine on Petersfield Road are clear: they want more of this, and they want their libraries to reflect how communities live today. Jake on Boscombe Grove Road points to the need for play, as well as digital education services, while Tamzine on Southbourne Overcliff Drive and Katarzyna on Castle Lane West highlight an appetite for cafés, longer hours and more welcoming multi-purpose spaces.
Throughout my consultation, constituents said that they want books to remain at the heart of our libraries. Rosemary on Rolls Drive says that
“physical books should always be at the core”.
Mary on Hengistbury Road calls for
“more books and faster reservations”,
while Fiona on Sparkford Close highlights the need for up-to-date fiction and bestsellers at Castlepoint library. Jill on Leydene Close similarly points to the importance of strong and varied book collections.
Each library offers something different, based on the needs of the local community it serves. Boscombe library, for instance, has a large collection of books in Polish that were donated by the community. Books offer escapism, spark imagination and inspire empathy, as we jump into someone else’s world and experience it as they do. The ability to step into other people’s shoes is so critical in today’s politics, and it comes from the changing displays every month in the libraries, which highlight awareness months such as Pride Month.
Sadly, the books at Charminster library are gathering dust in the year of reading. Clearly, that is unacceptable. I have named so many of my constituents who feel so disempowered, so powerless and in some cases so hopeless, because I want them to know that their fight is not in vain and that they are on the official parliamentary record for evermore. I want them to know that when they raise their voices, they will be heard by their representatives, and I want them to know that I and the Government are doing all we can to bring Charminster library back into use and to support all our libraries across Bournemouth East after 14 terrible years of austerity.
On that note, I have some asks of the Minister. First, will he take back this point back to the Department and confirm that the duty to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service under the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 does indeed still bind BCP council? The Act places a duty on the Secretary of State to superintend the service and to make sure that councils discharge their duties, and where there is concern that a council is failing, the Secretary of State has the power to hold a local inquiry on a complaint or on the Department’s own initiative. Charminster library is a beautiful and historic building, but it has been closed for six months, because of neglect after years of poor maintenance, with the current administration voting down Labour’s library rescue plan to allocate just 10% of the extra £5 million secured from this Government in council tax flexibility on visible improvements such as upgrading our libraries.
I have another request: will officials from the Department meet me and a delegation of Charminster library users to look at what an intervention could achieve? Lastly, will the new national libraries strategy directly cover buildings such as Charminster library and the gap between a council’s legal duty and the closure of libraries?
I end where I began. As a new MP in 2024 without a parliamentary office in the constituency, I went into almost every library to hold my surgeries. Ever since, I have seen the work of librarians and libraries. They are absolutely fundamental to our democracy and indispensable to a thriving society. We need Charminster library to open once again. We need the lights to be turned back on and the librarians to be back doing their essential work of enriching and gluing together our community. This is my vision of the future of libraries in Bournemouth East. This is a future worth fighting for. I ask the Minister and the Government to support this vision and to back this future for the libraries of Bournemouth East and the constituents whom I am so proud to represent.
The Vice-Chamberlain of His Majesty’s Household (Sir Nicholas Dakin)
It is a joy to serve when you are chairing, Mr Turner. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) on securing this debate. He reminds us of his campaign for playgrounds, and I am sure that he will continue to be equally committed to the campaign that he is on with libraries. I am pleased to respond to the debate on behalf of the Minister responsible for libraries, my noble Friend Baroness Twycross.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
My Newtownards library has been allocated funding by the relevant Minister. Understanding that a warm library is a place of knowledge, friendship and community, does the Minister also agree that the benefit to communities is more than the ability to borrow a book and is in fact the ability to connect, and that that needs to be supported by all of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?
Sir Nicholas Dakin
I absolutely agree. The hon. Member points out and underlines the richness, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East drew attention, of the role that libraries play in their communities.
My hon. Friend talked about libraries in his constituency, especially Charminster library. I want to take this opportunity to strongly agree with those of his constituents who have sung the praises of public libraries, the value of which he so ably demonstrated in his speech. It is rare to find someone who does not believe that libraries are important to their communities. It is more than 175 years since the first Public Libraries Act, in 1850, and it is fair to say that libraries look a bit different from those originally established, but I like to think that even where the technology and style of delivery have changed, an 1850s library user from “Back to the Future” would recognise the core of what libraries do—they would recognise the shelves full of books and the knowledgeable library staff. Public libraries open up opportunity by democratising access to information and knowledge. They level the playing field by providing spaces for study and reflection.
Karl Turner (in the Chair)
I remind Members that interventions must be short.
Matt Rodda
Thank you, Mr Turner. I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for his time. Just to add to his words on this issue, many local councils are doing the right thing. I had the great pleasure of attending the opening of the new Central library in Reading, in great contrast to the experience of my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) in his town.
Sir Nicholas Dakin
My hon. Friend is right. A local library is a very special place. It is a place of potential in every sense of the word by introducing children to the world of reading, shaping young minds through Baby Rhyme Time and giving agency and choice to young readers—no book is the wrong book—but also by helping people of all ages to develop wider skills and, in particular, digital skills, supporting people to access the huge expanse of the digital world we now live in. Libraries provide inspiration, education and entertainment for many thousands of people every week. In particular, the act of reading expands our minds, opens up our thinking and makes us more tolerant. In a diverse country like the UK, every child should be able to see themselves represented in our literature and to read and learn about other children who are not like them.
Gordon McKee (Glasgow South) (Lab)
My hon. Friend the Minister is being very generous with taking interventions. Does he agree that SNP-run Glasgow city council’s decision to cut school librarians was a mistake and has a detrimental impact on kids’ education?
Sir Nicholas Dakin
Certainly. It is always a negative thing when libraries’ time is cut, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East demonstrated in his speech. It is important that we remember that the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 requires all local authorities in England to provide a “comprehensive and efficient” library service. I can confirm that that is binding on all library authorities, including Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council.
Public libraries are funded through the local government finance settlement. Each local authority is responsible for assessing the needs of its local communities and designing library services to meet those needs within its available resources. We recognise the financial pressures facing local authorities after 14 years of Conservative cuts. This Government are committed to restoring the stability of council funding, but there cannot be cuts of that scale over that period without a significant impact on services, including public library provision.
The most recent local government finance settlement is our most significant step yet towards making English local government more sustainable. We are making good progress on long overdue promises to fundamentally update the way that we fund local authorities. We are delivering fair funding, targeting money where it is needed most. We are delivering the first multi-year settlement in a decade, simplifying an unprecedented 38 revenue funding streams worth almost £57 billion over three years. That should provide greater stability, certainty and flexibility for local authorities.
It is important to note that the majority of funding in the local government finance settlement is not ringfenced for a reason. Local leaders are best placed to identify local priorities. It is for them to determine how funds are used to finance their activities to best meet local needs. For BCP, the settlement will make up to £499 million available in core spending power by 2028-29—an increase of 24.2% since 2024-25. The people of Charminster are clear about how they feel about their local library, and they want their council to make quicker progress to find a long-term solution to its closure. We hope the council hears that passion and the value that its residents place on the library, and weighs that in the balance as it make the necessary decisions.
My hon. Friend also specifically asked about the Government’s superintendence responsibilities. It is for the local council to determine how it will meet its statutory duty to deliver a comprehensive, efficient library service. The Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport has the statutory duty to superintend that provision in England, but we expect any council to be able to justify its decisions and to be clear about how local need has shaped the service in order to comply with the duty.
Our guidance on libraries as a statutory service provides local authorities with clarity on their statutory responsibility. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport encourages local authorities that are considering making changes to their service to inform it about their proposals before public engagement or consultation. Between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, DCMS directly engaged with 40 local authorities, which involved 62 conversations either in person or virtually. None of those conversations took place with Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council.
The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has a statutory power to intervene by way of local inquiry if she considers that a local authority is not providing a comprehensive, efficient library service. She takes that role seriously, and should a complaint be made, Ministers will challenge the local council and carefully consider evidence before deciding if a local inquiry is needed.
I can certainly take my hon. Friend’s request for the Libraries Minister to meet him and a delegation of Charminster library users back to the Department. My hon. Friend is right to say that the library is a vital community hub; we have heard other Members underline that point. Many people may be aware that on 2 March, the Government announced their intention to publish a new strategy for public libraries later this year. It will aim to restore their position at the heart of communities. We want libraries to be well run, well used and well connected. More than anything, we want them to have an impact in their communities. That work is ongoing; we hope to publish the strategy shortly and we appreciate the views and feedback that we have received, which helped to shape it.
This debate questions the future of public libraries in Bournemouth East in particular. My hon. Friend has spoken with passion about the value of libraries in Bournemouth East, using the voices of the people who live there and their lived experiences. I have heard how much the people of Bournemouth East value their libraries and their anxiety about the future of the much-loved Charminster library. I hope that Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council will carefully consider the options available to it.
Question put and agreed to.
Farming: Financial Sustainability
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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David Smith (North Northumberland) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the financial sustainability of the farming sector.
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. In a shameless effort to garner sympathy, I thank you for allowing me to sit down if I need to; I have a bad back today. Members can feel free to be sympathetic in their interventions.
It is a great pleasure to be here for this debate on the financial sustainability of the farming sector. The best beef in the world is reared in my constituency of North Northumberland. There may be some competition there, but let me assure the Chamber that that is true. However, farmers are not taking home the best cuts in terms of profitability. The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission—the FFCC—found that in 2023-24, an average cereals farm in England took in a quarter of a million pounds from selling crops such as wheat and barley, but after costs, it made a loss. For profit, it relied on subsidies, diversification and environmental schemes. Those are all good things, but they come with an underlying challenge.
As the party of labour, we should be alarmed when any worker receives a poor return for their work. I know that alarm is shared by my colleagues in the Labour rural research group, many of whom are present, and by the Minister, whom I welcome to his new role and to this debate. In her profitability review, Minette Batters was very clear that
“there is no silver bullet to achieve farming profitability.”
Today, by genuinely happy coincidence, the Government have published their 25-year farming road map, with a focus on profitability, productivity, sustainability and resilience. I look forward to digesting the road map, which I have with me, and I trust that many of the points raised in the debate will chime with its contents. I hope that the Batters review, the farming road map and the LRRG’s upcoming report on farming profitability can help the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Government to tackle the wide range of reasons why farming often does not pay.
I want to focus on three elements: protecting our farms from the global markets as part of a drive for food security, regulating the marketplace so that produce receives a fair price, and cutting costs and boosting innovation so that farmers have more at the end of their work. On food security, one farmer recently told me that
“covid and the current conflict in the Gulf have shown that globalised supply chains do not have the resilience of a strong indigenous industry.”
He is right, and I am glad that the Government share that view in the road map, but our industry is not strong enough. Our farmers earn a lower share of food chain gross value added than farmers in Germany, France or the Netherlands. Just 9% of farms produce 62% of our food, and high production costs mean that high-quality British produce struggles to compete with the international market on price.
Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)
I thank the hon. Member for securing a very good debate. On food security, in south Shropshire, just outside Onibury, there is a campaign to stop over 130 acres of solar panels going on good agricultural land. The plans would make it harder to be resilient and to provide food security as a country. Does he agree that no solar panels should go across good agricultural land?
Karl Turner (in the Chair)
Order. I remind Members that there are lots of people who want to speak. Interventions really do need to be short.
David Smith
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. He will see this in the road map and in the Government’s approach. There needs to be the right balance between environmental approach, renewables and food production. I agree that the decision about where solar farms go is key.
We need to help British farming to develop greater financial resilience and shield it from external pressures. That starts with ensuring that imported food products meet the same high standards as home-grown produce. I ask the Minister to offer some thoughts on what guarantees he can make so that alignment with the EU and other trade deals will maintain a level playing field on quality. That subject was not heavily touched on in the road map.
Stability is also vital for our farms. Although agri-environmental schemes should not be the difference between the black and the red, they have a role to play in farm budgets. They can cover a bad year or provide extra on top, but take-up, delivery and financial sustainability demand stability. The withdrawal of the sustainable farming incentive last year dented farming confidence; I encourage the Minister to pay very close attention to roll-out of that, which we expect imminently.
Devolved economies have a role to play in developing food security, too. Farming should be part of a tightly bound regional ecosystem in which regional investment banks, devolved funding pots and local authorities work together to match up funding, skills and procurement pathways. In our manifesto, we promised that half of all food purchased across the public sector would be locally produced or certified to higher environmental standards—a great ambition. Will the Minister update us on the progress towards that, and on what work he is undertaking to create a public record of how much of public institutions’ food is sourced from the UK? We can create a virtuous circle in that way.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
The hon. Member is right to say that we need to produce more food in this country but, at the moment, farmers are telling me that they are not putting crops in the ground because they cannot afford the fertiliser to sustain them because of the situation in the Gulf. What does the hon. Member think the Government should do to support farmers right now?
David Smith
If the right hon. Member bears with me, I will get to exactly that point.
The second area of concern is the marketplace. The FFCC reports that farming productivity increased by 60% from the ’70s to the 2020s, but that farming incomes have not increased in line with that. The size of and competition between supermarkets have forced farmers to accept bargain basement farm-gate prices at times, and the middle men have consolidated too. The National Farmers’ Union reports that, in the ’70s, there were 2,500 abattoirs across the UK; there are now just 200. The reality for the fragmented farming sector has been bleak: its increased productivity still ends in lower prices.
One of the best responses to this high-cost, low-price trap is to create a new labelling and welfare system based on the Made in Australia approach, which the LRRG has advocated for. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Noah Law) for his work on that. Every food product in supermarkets, wholesalers and catering should clearly tell consumers how much of it was made in the UK, ideally in which region and to what welfare standard. Indeed, regional identity systems should be supported and verified. Instead of superb Northumberland beef being thrown into the same mincer as low-cost, low-welfare imports, packaging can help consumers choose between different quality products at different price points and different welfare standards. The farmers who invest more in their produce can then negotiate for more at the farm gate.
The Government have to develop tighter rules on what can and cannot be claimed as “farmer-supported”, “grown in Britain” or other heartwarming slogans that do not reward the hard graft of British farmers. I welcome the fact that the Groceries Code Adjudicator has already been taken into DEFRA following the Batters review.
We should help farmers consider how to develop better collective bargaining power. My understanding is that the Agriculture Act 2020 provides a framework for producer organisations to form co-operatives. We should give that our full support. At the end of the day, we the Labour party are a party of mutuals and co-operatives.
The third and final string of the bow is innovation. There have been some major steps in this direction under Labour. I am really pleased that the road map is so committed to innovation, and that £123 million has been committed to investing in innovation this year alone. The NFU has urged the Government to implement the national policy planning framework as soon as possible, which would really help.
We need to look at how we can cut inputs and free up capital for farmers to reinvest in their farms. Energy prices are too high. The recent red diesel fuel duty cut was an incredibly welcome step and has been well received by my farmers. I am now interested to see what options are open to help farmers install renewable energy supplies on their estates via GB Energy. I support the NFU’s ask of the Government to help farmers cut electricity prices by opening a standard industrial classification subdivision for energy intensive farming.
Fertiliser prices are too high. There is massive unease about the incoming carbon border adjustment mechanism regime and its effect on fertiliser prices, which is already one of the biggest costs for farmers. We can transform the fertiliser conversation altogether by restarting ammonia production in this country. Sadly, the last plant to produce virgin fertiliser in this country was allowed to wind down by the previous Government in 2023. I know that the Minister for Industry has been working hard in this area already, and I hope that the shadow farming Minister can look at this.
All that strategic support would cut input costs, thus freeing up capital for farmers to use on developing new technologies that help them produce more for less. The Government’s farming innovation fund will have £200 million up to 2030. That is an excellent example of state-backed innovation. Farmers in North Northumberland are already experimenting with using soil and sampling and targeted purchases to cut their fertiliser bills. The Government need to find those farmers and invest in their work.
A local farmer told me recently:
“As a farming family we often accept that we are privileged to work in the profession that we do…but it is often somewhat demoralising (and distracting) to consider what little relative financial reward we receive for the work we do.”
Other industries grow and shrink as conditions change, but we will always need food, and we will always need much of our food to be grown here in the UK. The issue is that what we pay for food today is also what we are paying for our food tomorrow. While farmers remain stuck at the wrong end of the low-price, high-cost cycle, our national food security is also at risk.
It is the role of Labour, not a laissez-faire Conservative party or a rootless Reform UK party, to dignify the work of farmers by ensuring that they receive proper reward for what they do. All workers should be supported by the Labour party, whether they are blue, white or green-collar workers. By developing more resilient British farming as part of our national security, regulating the marketplace so that quality produce gets a fair price, and opening up opportunities for farmers to innovate and increase their margins, we can make sure that farming is sustainable for years to come, and we can keep North Northumberland beef on the menu.
Karl Turner (in the Chair)
I remind Members that they should bob if they wish to be called in this debate. Given the number of Members wanting to take part, I have to impose a formal time limit of one minute and 30 seconds—90 seconds. I call Olly Glover.
Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)
Thank you, Mr Turner—I am in a state of astonishment at being called first. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship once again. I thank the hon. Member for North Northumberland (David Smith) for his articulate opening speech. Most of what I am going to say follows a recent farm visit and farmers’ roundtable. I thank the NFU and the Country Land and Business Association for arranging that, the 20 attendees who gave their time, and Robert Clayton for having us at Mill Farm in West Hendred.
Three key challenges face farmers in my constituency and across the country. The first is the question of regulation and costs, with the impact of the Iran war a major concern on top of existing Brexit-related challenges, with red diesel and fertiliser subject to major inflation, and electricity standing charges for farmers having risen by 44% to 91%. Secondly, prices incentives and food culture need to change. We need to strengthen the Groceries Code Adjudicator. It is welcome to finally see a Government response to the Minette Batters profitability review today, but fundamentally what farmers raise is a lack of Government understanding and listening to farmers about the challenges that they face.
Thirdly, we need more investment and funding for our farmers. Food security should be thought of in the same way as wider national and defence security. That is why the Liberal Democrats are calling for investing £1 billion extra in environment land management schemes, so that we can properly support our farmers and make sure they contribute to a resilient food supply chain.
Samantha Niblett (South Derbyshire) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. As I frantically go through the speech that I wrote before the statement today, I might end up saying a load of things that have been covered already, so I will snip it really short, mindful of the short amount of time that we have.
I want to raise awareness of something I have already written to the Secretary of State about: the recent introduction of crippling electricity standing charges in the farming sector. I also want to put back on the agenda using the sustainable farming incentive to fund increased uptake of leguminous protein crops, and recognising the value of those crops as nitrogen-fixing tools in arable rotation. That would allow growers to optimise the efficient use of artificial fertiliser alongside strategically and environmentally beneficial crop production methods that also support domestic food production.
I am mindful, as always, of the need to support our farmers—now more than ever. We need to show our farmers that we care by taking action to support and celebrate them. I very much look forward to reading in full this report in my hand. I could not be in the Chamber for the statement, but I look forward to watching that back and to listening to everybody else’s questions.
Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I will be brief.
It is wonderful that we are having this debate, and indeed that we had today’s statement, although sadly I was not able to be in the Chamber to hear it. We need to recognise that farmers are central to our health, wellbeing and security as a nation, for three reasons. The first is good food: we need to produce as much of our food as possible as locally as possible. The second is good land: we need to care for our land; after all, it is the soil on which everything that farmers produce depends. The third is good livelihoods: rural farming communities, such as mine in North Herefordshire, are entirely interlinked with health, wellbeing, and financial and ecological sustainability.
It is disappointing that the Government sadly got off on the wrong foot with farmers, but I hope today marks something of a turning point. We need two things from the Government. First, we need regulation that works for farmers, with a level playing field. That means consistently applied regulation across the country and internationally. We cannot have our farmers undercut by imports produced to lower standards. Secondly, we need investment in farming, to enable farmers to transition to more nature-friendly and river-friendly methods, and to support the security and sustainability of farming in the UK.
Steve Witherden (Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. It was in this Chamber, on 28 January 2025, that I was the only Labour MP to speak out against the Government’s proposed changes to agricultural property relief. I did so in the knowledge that such changes would have been damaging to the livelihoods of huge swathes of my constituents.
There is no industry more important than the food industry. The food sector employs 17% of Wales’s total workforce, and at the heart of that sector lie our farmers. A sustainable farming sector requires fairness and transparency throughout its supply chain. An industry built on long-term planning, fair returns and transparency will make for a more resilient industry in the face of current challenges than one based on short-term decision making.
As most farmers do not sell directly to retailers, the NFU has long campaigned for the Government to extend the code to include more retailers, food service businesses and manufacturers in order to oversee the trading relationship between farmers and their intermediaries, ensuring that farmers get the best possible deal. We must also recognise the importance of trading with the European Union, on which Wales relies heavily for 75% of our food and drink exports. A commitment to strengthen our relationship with the EU would create valuable opportunities for Welsh producers and support growth across the sector.
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. Let me start by inviting the new Minister—I welcome him to his place—to visit Dartmoor over the summer to meet farmers, commoners, the Dartmoor hill pony organisations and, importantly, the Dartmoor Land Use Management Group. I invite him to bring Natural England, too, because it is at the centre of quite a lot of what has been said about Dartmoor in the past few weeks.
Previous meetings with Ministers and officials since the Government came into office do not seem to have made a difference and have not delivered a plan for sustainable farming on the moors. In 2023, the previous Government launched the Fursdon review on the future of Dartmoor. Its report includes a recommendation —No. 27, or paragraph 23.2 according to gov.uk—to ensure that ponies remain on the moors, but it also reports, in paragraphs 23.1 and 23.3, that cattle and sheep in significantly deliverable numbers are an intrinsic part of delivering that and the land management needed for Dartmoor; otherwise, farms on Dartmoor are not sustainable.
The Dartmoor Land Use Management Group was set up following the Fursdon review to assess how farming and environmental land management can co-exist. It has yet to report back, which is why it is so disappointing that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Natural England are pushing ahead with livestock stocking numbers that risk the sustainability of farms right across Dartmoor and, with them, the ponies themselves. A petition to adopt recommendation 27 has more than 200,000 signatures. Ponies, cattle and sheep are intrinsically linked on the moors. In a visit over the summer, the Minister could be assured of a friendly welcome and hear directly from those involved.
Adam Jogee (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)
Newcastle-under-Lyme is home to many brilliant farmers who work relentlessly to supply our shops, pubs and restaurants and to tend to our green and pleasant land. When I was elected I promised my farmers and their families that I would fight their corner every single day. We need a fairer deal for our farmers and the supply chain. Our farmers are the price takers, not the price makers. They are feeling the squeeze from our supermarkets. We must deliver and enforce fair contracts across all sectors.
Our farmers also need long-term certainty. Although I welcome the new 25-year farming road map, our farmers need more from us. They need a sustainable framework that lets them plan for the next decade, not just the next season.
Our farmers in Newcastle-under-Lyme and across our United Kingdom are the backbone of our country. We must go further and do more to give them the power to earn a fair return and to give them and us the certainty to plan for the future. I gently encourage the Minister to look for the letter I sent him last week. I congratulate him on his appointment and look forward to welcoming him to Newcastle-under-Lyme before too long.
Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)
It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I rarely miss an opportunity to speak about farming in this place. It was a privilege last October to be elected by Government MPs as the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on farming.
I suspect that there is too often a perception in Whitehall that farmers do rather well. Land rich? Perhaps. Cash rich? Rarely. It is too rarely acknowledged that many farmers earn little more than £20,000 a year. My region, the south-west, has the lowest average farming business income of anywhere in the country, at just £35,100 per farm. My farmers are not landed gentry. They are people who work with their hands. They are up before dawn, toiling through the winter. As I said in the House yesterday, the Brexit deal we ended up with has strangled trade in food, farming and fishing. We need a comprehensive sanitary and phytosanitary agreement with the Europeans as soon as possible. It would reduce trade friction and lower costs for farmers directly.
The effects of getting things wrong in this area spread far beyond the farm gate. As farms fall, so do butchers, delivery drivers, packagers, suppliers, labourers and contractors. The elephant in the room is that food security is national security. There is simply no substitute for a farmer. Without them, we all go hungry.
Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner.
About 55% of my Carlisle constituency is agricultural land. Farming remains vital to our local economy, our identity and our communities. However, more than half of the farmland in our county—some 54%—is classified as “less favoured area”. As a result, farmers in my area require substantially more land to support their livestock and maintain viable businesses than is the case in other areas. That is why it is important to recognise the distinction between a farm’s physical size and its economic size. A holding may cover a large number of hectares but that does not mean it generates a proportionally large income or profit.
Against that backdrop, in February I wrote to the then Minister of State with concerns about the first round of SFI allocations because SFI funding was open only to farms under 50 hectares. My concern is not with the principle of supporting smaller farms but rather that an approach that focuses solely on physical size does not always reflect the realities of farming across different parts of the country. Farmers in my constituency with holdings of more than 50 hectares will have to go into the next round of SFI and compete with farms that are genuinely large in terms of productive output, with farms that are much larger, and often with land agents.
I therefore have two questions for the Minister. Will he please consider how future schemes will consider the impact of LFA land? Will he also confirm that common land farmers will be eligible to apply for the SFI?
Sarah Bool (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner.
The farming sector is vital. I know that because 88% of my constituency is agricultural land. Farms are a unique sort of business because they not only have to make our food and protect our countryside but, like all businesses, have to make a profit. We must respect and understand that. I appreciate that the Government have published their farming road map, and I am grateful that they have finally recognised that farming needs long-term planning but, ultimately, actions speak louder than words.
The NFU has highlighted many issues that we need to focus on but, given the limited time available, I am going to focus purely on energy. The Food and Drink Federation told the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee that food inflation will reach 9% by the end of this year and that energy prices are at the heart of that inflation. The Government have put in place help for energy-intensive industries, but subsections of farming are not recognised under that scheme and are therefore excluded. I raised that point with the Chancellor. I urge the Minister to go back to her and consider whether the Government can include farming and food producers in those schemes to allow them to get support. While he is doing so, perhaps he will ask again if she will scrap the family farm tax in order to give farmers the support they ultimately need.
Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Northumberland (David Smith) for securing the debate. I have been applying for a debate on this subject for many months, so it is great that we are having one. I warmly welcome the new farming Minister to his place, too.
I recently had a catch-up with farmers in Cannock Chase and heard about various challenges that they are facing. We are living in highly uncertain times. The new series of “Clarkson’s Farm” is shining a light on how financially tough farming can be, but also on the many ways that technology can improve that picture environmentally and financially. The Government’s investment of £123 million to help farmers boost their productivity is therefore very welcome.
I am also very pleased that the farming road map is now out. As chair of the APPG on UK food security, I was particularly pleased to see the restated commitment to maintaining our food production at at least current levels. I am also keen on making sure that supply chains are fair for our farmers—something that we often could not have said in recent years. Over the last couple of weeks, the EFRA Committee has had the privilege of visiting New Zealand, where I was struck by the prevalence and power of agricultural co-operatives and the power that they give Kiwi farmers. I would love to see more of that here, because it would go a long way to redressing the imbalance that we all too often see in our supply chains here in Britain. I look forward to working with the Minister on that and many other issues that colleagues have raised, but in the interests of time I will leave it there.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I thank the hon. Member for North Northumberland (David Smith), who set the scene incredibly well. I have four points of 30 seconds each. When we talk about farming in Northern Ireland, we are talking about family farms. Over 27,000 farming families across Northern Ireland work the land day in and day out. Financial sustainability requires three things from this Government: certainty, equity and protection. We need an increased multiannual farm support budget that is fully inflation-proofed. If there are no farmers, there is no food. That cannot be right.
Financial sustainability is impossible if farmers are forced to sell their top-quality, world-leading produce at or below the cost of production. The Government must use their powers to enforce fair dealing and transparency right across the agrifood network, and they must protect the family farm structure from punitive taxation. Recent proposals and changes threatening agricultural property relief and business property relief strike at the very heart of generational sustainability. Forcing a grieving family to sell off parcels of land just to pay an inheritance tax bill destroys the viability of enterprise overnight. It is a tax on food security and the Democratic Unionist party will stand four-square against it.
Maya Ellis (Ribble Valley) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Northumberland (David Smith) for securing this timely debate and welcome the Minister to his place.
I asked local farmers in Ribble Valley what they would like to highlight in this debate about profitability. As hon. Members would expect, the responses included the increasing tax on fertiliser, energy prices, the short-sighted farming vision, the public’s understanding of where our food comes from and its value and quality, seasonal staff and many other things, so I am really grateful that the Government today outlined their farming vision to 2050.
In the interests of time, I want to highlight a broader question about who we what to be as British society. We could choose just to import most of our food, but to me, farming is core to our Britishness. We value our local farm cheese brands, we value our rolling green hills, and we value the role farmers play in maintaining our walkways and gritting our paths in winter.
Jenny Riddell-Carpenter (Suffolk Coastal) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent point. It is not just about identity; we also cannot be reliant on food imports if we are going to be food secure as a nation.
Maya Ellis
I completely agree. The main point I want to make, alongside all the powerful financial and security arguments that have been made, is that we need farming to be financially sustainable because we want it to be sustainable. We want it to be part of what we prioritise as this country. A More In Common poll found that, after the NHS, our British countryside is what British people value most about this country, so please, let’s not take it for granted. With no farmers, the countryside is not sustainable either.
Sadik Al-Hassan (North Somerset) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. My constituency is built on the backs of family farms that I have visited, many of them run by the same family for generations. I have had the privilege of sitting around kitchen tables with farmers and the NFU, and I hear the same thing time and again: making a profit from growing food in this country is almost impossible. However, North Somerset farmers do not do this job for the money; they do it as a way of life, and with the hope—often a distant one—that one day prices will allow them, or their children, to make a decent living from this land.
I warmly welcome the long-term farming road map published today and the Government’s response to the Baroness Batters review. I also welcome the action on supply chain fairness and the transfer of the Groceries Code Adjudicator to DEFRA. That matters because farmers need a fair price. As a member of the Labour rural research group, I asked the Minister, as this road map is delivered, to keep welfare labelling firmly in view. It could put an extra £60 million into farmers’ pockets. LRRG research suggests British farmers are losing out by as much as half a billion pounds, undercut by lower-welfare imports. A mandatory tiered labelling system would build on the excellent foundations laid today.
Farmers in North Somerset have waited a long time for a Government willing to back them with a genuine plan. Today, they have one.
Ann Davies (Caerfyrddin) (PC)
Diolch yn fawr, Cadeirydd; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I declare an interest as a dairy farmer and a member of the Farmers’ Union of Wales.
The costs of farming have spiralled over many years, particularly since Brexit. I want to concentrate on the cost of fertiliser and fuel, both of which have been affected by the war in Ukraine and, most recently, the war in Iran. Input prices affect profitability, and too often profitability is what forces decisions on whether farmers remain on the land, give up, move on or start over.
Farming is a hard life, with long hours and hard graft—I can tell hon. Members that from personal experience. We need stability in the market on costs but also on farm-gate prices that farmers receive for their goods. Milk prices have crashed, leading many smaller dairy holdings to make the decision to leave the market. Sheep and beef prices have steadied but are now showing signs of decline, and horticultural producers also want a steady market for their produce.
We need to seriously value food production. Since I have been in this House, I have heard hon. Members talk about food security time and again, but in all honesty the meaning of that phrase is often lost, I am sorry to say. My ask of the Minister is simple: will the UK Government commit to action to improve resilience across the food system and supply chains, so that we can invest, stabilise the industry and encourage growth?
Mr Bayo Alaba (Southend East and Rochford) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Northumberland (David Smith) for securing this debate, which I know resonates deeply with many farming families living and working in my constituency.
Farming is more than a job: it is a lifestyle, a history and an identity that has defined rural communities for the entirety of this country’s history. Last week in my constituency, I spent time with members of my local NFU—a quiet and shy bunch. We spoke about the challenges they face, the concerns they have and the support they need from Government. They told me about pressures from rising fertiliser costs, driven in part by the conflict in Iran, and about how so-called equivalent standards are giving favourability to imported foods over home-grown produce. I have also heard from local farmers who say that outdated and underfunded rural infrastructure is preventing them from scaling up and delivering growth.
It is clear from those conversations that food production must be a priority in planning for growth and in ensuring that the UK is resilient in the face of global instability. That also means creating a level playing field that does not restrict farmers with complex regulation, and that supports them with predictable funding streams. The financial sustainability of the farming sector depends on forward-thinking and informed planning. I am grateful this key sector is the focus of today’s debate, and I hope meaningful conversations continue.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
I thank the hon. Member for North Northumberland (David Smith) for securing this debate. I am the vice-chair of the APPG on food security. Agriculture makes up 20% of businesses in North Shropshire, with well over 1,000 agricultural holdings, so it is a huge part of our local economy.
In the short time I have, I will focus on two issues. For the roughly 130 dairy farmers in North Shropshire the huge pressures of climate change, increased input costs, rising energy and fertiliser prices, and hostile trade deals have come at a time when milk prices are simply not keeping up with the cost of production, as we have heard.
One farmer in Market Drayton reports being down £25,000 a month on his milk price, while a family farming in Maesbrook told me that they have been selling off livestock just to keep their heads above water. On top of that, several farmers in the area have reported being unable to reach their milk buyer for information about pricing, meaning that they are unable to plan ahead. Farmers suffer time and again for their lack of power in the supply chain. Will the Government outline the action they will take to bolster the role and effectiveness of the Groceries Code Adjudicator and to enshrine its golden rules in law so that producers are properly protected, as recommended by the EFRA Committee and the Batters review?
Farmers in my constituency are particularly concerned about the proposed changes to water abstraction licences due in 2028, which could have a huge impact on the viability of many farms in my area. Water security is central to food security, so I would appreciate the Department outlining what those changes will mean in real terms for our farmers.
Adam Dance (Yeovil) (LD)
I will be honest: I had quite a different speech prepared for today, but I have scrapped a lot of it following today’s statement.
When it comes to farming, we have heard all sorts of fantastic slogans, promises and tributes but, when I meet farmers or hold my farming forum in Yeovil, it is clear to me that farmers have had enough of that. They have had enough of words, enough of this place and enough of this Government, and they want some clear action. With the publication of today’s farming road map, we are starting to go in the right direction, even if it has taken two years to get here. The road map sets out a vision for the future direction of farming, and I think that DEFRA has actually gone out and listened, which is a big change from the family farm tax and the sudden cut to SFI.
However, there is no long-term funding to go with it. I expect that that is because of the Treasury, which I feel just does not understand rural communities and the farming sector, and I am sorry, but that is not good enough. Farmers like Nick from South Petherton are telling me that they have to take so many more costs on the chin. He and others across Yeovil and Somerset are paying thousands of pounds extra a week for diesel and fertiliser. I had so much more to say today but, given the time limit, I will stop there.
Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)
It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Turner. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Northumberland (David Smith) on securing this important debate.
Farmers are the foundation of communities across the country, but British farming is in crisis—not a crisis of effort or ambition, but a crisis of confidence that successive Governments have chosen to ignore. Chris, a farmer in Babcary, has spent his whole life in agriculture, building a business worth passing on to his son, but Chris has terminal prostate cancer. For 18 long months, what caused him the greatest anxiety was not his health, but the tax bill his son would soon face following the Government’s cut to agricultural property relief, should he not survive seven years. I know how he feels, as I had very similar painful conversations with my mother. Like many farmers across the country, I was relieved when the Chancellor has moved the threshold to £2.5 million, but the family farm tax should be axed altogether.
Somerset farmers are struggling because successive Governments have let them down. The Conservatives gave farmers a kick in the teeth with their £358 million underspend on the farming budget, and Labour has delivered more of the same: a family farm tax with no consultation, a real-terms DEFRA budget cut of 2.3% a year, a farming budget slashed by more than £100 million and the closure of the SFI last year without notice. The Liberal Democrats were the first party to oppose the family farm tax, and we will keep opposing every policy that treats our farmers with disdain rather than lifting them up, because they are critical to our national security.
Jonathan, who farms in Little Weston, looked to the Rural England Prosperity Fund, only to find that DEFRA excludes farmers who want to diversify into food and drink. It is a fund for rural businesses to apply to, but it excludes adding value to the very products that farms produce. DEFRA also promised uplifted stewardship payment rates in April, but that promise has not been fulfilled, and there is no clear route from old schemes to new ones. The Government are asking farmers to transition and then shutting the door in their face.
British farmers are the best in the world, and the Liberal Democrats would invest an additional £1 billion a year into the farming budget so that they can continue to produce high-quality food for our tables while protecting and enhancing our natural environment. We would set payments over 10-year periods and ensure that every farmer has a route from old schemes into new ones.
In February I visited Andrew Moon, a third-generation pig farmer based in Baltonsborough who has more than 400 sows. His business is fighting for survival. Without warning, processors demanded a 30% cut in production, but Andrew asked a question that I could not answer: if farmers are forced to cut herds by 30%, where will the pork come from? Perhaps the Minister can help me answer that question.
Producers are being squeezed out of their own supply chains, with no commitment from retailers and no consultation—just an immediate demand to produce less. The Liberal Democrats have long called for a strengthened Groceries Code Adjudicator, with real teeth, to protect producers like Andrew, as well as public procurement that supports high-standard food and a guarantee that future trade deals will never undercut British farmers.
Yesterday marked 10 years since the Brexit vote, and it would be remiss of me not to address the impact that it has had on British farming. The botched deal has strangled trade across our food, farming and fishing industries. Every border check, every lorry held at port and every delayed consignment is a cost absorbed somewhere in the supply chain, and it is rarely the supermarkets that suffer. That is why the Liberal Democrats are calling on the Government to sign a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement with the EU as soon as possible, so that Somerset’s pork, cider and cheese reach European shelves without the paper eating into their profit.
We are sleepwalking into dependency on fragile global supply chains and into a crisis of empty fields and empty plates at home. The Government must treat farming as critical infrastructure, because Britain is not secure unless food supply is secure. That means providing long-term financial security for our farmers.
Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I thank the hon. Member for North Northumberland (David Smith) for securing this important debate.
I welcome the Minister to his place. His natural passion and enthusiasm for this vital sector is evident in the zero parliamentary mentions he made of farming prior to his appointment, despite his having been elected in 2017. Nevertheless, I wish him all the best. For the good of the sector, I hope that he gets out and engages with the farming community more than his predecessor, the hon. Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle).
This debate is about financial sustainability for the farming sector. Over the past two years, this Labour Government have continually pulled the rug out from under our farmers. We have had the sudden and unannounced closure of the SFI scheme, the rapid acceleration of delinked payments, the introduction of the family farm and family business tax, the jobs tax and, soon, the fertiliser tax. The result? Record farm closures under this Labour Government, and greater food insecurity than we have seen before.
Our farmers are fed up, worried and increasingly concerned about the future of their farming businesses and their livelihoods. I know that because, unlike the Government, the shadow DEFRA team and I have been out and about, travelling up and down the country, attending agricultural shows and speaking to farmers across the United Kingdom. We have been to the Royal Highland Show, the Royal Cornwall Show, the Royal Cheshire Show, the Lincolnshire Show, the Essex Country Show, the Balmoral Show in Belfast, and Cereals—just to name a few. The locations may vary, but the same theme comes out again and again: devastating cash flow challenges as a result of the fiscal decisions made by this Labour Government.
Unlike in other professions, income from agriculture can be volatile. Farm businesses are price takers, and the determinants of the prices they receive are out of their control. By the time the crops or livestock reach the market, prices may have dropped, but goods must be sold anyway. Income schemes such as the SFI are so important—but not in the Government’s eyes, with their chop-and-change approach. Under this Government, the schemes are not providing any reassurance or support to the majority of farmers. Last year, the Government closed applications for the SFI scheme with no warning, and yet again they have announced a budget that does not meet farmers’ requirements.
Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)
Would my hon. Friend agree that another uncertainty is coming down the path? The Climate Change Committee is asking farmers to reduce livestock numbers by up to 40%. That would devastate and make unviable so many farms—complete madness.
Robbie Moore
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. On the day when the farming roadmap has been announced, this just shows the direction that the Government want to take: to destock and produce food less. The key question from the shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs that the Secretary of State did not answer in the Chamber was: if that is the ambition of the Government, where is our food coming from?
The £100,000 cap for the SFI will be a disaster, resulting in lower environmental roll-outs. The changes to delinked payments that went through as a statutory instrument just a couple of weeks ago had no costed impact assessment associated with them. It is an absolute disgrace that Labour MPs all voted to drastically reduce the payments despite no impact assessment having been done.
The Conservative party has been clear that we will reverse the family farm and family business taxes. We will reinstall the 100% relief on agricultural and business property because we know the huge negative implications that is having on family businesses needing to mitigate any inheritance tax liability and on the investment they are able to put into their businesses. That is impacting not only our primary producers but the wider supply chain. I say to those Labour MPs that they should be ashamed of themselves for continuously voting that through.
Then we come to the challenges associated with input costs, including the fertiliser tax. If we want to increase or stabilise domestic self-sufficiency at 63%, why on earth are the Government coming through with the fertiliser tax? It has been raised as a concern, but the Government seem unwilling to tackle the challenge. The Conservatives will scrap that tax. [Interruption.]
Karl Turner (in the Chair)
Order. There has been a lot of chuntering while the shadow Minister has been on his feet. If you wish to try to intervene on the shadow Minister, please do—he may give way. However, do not chunter constantly when people are trying to make a speech.
Robbie Moore
I thank you, Mr Turner, for your advice to colleagues. If they wish to intervene, they are more than welcome to do so.
Red diesel has been a huge challenge: its price rose dramatically from 67p a litre to about £1.35p a litre at its peak. However, the Government’s rebate or reduction applies only to this year. If someone is growing crops or producing livestock, they need greater certainty beyond this calendar year. I call on the Minister to reinstate a level of reassurance that goes beyond the end of this calendar year.
We then have the EU reset. Pushed by EU members, the Government have put back the date beyond 22 July. However, CropLife UK has rightly estimated that the EU reset deal, as it is being promoted at the moment, could drain £810 million from UK farmers and sacrifice almost 9,000 jobs. What reassurance can the Minister provide to our arable sectors, which are suffering and struggling right now?
Today we had the announcement about the farming roadmap for the next 25 years. Where is the reassurance that cross-sector Government Departments have bought into that? Labour’s record on this is not good. It does not matter what food strategy the Secretary of State for DEFRA comes out with: if a Chancellor comes out with fiscal decisions like those under the last two years of this Labour Government, that will blow any food strategy out of the water.
Karl Turner (in the Chair)
Order. I suspect that the shadow Minister is going to bring his remarks to an end very soon.
Robbie Moore
Absolutely, Mr Turner.
The financial sustainability and profitability of the farming sector is vital. Through the choices that the Government have made and voted on, they have demonstrated that when the revolving door of farming Ministers say that food security is national security, that is just warm words.
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Stephen Morgan)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Turner. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Northumberland (David Smith) on securing this important debate and thank all those who have made contributions this afternoon.
I am delighted to see the excellent Labour rural research group here in force. Their speaking with such insight and passion is a reminder to me of the real champions for rural affairs issues who we have on our Benches. What a shame that so few Conservatives are here! Maybe that is a reminder of their disastrous election result in 2024.
I want to pay tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle), for her hard work and dedication to the role. Her ambition for farming and food security will make her a tough act to follow. I have already had the opportunity to meet a range of stakeholders from across the sector and visit a range of farms and farmers across the country, which has reinforced to me the importance of farming. It matters to our country, supports rural jobs and communities, provides the food we rely on and underpins our national resilience.
As I mentioned earlier, today we published our farming road map, which sets out our plan for farming up to 2050. The road map sets out a clear direction towards a future for farming. It will give businesses in the sector confidence to invest, grow, plan for the future and secure farms for the next generation. The road map will help our food and farming system to become more resilient to global crises, adopt nature-friendly methods that support profitable food production in the long term and shore up food supplies. It sets a direction for agriculture that involves clearer, fairer routes to market, with better access to the tools, technology, skills and supply chains that farmers need to run sustainable businesses.
Alongside the road map, today we published our full response to Baroness Minette Batters’s independent farming profitability review. The vast majority of her recommendations are either already under way or are being implemented soon, including the formulation of the farming and food partnership board, which has already met twice. Today, we announced that we will be taking a number of additional actions to create an environment for profitable farm businesses to thrive. That includes an additional £53 million investment for the farming innovation programme to help farmers to harness new technology that improves productivity, reduces reliance on inputs and improves long-term resilience. It also includes investment in the skills and people that the sector needs. By supporting training and new entrants, farmers’ hard-earned knowledge will be passed down to the next generation.
I also want to recognise the pressures that many farm businesses face—a theme that has come out very clearly in the debate. Input costs rise quickly, and global markets can shift overnight; that uncertainty makes it harder to plan, invest and employ. That is why I want to reiterate this Government’s long-term and practical approach to farming, our commitment to stable funding, and our simpler and fairer funding schemes, which are designed to make farming more resilient and sustainable for the future.
James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)
The Minister may well know that it was only a few years ago that the UK met 40% of its own nitrogen and fertiliser needs. Would he commit to working with the Minister for Industry to look at how we can get our domestic production to grow once again, given that under the Conservative party it disappeared altogether?
Stephen Morgan
I thank my hon. Friend for his reminder of the Conservative party’s record of failing rural Britain. I am very happy to take away the action he suggested. If we are to deliver our road map successfully, it will require lots of cross-Government working, and I am very committed to making that happen.
Let me address the fertiliser issue; I appreciate that major input costs are real source of worry for farmers. We are very conscious of the increases in fertiliser prices that have occurred because of the middle east conflict, and we are working actively to monitor the impacts on the agricultural supply chains. We have regular communication with domestic fertiliser suppliers, commodity traders and farming stakeholders, including the National Farmers Union, and we have been clear that we are committed to ensuring that markets function fairly.
We continue actively to monitor developments in the middle east, as well as other impacts on our food and farming sectors, including through ongoing engagement with industry leaders. My Department is aware that there are signs of some pressures easing but that prices still are above pre-conflict levels.
We recognise that these costs continue to be a significant issue for farmers; that issue was raised with me on my first day in this role, when I met with the NFU. The pressures that it is imposing are absolutely worth considering further. Whether through more effective use of technology or the adoption of more sustainable farming practices, we can better equip our farmers and growers to produce good food in a more resilient way, and this Government stand ready to help farmers to do that.
Greg Smith
Does the Minister accept that it is a choice made by this Government—maybe not by DEFRA, but by the Treasury—to bring in the carbon tax from 1 January? The Government cannot change events in the middle east, but they could choose to delay or scrap that tax.
Stephen Morgan
I remind Members that we currently have a good supply of fertiliser and are keen to support domestic production. The Government are live to the other issues that the hon. Gentleman raises; I will take them back to the Department, and am happy to write to him on his concerns.
The Government are also sharing information and guidance to support farmers to diversify sources of nutrients to reduce reliance on artificial fertilisers and strengthen long-term resilience by managing more effectively. DEFRA’s new nutrient management planning tool is already supporting our farmers by matching nutrients to crop and soil needs. That enables farmers to make the most of nutrient sources and to reduce their reliance on artificial fertilisers. More than 500 farms have used the tool since it was launched.
DEFRA has launched a consultation and call for evidence to inform how the Government modernise fertiliser production and the regulations around it, which will further improve future fertiliser supply options. We will continue to work with farmers to ensure that they become more resilient, through our innovation funds and equipment grants or our continued shift from area-based subsidy to environmental land management schemes.
Another issue raised in today’s debate was about fuel. Farmers have told the Government how important manageable fuel prices are to the financial sustainability of the farming sector and food security, and we have listened. While the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore), worries about his selfies for social media, we are focused on taking decisive action to support farmers by slashing the fuel duty rate on red diesel from 10.18p to 6.48p per litre—its lowest rate in 20 years. That means that red diesel now benefits from an 88% tax discount, saving farmers more than £300 million a year.
We have also extended the 5p fuel duty cut until the end of this year, keeping taxes at a 16-year low and saving the average driver £120. My Department will continue to work actively with others to monitor developments in the middle east, including their impact on the supply and price of red diesel. We are committed to ensuring that the market functions fairly, and will continue our discussions with industry leaders, including the NFU and farming stakeholders.
There are real, recent issues that need to be addressed; I have heard from the stakeholders I have already met that additional pressures are affecting farmers. The Government are well aware of the impact of climate change -related extreme weather on the financial sustainability of farms in recent years—this week’s heatwave is a reminder of that. We are committed to working with farmers to deliver long-term solutions to the risks associated with extreme wet or dry weather, and to increase profitability, because farmers being able to run profitable businesses is good for the whole economy and vital for food security. That is why we are investing in farming schemes and grants to make farming more resilient to economic and environmental shocks, and to safeguard our long-term food security.
We have allocated a record £11.8 billion over this Parliament to sustainable farming and food production. Overall, farmers and land managers will benefit from an average of £2.3 billion a year through our farming and countryside programme.
Rebecca Smith
On that point specifically, I raised Dartmoor and invited the Minister to visit my constituency. He has about 30 seconds left to speak, but could he respond to that point?
Stephen Morgan
I am happy to write formally to the hon. Lady to respond to her questions.
The message I leave with Members is simple: this Government believe that food security is national security. We are standing alongside farmers through global uncertainty, and supporting them by equipping them to manage volatility more effectively. We have already responded to the real pressures around fertilisers and fuel that farmers face and are backing British farming with record investment, improving schemes to make them simpler and fairer and supporting productivity and innovation. We are proud to work with British farmers as we grow the future of farming together.
David Smith
I thank the Minister for his comprehensive speech, and especially for touching on the issue of fertiliser. That issue is significant for all hon. Members here, and we will follow up on it.
The discussion has, for the most part, been cross party. If the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore), would like to see the level of conversation and the in-depth relationships that Labour MPs have with our farmers, I encourage him to go on social media to look at all our different listening exercises. He should also look at just how many—there are more than 100—rural Labour MPs sit in this House.
I could say many things, as some fantastic points were raised, but I finish with the idea of identity in our countryside and way of life. We need to secure that, and we will not do so unless we make farming financially sustainable.
Written Statements
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority: Contingent Liability Notification
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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The Minister for Energy (Michael Shanks)
My hon. Friend Lord Vallance of Balham, Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation has today made the following statement:
I wish to inform the House that the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero intends to undertake a contingent liability to provide the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority with an indemnity to cover risks arising from losses and damages to construction projects across NDA sites. The indemnity is expected to save the NDA at least £1 million per year compared to insurance premiums and will provide certainty of cover.
It is normal practice, when a Government Department proposes to undertake a contingent liability in excess of £300,000 for which there is no specific statutory authority, for the Minister concerned to present a departmental minute to Parliament giving particulars of the liability created and explaining the circumstances; and to refrain from incurring the liability until 14 parliamentary sitting days after the issue of the minute, except in cases of special urgency in line with “Managing Public Money”.
The indemnity covers construction projects on NDA sites against damage from terrorism, fire, flood or other natural hazards. The probability of crystallisation is low and mitigated by robust risk assessments, site access restrictions, rigid safety controls and regulations. It will cover only non-Nuclear Installation Act 1965 risks, as those are covered under the nuclear indemnity.
Construction insurance is an industry norm and the NDA has previously procured this at considerable cost. The indemnity will provide joint protection to all procured construction contractors and the NDA, but the NDA is the only one being indemnified.
The indemnity will be enduring from 1 October 2026, covering claims over £20 million up to a £650 million cap per year and with a £650 million cap per claim. Insurance will cover all claims up to £20 million. If the liability is called, provision for any payment will be sought through the normal supply procedure.
A departmental minute has today been laid before Parliament setting out full details of this contingent liability. The Treasury has approved this liability in principle. My Department will keep Parliament informed of any changes to this contingent liability as appropriate.
[HCWS143]
Farming Profitability Review: Government Response
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Emma Reynolds)
I shall be making an oral statement on this subject later today.
[HCWS142]
Gaza Departures: Government Support
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Yvette Cooper)
Today, with the agreement of the Secretary of State for Education, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the Secretary of State for the Home Department and the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, I am making the following statement.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains deeply concerning. The Government are committed to providing practical support to those most affected by the conflict and to contributing to the longer term recovery of Palestinian society.
Student departures
The UK Government have confirmed renewed support for high-achieving students from Gaza to take up fully funded scholarships at UK universities for the 2026-27 academic year.
This will build on support already provided by the Government in the current academic year, through which we have enabled over 100 students from Gaza to travel to the UK to pursue their studies. The Government will continue to prioritise students who hold fully funded and verifiable scholarships, and who meet the requirements of the immigration rules.
This targeted approach ensures that students supported will have the financial means to study and live in the UK. Eligible dependants will be supported in line with the immigration rules.
This also includes eligible Chevening scholars, who will be supported to take up their places at UK universities where possible, recognising their leadership potential and the important role they can play in the future of Palestinian society.
The Government will work closely with devolved Governments, universities, international partners and relevant authorities to facilitate departures and onward travel. However, departures from Gaza remain highly complex and dependent on factors outside the UK Government’s control. As such, travel and timelines cannot be guaranteed.
All individuals travelling to the UK under this route will be subject to robust security and immigration checks, including the provision of biometric data prior to travel.
This programme reflects the UK’s enduring commitment to education as a driver of opportunity, stability and future leadership, and forms part of broader efforts to support the development of a future Palestinian state.
Medical evacuations (MedEvac)
The Government have also confirmed the resumption of UK-supported medical evacuations of critically ill and injured children and their immediate families from Gaza, following a pause due to the regional conflict.
In 2025, a cross-Government effort supported the evacuation of 50 children, alongside their immediate family members, to receive specialist treatment in NHS hospitals across the United Kingdom. Building on this, the Government will now facilitate further evacuations for those identified as in need of urgent medical care.
Patients will be identified through established processes, including collaboration with the World Health Organisation to match children with specialist care teams within the NHS.
Recognising the severe degradation of healthcare provision in Gaza, this programme enables access to specialist treatment that is not currently available locally. It also reflects the compassion and expertise of the NHS in supporting some of the most vulnerable children affected by the conflict.
Individuals arriving under this scheme will be granted temporary permission to stay in the UK, including access to appropriate healthcare and support. All arrivals will be subject to stringent security screening, including biometric checks, in line with standard requirements to protect the public.
Conclusion
Together, these measures demonstrate the Government’s continued commitment to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, while supporting the longer-term resilience and recovery of Palestinian society through education and healthcare.
A policy statement setting out more details will shortly be published on gov.uk. The Government will keep these arrangements under close review in light of ongoing developments.
[HCWS144]
Nottingham Maternity and Neonatal Services
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (James Murray)
I refer hon. Members to the oral statement I made in the House today, 24 June 2026, on the publication of the report from the independent maternity and neonatal review of Nottingham University hospitals NHS trust.
[HCWS145]
Grand Committee
Arrangement of Business
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Bull) (CB)
My Lords, as a reminder, if there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, this Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and resume after 10 minutes.
Financial Services and Markets Bill [HL]
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)
My Lords, before we start, I ask noble Lords, as I did on Monday, to declare their interests before they speak. If they did not do that on Monday, they need to do it today. In addition, as per paragraph 8.82 of the Companion, when it comes to pressing or withdrawing amendments at the end of the debate, I ask noble Lords to keep that debate short. We are not supposed to rehash and repeat the whole debate, so please keep it succinct.
Schedule 2: Payment systems regulation
Amendment 47A
Lord Holmes of Richmond
“6A After section 1QA insert—“1QB The Payment Systems Panel(1) Arrangements under section 1M must include the establishment and maintenance of a panel of persons (to be known as “the Payments System Panel”) to represent the interests of—(a) participants in regulated payment systems, and(b) those who use, or are likely to use, services provided by regulated payment systems.(2) The FCA must appoint one of the members of the Payments System Panel to be its chair.(3) The Treasury’s approval is required for the appointment or dismissal of the chair.(4) The FCA must appoint to the Payments System Panel such persons to represent interests and expertise relevant to the FCA’s payment systems objectives.””Member’s explanatory statement
Schedule 2, paragraph 6 removes the Payment System Regulator from the FCA’s statutory panel composition provisions and does not replace it with any payments-specific representation. This amendment and another in the name of Lord Holmes of Richmond seek to provide such representation.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to open day two of Committee on the Financial Services and Markets Bill. As it is the first time I have spoken in Committee, I declare my interests as set out in the register around technology, as an adviser variously to the Crown Estate, Endava plc, Simmons & Simmons LLP, and as non-exec director of Avalanche BVI Inc and the Avalanche Foundation.
I had hoped to take part in day one of your Lordships’ deliberations on the Bill, but unfortunately there was a direct clash with the Sporting Events Bill in the Chamber. I was hoping to be able to perform some kind of Bill biathlon but, sadly, time clearly caught up with me and I found myself stuck on the track in there. However, it is a pleasure to open day two of the Bill. I will move Amendment 47A and speak to the other amendments in this group in my name. I give more than a nod to the other amendments in this group and I thank my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for co-signing two of my amendments.
In essence, these amendments can be seen as a connected group. The intention set out in the Bill is clear that the PSR is no more and its functions are to move over to the FCA. That is a defensible and clear objective and it has been communicated. The difficulty is that it is not what the Bill currently achieves. In many ways, these amendments could be summed up by “Lost in Translation”, because key elements of the functions of the PSR, not least those critical elements around competition and innovation, have not come over and certainly have not been reproduced in the Bill to the same extent as they appear in their original statutory form. This is clearly a gap in the Bill that we have before us.
Amendment 47A suggests a payment systems panel. This goes to the second element of “Lost in Translation” in the Bill. Representation of those involved in and affected by payments has similarly disappeared and has not come across from the wording in the originating statute. This is critical, not only because it does not fulfil the Government’s stated intention with these parts of the Bill but because, when you think about it, so much in life involves a payment. Something is either started with a payment or ended with a payment and, if it is neither started nor ended with a payment, odds-on it is probably a payment in its own right. This needs to be put right in the Bill and I suggest that the payment system panel achieves that.
The remaining amendments in my name very much go to putting back those requirements and obligations, as set out in the originating statute, around competition and innovation. The Government have talked variously about the growth objective, not least the role that regulators have to play in it. Indeed, they summoned regulators to No. 11 for a regulators’ showdown— I am not sure what the collective noun for a group of regulators is, but it was certainly a gathering—focused solely on growth. Well, competition and innovation are critical to that growth objective.
I suggest that this suite of amendments fills the gap that is left in the existing draft of the Bill. I very much look forward to the Minister’s response and to the debate on this and the other amendments—those who have put them forward have all done so on similar and related issues. I beg to move.
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)
My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 48. It addresses a simple but important point: the quality of regulation depends on the quality of consultation. At present, consultation periods vary unpredictably. Some run for many weeks; others, even on significant policy shifts, have been compressed into days. That inconsistency makes a system difficult for firms to plan around, inaccessible for consumer groups and individuals, and challenging for Parliament to scrutinise. I am a serial responder to consultations—I have been for over 20 years, not just on financial services—and I have experienced this difficulty myself.
The Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee, on which I serve, along with several other Members who are present in this Committee, heard extensive evidence on this. In our report Growing Pains, we concluded that the FCA and PRA need a better understanding of the lived experience of regulated firms in coping with consultations, policy statements, “Dear CEO” letters and the plethora of regulatory tools now used. That is a polite way of saying that the system is overloaded and fragmented.
My amendment would introduce proportionate, predictable windows: four to six weeks for minor changes and six to eight weeks for material ones. I seem to recall that, in Brussels, the time allowed was two months and for more complicated things an extension was available of three months. It would also be in line with that, so not out of line with international thinking. The amendment also sets out the factors that regulators must consider when deciding whether a proposal is minor or material. That embeds proportionality but without rigidity. I envisage that there could be, again, the opportunity for extensions in difficult cases. The FCA quite often does that, but usually quite late, after you have had a panic. Crucially, regulators may depart from these windows in exceptional circumstances, as I have said, but they must explain why. That is transparency, not constraint. It ensures that urgency can be accommodated but not used as a blanket justification for compressed consultation.
Predictable consultation matters because it is the only point where Parliament, industry, consumer groups, individuals and civil society generally can influence policy and rule-making. If windows are unpredictable or too short, smaller firms and resource-constrained consumer bodies are effectively excluded. Trade associations cannot consult their members, but their responses are important, as we know that many firms are reluctant to respond directly, for fear of being seen as criticising regulators and suffering supervisory consequences.
The various advisory panels have their place, of course, but they are not a substitute for open consultation. They rely on the knowledge of individuals, not the pooled experience of the market or the public. Industry has asked for this amendment, which tells us something important: the current system is not working as it should. Consultation should not be a matter of luck or timing; it should be predictable, fair and transparent. This amendment would support better engagement and better outcomes. It is a modest but essential part of the culture change that the Lords committee called for, and I hope that the Government will look on it favourably.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group that relate to the PSR. Before I run through those, I want to comment on Amendment 47A, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond. I must say that I am attracted by the idea of a payment systems panel. Payment systems are such a critical part of our financial services structure. They are used more often by more people and more businesses than any other financial service. If they go wrong, or become too expensive, or fail to prevent fraud or error effectively, the impact on individuals and businesses would be very significant. The abolition of the PSR risks dilution of attention to payment systems, so the creation of a panel has very real merit, and I will listen to the Minister’s answer with interest. I will also be interested to hear why the payment systems competition objective in the Bill is missing elements originally included in the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act 2013, as the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, has pointed out.
I move on to my Amendment 49, which is simply a request for clarification and understanding. I have read new subsection 131Z3(2)(d)(ii), inserted by Schedule 2, a number of times, but have been struggling to understand the double negative in it. I think I now understand that it means that any system that includes any arrangements using digital settlement assets may be a payment system even if that system’s primary purpose is not that of enabling persons to transfer funds. Is that correct? If so, why is that? Why do we treat systems not primarily intended to be used for the transfer of funds, but which include digital settlement assets, differently from systems that do not include digital settlement assets?
Amendments 50 to 53 are all related and designed to reduce the discretion of the Treasury to designate or not designate a payment system as a regulated payment system. As it stands, the Bill gives the Treasury complete discretion. The Bill sets out when the Treasury may designate a payment system to be regulated, but whether it does so is entirely at its discretion, subject only to some consultations. If it does not wish to designate a payment system as a regulated payment system, it does not even need to consult. Similarly, new Section 131Z6 gives it complete discretion to withdraw any designation at will at any time. Why does that matter? That might be best illustrated by a completely hypothetical and obviously completely made-up example. Stablecoins are generally recognised as being primarily a payment system. Let us imagine that there might be a politician who has received a donation of, shall we say, £5 million from an overseas billionaire who is a major shareholder in the world’s leading stablecoin issuer. Perhaps that politician may not have registered such a donation. Let us imagine that that politician gains a position of influence over the Treasury and feels that the interests of his benefactor might be assisted if stablecoins, or indeed a particular stablecoin, were not designated as a regulated payment system. The Bill, as drafted, would allow exactly that to happen. Does the Minister agree that this feels somewhat inappropriate and open to potential abuse?
My amendments would reduce that discretion so that the Treasury must—“must”, not “may”—designate a payment system as a regulated payment system if it is satisfied that any deficiency in the design of the system, or any disruption of its operation, would likely have serious consequences for those who use or are likely to use the services provided by participants in the system. It would have to withdraw a designation if satisfied that those grounds are no longer met.
My Amendment 55 is another request for clarification; I recognise that it may not be required. Prior to being abolished, the PSR does not have a secondary competitiveness and growth objective such as that of the FCA. It has an objective to promote effective competition in the market for payment systems and services and an innovation objective, but those are different things. It was not clear to me when I read this whether, as the PSR becomes part of the FCA, the regulation of payment systems will become subject to the FCA’s wider set of objectives or not. This amendment aims to put that beyond doubt, but perhaps the Minister could confirm the position.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, I will make a few comments on amendments in this group and speak particularly to my Amendments 54 and 57. I say very gently that I agree with the other amendments in this group. My noble friend Lady Bowles is looking for consistency in the consultation period. Unless someone has been on the other side of a consultation period—not setting it but trying to respond to it—they may not know that the real-life difficulties of the inconsistency, frankly, are often a barrier, not just an annoyance. Amendment 47A is in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and yes, it makes sense to have a payment systems panel on an issue such as this: we need to make sure that a full range of views and experience is taking a look at such a crucial piece of the financial plumbing.
On Amendment 55, I could not understand why ease of use should have been removed from the competition objective. That made no sense if we are thinking about people and consumers. I do not know whether the Government could explain that. I very much support the noble Lord, Lord Vaux. It had struck me but I did not do anything about it and I should have. His Amendment 49 deals with this capacity to exclude digital payment assets from definitions in payment systems, which just seems fundamentally wrong. We are moving in the direction of digital, these are coherent parts of the payment system and it is going to be relevant to the two amendments that I am about to discuss.
My Amendment 54 recognises that we are in a fast-changing world. We are increasingly in a time in which the payment system is made up of many more entities than just the conventional players. New schemes, platforms, exchanges and all kinds of services are coming on stream; these are key and many are digital. Amendment 54 emphasises that the FCA must, in its service-user objective, focus on “consumers”, a much clearer term than “users”. We have seen in the past that consumers get lost in this overall definition of users. It would require the FCA to look at the issues of inclusion, redress, access to cash, choice and interoperability from the perspective of the consumer in this increasingly complex world. As we move forward, many consumers will simply be bemused.
A simple example arose for me when, very recently, I spoke to an American firm planning to offer payroll services in the UK using 100% stablecoin. The firm is very confident that this will be in place shortly after the regulations are approved by the FCA. How does an employee receiving 100% of their salary in stablecoin turn that into cash at an ATM? Obviously, there are huge issues of access to cash, interoperability and who will pay for the necessary software and hardware changes.
Amendment 57 carries on with this theme and picks up an earlier group, addressing the need for all participants in the payment system, including tech companies, to pay their fair share. That is why the definition of “payment system” really matters and should not exclude digital assets. As the payments world changes so significantly, financial inclusion will be a far more complex issue, and it is untenable for the costs of this to fall just on the banks. My amendment makes it clear that every participant across all recognised payment systems must step up: we need a level playing field.
The intent of these really quite simple amendments is to help overcome the incredibly fragmented and confusing payments landscape in the UK, particularly when we look at it from the perspective of the consumer. It is an obstacle course and, frankly, general confusion and fragmentation let overseas entities take advantage of us. I am very troubled that the National Payments Vision of the Bank of England does not have digital assets in scope. The Bank issued its policy announcement on systemic stablecoin on Monday, and it says that its work will be in parallel with the National Payments Vision, but I am still trying to work out why the two are not properly linked together and coherent. There are new players in this field, and some are asserting that we need a single sovereign payments system to respond to core consumer needs and to join up the dots with consumers at its heart. I met the Canadian company Interac, and that is exactly what happens in Canada, so there are international examples, which do not seem to be under consideration in any of the material that I have been looking at.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for bringing forward this group of amendments, which raises several important questions around the future shape of payments regulation once the Payment Systems Regulator is brought within the FCA. I am particularly grateful to my noble friend Lord Holmes for introducing Amendments 47A and 101A with simplicity and clarity; I note the support from the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer.
Despite the arguments of the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, I do not favour extending the FCA’s service user objective to include consumer redress or access to cash; indeed, I am against a levy for such purposes. In any event, payment system operators do not deal with customers. That is done by financial services firms.
I am more receptive to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, on applying the secondary growth and competitiveness objective to the regulation of payment systems. Does the Minister intend to do this? If so, can it be done by the proposed regulations or does it need to go into the Bill? I should add that, as with so much in the Bill, the framework is broad while the substance is left to later regulations. That is a real concern, as it leaves a lacuna in parliamentary accountability.
We have been through the arguments on consumer credit and in-person banking, but I log them again for good order. I want also to address two central themes running through this group: first, the need for proper industry engagement and accountability in regulation-making; and, secondly, the question of whether the new regime is sufficiently clear and future-proofed.
On the first point, we welcome the amendments that seek to strengthen the consultation requirements and ensure adequate time for meaningful industry engagement, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, set out in her Amendment 48. That would have a dual effect. First, it would increase transparency and accountability for regulators. If regulators are required to consult properly, explain their reasoning, engage with those affected and publish clear strategies, we have a better chance of understanding not only what they are doing but why they are doing it. One point that is clearly of concern to other noble Lords is the extent of the discretion afforded to the Treasury in designating and de-designating payment systems.
The second effect is that this would ensure that those affected by regulation have a meaningful opportunity to have some input in our deliberations on the Bill and our discussions with industry. It has become clear that the regulatory environment seems to be planned and developed at some distance from the firms that are expected to comply. New regulations, handbooks and guidance may make sense to the people sitting in the FCA or the PRA, but they do not always make sense to those at the coalface: firms, compliance teams, payment providers and market participants. They have to interpret them to implement them and live with the operational consequences.
In this case, those with an interest go way beyond the regulators’ normal clients. For example, concerns have been expressed by retailers, which are usually quick to spot practical problems. I remember well that, when I was at Tesco, we were introducing the euro into our businesses in Ireland and elsewhere. Because of inadequate consultation, the timing was wrong, with training and IT changes needed during the busy Christmas period—a recipe for cost and chaos.
This is a real problem. If regulation is developed in a silo, away from the experience of market participants, even well-intentioned regulation can become impractical, disproportionate or poorly targeted. We end up with the regulator and the regulated working from different understandings of how the market actually functions. That is why I hope that the Minister will look constructively at the amendments that seek to strengthen consultation, transparency and meaningful engagement both with professional bodies and with market participants. Without proper planning, there will be a risk to growth—and, indeed, to the UK’s reputation on payment systems, which has generally been good.
The second major issue is the question of what exactly is covered by the regime. Is the Bill regulating the market as it exists today or preparing the UK for the market as it will exist in a few years? We will speak about digital finance and digital assets in later groups, but the point is highly relevant here, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, mentioned. If the Bill is to modernise and improve regulation, why does it feel in places as though it is being designed for a market that may already be out of date? We have the legal system, the financial services expertise, the markets, the professional services ecosystem and the technology capability to be a world leader, but leadership requires clarity and confidence from the Government and I do not think we are yet seeing enough of either in this Bill.
That brings me to the wider point about accountability and scope, which was raised on Monday. If the PSR’s functions are to be absorbed into the FCA, how will this new regime be properly held to account? How will the Government ensure that payments regulation does not become simply one more area lost within the wider FCA structure? I would be grateful if, in addition to my initial questions about growth, competitiveness and the level of delegation, the Minister could address three points.
First, how will the Government ensure that industry and professional bodies are brought into the regulation-making process early enough for their input to make a meaningful difference? Secondly, how will the Government ensure that the new regime is sufficiently clear and future-proofed to capture new forms of payments and digital finance, rather than regulating for the market of the past? Thirdly, how will the new payments regime be held to account once it sits within the FCA and what mechanisms will exist to ensure that Parliament, industry and consumers can properly scrutinise its operations? A lot of clarity is needed on this part of the Bill, which we of course support in principle. I very much look forward to the Minister’s reply.
The Minister of State, Department for Business and Trade and HM Treasury (Lord Stockwood) (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Holmes and Lord Vaux, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Kramer and Lady Bowles, for tabling these amendments, and to the noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I will speak first to the amendments concerning the regulation of payment systems and then turn to Amendment 48 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, which raises a separate issue concerning the consultation processes of the FCA and PRA.
There is no doubt that payment systems are critical economic infrastructure. They must be secure and resilient, but also support competition, innovation and good outcomes for the households and businesses that rely on them. That is the purpose of the Bill. It consolidates the Payment Systems Regulator’s functions within the FCA to create a more coherent framework. This is an institutional reform and should not be seen as weakening consumer protection, competition regulation or regulatory standards. The PSR has been effective in driving competition and innovation among payments firms, but the current framework is too fragmented. The Bill will reduce the number of regulators with which firms need to engage.
It is worth stating that the Government have not rushed into this. We consulted on this proposal almost a year ago, in September 2025, and have been working on the details ever since. We published a detailed response in April this year. Throughout this process, the Government have been clear: the intention is not to fundamentally change how this part of the sector is regulated; it is about changing who regulates it to produce a more streamlined system. When I respond to each amendment, I hope that noble Lords will keep this in mind. I hope to reassure noble Lords that the Bill already provides the right framework.
I understand that the desire of Amendment 47A is to ensure payments-specific expertise and that the interests of users and the industry are heard in the FCA. However, the Government do not consider a new statutory payments system panel to be necessary, because the Bill ensures that the FCA’s general duty to consult in relation to its general policies and practices includes participants in regulated payment systems, including those who use or are likely to use services provided by participants in payment systems. We believe that this will ensure that their views will be considered without needing to recreate separate structures within the newly simplified regulatory framework.
I understand the concern in Amendment 49 about whether systems that involve digital settlement assets fall within the definition of a payment system. The Bill attempts to be clear that they can and are capable of designation, even where enabling the transfer of funds is not their primary purpose, reflecting how they may support payment activity within wider platforms.
Amendments 50 to 53 seek to make designation mandatory once the relevant payment systems definition and designation threshold is met, and to restrict the Treasury’s discretion to revise or withdraw designation notices. The Government do not consider that appropriate. As I have already stated, payment systems are technologically dynamic. The Treasury must retain discretion to assess the circumstances and to regulate proportionately, taking into account the relevant factors. Making designation automatic, or withdrawal too restrictive, could introduce rigidity and unintended consequences. Therefore, the Bill preserves the existing position whereby the Treasury may designate a system where it meets the definition of a payment system, and only where the relevant threshold is met. The Government have determined that it is appropriate to maintain a designation regime for payment systems because it facilitates more targeted and proportionate regulation.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
I am not sure I fully understood the Minister’s response to Amendment 55. Does the FCA’s secondary growth and competitiveness objective apply to payment service systems under the Bill? That was the clarity I sought.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
It does indeed. Returning to Amendments 55A, 55B and 55C, I agree that the FCA must be able to consider user access and market entry by infrastructure and payment service providers. The Bill already achieves that. The FCA’s payment systems objectives are intended to be equivalent in substance and scope to the PSR’s existing objectives.
The noble Lords, Lord Holmes and Lord Vaux, asked about drafting differences between the FCA and the PSR objectives. Changes in drafting of the FCA’s payment systems objectives are for simplification only. The FCA’s payment systems objectives retain the substance of the PSR’s objectives.
Turning to Amendment 57, the Government are committed to improving financial inclusion, but a new levy on payment system participants is not the right mechanism. The better course is targeted and proportionate action, including through the Government’s financial inclusion strategy and the recent allocation of £132.5 million in dormant assets funding to Fair4All Finance.
On Amendment 101A, the Bill already provides for the secondary competitiveness and growth objective to apply to the payment systems’ general functions. Any reporting on that secondary objective would include its application to payment systems’ regulation, as appropriate. Therefore, the Government consider the amendment unnecessary and are satisfied that the Bill already gives the FCA the right objectives to support innovation, competition and growth.
Finally, Amendment 48 seeks to introduce maximum and minimum lengths for the consultations undertaken by the FCA and PRA. I understand the desire to ensure that, where regulators consult on proposed rule changes, stakeholders have a fair opportunity to consider the proposals and respond properly. However, this amendment would impose a rigid statutory timetable on consultations, which will cover a very wide range of issues that vary considerably in complexity, urgency and market impact. The Government’s view is that it is appropriate to allow the regulators to determine the appropriate consultation period, rather than being bound to timings set in primary legislation.
The noble Lord, Lord Vaux, is right on how we describe the interpretation of the drafting; I commend him for his skill in reading a very technical provision that I have had difficulty reading. He asked why payment systems that involve digital settlement assets are treated differently. This reflects the particular characteristics of digital settlement assets and the way the market is developing. It also reflects the existing arrangements under the PSR framework.
The Bill preserves flexibility to bring relevant systems within the scope of payment systems regulation, where they support payment activity. That does not mean automatic regulation. The system must still be designated by HMT before the FCA’s main powers apply. This approach ensures that the new framework is both future-proofed and proportionate. The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, raised the issue of consultations with industry. The FCA works closely with industry, and the Bill sets out clear consultation requirements on the FCA to support this as it takes on this new role.
As I said at the start, I cannot accept these amendments, but I appreciate the spirit of where they come from. The Bill is aimed at ensuring that we have the right institutional framework for this part of the sector, while ensuring that we do not weaken those consumer protections. I therefore ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
Before the Minister sits down, may I come back to the question of consultation? We are being asked to have a high degree of delegation with this change of governance for the Payment Systems Regulator. The Minister seems sure that the regulator will meaningfully consult the right people at the right time. It seems extraordinary to leave so much discretion with the regulators, particularly, as I explained, when they are moving into very new areas. He has rejected the idea of a panel, which would be one way of getting expertise into the system, and I wonder if he will think further about this.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
To come back on that, we have heard the criticism of the FCA loud and clear. The intention is for further debates to come back to what we believe is the current state of oversight and governance, and we are open to the conversations that the debates will lead to.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this important debate. One of the key themes that ran through it and the Minister’s response is the question of clarity, or the lack thereof. Certainly, as a consequence of these changes as currently drafted, there is less clarity on payment systems regulation and on how the competition and innovation requirements will be satisfied in a broader context. I fully support the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, on his amendments, and I will come to the important amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles.
I am disappointed that the Minister did not take the opportunity to offer a consultation about consultations. The reality is that the Minister could take this opportunity to bring clarity to increasing and varying levels of opacity and unnecessary levels of control in the hands of the regulator, where they currently exist. We have seen this in financial services in recent Bills that we have considered; it goes beyond financial services to this sense of leaving regulators with greater powers as a consequence of significant statutes passed, as opposed to Parliament debating and determining these decisions, which in no sense would tie the regulators’ hands. In fact, the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, would assist the regulators, because it would bring clarity on how to operate these consultations. There is a significant issue with consultations in financial services, and a significant issue with government consultations across the piece. It is not a party-political point; it has been the case for years. This is an opportunity to bring clarity to this and enable more firms, more individuals and more perspectives to be brought into what would then be better consultations and better outcomes as a result of that consultation process. I very much look forward to the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, bringing her amendment back on Report. It is strong; it would not let too many cats out of too many bags—even though I stand with a Labrador at my feet—and I do not think that this will be the last we see of a number of these amendments. For now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Stockwood
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would remove a subsection which duplicates section 131Z19 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (inserted by paragraph 18 of Schedule 2).
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
My Lords, the purpose of the government amendments in this group is to ensure that the relevant provisions of the Bill operate clearly, consistently and in line with the Government’s original policy intent. They are technical and corrective in nature and do not change the underlying policy of the Bill. However, it is important that noble Lords understand the purpose of the amendments so that they can agree that they are minor and technical, so I will explain them briefly.
Amendments 56, 60 and 63 make minor, technical corrections to Schedule 2, which, taken with Clause 13, abolishes the Payment Systems Regulator and gives broadly equivalent functions to the FCA. Amendment 56 removes a duplicative provision from new Section 131Z9 to the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 that is already covered by new Section 131Z19. Amendment 60 corrects a cross-reference so that the Bill refers to the correct FCA payment system powers when setting out how the Competition and Markets Authority is to determine an appeal.
Amendments 61, 62 and 63 ensure that references to the chair of the PSR, which will be obsolete after the PSR is abolished, are deleted in the correct places in Schedule 1ZA to the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, which concerns the FCA’s constitution and governance.
Amendments 143 to 145 are also minor and technical amendments. Amendment 143 and 144 ensure that Section 66A of FSMA is amended in a coherent and orderly way, regardless of whether the amendments to that section made by Clause 27 are commenced first or the amendments to that section made by Clause 36 are commenced first. Amendment 145 amends subsection (4) of new Section 55AA, inserted by Clause 29(3), to ensure that the language used there is consistent with the language used elsewhere in FSMA. The amendment simply replaces the words “is in force” with “has effect”. These amendments do not change the policy or legal effect of the affected clauses. They are drafting amendments for the purposes of coherence and consistency only.
I now turn to Amendments 147 to 150, to Clause 33. Clause 33 allows firms to apply for senior approval, subject to conditions or a limited period; they are known as permitted conditional applications. This helps support a more flexible approvals process. Amendments 147 to 150 are technical amendments that fix an error in the original drafting and will ensure that the framework operates as intended. Without these amendments, there is a risk that decisions will not be properly formalised and that the period for determining applications will not be applied consistently.
Amendments 147 and 149 provide that the period for determining permitted conditional applications is the same as for other senior manager applications. Amendments 148 and 150 provide that regulators must give written notice when they approve a permitted conditional application. Taken together, these amendments will ensure that the statutory framework works clearly and consistently in practice.
In summary, this group of government amendments makes technical corrections to ensure that the Bill works as intended. I hope that noble Lords will join me in supporting them.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
My Lords, I have given the Minister notice that I intend to object to these amendments, so if he presses them, I will object and therefore they will not pass. It has been the custom of our House that when the Government table amendments to Bills, they notify all Members of the House—because the Government cannot determine which Peers might be interested in which amendments—and explain the amendments. It may well be that some of these amendments are technical and mean simply the correction of errors, but Members of your Lordships’ House should have the opportunity to consider them properly.
I became aware of this only late last week, when I suddenly realised that several government amendments had been put down—these and others—and that I had had no letter. I do not believe that anybody else has had a letter. Because of that, we ought to maintain the customary practices of your Lordships’ House. As I said, I will object to these amendments if they are put.
Lord Altrincham (Con)
My Lords, I will speak briefly to the government amendments in this group and declare my interest as a director of South Molton Street Capital, which is regulated by the FCA. I thank the Minister for explaining so clearly these amendments. He has described them as minor technical amendments and as descriptions around making language consistent with FSMA. Notwithstanding that, at the outset, we welcome these amendments in so far as they are intended to make the Bill clearer, correct cross-references, remove duplications and ensure that the legislation works as intended. The amendments before us are technical in character and, where they improve the coherence and operability of the Bill, we do not object to them.
However, following the words of my noble friend Lady Noakes, I want to raise a broader procedural point, because I think it matters for how this Committee is able to scrutinise the Bill properly. We understand that not all noble Lords who have taken a close interest in the Bill were engaged by the department on these government amendments. That is a concern. I would be grateful if the Minister could give us a clear commitment that, ahead of future stages, the Government will make every effort to engage with not only the Opposition Front Bench but noble Lords across the Committee who have raised substantive concerns, and to provide timely, written explanations of any further government amendments.
I understand that my noble friend Lady Noakes will be writing to the Minister about the way in which the Government have handled engagement and oversight around these amendments. Given the reservations of my noble friend and of her committee, it is right that we do not agree to these amendments today but rather see them reintroduced on Report, as a matter of principle.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
My Lords, I am happy to apologise to the noble Baroness for any mix-up. It was my understanding that it was not necessary to do an all-Peers letter for only a handful of technical amendments. With that in mind, we believe that the amendments we have proposed are minor and technical in nature and were tabled in good time before the Committee’s first debate. They are on drafting errors and remove duplicate and obsolete provisions, ensuring that the relevant provisions in the Bill and FSMA operate clearly and consistently. I trust that my explanation has given the noble Baroness the information she needs, but I will withdraw the amendment for now and bring it back on Report.
Lord Holmes of Richmond
“(1C) Regulations made under subsection (1A) may make provision in relation to— (a) the Financial Conduct Authority, in respect of its functions under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000;(b) the Financial Conduct Authority, in respect of its functions relating to payment services or electronic money;(c) Ofcom;(d) the National Crime Agency;(e) the National Economic Crime Centre;(f) law enforcement agencies.”Member's explanatory statement
The amendment seeks to require more effective intelligence sharing between supervisory authorities.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to open on this group of amendments, which in many ways builds on the first group. This Bill is light on the use of technology and on the use of intelligence between the regulators which are spread across the financial services landscape. As my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe said in responding to the first group, in many ways the Bill feels as if it is written for a time which is already rapidly evaporating. There are new payment mechanisms and new financial instruments. In fact, there are new products which are already dominating key parts of the market.
It would seem to make sense to have provision for more intelligence-sharing across the regulators, and indeed the broader landscape. Modern technologies are deployed by both participants and bad actors in this arena. Thus, it would seem to make sense to have combined activity, connected action and shared intelligence among the regulators and, within that, to bring technologies such as AI and others to bear in achieving it. I look forward to the debate on this amendment and others in this group, and to the Minister’s response.
Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)
My Lords, I should like to speak to Amendments 64B and 69AA in this group, which are in my name. They direct attention to matters arising from the provisions in Clause 14 that are of great concern to the Law Society and the Law Society of Scotland. I apologise to the Minister for their late arrival; they are based on draft amendments that were not sent to me until Monday of this week. I am grateful to the Table Office for its help in drafting them at short notice.
The background to these amendments is as follows. The Law Society and the Law Society of Scotland are both regulatory authorities. Their current regulatory roles include responsibility for supervising compliance by solicitors, in their respective jurisdictions, with the UK’s anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing frameworks. They are, therefore, supervisory authorities of the kind referred to in the amendment to Section 49 of the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018, as set out in Clause 14(2).
However, the regulation of anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing is only part of the responsibilities that these two societies exercise as regulators. Solicitors play an important role in tackling economic crime. The societies’ roles as AML supervisory bodies are a key component of their functions as regulators of the solicitor profession. This is a task that both societies take very seriously. I am told that the Law Society of Scotland employs a team of dedicated specialists with detailed, up-to-date knowledge of the trends in economic crime and the risks that are associated with the provision of legal services; I have no reason to think that the way in which the Law Society of England and Wales handles its responsibilities is any different.
The effect of the amendments proposed in Clause 14 would be to transfer, through regulations that we have not yet seen, the front-line AML supervision of the solicitor profession to the Financial Conduct Authority, as the single professional services regulator. The Law Society believes that this will amount to a seismic shake-up as to how law firms and their AML/CTF obligations are regulated, which risks sending shockwaves through the sector. It also says that adapting to this change has the potential to divert attention, resources and time from supporting clients and developing solicitors’ businesses, with effects that it would be quite hard to cope with.
The Law Society of Scotland strongly opposes this change. Its point is that it will lead to the duplication of systems of regulation. On the one hand, the society will continue to have its role as the profession’s regulator; on the other hand, there will be the FCA. Solicitor firms, large and small, will have to deal with them both in future, increasing the time spent and the cost of being regulated. This will bear heavily, especially on small firms in the remoter areas of Scotland, which often operate on very narrow margins. The population is thinly spread in these areas, as are the firms that exist to provide essential legal services there to the people who need them. Much will of course depend on how the FCA approaches its task, but anything that might lead to the disappearance of these firms due to the consequences would be very much to be regretted. That is what lies behind the Law Society of Scotland’s objection.
The Law Society of England and Wales, for its part, is concerned that, without a clear statement of their position by the Treasury and the FCA, Parliament is being asked to legislate for powers to enable the detail of the reforms to be enacted that remain unclear and which the sector has not yet seen.
My Amendment 64B focuses on the points that are of particular concern. I shall mention in relation to each one, as briefly as I can, the questions for which answers are sought from the Minister. Proposed new subsection (1C)(a) asks that the regulations be “proportionate and risk-based”. The question is whether the FCA intends to import its banking model into the process for all solicitors’ firms, small as well as large, or instead to take a risk-based approach. Should not the supervision in regard to this profession be tailored to the risks posed by the different sectors within it? Firms vary from the very small, with perhaps just one partner in a remote part of Scotland, to the very large international firms found in the City of London. How will the Government ensure that the small high street firms up and down the country are not disproportionately burdened by the system that they propose to operate?
Proposed new subsection (1C)(b) seeks appropriate protections for legal professional privilege and client confidentiality. Can the Minister confirm that nothing will be done under Clause 14 that will weaken legal professional privilege, which has a vital role in securing access to justice? The Solicitors Regulation Authority of the Law Society of England and Wales at present keeps all LPP material confidential. It may be used only for investigation and enforcement proceedings against the solicitor or the firm that it regulates. It may not be used in relation to proceedings that may be taken against its clients. Will the FCA follow the Law Society’s practice? Will it also accommodate the duty of confidentiality that underpins much legal work? Further, will it respect the obligations of the solicitor or the firm to the court?
Proposed new subsection (1D) seeks to avoid duplication. It is feared that the Treasury will introduce a broader system of regulation than the current regime, with the risk that this will duplicate the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s oversight, create unnecessary burdens and delay routine transactions. What practical mechanisms can be put in place to prevent solicitors from being subjected to overlapping requirements from both the FCA and the SRA?
Proposed new subsection (1E) calls for an impact assessment. How can the appropriateness of these powers be judged without seeing the underlying regime? Will the regulations be accompanied by assessments of their impact on those to be subjected to the system of supervision for which they provide? What estimate has been made of the compliance costs for these law firms? Will the powers be compatible with the way that legal services are regulated in Scotland, which has a different legal system from that in England and Wales?
My Amendment 69AA asks for a review of AML and CTF supervision within three years and a report that includes an assessment of each of the points to which I have drawn attention. I do not expect the Minister to answer my questions this evening. I have set them out because I hope that they may form the basis of some discussion, if the noble Lord is willing to meet me at some point before Report to go over these thoughts at greater leisure and in more detail.
Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con)
My Lords, I add some comments to what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, has said and what he is trying to achieve. I put on record my interests in the register as a chartered accounts and chartered tax adviser—I am very well versed in the burdens, I suppose, of the AML regulations in smaller practice. These are burdens that we all suffer almost daily if attempting to move money between one very regulated institution in the UK to another very regulated institution in the UK. We have all suffered it: you transfer funds from one to another, yet the receiving institution asks the same questions all over again, including proofs of source of funds, as the original organisation, in the UK, asked when you put those funds into that institution.
Frankly, the AML regulations have got out of control. We could do it in this Bill, and I think it is time to streamline what has become a real blockage in the UK. I had a quite ridiculous situation recently in purchasing a property: they wanted proof of funds for a transaction that I conducted in 1992. I struggled to find it, because it had long gone through the shredder, as one might imagine.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, I will make some comments on the amendments that have been discussed and then speak to the amendments in my name. I have some sympathy with the issues raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and I very much hope that the Minister can clear up this issue of professional privilege and client confidentiality, because it seems to me that it is not in any way interpretable from the legislation or the Explanatory Notes, and it is key.
I also see that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, have tabled Amendment 69A to require a report on the transfer process, which seems very sensible. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, has an amendment calling for a review of anti-money laundering and counter- terrorism financing supervision within three years. All those make some sense to me.
I will look particularly at Amendment 64A from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, because it hits part of the problem on the head. It seeks to require more effective intelligence sharing between supervisory authorities. It is that failure of intelligence sharing that many people consider to be the fundamental underlying cause of many of the problems we have today. It is not very clear that the proposals the Government are bringing forward are the easiest way to remedy that. I will say more on that later.
For my amendments in this group, I thank the Chartered Institute of Taxation and the Association of Taxation Technicians for both clarifying issues and proposing legal language. Despite all the steps we have taken over recent years, London remains the global centre of choice for laundering dirty money, whether from crime, sanctions busting or political corruption. Estimates suggest that 40% of all laundered money globally goes through the City of London or the Crown dependencies—up to £325 billion a year. The primacy of the London money laundromat is not an accolade we wish to retain.
Part of the problem has been the fragmentation of oversight by 25 separate public and professional bodies, supervising not just financial institutions but the many enablers, ranging from accountants to solicitors, property agents and service companies. In 2018, the Government set up within the FCA what they hoped would be the answer: the Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision, which the noble Lord, Lord Mackinlay, described as the OPBAS—I thought it was an acronym, not an initialism. It was put in place to oversee the 22 professional body supervisors, not the public ones. We need to acknowledge that it has had some real successes, but it has not been as effective as we had hoped. That goes back to the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, who is no longer in his place: the primary reason for this, in most people’s opinion, seems to be relatively poor communication and co-operation between OPBAS and the law enforcement agencies. Frankly, I cannot find anything in this Bill that begins to deal with that.
One approach to remedying this situation would have been to have given OPBAS proper resources and more teeth. Instead, the Government have decided that the FCA should take on directly all supervisory responsibility for anti-money laundering and counter- terrorism financing. Many in the professional bodies are very correctly worried that the FCA lacks the expertise and capacity to carry out the role it is being given, which is much more complex than just enforcement.
Many of the firms that the FCA will supervise on these AML issues are small to tiny. The FCA has no significant history of supervising small and tiny firms, and no understanding of the different operations and pressures of these entities or their specialist activities. The firms—this has been one of the strengths of the professional bodies—need compliance support, education, expert helplines, hand-holding and guidance from a supervisor that knows their business model.
My Amendments 65 to 69 should be seen as part of a whole. They are collectively intended to try to tackle that problem, and to clarify and ensure a workable transition process. Amendment 65 addresses education guidance and compliance support. Amendment 66 requires a proper transition timetable. Amendment 67 requires the FCA to have the necessary expertise and experience in tax, accounting, legal services, trust and company service provision—it does not have that at the moment. Amendment 68 requires transparency on supervisory costs and the fees that the FCA will levy. Amendment 69 requires a report in six months on how effective the new anti-money laundering system is.
Frankly, all of that should have been in the Bill, and none of it should be controversial. Once again, we have a situation where the Government seek to pass primary legislation that gives Ministers and regulators a blank sheet of paper to fill in as they wish with secondary legislation. At this point, as far as I can understand— I looked but could not find it—we do not even have a promise to publish the regulations for consultation.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to the stand part notice on Clause 14 and Amendment 69A in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Altrincham. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lord Holmes, to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead—whom it is a particular pleasure to welcome to the Committee on this Bill—and to the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, for bringing forward a number of useful amendments in this group. My noble friend Lord Mackinlay of Richborough is right to summarise the concerns about and nonsenses of the money laundering regulations in general, which we should try to address as part of reform. We certainly support that.
The question we have to ask is whether the Government’s chosen mechanism is sufficiently clear, proportionate and workable. At present, I am concerned that it is not. Clause 14 represents a major structural change, moving front-line AML supervision for professional services from the existing professional body supervisors to the FCA. The Bill will allow FCA supervision of money laundering to be extended to several new areas—to 22 bodies in all, as we have heard, including solicitors, law firms, accountants, trust and company service providers and, in practice, estate agents. Yet, as with so much in this Bill, the framework is broad while the substance is left to later regulations. That is a real concern.
My Amendment 69A seeks to address that in part by requiring the Treasury to report to Parliament on the process for transferring responsibilities under Clause 14. That report would force the Government to set out how the transfer will work in practice, what steps will be taken to manage the transition, how costs will be assessed, how duplication will be avoided and how the FCA will acquire and maintain the necessary sector expertise—all points that have been raised in the debate.
We have heard serious concerns from industry and professional bodies about spiralling costs, duplication and regulatory uncertainty. The Law Society described the proposal as
“a seismic shakeup to how law firms and their AML … obligations are regulated”.
It warned that the change risks diverting
“attention, resources and time from supporting clients and growing their businesses”
towards adapting to a new and uncertain compliance regime. That concern should be taken seriously. The Government and the FCA should be seeking to simplify requirements, reduce duplication and minimise the compliance burden, while maintaining strong safeguards against economic crime.
The risk of duplication is particularly important. Solicitors are already subject to a distinct regulatory framework. They have professional obligations, ethical duties, responsibilities to the court, duties under the rule of law and obligations around client confidentiality and legal professional privilege. If the FCA is now to be added to that landscape as a supervisor, the Government must explain precisely how the new system will avoid overlapping or conflicting expectations.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, I am particularly concerned about sector expertise: if the FCA is to take on these responsibilities, it must have people within it who understand the professions and bodies that they will be supervising. It must understand how law firms operate, how client accounts work, how professional privilege functions and how smaller or high street firms differ from large practices.
Costs are another major concern. I emphasise that small and high street firms are worried that a move to FCA supervision may result in higher fees and new compliance costs. Many of these firms are already under pressure. They serve individuals, families and small businesses in communities across the country. If the effect of this reform is to impose disproportionate new costs on them, it could have real consequences for access to legal services. The FCA does not understand how to deal with thousands and thousands of such firms.
We also need to understand how regional capacity will be maintained. Professional services are not confined to London; it is one of their charms. AML risks and compliance responsibilities exist across the whole country. The existing professional body model has the advantage of sector-specific and, in many cases, locally embedded knowledge.
There is also a specific territorial issue here, as we heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. The Law Society of Scotland has opposed the change and raised concerns about the compatibility of FCA supervision with the regulation of legal services in Scotland. The Government need to explain how these reforms will interact with devolved and existing statutory frameworks, as well as how they will avoid creating a two-track or conflicting regulatory regime. The noble and learned Lord also emphasised the SME issue, which seems to be a particular difficulty in Scotland.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Kramer and Lady Neville-Rolfe, the noble Lords, Lord Altrincham and Lord Holmes of Richmond, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, for tabling these amendments relating to the implementation of anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing supervision reform. I would be more than happy to meet the noble and learned Lord to discuss his points in detail before Report. I thank him for that kind offer. I am also more than happy to write to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville- Rolfe, on her questions, although I will cover professional privilege in my response.
I recognise the broad concerns that sit behind these amendments. We all want to get this right. However, the Government do not believe that these additional statutory requirements are necessary. I will start by setting out why Clause 14 should stand part of the Bill. Because the UK is a global financial hub, we face heightened vulnerability to illicit finance, as has already been mentioned. The UK has a robust set of anti-money laundering rules, but the supervision of those rules is simply not consistent. The Government understand the burden of compliance, but their recent statutory instrument made money laundering regulation more proportionate by ensuring that requirements are enforced when and where the risks are highest, and reduced where they are not.
In October 2025, the Government announced their intention to reform the supervision framework, with the FCA becoming the supervisor of compliance on anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing rules for professional services firms. Clause 14 is designed to support this transition and ensure that the new supervisory regime can function effectively. It is worth restating that we believe that the vast majority of companies take seriously their responsibility to ensure that their clients’ funds are clean. We are grateful for their efforts; they are important gatekeepers, protecting the integrity of the UK economy. This reform will bring professional services firms in line with other regulated sectors, such as financial services, which are already overseen by a public sector supervisor. This is fair and proportionate.
The Government have recently published their updated anti-money laundering and counterterrorist financing national risk assessment. It found that all professional services in scope of this reform remain high risk for money laundering, based on an extensive analysis of the available evidence and intelligence. Clause 14 is essential to ensure the effective implementation of these supervision reforms. Without it, the Government would lose the ability to make important provision in respect of co-operation and information sharing between the FCA and professional bodies.
Ongoing co-operation between the FCA and professional bodies will be key to ensuring that firms’ reform is effective; it has been mentioned by many noble Lords today. It will mean that additional burdens on firms, including dual regulation and issues around enforcement, are minimised. Without this, implementation of reform will be less effective, and firms will likely face additional burdens, which the Government are determined to avoid.
The Government’s objective is to simplify and strengthen the fragmented supervisory system, improve consistency across sectors and support more effective action against economic crime. Effective supervision depends on robust co-operation and information sharing between supervisors and other partners across the wider AML/CTF framework. Co-operation and information-sharing mechanisms will ensure that additional burdens on firms, including dual regulation and issues around enforcement, are minimised, addressing key concerns raised by stakeholders. Clause 14 provides the basis on which those future arrangements can be established. The Government therefore consider Clause 14 essential and strongly support its inclusion in the Bill. To re-emphasise the objective here, this is about simplifying and strengthening a fragmented supervisory system, improving consistency across the legal and accountancy sectors and ensuring that firms are supervised to a consistently high standard. There is no proposal to introduce new anti-money laundering obligations on businesses.
I turn now to Amendments 65 and 67, which are concerned with whether firms will continue to receive appropriate support and whether the FCA will possess sufficient sector-specific expertise, which has been raised by many noble Lords today. The Government agree that these are important issues. However, they are already central to implementation planning. The Treasury’s recent consultation on the FCA’s duties, powers and accountability demonstrated the importance that stake- holders place on sector expertise, guidance and engagement. The Government have been clear that implementation must involve the development of specialist expertise within the FCA and close engagement with existing supervisors and representative bodies.
The FCA also starts from a strong foundation. It already supervises firms for AML/CTF purposes and oversees legal and accountancy professional body supervision through the Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision. This gives the FCA substantial experience of both AML/CTF supervision and the professional services landscape. The FCA will also ensure that there is clarity for practitioners on sector-specific issues, such as guidance on the treatment of documents covered by legal professional privilege.
The Government have also recognised the value of practitioner expertise. Consultation responses strongly supported practitioner-led guidance, and the Government have indicated in their response to the consultation, published on 18 June this year, that engagement with sector experts and existing guidance bodies will remain an important feature of the future regime. The Government therefore agree with the importance of preserving sector expertise and ensuring that firms continue to receive effective support. However, these issues are already being addressed through implementation planning, continued engagement with existing supervisors and representative bodies, the development of specialist capability within the FCA, and future guidance arrangements. The Government do not believe that additional statutory obligations on either the Treasury or the FCA are necessary to achieve those objectives.
Amendments 64B and 69AA reflect important stakeholder concerns surrounding the need for proportionality and a risk-based approach, appropriate protections for legal professional privilege and client confidentiality, and the need to minimise duplication and impact on supervised persons. These concerns were raised by respondents to the recent consultation, and the Government agree that they are very important issues. Amendment 64B would require regulations made under new powers to consider proportionality and a risk-based approach to supervision, provide appropriate protections for legal professional privilege and client confidentiality, and avoid duplication between regulators. It would also require the Treasury to publish an impact assessment prior to making regulations.
However, the money laundering regulations, or MLRs—the legislation that provides for our supervision regime—already provide protections in respect of the need for a risk-based approach and legal professional privilege. The risk-based approach underpins our supervision regime and is already set out in the legislation. The Government took additional steps to ensure that the existing regulations are proportionate through changes made via statutory instrument on 9 June 2026. The MLRs are kept under regular review to ensure that they are proportionate.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, particularly asked me to cover this point, so I take the opportunity to do so. The FCA will not be able to compel disclosure of legally privileged material under new responsibilities. It will provide guidance to ensure that privileged material is appropriately protected during supervisory activity. That is because this Government are committed to respecting the distinctive obligations that the legal sector has. Regulation 72 of the MLRs provides explicit protection for legal professional privilege. This will apply to regulations made under the new power conferred by Clause 14.
Finally, the power in Clause 14 will ensure that reciprocal co-operation and information-sharing between supervisors and professional bodies is central to the new regime, minimising duplication. Regulations made under the new power in Clause 14 will be subject to the draft affirmative procedure. In making regulations, the Government consider the impact on firms; this is formally set out in our published regulatory impact assessment. Therefore, the additional requirement introduced by Amendment 64B would be duplicative of this process.
Amendment 69AA would require the Treasury to review regulations made under the new power in Clause 14 within three years of them being made, and to lay before Parliament a report summarising the conclusions of that review. The Government are already required to review the MLRs at intervals not exceeding five years, a requirement that would also apply to regulations made under the new powers in Clause 14. As a result, the Government regularly review the regulations to ensure that they are effective and proportionate, and to respond to emerging threats. This is evidenced by regular updates made to the regulations via secondary legislation, with the most recent changes made this month.
The Government’s aim is to minimise duplication and burdens on firms and to protect legal professional privilege and client confidentiality. These will be the most important factors when considering reviewing existing regulations. Consideration of these issues is already fundamental to our supervision regime, and the regulations are consistently reviewed to ensure that they continue to be fit for purpose. Therefore, the Government consider these additions to be unnecessary.
Amendments 66 and 69 are ultimately concerned with readiness and implementation. They seek assurances that the FCA will be capable of supervising professional services firms across different regions of the UK, and that the reform will proceed according to a clear timeline. The Government share the objective of ensuring the implementation is successful. While significant implementation planning has already taken place, substantial work will continue ahead of commencement. The Government have consistently recognised that this requires careful preparation, phased delivery, detailed transition planning and close collaboration with existing supervisors.
The Government have also been clear that effective implementation will require the development of sector-specific and jurisdiction-specific expertise, including a strong understanding of the legal sector, as mentioned, and of professional services firms of all sizes across all parts of the United Kingdom. HMT will work closely with the relevant bodies in Scotland and Northern Ireland to ensure that implementation reflects the distinctiveness of their legal systems and is aligned with existing legislative and regulatory frameworks. This is already managed through governance and business planning. The FCA already operates nationwide and has confirmed that it anticipates having a significant presence for the new regime in its offices outside London, to ensure it has the capacity to supervise these additional sectors.
However, the Government do not believe that placing reporting requirements or implementation timetables in primary legislation is the right approach. Implementation of this reform is a complex programme involving systems development, recruitment, training, funding arrangements and transition planning. The Government must retain sufficient flexibility to ensure that these activities are delivered effectively. However, that does not mean firms will be left without certainty. The Government are already working closely with the FCA, HMRC and existing supervisors to ensure reform is implemented in an orderly way, including ensuring that businesses are clear about when transition will occur and have sufficient time to prepare for change. A statutory timetable risks becoming outdated and may constrain the Government’s ability to manage implementation in the most effective manner.
Furthermore, the detailed provisions on supervision reform will ultimately be delivered through future secondary legislation. This means that the Government will retain control over commencement and can ensure that functions are conferred only once appropriate implementation preparations have been completed.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
Since it is Committee, I have a couple of points to raise with the Minister before we finish this important section. First, I think the industry needs some idea of the timeframe for these reviews and for the implementation of these changes. That may already exist in ministerial statements, but it would be extremely helpful if the Minister could look into that and let us know. We have had the experience of the defence investment plan, and the uncertainty that can be created when you do not know when major changes are being made is bad for the sector.
Secondly, on parliamentary privilege, a very niche point, do the plans to protect it apply to in-house counsel as well as external legal counsel? Small companies, such as estate agents, would not want to have to employ expensive solicitors and lawyers if they do not need to.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
I will have to write to the noble Baroness on those points, to make sure that my answers are correct.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Bull) (CB)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, is not here to withdraw his amendment, I will take it that his amendment is withdrawn.
Lord Ashcombe
Lord Ashcombe (Con)
My Lords, unfortunately, I was unable to speak at Second Reading—like the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, as he mentioned on Monday—but I am delighted to be back in time to speak in Committee. I declare my interest as an employee of Marsh, an FCA-regulated firm.
The amendment in my name in this group, Amendments 69B and 73A, propose that our financial regulators move from a five-year to a three-year strategic planning cycle. At its heart, this is a straightforward proposition: regulators must keep pace with the world they regulate. In financial services, the rate of change has accelerated to such an extent that a five-year strategy can quickly become outdated. When the FCA and the PRA last set their strategies, few could have anticipated the speed and scale of the developments that followed. The volatility seen in digital assets, the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence in financial decision-making, the growing importance of cyber resilience to financial stability and the impact of geopolitical tensions on global markets have all evolved far more quickly than expected. Yet regulators remain bound by frameworks conceived for a very different environment.
A three-year cycle offers a more realistic and proportionate approach. It is not an arbitrary shift. It better reflects the pace of change in financial services, aligns more closely with the Treasury’s spending review cycle and mirrors the planning horizons adopted by many firms. It also corresponds more closely to the time it takes for innovation to move from novelty to something requiring clear regulatory oversight. Some may argue that a five-year cycle provides greater stability, but stability should not be confused with rigidity. A strategy that is clearly out of date does not offer certainty; it risks losing credibility. True stability lies in a framework that is regularly reviewed and refreshed, so that it remains relevant and dependable. Nor would a shorter cycle create unnecessary disruption. It would not require regulators to constantly change direction; rather, it would ensure that their strategies are revisited at appropriate intervals and updated where necessary. That strikes the right balance between continuity and responsiveness.
There is a practical consideration. Industry participants have consistently highlighted that five-year strategies can be overtaken by events well before their conclusion, making it harder for firms to plan with confidence. In reality, regulators have already had to adapt to unforeseen shocks—whether economic, geopolitical or technological —outside the normal review cycle. For that reason, this is not a radical proposal but a pragmatic one.
It is important that financial regulation does not rely on a planning horizon that no longer reflects the realities of the market. The FCA and the PRA are strong institutions, but even the most capable regulators cannot be expected to operate effectively within five-year strategies in a period of such rapid change. A three-year cycle is a measured reform. It would help to ensure that regulation remains responsive, credible and accountable, while fully respecting the independence of our regulators.
These are probing amendments. As such, can the Minister say why the Government chose to fix five-year periods for strategy reviews? I believe that is too long, so I look forward to hearing his thoughts on that. I also support the amendments in the names of my noble friend Lady Noakes and the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted. I beg to move.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 70, 71, 73, 74 and 76 in my name. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, for adding his name to Amendments 70, 73 and 76.
At first sight, Clause 16 looks like a bit of “motherhood and apple pie” legislation. After all, what is not to like about five-year strategies, which are what most businesses do in the UK and internationally? A closer look at Clause 16, however, reveals a bit of a mess. The position we have at the moment is that the PRA is required to determine a strategy, and it does this by way of annual business plans. There is no requirement in statute for the FCA to do anything but it has routinely issued annual plans; last year, it issued a five-year strategy as well. So this is clearly a slightly messy area, and the Government are right to try to tidy it up.
I fear, however, that the solution in Clause 16 will make things worse. First, the requirement for a strategy seems to be a static one, requiring a five-year strategy to be set and then replaced when the five years have nearly run out. The subsections of new Sections 1JZA and 2E, to be inserted by Clause 16, envisage that the strategies can be revised or replaced, but it is unclear what the trigger for that is other than when the Treasury issues new recommendations in a remit letter. In the business world, strategies are kept under review and are often revisited annually—certainly more often than every five years. I believe that Clause 16 needs a positive requirement for the regulators to keep their strategies under review, if only to confirm their continuing validity. My noble friend Lord Ashcombe’s Amendments 64A and 73A would partly get round the problem by shortening the period, but they still envisage a static strategy; it would be three years and then, at two years and nine months, you would do another one, which is not a satisfactory approach to drawing up strategies.
The Explanatory Notes explain that these strategies are expected to be
“high level and focus on the FCA’s and PRA’s top priorities”.
That is fine, but it is not very useful for the regulated firms that want to know how the regulators’ actions will affect them in practice. If these five-year plans are anything like the FCA’s five-year strategy—all 20 pages of it are full of drawings, photographs and big letters—firms will be very disappointed. The FCA’s four priorities of being a smarter regulator, fighting financial crimes, supporting growth and helping consumers are so high level that they mean nothing to regulated firms.
At the moment, both regulators annually set out the detail of what they plan to do for the following year. Can the Minister say whether this will continue once the Bill becomes law? There will be no requirement in law for either the FCA or the PRA as a consequence of the Bill, and, given the lightweight content of the FCA’s five-year plan and the Government’s intentions for only high-level strategies, it would be a serious error if the regulators were not required to publish their detailed annual plans as well.
These are deficiencies in Clause 16 but they are not covered by specific amendments, mainly because, when I drew up my amendments, I was working on the naive premise that asking for a five-year strategy was a sound, if unexciting, proposition. As I have explained, I now see that as flawed in many ways. For this reason, I fully support the Clause 16 stand part notice in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles; I am sorry that I did not have time to add my name to it.
On the amendments that I have tabled, I will start with Amendment 70, which requires the FCA’s strategic priorities to include its secondary competitiveness and growth objective. The equivalent provision for the PRA in new Section 2E, inserted by Clause 16, says that the strategic priorities of the PRA include secondary objectives, whereas the drafting of new Clause 1JZA for the FCA does not extend to the secondary objectives. The Minister has helpfully written to me today to say that the Government sort of accept that but that they will work up their own amendment. I thank him for that and I look forward to seeing the text of that ahead of Report.
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 72 and 75 and to my opposition to Clause 16 standing part of the Bill. I also support the other amendments in this group and their intentions: I think we could talk quite a lot longer about them all.
My Amendments 72 and 75 would require the regulators’ long-term strategies to include a review of their rulebooks, with the aim of identifying outdated or unnecessary requirements. That is a sensible and uncontroversial idea. No one disputes that the regulatory rulebook should be kept under review or that unnecessary or duplicative requirements should not be removed. Indeed, the FCA’s own handbook review consultation acknowledges that parts of the rulebook are outdated, unclear or internally inconsistent. I hope that this review idea can be taken up.
However, these amendments presently sit within Clause 16, which is where the problem lies. Clause 16 creates a statutory duty for the FCA and the PRA to produce long-term strategies. In principle, that is not objectionable; regulators have produced strategy documents before, and it is entirely proper that Ministers should be able to input as long as it is transparent, but there are other problems that have been elaborated on by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, which I do not need to repeat. In practice, however, Clause 16 is the delegation engine for Clause 17. It is part of a process of downgrading the day-to-day requirements, the regulatory principles on rule-making, into a commentary in a five-year strategy document. This is a profound change in the constitutional architecture of financial regulation. What were once operational regulatory principles, enforceable by judicial review—even if that route is rarely pursued—become strategic aspirations, influenced by Ministers, unchallengeable by others and reviewed only every five years. The long-term strategy is being used as a vehicle to downgrade regulatory principles and apply them in a minimalist, non-operational way—just talk, no walk. If Clause 16 is to remain, it must be made significantly better and not simply operate as a Trojan horse.
The key thing about regulatory principles is how to make them sensibly relate to operational matters— I say sensibly because that has not happened. That is the problem. It may work for some of them to be dealt with more thematically and rather more regularly than five-year intervals, but others need consideration at the rule-making and supervisory level. While Ministers are meant to stay clear of day-to-day operational interference, like the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, I query whether Clause 16 overly restricts ministerial input. FSMA 2000 has always had a difficult settlement to keep government away from day-to-day decisions, but—as the financial crisis showed—it is inescapable that the buck stops with government. Clause 16 does not strike the right balance there.
My Amendments 72 and 75 point to rulebook review. As I said in a previous group, and as noted by the Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee, it is effectively the regulators’ system that is cluttered, fragmented and difficult to navigate. It is a lot harder to navigate than a few regulatory principles that the regulators complain about, but which are the only way to challenge that regulatory clutter. In the Lords committee report, a central finding was that culture change, not structural tinkering, is what is needed. Regulators must be clearer, more predictable and more proportionate in how they exercise their powers. The Clause 16 regulatory strategy does not deliver that; it substitutes what were enforceable operational requirements about proportionality with unenforceable talk.
It rather looks as though the regulators will avoid having to step up to the mark. They did not much like the committee’s report or its suggestions of culture change, and, as we will discuss when we get to Clause 17, in the words of one City commentator, it looks like the regulators have done a job on Parliament. Clause 16 is not about transparency, nor is it new in suggesting a strategy document. It is just a vehicle to diminish the accountability and effectiveness of the regulatory principles, and I oppose it.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
I have added my name to three of the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, in this group. To be honest, I am not quite sure why I did not add my name to her other two; I should have done, so I apologise. The noble Baroness has already explained those with her usual clarity, so I will try hard not to repeat what she said.
Briefly, on Amendment 70, I was going to say that I assumed that the omission from the FCA’s strategic priorities of its secondary objective was an oversight. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has kindly shared with me an email she has received from the Minister that effectively confirms that, and that it will be sorted out at a later stage. Can I very gently say to the Minister that when he writes to noble Lords, it should be copied to all who have signed an amendment? On Amendments 73 and 76, I will listen with interest as to why the Treasury should be able to make recommendations to the FCA and the PRA only in relation to the long-term strategies—that is, every five years. I suspect that the Treasury will come to regret that restriction.
I have also added my support to Amendments 72 and 75 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, both of which would require the FCA and PRA to carry out a review of their regulations as part of the five-year strategy process, with a view to eliminating any unnecessary regulations. Rulebooks have a habit of growing—being added to—and scope has a tendency to creep, so a five-year spring clean must be a good thing and would be a good discipline that I would wholeheartedly support. I finish by saying that I share the reservations that have already been raised about the whole of Clause 16.
Lord Massey of Hampstead (Con)
My Lords, the Bill reflects the very substantial transfer of power, as mentioned by my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, from Parliament and from existing regulators, such as the PSR and the 22 professional bodies with specialised knowledge of the sectors, as we discussed earlier. This reflects a high degree of centralisation of regulatory supervision, which may lead to a lack of clarity and, in some cases, as my noble friend Lord Mackinlay mentioned, double regulation for small firms. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, said earlier, the system is also already overloaded. In that context, given the extensive proposed changes and the real possibility of unintended consequences, it seems that the Government should consider the setting of strategy for the future as an important component of the Bill.
Although I support all the amendments in this group, I emphasise the need for consultation with regulated firms and the regular review of the rulebooks as provided for in Amendments 71, 72, 74 and 75. The Bill indeed provides for the publication of a document and consultation with one party—the Court of Directors of the Bank of England is specifically mentioned as a party that will be consulted—but seemingly not with any regulated firm, despite the fact that regulated firms could clearly be very helpful in the setting of long-term strategy. Amendments 71 and 74, proposed by my noble friend Lady Noakes, therefore seem essential additions to the Bill, as would Amendments 72 and 75, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, and the noble Lord, Lord Vaux.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
I say a word of support in favour of these amendments. This industry, financial services, is one of the most innovatory and dynamic industries in this country and has led the world in its imaginative, entrepreneurial approach for centuries. What we are seeing—I am glad to follow my noble friend—is the centralisation of regulation in one ever greater regulatory body. This will mean that the slowest ships of the regulatory convoy will determine the pace.
For these reasons, it is imperative that the strategic review takes account, much more regularly than every five years, of the updating of business actions, business transactions and the tools used by the sector; and that, as my noble friend Lady Noakes pointed out, it talks to the people who are the wealth creators whom it will regulate. For all the reasons that have been enunciated in the course of this short debate, including those from the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, I support these amendments.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, I am going to be exceedingly brief. I support the amendments in this group.
My noble friend Lady Bowles has hit on the fundamental reason for my strong opposition, which is the constitutional issue. By chance, I happened to speak to a senior regulator in the financial services sector—I am not going to use their name because it would not be fair to do so—shortly after the Bill came out. We started looking at its clauses, and that person said to me, “Ah, but, in the long-term strategy, we will be able to explain to people in detail why we are doing what we choose to do”. To me, that absolutely summed up the issue as a whole. There was no concept at all that there would be parliamentary insight, parliamentary oversight or engagement; it was simply going to be a much better vehicle to explain to people why certain things that had been identified as necessary were necessary and were going to happen. There was no sense of challenge anywhere at all. That is a really dangerous way for us to move our legislation.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to all who have taken part in this short debate. We are sympathetic to the broad purpose of requiring regulators to think strategically, but, if the regulatory strategies are to be meaningful, they must not simply become static documents published every few years then left on the shelf. As my noble friend Lady Noakes said, that is not the way we do it in business. Common practice is for five-year strategies, reviewed annually, and annual plans.
The amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Ashcombe would reduce the strategy period from five years to three years. He is right that markets can change very quickly, as we keep hearing. A five-year strategy risks being set in stone for too long, unless the Minister is able to clarify that the plans will be updated regularly. If not, a shorter period, such as three years, would have real benefits. Perhaps the Minister can explain why the period of five years has been chosen and how he believes the strategies will remain agile and flexible.
I am delighted that the Minister said that he was prepared to accept Amendment 70 on competitiveness and growth. As I have said several times, the growth of the UK financial services sector is key to growth more generally. Regulation should say how the Government—or the regulator—understand that objective, how they are giving effect to it and how their regulatory approach is supporting growth in the market, because the UK has a large and dynamic financial services sector. My noble friend Lady Lawlor emphasised that point, which we should not forget, and we cannot assume that its international position is guaranteed. Regulation has a direct effect on investment, innovation, listings, lending and market depth, as well as on the attractiveness of the UK as a place to do business, so, if regulators are not required to think explicitly about this, the growth objective risks being honoured in theory but neglected in practice.
Amendments 71 and 74 on consultation are very welcome. As we have said in our debates on previous groups, bringing experts into the room in a timely way is a vital part of the regulatory process.
In my view, the boards of regulators have a part to play in the strategic plans, but my recollection is that those engaged in regulated companies were excluded from the non-executive roles on the PRA and the FCA. Is this still the case? My own board experience is that conflicts of interest can be managed. I believe that regulators will benefit from current knowledge from the industry, particularly given these new statutory strategies, the digital changes to which we keep referring and the expansion of the scope of the FCA. I would like to hear from the Minister what the current rules are—perhaps in a letter, as I have not raised this point with him before.
I also support the principle behind Amendments 72 and 75 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles. They would require the FCA and the PRA to review their rulebooks and explain how they will simplify or remove rules that are outdated, unnecessary or duplicative. Regulation, as has been said, tends to accumulate. New rules and duties are added, but old rules are not always removed. Guidance, expectations and supervisory practice develop over time. A long-term strategy is not only about what new initiative the regulators want to pursue; it should also be about what the regulator can simplify. If a regular rulebook review is done with a view to making regulation less burdensome, cheaper to operate and supportive of growth, that will be a very positive step.
The amendments on Treasury recommendations also raise a serious question around accountability and regulator independence. There is, of course, a balance to be struck. We do not want day-to-day political interference in regulatory decisions but nor should independent regulators operate without clear strategic accountability to Parliament and the Government of the day, as my noble friend Lord Massey and the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, explained better than I can. The Government should explain why the Treasury’s recommendation-making power is framed as it is, why it is limited in the way proposed and how Ministers expect it to operate in practice.
Finally, on the Clause 16 stand part notice, I understand the concerns raised in the debate. The value of that clause will depend entirely on whether the strategies produced are meaningful, responsive and capable of being scrutinised. If they become generic documents with broad statements of aspiration, they will add little. If they provide clear commitments, measurable priorities, proper engagement with growth and competitiveness, and a disciplined approach to reviewing the rulebook, they will be useful.
I very much look forward to a full response from the Minister to the points that have been made.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
My Lords, I begin by explaining the Government’s purpose behind Clause 16 and why it should stand part of the Bill.
The Government have often heard feedback calling for the regulatory system to have an overall long-term strategy with clear goals, where the regulators consider the cumulative impacts of their policies and the interaction between supervision and rule-making. The reforms introduced by Clause 16 are intended to address this feedback and will improve transparency around the regulators’ long-term direction and focus, which the Government consider will support effective oversight and scrutiny of the regulators.
Clause 16 requires the FCA and the PRA each to prepare and publish long-term strategies so that stake- holders, including regulated firms, can better understand the regulators’ approach to the sector, and so that the Government and Parliament fully understand the regulators’ priorities and can more effectively hold them to account on how they are translating their objectives into actions and results. When the Government consulted on this proposal, it received strong support: 83% of respondents supported it and agreed that the regulators taking a more strategic and cohesive approach would benefit the sector by helping firms know what to expect.
I have listened carefully to the concerns raised by noble Lords. However, the Government remain firmly of the view that Clause 16 will support scrutiny. By requiring a clear long-term strategic overview, Clause 16 will help the sector understand and plan more effectively for regulatory initiatives and will help interested parties engage with the regulators at a strategic level. Without Clause 16, there would be no requirement for the regulators to set out, in one place, their long-term priorities and approach in advancing their objectives. The aim of the strategies is to make it easier, not harder, for Parliament and stakeholders to scrutinise whether the regulators’ actions are coherent and aligned with the framework that Parliament has set.
On Amendment 70, the Government agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, that the FCA’s secondary international competitiveness and growth objective should be central to the formulation of its long-term strategy. Growth is the number one priority for this Government and the financial services sector, as many have noted, is key to delivering this. The Government always intended the FCA’s long-term strategy to set out its priorities for advancing our international competitiveness and growth objective. We are looking into this point to determine if this is fully clear within the drafting of the clause, and we are open to tabling an amendment on Report should we determine that it is needed. I thank the noble Baroness for bringing this to my attention and commit to keeping her and other noble Lords informed as this consideration progresses.
I turn to Amendments 69B and 73A. The noble Lord, Lord Ashcombe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, asked me to explain the Government’s thinking behind the time periods here. The Government have set the length of this strategy as five years because, as has been noted, it is the standard time period for organisational strategies and is very common in the business world, as many noble Lords will appreciate. It also aligns with standard parliamentary terms and therefore the requirement for the Treasury to issue recommendations to the regulators at least once per Parliament. However, the Government recognise that financial services markets can evolve quickly and it is important that the regulators’ strategic documents remain current and useful.
The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, asked me how the strategies would be kept under review. The Bill provides flexibility for the regulators to revise or publish a new strategy within the five-year period if circumstances require it, or to publish a strategy for a shorter period of time than five years. If they do the latter, it will need to be with an explanation about why this is appropriate. Five years is therefore a maximum interval, not a requirement to wait five years before making a change. For example, the Bill requires the regulators to consider whether they need to update their strategy or issue a new one whenever new Treasury recommendations are issued. The Government’s view is that this strikes the right balance between providing a long-term, stable framework and allowing regulators to respond when market, economic or regulatory conditions change.
On Amendments 73 and 76, the Government’s approach here is deliberate. The need for the regulators to take account of Treasury recommendations at a strategic level, rather than at the level of general functions, has been carefully considered. Under the new framework, the Treasury’s recommendations to the regulators regarding its economic priorities will inform the development of their strategic priorities. This is aligned with the change to the way that the regulatory principles will be applied, and I hope it demonstrates the Government’s confidence that influencing the regulators’ strategies is an effective mechanism for ensuring that they have an appropriate focus and are performing well.
Further to this, the framework has been carefully designed to ensure that Treasury recommendations are taken fully into account. As I mentioned earlier, regulators must consider updating or producing a new strategy whenever the Treasury sends a new recommendation letter. The regulators will continue to be obliged to respond annually to the Treasury on their actions in response to the recommendations separately from the strategy document. This will support continued transparency and accountability regarding how the regulators are taking government recommendations into account.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
I just ask for clarification. The Minister talked about the way in which the Treasury will make recommendations and the regulator must take them into account. I did not hear the word “Parliament” anywhere in that. Where is the capacity for parliamentary recommendations and oversight to make sure that they are taken into account? Or is the purpose of this legislation to make sure that that does not exist?
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
I think this is part of a broader discussion. I am informed that this takes into account existing practices for how the reviews and overviews take place. Unless we decide, in the following debates, that we need an amendment to provide parliamentary overview, this will apply to the current regulatory framework as the oversight currently exists.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
I may be being a bit dumb, but I did not understand that at all.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
I do not want to get confused about this. My understanding is that this is already existing practice, but I will take this away and write to the noble Baronesses just to confirm that this is exactly correct. We are trying not to defer from the practice as it exists today, but I will write to clarify that.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
I just add that the point of the principles is that they are, in effect, Parliament’s recommendations set in law. I am struggling to see how that fits into the question of who can recommend from this point in time.
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)
I do not understand what happens when the strategy is right but the rules are wrong. What happens then? That does happen. We have, as I have called it before, the example that keeps on giving: when the FCA got the motor finance rules wrong. What happens then, when there is no way to correct that? The strategy, to treat customers fairly, might be right, but the rules produce something that is patently unfair. How can that be changed? There is nothing to measure against that now —the principles have gone.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
Again, we are trying to stress that the oversight that exists today will not be changed. The Treasury’s annual review should be able to take that into account. We believe that what we are putting forward here should not change the existing profile.
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)
I am sorry, but if you change something in primary legislation and rub out what is happening in existing processes, you have changed it. You cannot change something at a higher level than primary legislation.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
We will have to come back to these points at a later date. This is a broader conversation on oversight, and points have been made on this subject outside the Room. I hope noble Lords will allow me to come back to these points, as I think this will come up in further debates both during and after Committee.
Turning to Amendments 72 and 75, the Government agree that regulation should be proportionate and support the objectives behind these amendments. Indeed, the Bill forms part of the Government’s broader effort to reduce the burden of regulation on businesses, ensuring that the UK has a regulatory environment that supports growth while maintaining high standards. The Government have made a commitment to cutting the administrative burden of regulation by 25% by the end of this Parliament. The financial services regulators are actively contributing to this agenda. For example, the PRA is implementing new insurance reporting requirements that will cut paperwork by one-third, contributing to savings for firms of £66 million per year, and the FCA has proposed removing some transaction reporting that would save firms over £100 million per year.
However, the Government do not think it would be appropriate to impose a requirement that every long-term strategy must include a full review of all regulations and a plan for eliminating them. A universal rule review exercise each time a strategy is prepared or revised would not be proportionate and would reduce the regulator’s capacity to focus on other priorities. There are existing requirements in FSMA which require the regulators to keep their rules under review and to publish statements on policy and on their approaches to reviewing the rules. The Government consider that this is a proportionate approach.
Amendments 71 and 74 seek to require the FCA and the PRA, when preparing and revising their long-term strategies, to consult persons they consider would be affected, including those they regulate. I understand the intention behind these amendments. If the regulators are to produce long-term strategies that are meaningful and credible, it is clearly important that they are informed by engagement with those who are affected by them. The Government have a clear expectation that the regulator’s strategies will be informed by that engagement.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
Can the Minister explain why that is not included in the Bill? The Government expect them to engage with the industry. One would normally write consultation expectations into legislation. That is the normal practice. Why was it not done in this case?
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
Again, we will have to come back to that point. One of the things we are trying to consider is how we do not overburden by creating more regulation, but we will have to review that point and come back to the noble Baroness.
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)
On that point, it seems to me that nothing is being done to challenge the burden of regulation on firms—instead, the obligations on the regulator are being reduced. When you reduce the obligations on the regulator—for example, to be proportionate—the corollary of that is that they are unrestricted in the way that they can then increase the burdens on firms. That may not be the talk, but that is the consequence of the legal construct that we are now looking at.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
There is a broad philosophical point being made about trusting the FCA and the regulators. Again, we will come back to this in further debates. It is a view that I understand, and we need to develop this through the process of the debate, but it is definitely not the intention to give them free rein to make laws randomly. I think we will have to come back to that later in Committee, if that is okay.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, I ask for some clarification on this complex area. Under Clause 16, new Section 1JZA(7) states:
“A strategy may be revised by publishing a revised version of the strategy”.
Is the Minister confirming that, as it says in the Explanatory Notes, no consultation goes with that revision process?
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
That is correct.
Amendments 71 and 74 seek to require the FCA and the PRA, when preparing or revising their long-term strategies, to consult persons they consider would be affected, including those they regulate. The Government have a clear expectation that the regulators’ strategies will be informed by engagement with industry, consumer representatives and other stakeholders. However, adding a statutory consultation requirement could lead to long delays between a new Government setting direction through a recommendation letter and the regulators putting a strategy in place.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Kramer and Lady Noakes, asked how the Government’s remit will work under the new system. The FCA and the PRA will now be required to have regard to their remit letters when producing or updating long-term strategies. The regulators will continue to be required to respond annually to remit letters, setting out the actions to which they will respond. The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, asked about non-executive directors; I will write to her on that as I do not have the answer to hand.
The accountability of the financial services regulators is clearly an important matter of huge interest to the Committee. I have heard a range of views today on exactly what this should look like, and we will continue to debate this issue in relation to subsequent clauses. However, regardless of views on the wider matters of transparency and accountability, I am confident that the majority will agree that long-term strategies will add to our understanding of the regulators’ strategic priorities and approach, which must be a good thing. I therefore ask that Clause 16 stands part of the Bill.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
I have some questions for the Minister. Does he believe that the FCA’s five-year plan provides a model for what the Government have in mind for compliance with Clause 16, if it becomes law? I will start with that question.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
Does the Minister believe that the FCA’s five-year plan, which started last year, is the model on which Clause 16 has been based? Is the Minister expecting that sort of document to be produced in response to Clause 16?
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
What the clause is trying to represent is that this is the starting point. There is definitely work to do and it needs to be improved.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
What we have set out in answer to that question is that there is clearly a need for greater transparency and thinking about what the five-year plan looks like. In terms of the interaction with the Treasury, the hope is that we can get it into a position where it has greater clarity and certainty about long-term planning. It will be an emergent process, to ensure that it is improved on.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
I put it to the Minister that this clause has no specificity around it: no ability for the Treasury to agree the format or content of a five-year plan; no requirement for consultation; and no requirement for the involvement of parliamentary committees. We are being asked to give a blank check with these rather vague requirements. There are words in the Explanatory Notes about the Government expecting these to be “high level”, which is why I asked for the Minister’s reflections on what is clearly a very high-level document from the FCA. I am not getting any sense of what is likely to come out as a response to that.
Linked to that is my second question. I asked earlier what the Minister’s response would be to the question of whether annual plans were required. At the moment, both regulators produce annual plans for what they will do in the year, which provide a very rich source of information for the regulated community on what they can expect. If we are to have those levels of detail, it may not matter at all if an airy-fairy five-year strategy document is produced, full of drawings, pictures and stuff like that. If, however, we will not have anything else, and if the Bill takes out the one existing requirement on the PRA to produce annual plans, then we have a problem.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
I can clarify that an annual plan is required and will still be required. Let me write to the noble Baroness to confirm that.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
Can I conclude my remarks with a plea to the Minister? He has taken away a number of issues arising from this debate, on which he will be writing one big letter or several medium-sized ones. It is normal, when something as contentious as this arises, for all Members of the Committee to be copied in on any such letters, not simply the one noble Lord who raised a specific query.
Lord Massey of Hampstead (Con)
May I ask the Minister for a clarification? In his answer to the question about not having consultation in the Bill itself, I think he said that the FCA would engage with firms but that he did not want this in statute. Do I understand that correctly?
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
The sense is that it creates an administrative burden. We are trying to cut down on regulation as part of trying to accelerate growth, and we believe that that is the right balance.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
Do we not want to reduce regulation on regulated firms, rather than regulators?
Lord Ashcombe (Con)
My Lords, what an interesting debate this turned out to be. There are a number of flaws, which have been extremely well demonstrated by all noble Lords on this side of the Room. I thank the Minister for his answer to my question. I am also extremely grateful to my noble friend Lady Noakes for improving my amendment significantly by talking about annual plans, which is quite correct. However, it is imperative that we continue to have parliamentary oversight of the regulators. From the discussion we have had this afternoon, there is no doubt that this clause still has a number of legs in it, and the horse race will continue for some time. I am sure we look forward to coming back to this on Report but, with that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Noakes
“Review of regulatory principles(1) Within 12 months of this Act coming into force, the Treasury must carry out a review of the regulatory principles in section 3B(1) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000.(2) The review must in particular consider whether—(a) the regulatory principles duplicate other requirements in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 or elsewhere, or(b) are no longer required.(3) The review may make recommendations as to whether section 3B(1) needs to be amended or whether there are other mechanisms which can achieve the same result.(4) The review must be laid before each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment calls for a review of the regulatory principles in section 3B(1) of FSMA.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 77 calls for a review of the regulatory principles in Section 3B of FSMA 2000. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, for adding his name to it. My amendment calls for the Treasury to review the regulatory principles and, in particular, identify those that are duplicated or no longer required. As we have already discussed in outline and will discuss further in a later group next week, FSMA currently requires the FCA and PRA to have regard to the regulatory principles in their general functions, but Clause 17 downgrades this by confining them to the new five-year strategy documents.
When your Lordships’ Financial Services Regulation Committee reported last year on the secondary competitiveness and growth objectives for the PRA and the FCA, it took eight pages of our report to describe the web of objectives, principles and “have regards” that the regulators have to live with. In fact, the eight pages covered only some of the “have regards”. The FCA told us that it had around 80 “have regards”, on top of the Chancellor’s remit letters and the regulatory principles themselves. The PRA said that its number was 25. My Amendment 77 should probably have required a review of all the “have regards”, and if I bring it back on Report I may well extend it to that.
In Committee, my amendment is focused on the regulatory principles, because, via Clause 17, these have become a contentious part of the Bill. There are currently eight regulatory principles in Section 3B, plus a vestigial reference to a ninth, and they include some very significant ones, such as proportionality, which we will also be discussing later in Committee. There were seven in the first iteration of FSMA, but they have been changed many times over the years and only three of the current principles directly read across to the original list—namely, efficiency and economy, proportionality and consumer responsibility—which suggests that not all the Section 3B principles are enduring in nature. We should expect the regulatory principles to represent the essential elements of how regulation should operate in practice and have some form of enduring quality. It is relatively clear that Section 3B of FSMA does not meet that test.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
My Lords, I hope to keep the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, happy by being very brief. One of the things that came out of the committee’s report was the proliferation of principles and “have regards”, et cetera. It is ripe for a review and an overhaul, and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, I very much suspect that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and I would find significant differences in our ideal list of the regulatory principles in Section 3B(1) of FSMA. I will argue in the next group for a “have regard” to the risks of the private credit market to financial stability. In group 8, my colleagues will argue for a “have regard” on sustainability and in group 10 for a “have regard” on financial inclusion.
These are all probing amendments, but they reflect the need for principles to be reviewed, debated and potentially changed by Parliament, so that a review would have input from the regulators and from the Government, but the final decision would rest with Parliament, as it has always done in primary legislation.
To pick up one of the issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, made about durability, constant churn is unacceptable and would leave the regulators and the financial sector in confusion, and none of us wishes for that. But I think that on the whole, we can look back and say that Parliament has behaved responsibly. Not everybody likes all the principles, but the financial system and the regulators have not had difficulty in delivering, or considering and making sure it is having regard to, those particular principles, particularly when financial stability is at stake.
To me, what underlies all this is the democratic process. I do not believe that principles can be abdicated to a regulator, which is what happens with the Bill—they go off into the long-term strategy. I believe this is for Parliament, and I would very much always support a review. Parliament has that right and that responsibility.
Some of us rather suspect that the removal of the principles to the five-year strategy has been to provide a covert way to diminish the climate change principles. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, whom I respect, would move them through the front door, but for many of us there is a strong suspicion that this is removing them through the back door so that the Government do not get the opprobrium that would follow from groups that are concerned about net zero and climate change. Some in the financial services sector are actually very dedicated to achieving climate change targets, but there are also plenty of voices that regard every climate change target and every net zero as a cost and a regulatory burden, and it seems to me that those voices have had very strong sway with the Government.
I suspect, frankly, that we would never have had climate change in among the principles had it not been for Mark Carney, and I very much doubt they will survive in any substance as part of the long-term strategy unless there is something of a volte- face in attitudes as we keep going through very extreme weather conditions and it becomes apparent that there is a huge financial cost and a huge risk to financial stability from the extreme weather conditions and the consequence damage to our overall economic circumstances.
As I say, if the Government wish to change the principles, they should do it through the front door in the way that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, proposes: raise the issues, tell Parliament that they wish to make changes and argue in favour of those changes. But that is a fundamentally different approach from taking principles, which I suspect they dislike, and moving them to a long-term strategy so that they will, over time, dwindle but without visibility or any parliamentary input.
Lord Altrincham (Con)
My Lords, this is a welcome amendment because it raises important questions about the structure of our regulatory framework and in particular about whether the regulatory principle set out in Section 3B of FSMA—the eight principles—remain coherent, useful and properly calibrated to the circumstances in which we now find ourselves.
Over time, FSMA has accumulated objectives, secondary objectives, regulatory principles, “have regard” duties, reporting requirements and consultation obligations. Some of those are individually sensible and many were introduced for good reasons, but taken together, there is a real risk of regulatory layering. Duties and principles are added and new obligations are placed on regulators, but very little is ever taken away. The result is a framework that is increasingly complex and it is not always clear which duties genuinely drive regulatory behaviour and which simply sit on the statute book without translating into meaningful change.
The amendment asks the Treasury to review whether those principles are duplicative or remain necessary, and whether the framework could be simplified or improved. There is also a wider question, which was raised by the Financial Services Regulation Committee in its report last year, about whether these sorts of duties actually translate into anything meaningful in practice. It is one thing for Parliament to place a duty on a regulator to have regard to a particular principle or consideration—as my noble friend Lady Noakes mentioned, that is exactly what the Leeds reforms are trying to streamline—but quite another for that duty to shape decisions in a clear, measurable and accountable way.
Needless complexity matters for firms as well as for regulators. A complicated regulatory framework does not stay confined to the regulator; it filters down into consultations, supervisory expectations, compliance systems, legal advice and business decisions. If the statutory framework is unclear or duplicative, the burden ultimately falls on the firms that have to comply with it. At a time when we are asking financial services to support growth, investment and competitiveness, we should be especially alert to unnecessary regulatory complexity. The UK’s high regulatory standards are not in question, but there is a question as to whether the framework through which those standards are delivered is as clear, efficient and proportionate as it can be.
I therefore hope that the Minister will engage constructively with the amendment. I would be grateful if he could explain how far the principles have already been reviewed in preparation for this Bill, in the light of the comments from the Financial Services Regulation Committee. Do the Government accept that the accumulation of regulatory principles and duties can create complexity, and do they believe that the existing Section 3B principles remain fit for purpose? This amendment raises a valuable point; I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for their thoughtful contributions to this debate. This clearly animates a lot of discussion. I particularly acknowledge the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and the work of the Financial Services Regulation Committee in effectively scrutinising the work of the regulators. It is important work, and we intend through this process to support that and not diminish it in any way. As was clear from those contributions at Second Reading, noble Lords place a strong emphasis on getting the regulatory principles right. The Government also take this matter very seriously.
Amendment 77 would require the Treasury to carry out and lay before Parliament a review of the regulatory principles in Section 3B(1) of FSMA. I am sympathetic to efforts to streamline the process of making regulation and to giving regulators a clear and manageable set of issues on which to focus. However, the Government have already considered this question and have carried out a review of the regulatory principles, as well as the other “have regard” provisions mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes. The Government committed to this review in the Regulation Action Plan published in March 2025, and carried out the review with a view to identifying opportunities to rationalise those principles.
As a result of that review, the Government concluded that each of the regulatory principles in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 is individually important; that they do not materially overlap with each other or with other requirements set out in legislation; and that they play an important role in providing transparency and supporting the Government and Parliament’s oversight of the regulators. However, the Government also found that the “have regard” provisions can reduce regulators’ ability to act strategically and with a clear focus.
Currently, the way that the principles operate results in the production of large volumes of information that do little to support effective overall scrutiny of a regulator’s performance. The Government have drafted the measures in this Bill with a view to rationalising how the regulators take these regulatory principles into account, without amending the principles themselves. We recognise that this is an area where there is significant interest; issues related to this amendment will continue to be debated during the passage of the Bill, when there will be an opportunity to discuss this area in greater detail. A further statutory review, beginning after Royal Assent, would duplicate the work that the Government have already undertaken.
I will come back to noble Lords’ specific questions in writing if I do not cover them later in the debate. I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for taking part in this brief debate on what is, I think, an important area.
The Minister said that the Government have already reviewed the regulatory principles and found them to be absolutely fine. I find that quite remarkable, given that they clearly duplicate other requirements and that some are, frankly, almost incomprehensible; they have grown up over the years in various ways. As the Minister knows, the burden on my remarks was on the proliferation of have regards and not just the regulatory principles, which we will be debating in the context of the Government’s clear desire to downgrade the way in which they operate and to reduce the ability of Parliament to hold the regulators to account. We will return to that issue.
This is an important area for the Government to look at again. They say that they have reviewed all the have regards—there are many of them throughout FSMA—but I cannot believe that they have concluded that no change to the legislation is required. It beggars belief, because the have regards clearly overlap in some areas and are restated in others. I continue to believe that a proper review should be undertaken. I will remind myself of what the Government’s so-called review has already found, because I am not sure that I remember the details of it at the moment—I will check up on it between now and Report—but, as I indicated earlier, I may well return to this theme on Report, if not with this specific amendment. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Kramer
“(2) In section 3B (regulatory principles to be applied by both regulators), in subsection (1), at the end insert—“(i) the need to consider—(i) the interconnections between private credit vehicles and PRA-authorised banks, insurance companies and pension fund, and(ii) the limitations of the FCA’s regulatory perimeter in managing the interconnection between private credit vehicles and non-regulated financial organisations.””Member’s explanatory statement
This probing amendment would replace the removal of the regulatory-principles duties in Clause 17 with a new “have regard” to risks to financial stability arising from the interconnection of private credit markets with banks, insurers and pension funds, as well as with non-regulated institutions.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, this is very much a probing amendment, but I thought that we ought to raise this issue; the Bill seemed an appropriate place to do so. Frankly, it is an issue on which we have hardly touched in Parliament.
Private credit markets are a phenomenon that has surged since the crash of 2008. Market-based finance accounts for around half of the UK and global financial sector assets, according to the Bank of England. Global private market assets were estimated at $18 trillion in 2025. As Sarah Breeden, a deputy Governor of the Bank of England, said in a speech made this year:
“They have not yet been tested, at that scale and complexity, by a broad based macroeconomic shock in a higher rate environment”.
At the same time, public debt is close to post-war highs, not just in the UK but globally, making it more difficult to respond to any financial shocks.
People sometimes see the private credit sector as distinct from other parts of finance. In the UK, the banking sector has lent to private credit funds at a scale to provide them with liquidity, with pretty much no transparency to evaluate the quality of funds. There is clearly co-investing and interconnections through derivatives. I cannot find good data to work out where the exposure lies, but there have been enough articles raising warning signs to convince me that there is something serious here that must be looked at.
UK pension funds have invested heavily in private assets. The Universities Superannuation Scheme has £7.8 billion in private credit exposure. Institutional providers such as TPT Investment Management have launched schemes specially for the use of UK pension schemes, and the Mansion House Accord encourages even more investment into these private markets. As I listened to the Pensions Minister during the passage of the then Pension Schemes Bill, I heard what sounded like claims that these private assets are high-return, low-risk assets and perfect for pensioners with very little savings. It is because of such a naive understanding of private credit, among other things, that that Bill was so important. That is why protecting the fiduciary duty of pension trustees dominated its passage; the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and my noble friend Lady Bowles were instrumental in making sure that that fiduciary duty remained primary.
The insurance companies are deep into this, too. According to the Bank of England, in evidence given to the Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee:
“The interconnections between private markets and the life insurance sector have grown considerably, with analysis by the IMF … showing that approximately 35% of assets held by US life insurers and approximately 23% of those held by UK life insurers were allocated to private credit”.
It is clear that if the private credit market goes wrong, it goes wrong for the whole financial sector. It is not an exaggerated fear: the sector has serious liquidity issues. Anyone who picks up a newspaper can see that firms such as Blackstone, Oaktree, Apollo and Morgan Stanley, to name but a few, are now limiting or refusing redemptions. We cannot ignore the canary in the coal mine.
The Lords FSR Committee published a report on this sector in January, entitled Private Markets: Unknown Unknowns. At the end of that process—I give some credit to the committee—the Bank of England announced that it would conduct a system-wide exploratory scenario that will involve the banks, insurers, private equity companies and pension fund investors, but on a voluntary basis. It will report in 2027. The committee is to be commended for focusing on the issues in this sector, but I do not think that this satisfies a reasonable standard of parliamentary scrutiny or reflects a parliamentary responsibility to the public to make sure that we avoid another major financial crash. Therefore, my amendment is designed simply to put pressure on the Bank of England in order to get proper answers. I am still disturbed that it thinks it will do so only on a voluntary basis. I hope that the Bill as a whole can be amended to restore proper democratic oversight, and then Parliament could engage with finding a solution. One of the reasons so few people in both Houses are aware of the concerns about the issue is that there is virtually no vehicle for a debate, for consideration and for action.
The second part of my Amendment 78 addresses a problem that I have never heard widely discussed. If the private credit market goes bad—and the banks, because they are entangled with that market, begin to divest loans—what happens to small businesses dependent on bank credit? We saw this behaviour in 2008. After the crash, banks continued to fund the big companies but found every way possible—many of them legal but I would consider unethical—to call in loans to small companies. In loan agreements that were being paid in full and on time, there would be a covenant somewhere in the documents that said that if loan-to-property values fell below a certain level, the loan could be called. I am pretty sure that the small business never really thought that that was a significant paragraph in its loan agreement, but it proved the trigger and we saw basically every major bank exercise it.
The FCA refused to act and has always held the line that the regulatory perimeter means that it cannot offer protection to small businesses and that, instead, caveat emptor applies. To me, this is untenable in the complex world of finance that we have today. I want the regulators to take a proper look at the whole issue of the regulatory perimeter, if we are to go into a cycle of financial shocks.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on what may be the most important amendment that we will discuss in Committee, and I hope we might discuss it on Report as well. As she said, there is a huge lack of discussion of this issue in Parliament, whereas if you go to the pages of the Financial Times, for example, you will see, pretty well every day, alarming reports and strong headlines expressing concern about the issue. I am aware that we are operating under heatwave conditions, as is the rest of the nation. As with our credit system, we have all been puffed up by a lot of hot air, much of which has indeed been financed by our financial system, so I will be quite brief, but I want to pick up a couple of points that the noble Baroness made.
The powerful argument about a voluntary engagement with the stress test is just laughable—with a sick kind of laugh. We know what voluntary regulation has done in so many different areas of our business sectors, and that is not the way to go forward. The noble Baroness also talked about pension funds, particularly about investing in private credit and the grave concerns that it raises. There is quite a bit of research that indicates that the people profiting from this are the managers and companies, and pension funds are getting the same or lower returns as they are from other investments.
The most useful way I thought I could add to this was to go through the Financial Times private credit headlines for this month alone. I will give a representative selection of them. The first is:
“Are insurers becoming dangerously addicted to private credit ratings?”
It is a question-mark headline, to which the answer is clearly given as “yes” in the article. Here are some of the others:
“Apollo’s flagship private credit fund hit by 17% redemption requests”,
“BlackRock private credit fund honours less than 40% of redemption requests”,
“Partners Group limits withdrawals at private equity fund for wealthy individuals”,
and
“Cliffwater’s flagship private credit fund redemption requests hit 17%”.
Rather than expound at length, I refer noble Lords to a single book: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.
There is no reason to think that what we are doing now will be different from where we have been before. Private credit is a new structure of a very familiar form, and we have seen what happens with these new financial-engineering structures. The noble Baroness is doing an important job here of at least starting a discussion on this. That discussion should be held at much greater length in the main Chamber, and its subject should worry us all.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, was kind enough to refer to the committee I chair. I will offer a few comments on this area.
First, in line with what I said on the previous group of amendments, I do not believe that this is a regulatory principle in any real sense. It is certainly not one directed just at the PRA and the FCA; for example, the system-wide exploratory scenario, which the noble Baroness referred to, is being undertaken by the financial stability arm of the Bank. She referred to Sarah Breeden—that is her area, and she is not in the PRA or the FCA.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, read out some headlines from the Financial Times. She is right that there is a lot of noise around private credit. It is all based in the United States at the moment. It is often said that what starts in America comes to the UK, but there are a lot of differences between what has happened in the US, including what has gone seriously wrong, and what has happened here. It is encouraging that the Bank of England has taken the initiative to carry out the system-wide exploratory stress scenario—it is the only central bank in the world to do so.
There was criticism that this was voluntary, and that is because the players in the private credit market are not regulated organisations and so they have no obligation under existing law to provide information. However, it is my understanding that the degree of involvement of the organisations taking part that are not directly regulated by the PRA or the FCA—or are not involved in the activities we are discussing—has been satisfactory.
One thing I considered tabling for this Committee was the question of whether the Bank of England has sufficient powers to get the information from the non-regulated sector if it needed to do so. I would be grateful if the Minister could reflect on that question. All the time the information is being adequately obtained voluntarily, I do not see any need to legislate for it; I am just not aware of whether there is a backstop power, and I ran out of brain power for drafting an amendment to find out about that. I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving me a cue to raise this issue.
A lot of issues arise in relation to the impact of private credit on the existing regulated organisations—banks and insurance companies—but it is also fair to say that, although there is not complete transparency on what the second-order impact would be if there was a stress in this situation, there is a lot of awareness and supervisory engagement with the key players, as was explained to us during the conduct of the inquiry that my committee undertook. The committee did not find such a scary situation as has been portrayed by other Members of the Committee this afternoon.
Lord Altrincham (Con)
My Lords, this amendment raises an important question around private credit and how our regulatory framework should respond to emerging risks in modern financial markets. I look forward to the Minister’s tactful comments on this amendment, given that the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, spoke so well in favour of private credit in our debate on the fifth group on our first day in Committee. Here we are with the problems of private credit on our second day in Committee. The Minister will be extraordinarily tactful in handling that.
We will have a wider debate on Clause 17 and the regulatory principles in future groups, but this amendment touches on some of those broader questions. The specific issue raised here—private credit—is an important and timely one. Private credit has grown considerably as a feature of modern financial markets; it has, in fact, grown partly as a consequence of regulation. We are dealing now with regulation of a consequence of regulation as the markets have evolved. It can provide an important source of finance outside traditional banking channels, supporting businesses that need capital to invest, develop and grow. For that reason, we should be careful not to respond to its expansion in a way that unnecessarily restricts access to safe and productive credit; indeed, the Financial Services Regulation Committee concluded in its report earlier this year that private credit has developed rapidly and plays a useful economic role.
That is particularly important at a time when we want firms to invest, expand and access the finance they need. We should not create a regulatory environment in which the answer to every emerging market development is simply more regulation without proper regard to the consequences. Indeed, the Government have been keen to support private equity through greater investment from assets such as pension funds in the UK. If they want this sector to continue developing, they must ensure that regulation supports, rather than restricts, access to credit for consumers who choose to use these products.
At the same time, it is right to recognise that financial markets do not stand still. The system changes over time, and the regulatory framework must remain alert to those changes. Areas such as private credit, non-bank finance, digital finance and other fast-moving parts of the system demonstrate the need for regulation that reflects the market as it is developing, not simply the market as it looked when earlier legislation was drafted.
The key point, therefore, is one of balance. We need a market that is dynamic, innovative and capable of providing finance to the businesses on which growth depends, but we also need a regulatory framework that is sufficiently up to date to understand and monitor emerging risks. We should keep in mind, though, that risk can never be eliminated entirely. The role of regulation should be not to remove all risk from the system but to ensure that risks are properly understood, proportionately managed and developed with an eye to supporting economic development and growth.
For those reasons, we will listen carefully to the Minister’s response.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the focus of the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on the vulnerabilities in the private credit system.
Although the Government are clear that the growth of private credit has brought benefits to the real economy, we and the financial regulators are very conscious of the potential vulnerabilities in this sector. Just last month, the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England joined their fellow G7 Finance Ministers and European Central Bank governors in agreeing that potential risks in the private credit ecosystem call for continued monitoring, including that of the interconnections with banks and insurers.
The amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, would require the PRA and the FCA to consider private credit’s interactions with the wider financial system in all cases where the regulatory principles are engaged, or else their decision-making could be unlawful. I assure her that the regulators are already working to understand these vulnerabilities deeply and to address them where necessary. This work does not require placing additional duties on the regulators.
I will highlight the existing work of those regulators. First, the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee has been focused on the risks of private markets for many years, and the Chancellor’s most recent remit letter to the FPC asks that that work continues. I specifically note the Bank’s system-wide exploratory scenario on private markets, the SWES—as if we needed another acronym. It is examining how a stress scenario could affect the UK’s private markets ecosystem and interconnected banks, insurers and pension funds, with significant participation across the industry. The UK’s system-wide regulator, the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee, is the right authority to carry out this work, and its findings will be laid before Parliament when it is complete.
For its part, the FCA also maintains a close focus on these risks, including in its firm-level supervision. Where specific issues are identified, targeted interventions follow. We also welcome the FCA’s work to improve the visibility of risks and data availability through its reviews of the alternative investment fund managers directive framework, and its efforts to raise standards on conflicts of interest, valuation practices and risk management.
I note the noble Baroness’s concerns about the FCA’s regulatory perimeter, but I emphasise that the marketing of funds in the UK is indeed subject to UK regulatory requirements, protecting UK investors. Further, the PRA continues to assess and mitigate risks from private markets to the banks and insurers it regulates. This includes its 2024 thematic review of private equity-related financing activities with banks.
Finally, given the cross-border nature of the private credit ecosystem, the Bank and the FCA are actively engaged in international work, including at the Financial Stability Board, which is chaired by the Governor of the Bank of England. The Government believe that, under our regulatory framework, vulnerabilities in private credit are being understood and addressed where needed, but there is of course much room to improve. I therefore ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, I will of course withdraw this amendment, but I wanted to get this issue on the agenda, and we need to continue to do so. I say to the Government: do not be complacent in this situation. A few weeks before the crash in 2008, everybody in government would have told you how well the financial sector was functioning. Being a cynic can be quite helpful.
I am particularly concerned about the impact on small businesses when we run into the next financial shock, because there will be one. That regulatory perimeter is a serious issue that the Government should be looking at. I do not know whether you can get the regulators to look at it voluntarily. As far as they are concerned, you go to Parliament only to explain; it is not where you take instruction. I am concerned about these issues. I look forward to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, on private credit, which will come later. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Kramer
“(2) In section 3B (regulatory principles to be applied by both regulators), in subsection (1), at the end insert—“(i) the need to assess the impact on the taxpayer of any provision of backstop arrangements by the Bank of England to private stablecoin.””Member’s explanatory statement
This probing amendment would replace the removal of the regulatory-principles duties in Clause 17 with a new “have regard” to the risks to taxpayers should the Bank of England provide a liquidity backstop to private stablecoin.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, here I am again with another issue that I want to raise. It does not necessarily look like it, but this is another constitutional amendment. Digital money and stablecoin are coming. As I have said in the House before, I am not King Cnut but I am concerned that both the industry and the regulators treat stablecoin as merely a change in plumbing in the payments system. I understand the desire for the UK to be an attractive place for stablecoin companies and the need to build a substantial sterling stablecoin sector. What concerns me is that, at scale, it has huge consequences for the taxpayer to carry the liabilities, and it determines who has their hands on the levers of economic power. I will not pursue that last issue; it would take about 10 minutes and the Committee is beyond coping with that.
In October, the FCA will publish regulations for the non-systemic stablecoin players but, on Monday, the Bank of England launched its policy statement and draft rules for systemic stablecoin. The document is clearly a loosening of rules previously under discussion, but my attention was grabbed by the Bank’s confirmation that it will introduce a central bank liquidity facility for systemic stablecoin. In other words, if there is a run on stablecoin, the taxpayer is on the hook. It is true that liquidity facilities are offered to the banks but to extend this to stablecoin is a major decision. I am not saying that it is right or wrong, but a decision on this scale, with the liabilities that are consequent, is above the pay grade of the regulator. This should be a decision in which Parliament is fully engaged. I beg to move.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
My Lords, the Financial Services Regulation Committee has also been looking at stablecoin, so I have a few words to say on the topic.
I go back to my earlier point: this is not a regulatory principle that can be applied by the FCA and the PRA. It has very little to do with them, as it is the financial stability part of the Bank of England that has issued the policy. The backstop is just one part of the arrangements, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, will be aware. A very significant part of the assets of stablecoin issuers also need to be held in unremunerated form at the Bank of England—30%, which is a significant amount of money. If the noble Baroness is worried about the cost to the taxpayer, she might also reflect on the gain to the taxpayer for all the time that there is not a crisis because the Bank of England has access to free money, which is part of the whole deal.
The stablecoin package needs to be looked at as a whole, rather than one small part of it being picked out. The noble Baroness may still disagree with it, but it is a calibrated package which balances the risks, including keeping one-to-one asset backing, which will also go a long way to allaying her concerns.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, that digital assets are a serious issue and that they deserve proper scrutiny. We come at it from a slightly different perspective. I note the point made by my noble friend Lady Noakes that this is not a matter for regulatory principles.
This week, as we have heard, the Bank of England published its final policy statement and draft code of practice for sterling-denominated systemic stablecoins. This may go some way to supporting institutional scale-up, but we are concerned by the general reaction, which has been that the fundamentals have not changed and that the prevailing regime we are left with could still leave UK issuers less attractive internationally.
We are very grateful for the work of the Financial Services Regulation Committee, under my noble friend Lady Noakes, with the help of her very distinguished committee. Yet again, it features in almost every part of this Bill. Its report, Stablecoins: Waiting for Regulation, makes it clear that the UK, in its view, is lagging behind the US and EU on stablecoin regulation. Stablecoins and other forms of digital money are no longer simply niche products or theoretical innovations; they have the potential to become part of the wider payments and financial infrastructure.
The danger now is that we risk creating, or at least allowing to persist, a regulatory grey zone. Firms need clarity on the duties, expectations and requirements that they will have to meet. That is why we are calling for a much clearer digital asset strategy from the Government. We need Ministers to take a position of leadership in this area. It is not enough to simply respond to developments as they arise in different parts of the digital stratosphere. We have tabled amendments alongside the noble Lord, Lord Ranger, who is somewhat expert in this area and is not here today, to probe the Government on the wider question of digital assets and digital finance strategy. We will come to those amendments in a later group. I do not want to pre-empt that debate now—not at this late hour, with so few people in Committee on such a hot day.
This amendment touches on the same underlying point: that the Government need to provide clarity and certainty. They need to provide leadership, whatever that is. I would be grateful if the Minister can briefly explain the Government’s position on stablecoins, and— in response to the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, has rightly raised—explain how stablecoins will help growth and competitiveness.
Lord Stockwood (Lab)
Amendment 79 would require the FCA and PRA to assess the impact on the taxpayer of any provision of backstop arrangements by the Bank of England to private stablecoin when exercising their general functions. I support the noble Baroness’s goal of ensuring that all government and Bank of England activity provides good value for the taxpayer. The Bank of England already has a duty, established in the joint memorandum of understanding with HMT, to
“ensure value for money by minimising financial costs and risks to its capital”.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
At this hour, the only thing to do is to withdraw the amendment. I thank the Committee.
House of Lords
Hares: Close Season
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Lord Randall of Uxbridge
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to bring forward legislation to introduce a close season for hares.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)
My Lords, the hare is a much-loved species in this country, and England is among the few European countries that do not have a close season on shooting hares during their breeding season. This is a terrible oversight, and this Government’s animal welfare strategy has made a commitment to
“consider how to … introduce a close season for hares”.
It will require a suitable primary legislative vehicle, and Defra is exploring every opportunity to find one.
Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)
I thank the Minister. I know she shares my frustration at the length of time it is taking for this legislation to appear. Although the hare can hide in the long grass, it is about time we flush it out. If the Minister has any suggestions for how we can advance this legislation I would be most grateful.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord and others in this Chamber for their huge support to further this legislation. As I said, it needs primary legislation. Legislative slots are always tight, but we are actively looking at how we can find a space during this Parliament. I think the best way that people can help is to express why this is so important and the difference it would make to hares, and to demonstrate that this country is an anomaly in not having a close season.
Lord Cromwell (CB)
While a close season is certainly a good idea, I have previously recounted in this House the case of a farming family who, sadly, feel obliged to kill all the hares on their land—because, otherwise, gangs running lucrative betting on illegal hare-coursing crash through their gates, destroy their hedges and drive four-wheel drive vehicles across their food crops, terrorising anyone who tries to stop them. Does the Minister agree that a close season will have no effect on these dangerous people, and that more resourcing for rural policing is what is needed to combat them?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, who has raised this issue previously. The close season for hares is a separate issue from the problem of hare-coursing. Hare-coursing is an illegal activity. It should not be taking place. Unfortunately, it has been picked up by criminals and has proved very lucrative for those criminals, who run betting rings on it. I am extremely concerned by the increase in it, particularly in certain areas. I have written to the Home Office asking for a meeting to discuss this further, because the noble Lord is absolutely right that, without enforcement, this will not to be resolved. These are dangerous people, and we need to do something about it.
Baroness Helic (Con)
My Lords, I commend my noble friend for his unwavering commitment to this issue, both in the other place and in your Lordships’ House, and I also commend the Minister for her clarity on this issue. The Scottish Government took decisive action by introducing a statutory close season for brown hares in 2012 and have also taken steps to protect mountain hares through licensing measures. The evidence clearly indicates that the brown hare population in Scotland has remained broadly stable since then, while welfare risks associated with shooting during the breeding season have reduced significantly. In the light of this, can the Minister say—and I understand that there is a tight parliamentary timetable—why after 14 years we have not taken that particular step to protect hares?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I think the rumblings behind me have given the answer to that question. I am determined to find a way to do this, and I will do everything in my power to find a legislative slot. I have a cunning plan; we will have to see whether it comes off. The noble Baroness mentioned mountain hares. Any legislation that we bring forward will be designed to include better protections for mountain hares too.
Lord Robathan (Con)
My Lords, I have kept two hares in my time: one 50 years ago, and one about 10 years ago. They were absolutely delightful. I would not dream of hurting hares, and I would not dream of shooting one. However, this is quite difficult, because the close season for hares gives them quite a long time. There may be ways to protect hares, other than what the Minister is suggesting, that we should pursue, including cutting down courses.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Lord is entitled to his views on this, as everybody is. However, having looked at the evidence, my view is that a close season should run from the beginning of February through to the autumn.
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, on animal welfare issues, I declare an interest as a dog owner. Some 45% of dog owners report that their dogs feel fear from fireworks, and the majority of people who have horses similarly find that fireworks affect their animals. Can the Minister say whether the Government have any plans to bring forward legislation to restrict the decibel limit to 90 decibels, and to restrict the time that fireworks can be sold, so that pet owners and their pets do not suffer needlessly?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
In talking about fireworks, the noble Earl is talking about something that is in the gift of the Department for Business and Trade, because the selling of fireworks is a trade issue. However, I can inform him and the House that I have had a meeting with the relevant Minister in DBT to discuss exactly this issue.
Lord Spellar (Lab)
My Lords, I suggest to the Minister that the Government’s legislative programme is not the only mechanism by which this could be done. For example, have the Whips been putting out Private Members’ Bills, suggested Bills and handout Bills, which is a well-known practice on both sides? Further, there is still the opportunity at any stage to introduce a Bill, which I am sure would sail through the Commons. It could then come here and not take up government time.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My noble friend has allowed me to express my deep disappointment that the PMB on this, which was Defra’s priority PMB for this Session, was not picked up. I thank noble Lords who were prepared to put it forward but did not come early enough in the ballot.
Lord Roborough (Con)
My Lords, hare populations vary dramatically around our country, and the breeding season can be for most of the year. Can the Minister clarify that she will ensure that hares can still be controlled where appropriate? I declare an interest as the owner of land where hare populations need encouragement rather than control.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
Absolutely, I can confirm that. The idea is to bring in a close season in line with those of other countries, not to stop control of hares absolutely.
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest in that I farm organically in Scotland and we have a number of hares around. In fact, when the close season came in in Scotland, it did not really do much to help the hare population, because there are enough foxes around to kill the hares, which I have tried but failed to do something about. What really helps is the creation of new habitat, and the Scottish version of the ELMS system has been very helpful in creating habitat for the hares. Can the Minister comment briefly about how ELMS could affect the habitat of hares?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
ELMS and the sustainable farming work that we are doing are designed to increase biodiversity in habitats and to help support the kind of habitat that the noble Earl is talking about. We are also looking at how we can best tackle things such as invasive species, which have a huge impact on our natural biodiversity. I am very keen that we work together on these things, because you cannot do things in silos. You have to bring things together if you are going to get the best result possible. I am sure the noble Earl would say that that was the same for red squirrels.
Lord Bellingham (Con)
My Lords, I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, said earlier, and I declare my interests in the register. Is the Minister aware of the Hares Preservation Act 1892, which specifically forbids the sale of hares during the notional hare breeding season, 1 March to the end of July? Is that Act working and is it being enforced?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
Acts from the 19th century have their place in some areas of legislation, but I think in protecting hares, we need to look at the current situation. Populations would have been very different then; farming was very different then. We need to look at how we best protect things such as the mountain hare, while at the same time having a close season for brown hares that aligns with those of other countries.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, it may be a little obscure to look at legislation from 1892, but from my experience all those years ago in government, there were possibilities of getting the Civil Service to be really creative in looking at how subsidiary legislation could be drawn from such laws. Quite often, I was told that it had to be primary, but it did not: it could be secondary. I wonder whether my noble friend could go back and have another go.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I can assure my noble friend that I have gone back—not just on this but on other things—a number of times to see whether we can bring in legislation without it being primary, but the lawyers have informed me that that is not the case. We need primary legislation. I am sure that the comments that my noble friend has made about older legislation will be looked at very carefully.
Scottish Government: Social Security Benefits
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Lord Bruce of Bennachie
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the total amount transferred to the Scottish Government in the last financial year following the devolution of social security benefits.
Baroness Suttie (LD)
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Bruce of Bennachie, and at his request, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.
The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Livermore) (Lab)
My Lords, following the devolution of social security powers, the Scottish Government are responsible for funding and administering social security benefits, with funding transferred from the UK Government. Funding for devolved social security is provided through welfare block grant adjustments that transfer funding from the UK Government to the Scottish Government. In the most recent financial year, this amounted to £5.8 billion for the Scottish Government. Decisions on how funding is used are for the Scottish Government.
Baroness Suttie (LD)
I thank the Minister for that Answer. In 2025-26, the total social security spend in Scotland was £6.9 billion, which amounts to £1.3 billion more than that which is transferred by the Treasury. It is far from clear how the SNP Government will manage to sustain this level of funding. Does the Minister agree that, to the extent that the Scottish Government have added top-ups, it is important to make it clear that the looming deficit from this and other unbudgeted expenditure is entirely the Scottish Government’s responsibility and they should not blame it on the UK Government—although they will undoubtedly try?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I agree; I am strong supporter of not blaming the UK Government. As the noble Baroness knows, funding is assessed through the fiscal framework, which links welfare block grant adjustments directly to UK Government spending on equivalent benefits. These adjustments are calculated on a forecast basis and reconciled on outturn, ensuring that funding reflects actual spending over time. The Scottish Government are then responsible for spending decisions, including on benefit levels and eligibility. Any additional spending on benefits is a choice for the Scottish Government and must come from within their own budget.
The Lord Speaker (Lord Forsyth of Drumlean)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, is taking part remotely. I invite him to speak.
Lord Shinkwin (Con) [V]
My Lords, in the event of our being at war, which some experts suggest is increasingly likely by 2030, the massive and urgent recalibration of resources to defence will inevitably mean that those who need most support due to their disability will be hit the hardest. What advice are His Majesty’s Government giving to the Scottish Government on the careful management of their social security budget so that they can mitigate the worst effects of such an eventuality on those whose disability makes them most dependent?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question but I do not agree with the assumption underlying it. Of course we must spend more on defence, but we must also continue to support those who need that support the most. As I said in answer to the first Question, spending on benefits is a choice for the Scottish Government and must come from within their own budget.
Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court (CB)
My Lords, does the noble Lord the Financial Secretary agree that fiscal responsibility should lie at the heart of the devolutionary settlement? Does he agree that maintaining fiscal credibility would be a particular challenge in the event of Scotland becoming independent? Is he aware that the Irish Free State had to cut the state pension by 10% in 1924 to maintain parity with sterling? Might he draw that to the attention of those who advocate Scottish independence?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I did not know the specific example that the noble Lord sets out and I am grateful to him for educating me, as he has done many times in the past. I agree that Scotland, in my view, is better off as part of the union and that independence would be disadvantageous to the people of Scotland and to the Scottish economy. I agree very much with what he says about continuing fiscal responsibility, both in Scotland and in the whole of the UK.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, unlike Scotland, which has taken on significant social security powers and used them directly to address child poverty in Scotland, Wales has limited control over the welfare system. Does the Minister agree with the principle of Gordon Brown’s report that nothing that is devolved to Scotland could not be devolved to Wales if the Senedd wants it?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I worked for Gordon Brown for quite some years. I did not always agree with him and I am not sure I do on this occasion. The noble Baroness knows that the fiscal framework sets a funding floor to ensure that the Welsh Government receive a fair level of relative funding. A review of the framework is triggered when relative funding falls to 115%. The Government remain committed to working with the Welsh Government to ensure the smooth delivery of their funding settlement, and there are ongoing discussions about funding flexibilities and their fiscal framework as part of this.
Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links (Con)
My Lords, the Scottish Fiscal Commission has forecast that over a million Scottish adults will be in receipt of disability payments by 2031 under the new Scottish social security system—that is over a fifth of the projected population. The divergence from Barnett consequentials in just this area is forecasted to be £1.2 billion, which will come, as the Minister says, either from spending cuts or rises in taxation—taxation rates already being the highest in the UK, reaching 48%. To help the Scottish Government balance the books and to give some relief to the Scottish taxpayer, I ask the Minister: what, if any, analysis has been done to assess the varying disability rates across the different parts of the UK, and what health interventions have proven successful in lowering those rates?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
As the noble Baroness knows far better than I do, the fiscal framework is designed to ensure that funding is fair and fiscally neutral at the point of devolution. It provides the Scottish Government with funding that reflects UK Government spending, while also giving them full responsibility for policy decisions in devolved areas. So, as I have said, any additional spending on benefits is a choice for the Scottish Government and must come from within their own budget.
The noble Baroness alludes to wider welfare reform. She will be well aware that spending on welfare increased by £88 billion in the last five years of the previous Government. I do not think anyone believes that the system that we inherited is working. It abandoned too many people to a life on benefits, it wrote off too many people as too sick to work, and it condemned too many children to be too poor to eat, which is exactly why we are reforming the system. She will know that we have launched the Milburn review, focusing on the causes of youth unemployment in particular, and he will come back with specific recommendations later this year.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, tabled this Question in part because he is appalled that so many people he speaks to in Scotland think that the whole of their benefit comes from Scottish-only taxes, not just the top-up. Ahead of the Brexit referendum, many people whose areas had received millions in EU support declared that their area had never received a penny because the EU contribution was unacknowledged or obscured. Is it time to improve communication and strengthen the union by making it clear that the whole of the UK contributes to benefit funding in Scotland, as well as in the other nations?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
There is a lot in what the noble Baroness says. I obviously agree with her, as I often do, on the matter of the European Union. I agree with what she says; it is very much worth looking at.
Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)
My Lords, the Minister may be aware that it has cost the taxpayer more than £650 million to set up Social Security Scotland, yet there are countless examples of claimants who are on benefits administered by both Social Security Scotland and the Department for Work and Pensions who have had money deducted because of a lack of communication between the two agencies. What action can the UK Government take to improve communication between both departments to make sure that those in genuine need of support are not penalised?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I did not know about what the noble Lord says. I am more than happy to take that back to my DWP colleagues and to discuss it with them.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, the Scottish Government are using this social security spending to deliver a more humane system that treats people with dignity. We have recently had the family finances project from the University of Glasgow and the University of Manchester, which shows that the Scottish child payment has reduced levels of food insecurity and material deprivation for children by about eight percentage points compared with comparable populations in England. Will the English Government follow suit?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I think the noble Baroness means the UK Government. I know that the Scottish Greens are in coalition with the SNP in Scotland, so presumably she supports what they are doing. As I have said already, it is a matter for the Scottish Government. They have full responsibility for policy decisions in devolved areas and any spending they choose to undertake must come from within their own budgets.
Resistant Hypertension
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the level of provision for treating patients with resistant hypertension including financial investment in renal denervation treatments.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)
My Lords, the NHS is increasing the diagnosis and detection of hypertension and is supporting the identification of resistant hypertension and its treatment. Renal denervation remains an option for some patients but is currently not widely commissioned by the NHS, in line with NICE guidance. The cardiovascular disease modern service framework will further support diagnosis and accelerate our commitment to reduce premature mortality from heart disease and stroke by 25% in the next 10 years.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for her Answer. This Government, thankfully, have a direct focus on prevention. In view of that, the UK expert clinical consensus on renal denervation, published in the Heart journal, concluded that existing commissioning arrangements no longer accurately reflect current evidence and technology evaluation on renal denervation. I therefore ask my noble friend the Minister: will the Government reconsider and commit to reviewing national commissioning policies for renal denervation, so that funding and eligibility criteria for this technology are made clear and consistent across all eligible sectors?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I can indeed give the commitment to my noble friend that NHS England is currently reviewing the clinical evidence for the commissioning of renal denervation treatment, and recommendations are expected next year.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, while innovative treatments have an important role, uncontrolled high blood pressure remains one of the leading drivers of stroke, heart attacks and kidney failure. What work are the Government undertaking to improve prevention and management of high blood pressure, particularly in communities with the highest prevalence and the poorest outcomes?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The noble Baroness is right in what she says. This is a largely preventable condition and requires much movement from treatment to prevention, as the noble Baroness said. That means bearing down on certain lifestyle factors and encouraging people to seek to give up smoking, or not to take it up in the first place; to tackle obesity and support people in that; and to reduce alcohol consumption. It is important to note that identifying it at an early stage is crucial, because it allows us not only to support lifestyle changes but, where necessary, to provide medical intervention.
Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)
My Lords, I welcome the remarks made so far by the Minister. We are aware of the drivers and that hypertension can lead to strokes and heart attacks. In particular, about 5% to 10% of those with hypertension have resistant hypertension. I ask the Minister specifically: when the cardiovascular disease modern service framework is published, will the Government consider explicitly defining resistant hypertension as a distinctive, high-risk subgroup, so that we will be able to ensure that a focus can be put on it and to help strategies to minimise serious cardiovascular diseases?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a helpful point. Indeed, the modern service framework will soon be published. Of course, as blood pressure is one of the seven risk factors for cardiovascular disease, as the noble Lord referred to, we have to improve detection and management. That is what the modern service framework will drive forward, particularly in local areas. Yes, it will make reference not just to hypertension, which is more widely applicable, but to resistant hypertension, as he suggested.
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
My Lords, NICE has recognised renal denervation as a potential treatment option for resistant hypertension, yet its use remains limited and subject to special arrangements for governance and research. What assessment have the Government made of the extent to which eligible patients are able to access renal denervation across England? Are Ministers concerned about the emergence of a postcode lottery in access to the treatment?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
Looking to the future, obviously, one can only act on clinical guidance. Renal denervation, as I mentioned to my noble friend, is an emerging option for carefully selected patients at the moment, as the noble Lord said. What matters now is that evidence is emerging, and that is why it is being reassessed. We will not have to wait too long to see what the future will bring in this regard, but it certainly has a role to play.
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, I will refine the previous questions. Resistant hypertension occurs when the blood pressure does not respond to standard treatment of two, three or even four drugs—hence we call it resistant hypertension. The reason why the renal system is involved is because the sympathetic nervous system acts between the kidneys and the brain. That controls vasodilatation and the production of hormones that raise the blood pressure. By denerving the renal system, which are nerves on the arteries of the kidneys, you can cut out one of the nervous system’s interactions between kidneys and the brain. What is important, therefore, is that people who suffer from resistant hypertension are treated by specialists at a specialist centre that considers denervation as one of the options, because it is not always the only answer. Therefore, does the Minister agree that people with resistant hypertension should be treated in a specialist centre?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I certainly would agree with that. Indeed, those who are diagnosed with resistant hypertension—and the noble Lord has, as ever, outlined how that is defined in a far better way than I could have done—can be referred by their GP to secondary care hospital hypertension services, so, to answer the point made by the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Evans, that does mean in-depth investigations and expert management. The House can be assured of that.
Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of the Health Data Research Service. We know that hypertension remains underdiagnosed, and it is right that the Government have diversified the detection pathways. However, between those first high recordings at a pharmacy or in social care, the information does not always flow through to the treatment location, so people remain undertreated as well as underdiagnosed. Can the Minister say what steps the department will take to address this failing?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
That clearly matters immensely. We have invested in community pharmacy services, which have brought this into the heart of communities and made it easier and more attractive for people to have their blood pressure checked. As of February, we have some 10,000 community pharmacies delivering. We are also developing the online NHS health check and the modern service framework. Information from pharmacies should be going direct to GPs, but I am heartened, as we move towards the health Bill, by the advent of the single patient record.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster (Lab)
My Lords, following on from the extraordinary explanation by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, of the background and the need for specialist centres, would a pilot project undertaken by NHS research help, in case there are any delays in assessing the information before us? This is something that the NHS should do more often—specific pilot projects to see how something works in practice.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
As my noble friend says, we have had great success, and it has really helped us to have pilot projects in other areas such as mental health services. I ask my noble friend warmly to anticipate the modern service framework, because that will set out how we are to go forward in this regard.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, following on from my noble friend’s question and the Minister’s answer, there is no definition in the department of preventable spending. Will the new modern service framework determine a definition of what preventable spending is so that it can be tracked over time to see whether prevention is becoming the norm?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The modern service framework will focus on the cardiovascular disease pathway. I take the point that the noble Lord is making and assure him that, as he and the House will be aware, one of the three main pillars in the 10-year health plan is the move from sickness to prevention. Therefore, we will be looking at how we ensure that it delivers the results that we need. The modern service framework will be focused on consistent high quality and equitable care—in other words, on outcomes.
Edinburgh Anti-Muslim Attacks
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Baroness Gohir
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the factors that contributed to the attacks on Muslims in Edinburgh on 19 June; and what steps they are taking to prevent the normalisation of anti-Muslim hatred, violence and discrimination.
The Lord Speaker (Lord Forsyth of Drumlean)
My Lords, before inviting the Minister to respond to the noble Baroness’s topical Question, which is about the attack on Muslims in Edinburgh last week, I remind the House that no reference should be made to the criminal case currently before the courts in relation to the individual charged with the attack. Noble Lords are free to discuss the general issue, but the specific case remains sub judice.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Lemos) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government are deeply concerned by the attacks in Edinburgh. Our thoughts and prayers are with those injured and the wider community, as well as the families of the injured. Investigations are live but I can confirm that a suspect has been arrested and charged. On behalf of the Government, I thank the police and the emergency services for their response. We are continuing close engagement with the Scottish Government on this concerning incident, and we are working with police partners and communities to tackle anti-Muslim hostility, support victims and strengthen cohesion.
Baroness Gohir (CB)
Muslims are terrified and do not feel safe. When will the Government update the hate crime strategy? It expired in 2020. When will the Government strengthen hate crime legislation? Loopholes in the law are being exploited by hate preachers. For example, stirring of religious hatred has to meet a much higher threshold compared to stirring of racial hatred for it to be a criminal offence. For people who follow any faith, their safety matters too.
Lord Lemos (Lab)
I agree with the noble Baroness that people of any faith, and indeed of no faith, should feel safe, and we are taking sustained action to keep Muslims safe, to support victims and to challenge religious hatred. This includes strengthening protective security, with a record £40 million in funding for protective security measures, as set out in our strategy Protecting What Matters. We have adopted a clear definition of anti-Muslim hostility in order to consider some of the issues the noble Baroness raises, and we will appoint a special representative on anti-Muslim hostility. We have committed a £4 million fund to tackling anti-Muslim hostility as a first step.
Baroness Warsi (Non-Afl)
My Lords, when the public discourse is deliberately poisoned, it is inevitable that we see the kind of hatred we tragically saw play out on the streets of Edinburgh. Is the Minister familiar with the now extensive academic and investigative reports from the United States—and indeed here in the United Kingdom—that have tracked states, foreign funders and wealthy domestic individuals who fund and support a network of groups, individuals, think tanks and media outlets to instigate and spread anti-Muslim tropes, racism and division? What are the Government’s plans to tackle this in light of their announced aim to reduce malign funding and foreign influence in our politics and public life?
Lord Lemos (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for that question, and I pay tribute to her long history of distinguished contributions on these issues. I am on day eight of my post as Faith Minister, so I am not familiar with all the academic research she cites, but I would be very happy to receive it from the noble Baroness and view it. On the substantive point she raises, as she knows, we have commissioned the Rycroft review and we will be legislating on political donations. But I take very seriously exactly the point she is making about not just anti-Muslim hostility but religious hatred generally: that there are external actors which are seeking to disrupt our politics and disturb our communities.
Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)
My Lords, the shocking attack on Muslims in Edinburgh is the latest among the many and increasing attacks we have seen. This is not happening in a vacuum, as noble Lords have set out; the increasing anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobia are becoming more and more normalised. It was very disappointing that after the latest attack last week, there was no statement, no COBRA meeting and very little from the media, at a time when British Muslims are feeling increasingly fearful for and worried about their safety. Does the Minister accept that what we need now is strong leadership to tackle this, not platitudes or a tweet?
Lord Lemos (Lab)
There has been a statement from both the Prime Minister and the First Minister of Scotland, and I do not accept the characterisation that there is in any sense a lack of response to this. We understand that this problem of anti-Muslim hostility is getting worse. We take it seriously, and when incidents such as these occur, we will want to see the full force of the law used, and we will demonstrate the sort of leadership the noble Baroness is seeking. I do not quite recognise the picture she paints.
Baroness O'Neill of Bexley (Con)
I welcome the noble Lord to his place; I think it is his first time at the Dispatch Box, so welcome. We also associate ourselves with his comments about the Edinburgh incident.
The overwhelming majority of people in this country reject hatred and violence. However, recent years have seen increasing tensions between communities and the growth of extremist narratives from different quarters. What assessment have the Government made of these trends, and what action are they taking to strengthen social cohesion and mutual respect across society?
Lord Lemos (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for those kind words; it is a pleasure to do business with her again. We have set out in our Protecting What Matters strategy clear actions towards more confident, cohesive and resilient communities. We want to protect the UK’s social fabric and strengthen pride, belonging and cohesion. We cannot make people love each other, but it is the Government’s job to help, enable and support people living in communities where people do trust each other. Specifically on extremism, we intend to publish an annual report on the state of extremism as part of Protecting What Matters.
Lord Sahota (Lab)
My Lords, the Edinburgh incident happened last week. In Belfast the week before that, people were driven out of their homes because they were immigrants. A couple of weeks ago, a Sikh was attacked in the West Midlands; and a couple of months ago, two female Sikhs were raped in their homes—and so on and so forth. People seem to be scapegoating migrants for all their troubles. If they cannot get a house, they blame the migrants; if they cannot get a job, they blame the migrants; if they cannot get a doctor’s appointment, they blame migrants—even though the doctor is a migrant. Is it not about time that the Government did something to really protect migrants, especially the Sikhs, who have been attacked in the West Midlands?
Lord Lemos (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that question. The really important point is that most of the incidents he mentions are crimes, and we want to see the full force of the law used against those crimes. They are not about breakdowns of trust; they are not about attitudes to immigrants; they are crimes, and we want to see the law used to deal with that. If the law needs strengthening, we will strengthen it, as we have on crime and policing. It would be invidious of me to pick on the experiences of individual religious or racial communities—I realise those often converge. However, our first duty as the Government is to enforce the law, and we will.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)
My Lords, I am sure the whole House will agree that any violent attack against a specific community is utterly reprehensible. We have stood here too frequently in the last couple of years evaluating the aftermath of antisemitic attacks and attacks against Jewish people—violent terrorist attacks against a much tinier minority. Does the noble Lord agree that, given the plethora of anti-religious, terrorist and other criminal laws we have on the statute books, any further attempts to develop new policies and laws to deal with specific religions goes against the grain of our equality, and we should be even-handed and treat all religious discrimination fairly without two-tier perceptions of justice?
Lord Lemos (Lab)
I absolutely do agree with that, and I do not think there is any question in my or the Government’s mind: we do not want two-tier protection for any individual community. On the noble Baroness’s question about antisemitism, my first visit in this job as Faith Minister was to the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, and last week I also visited Manchester’s British Muslim Heritage Centre. I can tell the House that on both occasions, people were robust and trenchant in their views on the Government and what we are doing, but they were pleased to see me and pleased to see us taking action.
Darfur: Atrocities
Lord Alton of Liverpool
To ask His Majesty’s Government, following atrocities in El Fasher in the Darfur region of Sudan, what assessment they have made of (1) the situation in El Obeid, and (2) of the likelihood of further genocide in Sudan.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
The Government are deeply concerned by reports of a potential RSF offensive on El Obeid. Last year, unimaginable horrors unfolded in El Fasher. The RSF has moved troops towards El Obeid and sent dozens of drone strikes. The risk of grave atrocities is acute. The UK maintains that genocide should be determined by a competent court. This does not prevent us taking action. The Foreign Secretary has sounded the alarm on El Obeid, mobilising the international community through the UN Security Council and the Human Rights Council and raising it directly with counterparts.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. The Foreign Secretary has said:
“El Obeid is on the precipice of an atrocity”,
in a country with an estimated 150,000 fatalities and between 14 million and 15 million displaced people. Given that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said yesterday, without a court determination, that what has been happening bears all “the hallmarks of genocide”, how does the Minister counter the criticism of the Government and their policies made yesterday at the International Development Committee of another place? In order to prevent further atrocities, as penholder at the United Nations Security Council, will we now demand an emergency debate, work for the extension of the arms embargo across Sudan and consider the deployment of blue helmets and the imposition of a no-fly zone?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I was at the International Development Committee yesterday, and I thought the evidence provided by the witnesses was compelling and impressive. I did not agree with it all, but I thought that those giving evidence did themselves a great deal of credit. I have asked officials this morning for renewed advice on duty to prevent and whether our responsibilities under the genocide convention are engaged in this instance, given what has happened so recently in El Fasher. The noble Lord will know that, up to now, the UN Secretary-General has deemed that the deployment of a force to protect civilians or a peacekeeping force would not be possible in this situation for reasons of there being no peace to keep and the difficulties of doing that, but we will continue to look at all available avenues in this situation. We do not want to see, as we did in El Fasher, another siege situation and all that unfolded at the end of that.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this subject to the attention of the House once again. It is an incredibly important subject, and we should be concentrating more on it. The UN Human Rights Office has said that it has verified 546 instances of conflict-related sexual violence and that sexual violence is increasingly being used as a weapon of war in Sudan. Given the UK’s experience supporting the investigation—and hopefully, later, prosecution—of war crimes in Ukraine, what plans do His Majesty’s Government have to provide equivalent support for the prosecution of war criminals in Sudan?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
We have done a couple of things: we have deployed specialist teams on gender-based violence in the area, and we have a fact-finding mission. We are doing that so that proceedings can follow. I will not go into the detail of some of the violence here, but the degradation is abominable and truly shocking, and the impunity with which it is carried out is really quite shocking. We need to continue to do everything we can to prevent it and to hold those responsible to account.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I note the Minister’s reference to the action by the Security Council and the joint statement by Foreign Ministers of like-minded countries calling for a halt on the attack on El Obeid. But does she agree that the absence of any reference to consequences in those statements renders them ineffective and, furthermore, that repeated statements over the past few years that have not been backed up by action have emboldened rather than deterred the perpetrators of atrocities on all sides of the conflict?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I have been on the record in this House on many occasions expressing frustration with the futility, sometimes, of the statements we make. They are hard to get agreed and very carefully worded, as the noble Lord knows. Do they have the real-world impact that we would wish to see? The truth is, not often enough. That does not mean it is wrong to pursue them, because the more light that is shone on these atrocities, the better. It is really important that we do that. I think we all agree that not enough attention is paid to this conflict and to what is happening in Sudan. They are an important tool. Are they sufficient? I agree with the noble Lord that they are not.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for his important Question. I know that my noble friend the Minister is well aware of the nature of the appalling tragedy taking place in Sudan. One of the factors fuelling the extent of that ongoing tragedy is the continued supply of modern weaponry, drones and the training of mercenaries. Does she agree with me that our Labour Government should do all that they can to prevent the supply of such equipment? It is fuelling this disaster.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Absolutely. There is no doubt that this conflict is being prolonged and intensified because of the supply of drones and other high-tech equipment to armed groups within Sudan, not just the SAF and the RSF but many others. There are now double digits of countries involving themselves in this conflict. They need to stop. That is the only way we will see any kind of resolution. We need to get on to a ceasefire, some dialogue and a civilian-led process. That is the only way forward here. The arms pumped into Sudan and the illicit gold flows need to stop, because until they do there will be no motivation for the warring parties to get around the table and resolve this.
Baroness D'Souza (CB)
My Lords, the Government were well aware of the arms pipeline between the UAE and the RSF, which took place from mid-2023 onwards and resulted in several genocidal attacks. Therefore, there was a choice for the Government to put pressure on the UAE to stop that arms traffic, but they did not do so. Can the Minister say why that decision was made? Was it made by officials or, indeed, by the Minister?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I would like to stop arms flows from every country into Sudan. I think there should be a complete embargo, which is what the UK Government are pushing for. As for specific conversations with particular countries, I do not think there is a conversation that I or my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary has had with the UAE or several other countries where we do not make that specific point.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I draw attention to my entries in the register on organisations working in the Middle East and on conflict resolution. I thank the Minister. At a time when there is a lot of challenge in the air and on budgets, I know that she prioritises the issue of conflict-related sexual violence, having visited Sudan and Darfur. She has talked of the abhorrent nature of it. Meeting the victims of sexual violence in conflict leaves an impact embedded on one’s brain and heart. Therefore, I commend what she has done to continue what I hope she recognises as the important work of the previous Government.
My focus is very much on conflict resolution. What specific role is the United Kingdom playing in support of the efforts of the Quad, which brings all the key parties together, and notably the United States, to bring an end to this awful conflict?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
We very much support the Quad process and have been active in doing so. We have provided channels of communication in support of the Quad. It is not the only process and there are other tasks to be undertaken. The UK is also involved in the civilian track because when, God willing, a ceasefire is achieved, we need to have that track up and running and in play. We are actively involved, alongside other partners, in having the relevant conversations to bring that about.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for all the answers she has given, as I thank the noble Lord for asking the Question. Only this week it was said in this Chamber that the conflict in Sudan does not have a high enough profile in our own media here and everywhere else. Will she talk to her friends and colleagues about whether it is possible to open a safe and legal route for any of the population of Sudan who would wish to come to the UK to escape the terrible situation they are in? We know that we have a large diaspora in the UK. It may be that, through a safe and legal route, we could alleviate the suffering of small numbers of people.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Obviously, that is a matter for the Home Office. I point out that most Sudanese refugees I have spoken to wish to stay in their region. They are furious about what is happening to their country. They feel very strongly that they wish to return and to provide leadership and support for the services that are needed to rebuild and reinstate peace. The UK supports millions of people on the borders of Sudan. It is desperately sad that they are unable to return home at this moment.
Lord Bellingham (Con)
My Lords, I too support the Minister’s robust and strong response. She mentioned the illicit flows of gold. Is she aware that the RSF has been exporting substantial quantities of gold to countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia and the UAE to help finance the provision of weapons and arms? Twenty years ago, there was a lot of focus on blood diamonds in west Africa. This blood gold is fuelling this truly horrendous conflict. Can more be done to try to expose the people who are buying this gold and to find ways of tracking and tracing it?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Yes, that is a very good suggestion. It is why we had an illicit gold conference recently. I am well aware of the problem the noble Lord describes. The idea of having a consumer-facing campaign around this is excellent. I would like to get involved in leading it. It is so destructive, and it is without doubt fuelling this conflict. I would welcome any move to make consumers more aware of where their gold comes from and of the fact that it can be used to support the devasting atrocities that we see in Sudan.
Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)
My Lords, I take the Minister back to the International Development Committee meeting that she attended yesterday, which has already been referred to. Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, testified that the UK had failed to act on intelligence and genocide warnings in Sudan. He specifically said that there had been not enough political will, and that it was blocked by the UK’s unwillingness to confront the UAE, the primary military enabler, as we know, of the RSF massacre in El Fasher in 2025. What direct representations were made in response to the intelligence that was received in order to try to combat an impending genocide?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I have huge respect for Nathaniel, but I disagree with the analysis that some options were put to Ministers and we chose the least. That is just not my version of what happened. It is important that analysts are able to give their perspective, but sometimes it is also acceptable for government to gently push back and disagree. There are things we can do to attempt to prevent these kinds of atrocities, but we have to be completely honest about the extent of our powers in some of these situations. I think that because El Fasher happened we are seeing a very different approach to El Obeid, and we are being much more active. That is because of the visibility of the atrocities. We saw people videoing themselves committing those heinous acts in El Fasher. I respectfully disagree with Nathaniel on the narrow point that he made yesterday, although I have enormous respect for him.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, it was recently reported that hundreds of Colombian private military contractors, apparently hired by a UAE-based company, transited through UAE military facilities before being deployed to Sudan to support the RSF. Are the Government aware of this case, and have they made representations to the UAE about it?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
We make frequent representations and I am aware of the Colombian link, alongside the links of very many other nations. This needs to stop. As long as this continues, this conflict will persist. We will not see the loss of life, the degradation of communities and the hideous sexual violence finish until other countries desist and stop fuelling this conflict.
National Security (State Threats) Bill
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Baroness Smith of Basildon
That Standing Order 44 (No two stages of a Bill to be taken on one day) be dispensed with on Tuesday 30 June to allow the National Security (State Threats) Bill to be taken through its remaining stages that day and that therefore, in accordance with Standing Order 47 (Amendments on Third Reading), amendments shall not be moved on Third Reading.
PATHWAYS Study: Puberty Suppression
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Baroness Cash (Con)
My Lords, the proposed PATHWAYS puberty blockers trial for 226 children as young as 11 risks becoming a medical scandal unfolding in real time. Gender-incongruent children include some of the most vulnerable children in society, with disproportionate numbers of that cohort having autism or mental disorders or being children in care. There is an unknown and inestimable correlation with social media that is yet to be uncovered. The challenges for these children and their families, and the difficulties they face, are not to be underestimated, but gender-incongruent and gender non-conforming behaviour is also often characteristic of children who grow up simply to be gay. Surely the Minister does not truly agree with a trial which will place children who would otherwise simply grow up to be healthy gay and lesbian adults on a pathway that may impair their fertility and their sexual development.
The data shows, and the Cass review accepted, that a very large majority of children presenting with gender incongruence will resolve without medical intervention. I assume that the Minister accepts this. That being the case, this trial will be subjecting many physically healthy young children to completely unnecessary medical risks. Let us be clear. The medical risks inherent in taking puberty blockers at such a young age are truly life-altering. They include possible lifelong consequences for brain development, including IQ, bone health, fertility and adult sexual function.
Shockingly, 2,000 children have already been treated with puberty blockers in this country. They were treated at the now closed Tavistock clinic. More scandalously, they went on to adult clinics and we are entirely in the dark about how they are today. The data linkage study to analyse the information about those children has not yet been done. A shocking six out of seven of those adult clinics they went on to have not released the data, despite Parliament legislating for it.
So, what are Ministers doing to require adult gender clinics receiving public money to provide that data? What is the current status of that process? And, when the Government still do not know what happened to the 2,000 children already treated, why and on what grounds are they exposing another cohort of healthy children to medical harm before that question has been answered? It is no good to point to the fact that the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, recommended a trial. Government cannot and should not outsource such decisions and it will be no defence to the litigation coming down the line, as it already is in the US, that the noble Baroness told the Government to do it.
In any case, there are major issues about consent, particularly given the nature of the trial as currently put together. I am deeply troubled by how the informed consent of children can possibly be obtained when they are too young to appreciate what they stand to lose: as young as 11. It is important to set out what they stand to lose. Commencing puberty blockers at an early age may make fertility preservation for these children impossible. Studies show that puberty blockers may affect brain development, including their IQ and memory function, as well as their bone density and organ development. There is currently no long-term data sufficient to quantify those risks. Then, of course, there is a risk that normal adult sexual function—let us call a spade a spade; we are talking about the ability to ever experience sexual pleasure—does not develop when puberty is interrupted at such an early stage.
In these circumstances, it is inexplicable that the Government have rejected the MHRA’s recommendation that children under 14 should not be included in any trial. This trial is for children from the age of 11. How does the Minister justify that children under 14 are to be included in the trial? And how does she argue that any child can give informed consent to such risks? Please can the Minister confirm that these risks and all others will be expressly communicated to the children and families concerned? If this trial goes ahead, it is inevitable that irreversible, unnecessary harm will be done to at least some of these children.
Finally, could the Minister confirm that the Government have carried out an assessment of the future liability coming down the tracks to the NHS, and therefore to the taxpayer? Have the ongoing treatment costs, the treatment-related harms and the future litigation risks been assessed? What is the estimated cost to the NHS and the taxpayer of those, and how will that be funded?
Polling in December 2025 showed that almost 70% of the public was against giving puberty blockers to children and 63% wanted this trial to be stopped. As the Government consider a fresh start in other ways, I beg the Minister to think again and stop this trial.
Baroness Barker (LD)
My Lords, this Statement takes place in the context of a relentless campaign against trans people that started among right-wing politicians in the United States of America but has been seized on here: the bandwagon has been jumped upon by politicians in this country. That is the context.
We on these Benches have a policy towards trans people that is based on our belief that trans people not only exist but have a right to exist, and they have a right to exist with the same dignity as the rest of us—and part of that is having access to appropriate healthcare. I ask the Government, as, I hope, they seek to defend this test against the kind of political campaigning that we have just heard, to bear in mind that the use of puberty inhibitors is not the harmful intervention that has just been characterised. It is a safe medical intervention that has been used for different conditions since the 1980s, and there is already a lot of data on it. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, identified in her review, an absence or at least an insufficiency of data about the use of inhibitors in relation to people who have gender dysphoria. That is why this trial, consisting of 226 people, in a highly regulated period of group activity, has been allowed to go ahead in order to generate the data that she says we need.
It is true that last week the independent MHRA approved an update to the basis on which the trial is going to happen, in order to make sure that the safeguards were increased. It is not unusual for that to happen in a medical trial. It is not unusual for trials to stop and take note of what has happened initially and then for revisions to be made to the basis on which they are run.
We on these Benches believe very strongly that medical treatment should be based on science and evidence, not on belief and ideology. This trial has been under sustained attack from political organisations such as Sex Matters which do not believe that trans people should exist or should exist with the dignities that they currently do. This trial is currently the only legal route for anybody to access puberty blockers, so in the interests not just of accurate scientific evidence but of children who need this treatment, will the Minister ensure that the people who have undertaken this research are protected from the relentless political attacks against trans people?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Barker and Lady Cash, for their contributions, both of which highlight why my right honourable friend the Secretary of State led on this Statement by saying that this is
“a sensitive, emotive and difficult issue”.
He also said, which goes the point raised by both noble Baronesses, albeit coming at it from very different angles, that our duty as a Government—a duty for any Government and one which the last Government accepted and acted on—is
“to protect the safety and wellbeing of children”
and
“to follow expert clinical advice and take an evidence-led approach”.
We, like the previous Government will be sticking to that.
The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, used the word “outsourcing”. I do not believe that the last Government outsourced responsibility when NHS England commissioned a review from the most respected paediatrician in this area, the noble Lady Baroness, Lady Cass, who we are fortunate to have with us now in the House. I do not believe the last Government outsourced. I think they took a responsible, evidence-led approach.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, said at the time of her review:
“This is an area of remarkably weak evidence”.
Again, I agree. It is also important to observe a very strong divergence of medical opinion. There is always a choice. We can continue with uncertainty in an unsafe setting, where there is that strong divergence of medical opinion, or we can seek the evidence. Nobody in your Lordships’ House can predict the evidence because it does not exist yet.
As I say, I think the previous Government had the right approach, which was why we supported it in opposition. They accepted the recommendations of the review by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, and, again, I feel that that is the responsible way forward.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the use of puberty-suppressing hormones has been banned indefinitely for gender dysphoria outside of research settings, so the trial we are talking about today is being set up to gather the evidence that the last Government wanted and we continue to want.
The trial was first approved by regulators in November 2025 and in February the MHRA requested changes to the trial protocol to make it even safer. This is quite normal in how these matters are dealt with. Perhaps I can give the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, the clear assurance that the changes to make it safer—which is absolutely the right thing to do—were around the age of those included in the trial, and monitoring possible impacts on bone density, future fertility and cognitive abilities. These are all points and concerns rightly raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, and have indeed been raised on a number of occasions in your Lordships’ House. I emphasise that it is usual for dialogue such as this to take place during a trial.
Reference was made to safeguards. There are a number listed. Again, I would ask noble Lords to look at them, but I will mention some of them. Children can participate only with the consent of a parent or guardian, and the child themselves must consent or assent. To the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, they can participate only if they are not subject to any safeguarding concerns, and if there is sufficient understanding by the young person—but also by their parent or guardian—of the nature of the treatment and its potential advantages and disadvantages. They can participate only if they have been deemed clinically appropriate by both the NHS care team and the national multidisciplinary team, and only if they are already accessing NHS gender services, including participating in a tailored package of psychosocial care.
All these safeguards rightly build in considerable safety preservation and ensure that it is the right people. I emphasise that there is no compulsion to take part in a trial, and indeed just getting close to one is a rigorous process. Due to ongoing legal proceedings, as referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, recruitment on to the trial will not begin immediately. We are currently in a set-up period, and we will set out our future plans in due course.
The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, referred to protecting researchers from “relentless” attacks. I hope the whole of your Lordships’ House would agree with that. Those who carry out research and those who lead reviews—such as the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, and indeed many others on our own Benches—in many different areas have been subject to the most relentless attacks. These have not all been via social media: sometimes they have been physical attacks. Violence is totally unacceptable and we cannot condone it in any way.
To the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, I say that prospective participants will indeed have comprehensive information on the advantages and the potential risks, in a way that speaks to how they need that information. The minimum ages were agreed through detailed scientific discussions between the MHRA and the trial sponsor. This is all driven by what will provide the right evidence that we need for decisions, and that evidence is clinically led. I return to the point about age, which I know exercises noble Lords, and is a fair question to raise. It was recognised during discussions between the trial sponsor and the MHRA that the right balance had to be struck between the maturity level of participants and providing treatment at the most clinically appropriate point in puberty. That would, of course, be earlier for birth-registered females compared with birth-registered males.
The noble Baroness, Lady Cass, may make this point herself, but I am grateful to the noble Baroness, who will be available for a drop-in discussion with anybody who would like to go into more detail. I hope that noble Lords will avail themselves of that.
The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, asked whether the Government had carried out an assessment of future liability. All research trials are expected to have appropriate insurance, and this one will. It will take into account any potential risks in a financial setting, as the noble Baroness referred to.
I will address one final point, although I am always happy to assist if noble Lords have other questions. The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, asked about six out of seven clinics not releasing data. Data is very important. That is why NHS England is re-engaging with data-sharing organisations, on which the data study will be dependent. Of course, that is separate to this trial, but we absolutely expect all commissioned adult gender services to collaborate with the study to ensure its successful completion.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)
My Lords, I remind the House that the next 20 minutes are for questions from Back-Benchers only.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
I thank the Minister. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, mentioned the need for data and scientific evidence. For the sake of transparency, we should mention that the Liberal Democrats received £1.33 million from Ferring Pharmaceuticals, which produces some of these puberty blockers. Further, just for clarification, Sex Matters has never believed that trans people do not exist. It is important to put that on the record.
I will press the Minister on the data linkage studies, because we would not need to put forward 226 vulnerable young people had NHS England and Ministers acted with a more robust strategy two years ago, when we raised this issue in the House, and forced the data linkage information from GIDS and others to be released so that it could be peer reviewed. Had that happened, we would have all the data on the short-term implications of these puberty blockers and on the long-term ramifications, and we therefore would not need this dangerous and risky puberty blockers trial, which, I have to say to the House, is going to be subject to very significant litigation.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I am sure that the noble Lord will understand from my earlier comments that I do not accept the characterisation of the trial. I urge all noble Lords to look at the facts on the safety provisions, requirements and stringency, which have massively increased—perhaps since some noble Lords originally looked at the matter. Implicit in the noble Lord’s query is to question why we are having a clinical trial when there are a number of children who have already taken puberty blockers. That is a fair question, but I remind the noble Lord that the conclusion of the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, was that there was not enough evidence, for all the reasons I referred to.
It might be helpful to make clear that the information collected by the linkage study, to which the noble Lord referred, is much more limited than the detailed information that the research team will be able to collect on the relative benefits and the risks. I confirm that NHS England, which is responsible for the data linkage study, is taking the time to ensure that data is shared by the relevant organisations—which, after all, is exactly what we are all after.
Baroness Thornton (Lab)
My Lords, it is such a shame that the party opposite resiled from cross-party agreement on this research. It is fair to question its motivation for doing that and possibly reach the conclusion that it is unsympathetic to trans people. I welcome the Statement and my noble friend’s calm approach, which contrasts sharply with some of the language that has been used around this important issue. When it comes to the PATHWAYS trial, does my noble friend agree that we must follow the science and avoid vilification, polarising language and politicisation, for the good of young people and our communities?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I certainly do agree with my noble friend. Indeed, her observations apply to any matters in respect of health, which should be evidence-led, based on fact, and based and rooted in scientific evidence. What we are dealing with here, as I said, is effectively a choice: a choice to do nothing and continue not providing the right healthcare in a safe and correct manner or to seek the evidence, as an independent review by the most esteemed paediatrician—as I said, it started under the previous Government, and rightly so—has advised us to do. I must emphasise that, if anybody listened, as I did, to the Secretary of State making his Statement in the House of Commons, I hope they will have got a sense that, actually, no one has jumped into this decision. What the Secretary of State said was that it was important to step back and look at the evidence. He himself told the Chamber how challenging he felt that was. I ask noble Lords never to underestimate how challenging this is, no matter what Government, what party, or what individual.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, I agree with what the noble Baroness just said, but I have to say, before I ask my question, that I am hugely disappointed that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, has chosen to question the motives of parliamentarians who are raising legitimate questions. That is no way for us to deal with an issue that is incredibly sensitive and involves children.
Clearly, a lot of very elaborate safeguarding protections are being put in place for this trial. There is an argument sometimes, when so much of that kind of thing is necessary, whether that in itself tells us something that we need to know about such a trial. However, if the trial leads to the puberty blockers being given the go-ahead, what can she tell us about the extent of the protections and safeguards that will be made available to all children who would then be eligible for these drugs? My concern, if they do become widely available, is that the pressure from teenagers to get access to those drugs will mean that it will not be possible to control it in quite the same way as this trial is being controlled at this time.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I understand the point that the noble Baroness is making but, in answer to her first question, this is not outwith any trial or intervention because there always has to be the clinical evidence and the approach to make sure that we are always seeking benefit, not harm. I am glad that the noble Baroness acknowledged the extensive safeguards. I hope that would reassure your Lordships’ House. Indeed, for children and young people who do take part in the trial, there will, for example, be repeated follow-up physical checks, questionnaires, blood tests, bone density scans and cognitive testing, all at the relevant time points. There will be psychosocial care throughout the trial. Importantly, the protocol also clarifies that, where there are significant concerns—again, I know this is a matter of concern about psychological well-being—that case then has to be promptly reviewed by the right clinician.
As for the future, I think we should wait for what the trial says. I am not going to speculate. I point out that we are not waiting, in terms of NHS care and support. Three services for children and young people have already opened in north-west London and in the south-west for those with gender dysphoria. NHS England will aim to deliver service provision in each region of England by the end of 2026-27. Again, that programme of work, rightly, was started under the previous Government. I think we all acknowledge that there are young people with gender dysphoria. They are to be seen, supported and dealt with in the most caring, appropriate and scientifically evidenced way possible.
Baroness Cass (CB)
My Lords, this is complex, and people across both sides of the House share one objective: to be cautious, careful and protective of children and young people. It is not my place here to answer many of the perfectly valid questions that have been raised, but I am developing a briefing based on proceedings in the Commons yesterday and I am listening carefully today, so I will not pick up on issues around the linkage study. I will refer to the Minister on one or two things.
The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, is right to say that the vast majority of children and young people desist, but the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, is also right to say that some do not. The clinicians working in the new centres are gaining considerable experience and working holistically to try to determine which young people—a tiny number—they feel may benefit from these medications.
I am not worried about the children in the trial but I am seriously worried about the children not in the trial. Approximately 240 children who have come to the new clinics have admitted to being on an extraordinary cocktail of medications, including testosterone from age 11, with facial hair at 13. Why are they doing this? They are not being perverse: we have told them for 15 years that these drugs are safe, effective and even life-saving, so is it any surprise that they will now go to any lengths to get them? They are not foolish, and they say they want to know the answers on that. We as the medical profession have created this issue, so it is on our heads to solve it. Does the Minister agree with me that the children in the trial will be at considerably less risk than the ones we know about who have come to the NHS and the very many more we are aware of who are not coming to the NHS but are going straight to rogue providers?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I agree with the noble Baroness and I thank her for the offer of the briefing, which I mentioned earlier, and for her observations. I associate myself with what she said about the complexity of the matter, which is why I take it so seriously. The fact is that this situation exists. I am exercised about those who are accessing puberty blockers in an unregulated fashion. It is extremely concerning, which is another reason for this trial, as well as the services being set up. That is why we indefinitely banned the sale and supply of puberty blockers via private prescriptions, taking effect from January 2025. If offences are committed then those involved will be brought to justice, and rightly so.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
My Lords, in my pre-political life I was a senior teacher at a very large comprehensive school, and responsible for child protection and what used to be called pastoral care. I dealt with lots of children who were confused about their sexuality, their place in the world and many other issues. I am afraid that I too would have asked the questions that the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, asked, based on that real experience. My question is aligned to my past experience. Studies show that a disproportionate number of children and adolescents with gender distress have neurodivergent conditions, such as autism. These are protected under the Equality Act. Could the Minister explain how neurodivergence was taken into account when designing the PATHWAYS trial, in particular the consent process—that is what troubles me the most, if I am honest—and any equality impact assessment?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The noble Baroness gives me the chance to reiterate that all the questions are valid. We are dealing with a complex, sensitive and difficult issue. What matters is that we get to the right place. As the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, said, I know we are all agreed on protecting children and young people. That is our motivation.
The noble Baroness asked about consent. As I said, children can participate only with the consent of a parent or a guardian, and the children themselves must consent or assent. The individual circumstances and nature of a child will be closely considered as part of the consideration. That is absolutely crucial. Children and young people may participate only if they are not subject to any safeguarding concerns. I am happy to speak in greater detail to the noble Baroness. All of this will be extremely rigorous, and rightly so. When we talk about the trial, we are talking about volunteers—that is crucial. They can participate only if they have been deemed clinically appropriate by both the NHS care team and the national multidisciplinary team. There is, correctly, the opportunity at every level to consider every child or young person as an individual, which is so important.
Baroness Alexander of Cleveden (Lab)
As some noble Lords know, I have some experience in my own family of the challenges around gender dysphoria and the difficulties for the trans community. I also have the experience of my mother, who was a haematologist at a time when there were great controversies surrounding that discipline. I was struck by what the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, said: there are GPs, psychiatrists and paediatricians—all sorts of medical professionals—wrestling with what the evidence may or may not show. While this is an extraordinarily difficult area, does the Minister agree that, in a world where there have been difficulties in the recent past, the responsibility of legislators is to try to equip all those professionals in the future with a clinically approved and evidence-led approach? It is only by having a highly safeguarded trial that we will move forward in a way that supports professionals operating in this area. If we demonise those individuals, the risk is that we never secure the evidence we need for the future.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I agree with that. In the Statement itself, the Secretary of State made the point that PATHWAYS is rightly one of the most scrutinised UK clinical trials of recent times. I am sure we all welcome that.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I would like to take the Minister down memory lane and explore with her the Mental Health Act and consent by those under 16. Can she confirm the law relating to that is still Gillick competence? My other questions follow on from that. In the situation where within the research programme they determine that the child is Gillick competent but the parents disagree, what remedies do the parents have and would they be able to go to court to challenge that, and be funded to do that? On the reverse, if the child is not deemed to be Gillick competent to give consent, and then the parents can give consent but are in dispute with each other, what remedies are there for them to settle that matter, and would they be funded to bring any such remedy?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I will approach this in the most straightforward way I know. Obviously, if there are other matters, I would be very happy to talk to the noble Baroness, as I have before. From my point of view, the number one safeguard is not an either/or. Participation can occur only with the consent of a parent or guardian and—not or—the child themselves. In some of the circumstances the noble Baroness raised, that will not be an issue. Clearly, if there is any doubt about consent, assent or suitability, the child or young person will not be included in the trial; it is only where it can be shown that all the safeguards apply.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, I listened very carefully to both sides of the argument, which is very emotional and charged because people hold strict views on the trans community or the risks to children. Without the clinical trial, where will we be? Is not the clinical trial needed to answer some of the very questions that have been asked?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The noble Lord takes me back to where I started. This Government, any Government, have a choice, but there is no neutral option here. We know that the status quo—which the last Government accepted and the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, clearly identified—is totally unacceptable and young people are not being protected. It would not be responsible to do nothing about that. We can discuss and disagree or agree about what the right thing is to do, but in his Statement, the Secretary of State made it clear that he has a responsibility to look at evidence and take clinical advice. That is the right thing to do.
Sporting Events Bill [HL]
(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Lord Addington
“(5A) The provisions of sub-paragraph (1) are not breached by the use of a representation by the holder of a premises licence under the Licensing Act 2003, Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005 and the Licensing (Northern Ireland) Order 1996 if—(a) the representation is used solely for the purpose of indicating to members of the public that the licensed premises will be screening or broadcasting the sporting event,(b) the use of the representation does not suggest, expressly or by implication, that the licensed premises is an official sponsor of, or otherwise commercially associated with, the sporting event or its organiser, or(c) the representation has previously been used for a continued amount of time, independently of the sporting event taking place.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would ensure that, in the case of a sporting event being hosted in an area where a small or medium-sized enterprise’s (SME) pre-existing advertising may conflict with an advertising provision as laid out in this Bill, that SME is protected proportionately.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I apologise to the Committee—I had not quite got myself in the right position to start proceedings. This is a probing amendment that looks at some of the minor problems that arise when a big Bill such as this comes out. The amendment probably refers more than it should to licensed premises, but it is a way of finding out how the Government perceive we should proceed. For those small firms that are making a living and are affected by this, what happens next if we take on the structures in the Bill? This has been one of the small niggles we have had about these Bills and processes. Let us see if we can get it right or at least give certainty to those affected. I beg to move.
Lord Foster of Bath (LD)
My Lords, at Second Reading, I raised the example of the butcher in Weymouth who, during the 2012 Paralympics and Olympics, was threatened with a £20,000 fine because he displayed in his shop window five strings of sausages in the shape of the five Olympic rings. He eventually got around this by changing the circles into squares, but it was a rather ludicrous example of the extremes to which some of the arrangements can go.
We are in a bit of difficulty, because before us we have a framework Bill which refers to lots of regulations to come, but we do not know what they will be. Yet at the same time, we all want to ensure that particularly SMEs can share in the benefit of hosting the sorts of events covered by the Bill. We therefore need to ensure that the regulations on association are flexible enough to protect the sponsors, who have paid a lot of money, but not be overly zealous in how we treat our small businesses, particularly those where the event is taking place.
Although my noble friend’s amendment relates to licensed premises, it could equally apply to all others. I want to test with the Minister a couple of questions. I am genuinely delighted that the impact assessment and Explanatory Memorandum, on pages 19 and 20, already give many exceptions that the Government are planning to introduce and which presumably will be picked up in the regulations. However, there are one or two areas where they do not go as far as many of the major sporting bodies have already gone. In 2012, many of our athletes were upset at not being allowed in any way, shape or form to thank the various people who had sponsored them over many years—an example could be one of my noble friend’s licensed premises supporting a particular athlete. They were not allowed to do so because of the tight restrictions: there was no way there could be any link between that unofficial sponsor and the individual athlete.
Equally, there were very strong regulations concerning what words could and could not be used. There was a whole list: you could not use “champion”; you could not even mention “London”, let alone “2012”. I am delighted that the IOC has, through changes to rule 40, made significant relaxations that now allow, for example, under certain circumstances, an athlete to thank their unofficial sponsor and the unofficial sponsor to refer to the athlete they have supported. There are various conditions around that.
However, there have also been changes to the language. The butcher I referred to earlier would now be allowed, under the IOC rules, to say “champion banger” or “gold medal sausage”. So, significant changes have taken place. Will the Minister ensure that relaxations and flexibilities such as those already introduced by the IOC for the Olympic and Paralympic Games will be covered by the regulations that will follow for each of the events covered by the Bill?
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the observations made by the noble Lords, Lord Addington and Lord Foster. This follows the line of the issues I raised on Monday concerning the impact assessment and the various impacts on small businesses. This amendment is clearly a probing amendment, but it is intended to establish protections for small businesses that may by chance get picked up in one way or another. We must ensure that we do not damage those businesses. As many of us said on Monday, mission creep ends up negatively impacting small businesses, often by chance.
I welcome the broad principle of this amendment, and I hope that further discussions will ensure that those protections, whether they be for individuals or businesses, are pursued.
Lord Markham (Con)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and other noble Lords for their gold medal contributions today—if I am allowed to say that, at this stage at least. As the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and my noble friend Lord Hayward set out, there are quite often unintended consequences, the sausage being a perfect example of what we would all agree is a disproportionate response. I think all we are talking about here are common-sense provisions in all of this, which I know are very difficult to draft into any sort of amendment, but which at the same time I think we would all agree would be sensible. With that, I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for tabling Amendment 58, which would introduce an exception to prohibition on unauthorised association. I understand that this amendment seeks to ensure that a licensed premises’ use of representations in pre-existing advertising material will not breach the prohibition, providing that the use does not suggest that the premises is an official sponsor of, or otherwise commercially associated with, a sporting event to which the unauthorised association provisions have been applied.
I can assure the Committee that a licensed premises’ use, or indeed any wider business use, of pre-existing advertising materials in this way will not breach the prohibition on unauthorised association. That is because the prohibition on unauthorised association applies only where a business uses a representation in a way that is likely to suggest to the public that it has an official association with the event. It is for event owners to agree with athletes and their individual sponsors—in response to the noble Lord, Lord Foster—the types of promotional activity that are to be permitted during an event. That is not for legislation.
I can also provide assurance to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that the Bill expressly provides that a business will not breach the prohibition on unauthorised association by providing factual information about the services it provides. The intention of this exception in paragraph 3(4)(b) of Schedule 4 is to enable businesses to factually describe goods sold and services they provide in the course of their normal business, where this is done in accordance with honest business practice. For example, a pub will be able to state that it is screening Euro 2028 matches without breaching the unauthorised association prohibition, provided it does not imply that it has an official association with Euro 2028. A B&B will also be able to state that it is within walking distance of a venue for Euro 2028 without breaching the prohibition.
We want to ensure that local businesses can show their support for major sporting events and we will work with event organisers to ensure that this is the case. The prohibition applies only to activity that would suggest to the public an official association with an event, meaning that there was a realistic chance that everyday members of the public would consider that such an association existed. The noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, cited the case of Olympic sausages; the example I have been asking officials about as I have gone through it is whether it is likely or unlikely that this Bill would prevent a local bakery selling football-themed cupcakes in support of Euro 2028, and I have been assured that it is not likely that that would happen. So, for the reasons I have set out, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Addington, to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Addington (LD)
I thank the Minister for that reply. Yes, I think the idea is that everybody is saying, can we avoid what we can only describe as the cock-up school of history? That is when something goes wrong that is unintended and gets in the way of the enjoyment here. I will take away what the noble Baroness has said, speak to people and see whether it is enough, because we might want to have a go again if it is seen that there is still some danger and we need some more clarity. In that spirit, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment and hope that we do not have to return to it—but if we do, we do. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“(2A) A plan prepared under this Schedule must—(a) have regard to sustainable modes of transport, including public transport, walking and cycling,(b) aim to minimise greenhouse gas emissions associated with travel to and from sporting events, and(c) include arrangements for admission tickets to a sporting event to confer entitlement to travel on specified public transport services serving the event.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that transport plans for sporting events promote public transport and other sustainable modes of travel and seek to minimise transport-related emissions, and include integrated ticketing arrangements allowing spectators to travel on public transport using their event tickets.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
Thank you. I am so sorry I was not at Second Reading. This is very much the sort of thing that I feel very strongly about. My three amendments in this group are on three different topics. One is transport, one is sustainability reporting and the third is on climate duty, all of which I feel very strongly about. I am going to find it hard not to bring these back if there is not progress.
It is extraordinary that this week, the hottest June day ever for the UK has been measured in Surrey. We are hotter here than California’s Death Valley, and that is saying something. We really are not weatherproofed and we are not heat-proofed. We are very lucky in this Chamber. I sat in Portcullis House at 9 am this morning: it was baking. We stewed in there. Of course, a lot of people do not have the advantage of air conditioning like this in their offices and in their public places.
I find it extraordinary that, in a week where parts of Britain have once again seen record temperatures, when red warnings have been issued because of extreme heat, and when climate change is impossible to ignore, we are debating a Bill that contains detailed provisions on transport planning for major sporting events but does not mention climate impact once.
Schedule 5 goes into considerable detail about transport plans. It tells organisers what they should consider, how they should co-ordinate and what arrangements should be put in place. Yet there is absolutely nothing about the environmental impact of those transport arrangements. For major sporting events, transport is often the biggest source of emissions. At the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, spectator travel accounted for more than half of the event’s carbon footprint. At Euro 2024, fan travel accounted for almost 80% of emissions. We need to be serious about reducing the environmental impact of major sporting events, and transport is the obvious place to start.
This amendment has two components. The first is that transport plans should have regard to sustainable travel options,
“including public transport, walking and cycling”,
and should seek to “minimise greenhouse gas emissions”. I am sure the Minister is well aware of all the work that happened in Ken Livingstone’s period at the London Assembly: we achieved a lot. The Government already tell us that rail is one of the greenest ways to travel. The Government’s own active travel investment strategy tells us that walking and cycling help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So we need to tell event organisers to take account of what the Government already recognise to be the lower-carbon options. Parliament has gone much further before, such as in the London Olympics, the majority of which was planned in the period of Ken Livingstone in London, and I am suggesting that we can do that in my later Amendment 88.
The second element concerns integrated ticketing. If we want people to leave their cars at home, we need to make the alternative the easy option for them. Again, we have a very recent and very successful example. Every match ticket for Euro 2024 came with a 36-hour public transport pass built into the ticket price. The result was a success, because more than 80% of fans travelled to venues by public transport and fewer than 5% travelled by car, and hundreds of thousands of rail journeys were made between host cities. This was achieved by making the sustainable choice the convenient choice. Integrated ticketing also benefits spectators. It is easier, cuts costs, and helps avoid congestion around venues. It improves the experience of fans while reducing emissions.
That seems a rare example of a policy that is good for the climate, organisers and the public. If there were ever an example of why we need to be adding in these amendments and preparing for climate resilience travel, it is today, when trains are cancelled due to heat and people are being asked not to travel. The Climate Change Committee has warned that climate risk will increasingly affect the operation of major events. When tens of thousands of people are trying to reach a venue within a narrow timeframe, those risks become particularly acute. What would it look like if we had today’s weather on the day of the Euro 2028 final?
Asking those preparing transport plans to think about sustainability and resilience is absolutely vital. The Government’s own impact assessment argues that legislation is necessary because voluntary arrangements alone do not provide sufficient certainty and consistency. If legislation is needed to ensure transport plans work effectively, why should climate impacts and climate resilience be left entirely to chance? Given the climate challenges we face and the examples of best practice we have already seen across Europe, that seems the very least we can expect.
On Amendment 87, on sustainability reporting, we hear the same language every time a major sporting event is bid for, such as world-leading sustainability, greenest games ever and low-carbon legacy, and it all sounds incredibly impressive at the time. But I get a bit fed up with the gap between the promises made and what actually happens. The Paris Olympics, for example, set itself up as the lowest-carbon games yet. In some respects, it did better than previous Olympics: emissions were lower than London or Rio, largely because they reused venues, cut down on new construction and made some sensible choices about energy and materials. But when you look a bit closer, the picture gets more complicated. Transport still dominated emissions; international travel still drove a huge carbon footprint; and, in the end, we are talking about millions of tonnes of CO2. Yes, there was progress, but it also showed something else very clearly: without proper reporting, it becomes very hard to know what was genuinely achieved, what was just assumed and what was simply good marketing.
That is the point of this amendment. We should not be relying on glossy bid documents and press releases to tell us whether promises have been kept. If we are serious about sustainability being part of these events, then we need to be just as serious about checking afterwards whether it actually happened. Right now, too often, the pattern is this: big promises at the bidding stage; celebration at the event; and very little scrutiny afterwards. This amendment says that, if you make environmental commitments before the event, you report on them afterwards—accurately, obviously—so that we can see what was delivered and was not.
Of course, there are already sustainability requirements for major sporting events, but they are patchy and inconsistent. Some bids are strong, while others are vague; some report properly, while others barely report at all. That makes it very hard to know what is actually being delivered. We need something more uniform: clear expectations that commitments are measured properly and reported before and after the event. Without that consistency, we are not tracking progress; we are just collecting promises—and, quite frankly, people are getting tired of empty promises.
Amendment 88 is on climate duty. We have had this kind of duty at past events—for example, in the London Olympics framework, where sustainability and wider environmental considerations were explicitly built into delivery. What we are seeing here in the Bill is a step backwards from that approach, just at the point when climate risks are more immediate, not less. We are told, including in the Government’s forthcoming major events strategy, that major events will continue to drive economic growth, enhance the UK’s soft power across the globe and strengthen social cohesion. Of course, they can do those things, but they cannot only be about that, and they certainly cannot deliver those benefits at the expense of our climate and environmental responsibility.
At the moment, the Bill is built around delivery, organisation and facilitation, but it is silent on sustainability. We need to put in place something that should already be clear here: a clear duty that, when exercising functions under the Bill, we must have regard to greenhouse gas emissions, sustainable transport, waste reduction and the UK’s climate and environmental targets. We can continue with a system where climate is assumed to be somebody else’s problem, or we can put in place a basic duty that ensures it is properly considered every time decisions are made on these events. I beg to move.
Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, my Amendment 91 seeks to insert a duty to clear up waste after a sporting event. This is a probing amendment that puts a clear, time-bound duty on the relevant local authority to keep event areas clear of litter and refuse during the event and to clean them at its conclusion. It extends explicitly to the public processions and assemblies connected with the event—the parades, fan zones and crowds—not only the stadium.
Why is this needed? I speak from lived experience and may incur the ire of the noble Baroness sat near me. Three weeks ago, as an Islington resident, I saw exactly what happens when no one is clearly responsible. On the morning after Arsenal’s title parade, the residential streets around me were strewn with broken glass, vomit, bottles, cans and bins overflowing. In its own guidance before the event, the council said, “We’re not putting any additional Portaloos out, so you’ll just have to find a pub or cafe to go in”. I pity people who live in the area who have a garden.
It is just crazy. Arsenal is not a poor club. It has just won the league. It is known to be a very financially successful club. Either Islington Council did not charge it enough money for the clean-up or the council funnelled the money that it got into another expense. Either way, it was unacceptable, especially considering the extortionate amount of council tax that I pay.
It stayed that way for the better part of 48 hours. There was no overnight clean-up. I had to steer my child around broken glass on the way to nursery drop-off. It is completely unacceptable. I am not a party pooper, I think the parade should absolutely have gone ahead, but residents already had to live through the parade; the least that could be expected is that it would be cleaned up properly afterwards.
For an example of how it can be done differently, turn your mind to Kensington and Chelsea and another big multi-day event that happens—with millions of people, so we are talking about exactly the same kind of scale. I know it has its fans and detractors, but Notting Hill Carnival happens over two days and by the Tuesday it is absolutely spotless on those streets. That is because the council gets a grip of the situation. I dare say Arsenal Football Club has a lot more money and funds available than the organisers of Notting Hill Carnival. So, there is something to be looked at there.
Why does this matter for the Bill? This is the framework for the events that we want to host the most: the Euros, the World Cup and the Olympics. They bring processions and assemblies across many host boroughs, over weeks rather than hours. If a single club parade can leave one London borough looking like it did for two days, picture a multi-week tournament with no clean-up duty written into the framework at all. The Bill covers ticketing, advertising, trading and transport, but the most basic civic question is absent: who keeps the streets clean and clears them afterwards?
My amendment would make the duty event specific, time-bound and explicit about processions and assemblies. It would close the gap that residents fall through. I am not wedded to the drafting. I am seeking a commitment in principle. Will the Government ensure that the framework does not leave host communities living with the aftermath and that host authorities are properly resourced to meet this duty, whether funded centrally or recovered from organisers?
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I have two amendments in this group, which follow up the remarks by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, in that we ought to write into the Bill the requirement for the sports industry to recognise the effects of climate change and the need to adjust sporting facilities, materials and stadia to the fact that over the next few years we will see significant changes.
There is already a problem. Those of us who have been following the football in America have seen different stadia and different degrees of comfort for players and spectators. I think we need, at least for major events, to look at ways in which we can anticipate this and get the sporting industry to make its contribution towards the modification of climate change in this country and to adaptation to climate change.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
I am in agreement with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on these amendments. I think she was very wise to bring this before the Committee, because this is a case where many of the international governing bodies and federations— the IOC in particular—have taken a lead. Without this legislation reflecting that, we would be seen to be behind what are important international obligations set by organisations such as the IOC. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, so there is cross-party support for his amendments. Whether the wording is right and sufficiently enabling is a matter for the Government to consider. I declare my interests. As the Minister knows, in 2012 I was chairman of the British Olympic Association, a member of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games and a member of the Olympic Board.
I will develop my argument and the reasons why. The International Olympic Committee has what it calls sustainability essentials, and any city bidding to host the Games has to meet those sustainability essentials when it bids. It then has a sustainability strategy, which it expects governing bodies around the world and all the national Olympic committees associated with the IOC to follow. When it comes to bidding for major events such as the ones we are talking about this afternoon in the context of this Bill, those who are bidding have to meet exceptionally high standards of sustainability and environmental protection, and it is right that they do.
I declare the fact that I sat on two commissions of the International Olympic Committee considering bids from other cities and then advising the members of the International Olympic Committee on the merits of those bids. One of the critical aspects of that was sustainability and the environment. If a city failed to meet those standards, it was very unlikely to succeed. For that reason, in the very early days of working closely with Ken Livingstone, the British Olympic Association sought to place sustainability right at the heart of the London bid that was judged in 2005. When I complete my remarks I will come on to the exceptionally important point that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, made about judging the environmental legacy.
All credit should be given in this Committee for the work of Sir John Armitt and the Olympic Delivery Authority. Sir John Armitt is one of the most outstanding men of his generation when it comes to engineering and the work he did as chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority—the body that organised the building of the venues, facilities and infrastructure for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games—and the key environmental measures he implemented over several strategic areas, including waste management. He diverted 100% of operational waste away from landfill. An impressive 99% of waste generated from venue construction and decommissioning was reused or recycled.
On energy and emissions—an important point for the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, on every occasion that he contributes to a debate such as this—it was incumbent on the ODA to cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least 20% compared with standard practices, so even where it was expected that we would see reductions, we had to go 20% further. The Olympic park energy centre utilised a combined cooling, heating and power system alongside biomass boilers burning sustainable fuels—far more sustainable than at Drax, I might add. Then there was the sustainable construction. The Olympic Stadium was built to be the most sustainable in Olympic history, repurposing old gas pipes and reducing materials.
Water conservation was important. Water was a serious challenge to the organisers of the Games in 2012, because the quality of the water that we had to achieve was tough to meet. For the organisers of the Games, it took many days of discussions with Thames Water at the time to meet the standards that the International Olympic Committee required in its contract with London to host the Games.
On the biodiversity side, the ODA implemented an Olympic biodiversity action plan to restore local rivers. Everyone knows what the East End of London looked like before the work started to bring the Games to London. They planted over 300,000 wetland plants and installed hundreds of bat and bird boxes.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, talked about public transport. It was a requirement that, when it came to hosting in London, we had to design a public transport Games that banned spectator parking at venues and instead relied entirely on public transit, walking and cycling networks to manage emissions.
I mention those as examples, but there are many more. Many committees were put in place to implement one of the most impressive sustainability Games there has ever been. That was made even more difficult at the time because the transformation of the Lower Lea Valley into the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park required the most comprehensive environmental enabling works ever undertaken in the United Kingdom. Before 2007, when the work started, the 246-hectare site was nicknamed “London’s scrapyard”, serving a neglected, heavily polluted brownfield site packed with light industry, active landfills, a soap factory, gasworks and overhead power pylons. A great deal of work was done on site clearance and deconstruction. Over 98% of all demolition materials were recycled and directly reused in the new infrastructure. Workers removed 52 massive overhead electricity pylons and buried 13 kilometres of power cables in deep underground tunnels.
Then there was the green cleaning up: the soil washing. The soil was choked with a century of industrial toxins, including oil, tar, arsenic, lead and cyanide. Soil hospitals were created. The Olympic Delivery Authority, again under Sir John Armitt, set up onsite laboratories and five industrial soil-washing machines. A huge amount of work was done, and I would be very happy to talk at length about it because I am proud of the work that we did in London 2012. The reason for mentioning a number of these examples is to reinforce how import it is that, with legislation of this kind, when we are sending a signal to the world of sport that we want these major events to come, and they are going to pick up this Act, as hopefully it will then be, and look at it, if they do not see a real commitment to environmental sustainability on the face of the measure, they will question why, especially since we cover so many other aspects.
We need to find the right words that make it enabling. We must not be too prescriptive, because the prescription may be even tougher when it comes to the International Olympic Committee, FIFA or an international federation. But there is merit in looking at this seriously and I hope the Minister will respond positively. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has done a service to the Committee by tabling these amendments, as have the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and my noble friend. If we can attempt to find a framework to add to the Bill along the lines that they have suggested, the Bill will be significantly improved.
Lord Mawson (CB)
I was not going to speak on this, but I thought I might follow the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, because we both spent many years of our lives grappling with the London Olympics.
I first became involved in the London Olympics in 1999. The first meeting on day 1 was with someone called Richard Sumray, someone called Paul Brickell and myself. We met at the Bromley by Bow Centre over coffee and began to wonder, first, what would it be like to take on Paris in 2012 when it was the next city on the list? And where on earth was there enough land to do such a project?
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I just want to make a few comments on this. The idea that we would not have some sort of ongoing environmental impact built into one of these assessments is unthinkable, to be perfectly honest. The exact wording used in any of these might not be the one that has come through, but there should be something in there. There has been in previous projects and should continue to be. I hope the Minister will stand up and say, “Yes, it’s here, it will go in, here is the assurance”, because without it we have missed a trick and gone backwards on ourselves.
I remember the arguments about the roof. I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, might think I was being flippant because, as someone who was consistently raising this, I stood up and said, “If you’re that bothered, I’ll have your ticket”. We can go on about such things, but let us remember that it was about the Games. It should be in here, but we need make sure it is the norm, because if it is exceptional then we are going backwards. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us that assurance when she speaks.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for leading the debate on this series of amendments. As she says, it is unavoidably in our minds today in the current heatwave. I am sure that noble Lords are particularly grateful to all the organisers of major sporting events who are working to adapt and tailor their events to the extreme temperatures that we are experiencing.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, is right to point to the importance of public and sustainable transport options. She is also right that they enhance the experience of people who are attending sporting events, both large and small. I have declared my interest in Formula 1 and my interest in the register of attending the British Grand Prix weekend last year. I did so by train and on the shuttle bus that the organisers at the Silverstone Circuit have been working so hard to make available, so that people can travel there in a sustainable manner. This was part of the broader commitment by Formula 1 to be net zero by 2030. Sports organisations, governing bodies and international bodies are all doing a great deal in order to provide the leadership and the changes that people rightly expect.
Major sporting events can be important focal points and rallying cries. As outlined in the contribution by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, they can be catalysts for important change in this area. He and my noble friend Lord Moynihan and the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, spoke about the experience of the work done in the run-up to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
My noble friend Lord Moynihan mentioned water quality. I thought, too, about the extensive debates in Paris about the quality of the water in the River Seine. When hosting these events, there is an important opportunity to bring focus to those discussions. Towards the end of his contribution, my noble friend Lord Moynihan mentioned ensuring that anything we do here is enabling and not too prescriptive, that it gets the balance right and acknowledges the leadership that many sporting bodies are already providing to try to achieve this. He and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, are right to raise this: there is merit in looking at what we can do with this legislation to drive that change in a positive way. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.
Amendment 95, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, refers to the major events strategy. Again, this is an area where it would be helpful to hear some of the Government’s thinking and whether there will there be a section on the environment and sustainability when it comes out.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Harlech. Like my noble friend Lord Moynihan, he was unable to be here at Second Reading for constitutional reasons, but I am very glad to have him back in his place in your Lordships’ House. He has provided a strong example of the benefit of having a young, working parent on our Benches, taking part in debates such as this. On behalf of the residents of Islington and north London, he powerfully set out the impact of the celebrations that took place. Sadly, these were not dealt with and cleared up by Islington Council in the manner people would have expected—and certainly the manner that those who pay the large council tax in that borough would want.
I congratulate my noble friend on not reigniting the row that he had with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb—who is a staunch Arsenal fan—during the debates on the Football Governance Bill. He has raised a very serious matter in this debate, and he clearly explained the impact that these things have. I hope the Minister will take seriously the concerns that he raised and make sure that the impact of major sporting events, and celebrations such as that, do not cause such hazards, inconvenience and dangers to local residents who are affected.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, and my noble friend Lord Whitty for their amendments. As highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, there was clearly considerable consensus during the debate. I will, I hope, add to that a little, but I will probably not go as far as noble Lords would like.
This Government fully agree that environmental sustainability should be, and is, at the heart of planning and delivering the major sporting events that we host, not least—as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, pointed out—as we experience the extreme heat of this week. I, for one, am delighted to be in your Lordships’ Committee this afternoon, rather than outside in the extreme temperatures.
I pay tribute to the noble Baroness for her work on the London Assembly and as deputy mayor for the environment and on sustainable travel. It was fascinating to hear from noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Moynihan and Lord Mawson, about their work relating to London 2012. It was a reminder of the true expertise and experience in your Lordships’ House, which the ministerial team in DCMS is keen to make use of. This should not be seen as an issue that is not cross-party. It is our desire, and it is in all our interests, to make sure that we use the expertise and experience in your Lordships’ House. I will set in motion the setting up of a ministerial meeting with people who have been involved in previous bids. Why would the Government not want to benefit from the considerable knowledge that we have?
On the approach taken in the Bill, and to give just one example, we are proud of last year’s Women’s Rugby World Cup, which introduced a dedicated environmental sustainability programme across all eight host venues in England. As the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, said, we need to learn from current practice to get the balance right. The sector is already doing a lot.
Amendment 59 relates to sustainable transport. This Government recognise the importance of sustainable travel and are committed to supporting effective transport planning that helps spectators reach major sporting events safely, efficiently and, where possible, by lower-carbon modes of transport. This issue is not about the desirability of those modes of transport in principle but whether these detailed requirements should be mandated in primary legislation.
The Government’s view is that the plans prepared under Schedule 5 retain sufficient flexibility to reflect different venues, events and local transport networks. For those reasons, we do not consider it appropriate to prescribe this level of operational detail in the Bill. Major sporting events already vary significantly in scale, location, venue layout, spectator profile and local transport provision. Requiring admission tickets to confer entitlements to travel on specific public transport services would not always be within the gift of an event organiser or designated body. It may depend on commercial agreements between multiple transport operators, as well as on existing ticketing systems, service capacity and local network coverage.
It could cause unintended consequences for people using trains to commute in a sustainable way. As someone who lives on a train line that covers Wembley, I regularly share trains with people travelling to events. Most recently, when travelling while the Harry Styles concerts were taking place, I felt very underdressed— I lacked the sequins that seemed to be a requirement. In this Government’s view, sustainable transport is better secured through proportionate, locally appropriate event planning, rather than through potentially inflexible statutory requirements, but we agree that using sustainable transport is the aim.
I turn to Amendments 87 and 88, which would require organisers of events to which the Bill’s framework has been applied to publish reports on the environmental impacts associated with the event, and require the Secretary of State and event organises to have regard to climate and environmental objectives when exercising their functions under the Bill. Again, we agree with the spirit of these amendments. This is why the Bill explicitly stipulates that a sporting event must be likely to bring social or economic benefits to the United Kingdom or a part of it in order for the framework to be applied. Social benefit here encompasses environmental and climate impact.
Lord Mawson (CB)
I thank the Minister for raising the point about us maybe sharing some of the knowledge we gained through the Olympics. I certainly would be really willing to do that, and I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, would as well. Some of us are concerned that, under successive Governments, lessons are not being learned from some of these projects. Some of us care a lot about the future of east London, and I worry that just a mile down the road, at the Royal Docks, we are not learning the lessons and are in danger of building the next phase of poverty in the East End of London, with developments literally with weeds between them. With the Olympic park, we were clear that we were building a mixed community that would connect housing, jobs and skills, health, and a whole range of enterprise and sport together in an integrated development.
I share with the Minister the thought that we need to get better at learning lessons. This Government rightly want to do some major regeneration programmes, which is correct, but I worry that the dots are not being joined here. I worry that if we do not do that then what we are seeing on the Royals will start to happen in lots of other communities across the country. I suspect that a conversation needs to happen—particularly with a new party leader, who may or may not know some of these things about place-making—about how there is an opportunity here that I fear will be missed unless we grab hold of it.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
To confirm, I will set up a meeting with people who have been involved in setting up previous major events. I would not have said that I would without checking with colleagues in the department, so I will try to set that in motion as soon as possible. I thank the noble Lord very much for his offer.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who spoke. On the point from the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, I am an Arsenal supporter but I do not take responsibility for every single Arsenal supporter. It is appalling that there was so much waste. I thought he showed great discretion in not mentioning that Islington Council is a Labour council—that was very kind and sweet of him. Sadly, the Greens are only in opposition there, so perhaps by 2028 we might have more sway.
The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, tabled his Amendment 95 after the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, tabled hers. Had I seen his, I would probably have just supported it, but this has contributed to a debate, so it has been quite useful in that way.
The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, made some very kind comments. After his tabling that regret amendment yesterday on the Climate Change Act, and winning the vote, I really thought I would never speak to him again. But obviously, his kind comments have completely changed my mind. It is a pleasure to agree.
On the difference between the two Mayors of London, Ken Livingstone and Boris, I would just like to say that Ken did all the back-breaking work for the planning and in carrying it through. As for Boris Johnson, to cut any further emissions he put potted plants along the major roads, which was a fairly inadequate way of dealing with carbon emissions. But, you know—that was Boris.
It was fascinating to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, about these different things that happened during the Olympics. I felt quite heavily involved, but I had completely forgotten about the water situation, and all the pre-planning as well, which I did not know anything about. That was all fascinating.
In response to the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, I hope the Conservative Opposition are going to be really heartened by the fact that there was so much support for putting climate change issues into the Bill. Given that we have had support from all around the Chamber, I hope we can do something much more progressive.
The noble Lord, Lord Addington, said that really, this is an obvious thing to do. The Minister knows I have huge respect for her and for her work here, but also at the London Assembly. But the Government have a problem here. With so much unanimity on this issue, the Government have to give way a little bit on this—a bit more than they perhaps want to.
Quite honestly, something that annoys me again and again with this Labour Government is that they talk about climate change, but they just do not get it. They do not see how to apply climate change measures to all the legislation they are putting through. The fact that it was completely left out, especially the transport sustainability issues, I just find astonishing. So, I will be pushing on this. The Government have to be seen to be aware not only of climate change but of the measures we can bring in to improve it.
I do not want to overstate the case, but we are responsible for future generations here. This really matters. I would love to be included in the discussions—although the Minister might not want me there. But if I can be, that would be great. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Holmes of Richmond
“(9) A plan under sub-paragraph (1) where the event is expected to attract 50,000 or more attendees on a single day must include—(a) a digital simulation model of anticipated crowd and traffic flows, validated against comparable event data,(b) accessible route modelling specifying the routing available to attendees with mobility impairments,(c) a real-time adaptation protocol that enables the relevant authority to implement AI-assisted adjustments to transport operations during the event, and(d) a post-event data-sharing obligation requiring anonymised crowd and transport flow data to be provided to relevant local authorities within six months of the event's conclusion for legacy infrastructure planning purposes.”Member's explanatory statement
The amendment requires digital twin modelling, which is now standard practice in infrastructure planning and was used, for example, in preparatory work for Euro 2024 in Germany.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to move Amendment 60 and to speak to Amendment 96 in my name. I look forward to the other amendments in this group.
This amendment continues a theme that I began on day one of our Committee debate on the Bill: the singular lack of anything in the Bill to take advantage of all the technologies, if human-led, that have such an incredible impact for the betterment of these major and mega sporting events when we bid and bring them to the United Kingdom.
Amendment 60 in essence just seeks to put in the Bill a digital twin to be part of the transport planning for major events involving 50,000 or more spectators. This would enable a variety of technologies to be deployed to drive a far better experience for spectators, all those involved with the event, and, equally importantly, all those who are not involved but are in the locality.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
I support my noble friend Lord Holmes’s amendment. Just over a year ago, Jarrod Bleijie, who is the Deputy Premier and Minister for State Development in Queensland, came to visit this House and listened intently to a debate on sport. One of the aspects that he focused on was that Brisbane was actively integrating digital twin modelling into the preparations for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The technology is being utilised across several phases of development, including urban planning, venue design and, as my noble friend mentioned in particular, transport optimisation. The points that my noble friend made are very relevant, because the Queensland Government’s SEQ—South East Queensland —digital twin initiative is leveraging predictive analytics to model traffic congestion, crowd movement and transit scheduling. This was exactly the point that my noble friend made about modelling in the locality. On the construction side, foundational projects such as Cross River Rail have built immersive replicas to test structural functionality and simulate passenger flows prior to their completion. There is no doubt that the importance of digital twin modelling in all major spectator sports events is now both understood and implemented.
My noble friend is right to alert the Government to embracing within the Bill, in some form, in the right terms and with the right phraseology, the challenges of integrating digital twin modelling as it stands. It will unquestionably morph into more sophisticated forms in the future. It would send a signal to potential bidders that we are very much on top of this technology and legislation.
Amendment 96 is focused on a cyber resilience plan. I do not want to be pedantic, but we really need a cyber security strategy, because that would provide the framework for what I think my noble friend seeks to achieve. We absolutely need to redouble our efforts to prepare for and prevent cyber threats. Everybody involved in major spectator sports events around the world now is completely focused on this important factor. There are too many bad actors out there looking to disrupt major events. Unfortunately, the major events that command global television coverage are targets for them, as was seen in the many cyber threats on the Paris Olympics. This will only increase.
The more we highlight the importance of these issues by placing them in the legislation in a suitable way to indicate that we are very cognisant of the importance of this as a part of preparing for any bid and, indeed, for the delivery of games that could face these threats in the future, the more we will be well-received internationally. The whole purpose of the legislation is to send a signal to the international federations—the IOC, FIFA and others—that we are not only prepared but aware of the major challenges that we face and that we are responding to them as a country. With those very few remarks, I absolutely support my noble friend’s intent.
Lord Foster of Bath (LD)
My Lords, the point about cyber is really important. At Second Reading I referred to my involvement in the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Prior to the Games I had the opportunity of visiting the transport management hub, a group that, among other things, had put gizmos in all the traffic lights throughout London so that they could change the lights at a moment’s notice to enable traffic to move through. A cyber attack on that would have brought the whole of London to a standstill.
The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, raised this as an important issue, but he did not point out that this is a reality for sports organisations already. The latest research shows that 84% of the major sporting bodies around the world report that they have had at least one cyber attack recently, and 57% say they have had more than one. This is a very real issue. I look forward to the Minister’s response. It is vital that we have it included, ideally on the face of the Bill.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I will briefly run through the amendments in my name. One of the things about the Bill that we do not really like is the fact that there is nothing on infrastructure. It may be implied. My Amendment 78 is trying to put some infrastructure in there.
Amendment 77 is about the accommodation. Much of what we are talking about and much of the reference in the last debate about the legacy from London has been to do with accommodation of athletes, et cetera. If we do not get that in a games bid, suddenly it loses one of the big attractions when it comes to renovation, especially on the model of the London Games. I hope we get some reference in there. Championships may be different. They are different things with different structures. In Birmingham we had a thing about repurposing and borrowing the accommodation that was used, and in London we created new stuff. I hope we get a few thoughts on that.
The amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter are about having a strategy towards a bidding process and making sure we have the capacity to intervene and get on with it. Even if it is seen that we have the capacity here, you have to organise it and bring it together. What are the Government thinking about to bring that latent capacity together and make sure it is always there? There are opportunities here. In most of the discussion on the Bill, I have not heard, “Oh no, we don’t want to bid; it’s a horrible inconvenience that will ruin my day”. I remember certain protests about the 2012 bid down in Greenwich being the best ones.
If we are assuming that it is going to be a good thing, where is the capacity? What are we doing to draw it together? There is a series of suggestions here, to be treated as probing amendments at the moment, about how we can do this and about infrastructure. Please can we have some thoughts on this? It is a very important part of this process going forward. If we do not bring it in, I think this is a Bill for a championship as opposed to a games. It fits better for a championship, when you are using sites and moving around the country, as opposed to a games. I hope the Government can say that I have got it all horribly wrong and missed something here. I wait to be informed.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, I listened carefully to the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, in relation to his amendments. My concern is about creep. I referred earlier to ensuring that we do not have creep that affects small businesses. Here I am concerned about setting up an organisation that has to be maintained when there is nothing relevant to do. The noble Lord used the phrase “always there”. I do not think that is the intention he is aiming for, but if you put it in the Bill you are saying to government, “You have to have a group of people who are working on this all the time”. It is surely far better for government to have the capacity to respond at the right time as quickly as possible, rather than having an “always there” structure.
Associated with that, on the accommodation to which the noble Lord refers, it is my understanding— I am looking at those who were involved in 2012 and in other major sporting events—that when it comes to the Olympics, UEFA and FIFA, the accommodation strategy is decided by those bodies. They will enter into negotiations with worldwide hotel chains and say, “What are you going to do if we come to Manchester, London or wherever it may happen to be?” This is not a responsibility of government. In fact, most of those international organisations would regard it as an intrusion if they were being told, “We’ve already got a strategy and this is how we operate”, because it may well conflict with what is intended by the major sporting organisations.
I cited international gay rugby tournaments when I spoke on Monday, and next year there is the gay EuroGames in Cardiff. With these smaller competitions, you go to those major cities and seek assistance on accommodation. Cardiff is expecting 5,000 or 6,000 competitors and a fair number of spectators next year. Any major authority will maintain a process by which it can deal with those sorts of approaches, but on a much smaller basis. I do not want to see this legislation set up a government structure that is required on an ongoing basis or a belief that the Government should intrude on matters such as accommodation when the major sporting organisations do it themselves because that is how they want to operate.
Lord Mawson (CB)
The noble Lord is correct on that point. It was the IOC that had the view on what should happen with the accommodation on the Olympic park. For example, it did not put kitchens in, for very good reasons—the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, will know more about this than I do. They wanted people eating not in that accommodation but in a special place, because if you are an Olympic athlete, eat the wrong foods and then have tests, there are implications. As a legacy company, we had the job afterwards of putting in the kitchens and a whole range of stuff to make all that work in its legacy format.
What you do want is close working relationships between that international body and those on the ground who are responsible for creating that legacy. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, may well agree that we learned on the go as we went on this journey together. It would be good if that kind of conversation about these close working relationships was happening between government and the international bodies on day one, so that we do not have to spend £323 million on a roof that does not quite work in legacy. Those connections really matter.
Lord Hayward (Con)
I thank the noble Lord for that helpful and affirmative intervention in relation to the points I am trying to make.
In broad terms, I do not want to see a structure that is required by government. One needs the capacity to respond quickly, in the right way, at the right time. That is how cities operate when they are trying to attract smaller international competitions of one form or another.
Lord Addington (LD)
That would be a perfectly acceptable response: that there is a capacity, that they will make sure they have the capacity to look at this and that there will be a strategy going forward. This is about clarification and finding out what happens here. As I read it, the Bill works perfectly well for a championship—it does not read so well for something for which you have to do a lot of construction work. I am trying to find out the Government’s thinking.
To back up the original point from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, here we must pay attention to the cyber and online world, as it is becoming an increasing part of it. His first amendment is a good tool—use it, because you will be expected to in future. The snappy video is being replaced by the plan. We are trying to get out of this important group of amendments what the Government are going to do, the limitations of the Bill—we have found some today—and what will be set down to the bidding structure that currently exists. Where the two overlap, we should find out what does not have to be done and what does.
Lord Hayward (Con)
I thank the noble Lord for that clarification, which is important for understanding the directions in which this Bill should go, and what we believe it should achieve.
Lord Markham (Con)
I thank my noble friend Lord Holmes, and all other noble Lords, for what I hope people will see as a good debate and a helpful contribution. We hope to make sure the UK is best placed for the best planned events, so I hope this will be taken in the spirit of helpfulness. As ever, my noble friend Lord Holmes brought us to the cutting edge of technology in the need for digital twins, and my noble friend Lord Moynihan set out the perfect example of Queensland for what is happening on that. He was absolutely right to remind us of the dangers from cyber attacks. With my other brief in my science and technology role, I am all too aware of that; it was brought out very clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, with his traffic light gizmo example. I would quite like to have one of those for my way home.
What the noble Lord, Lord Addington, was getting to on the infrastructure and accommodation points was in some ways similar to the point we tried to make in our amendments on Monday to enable an Olympic development-type agency. As he said, it is not a championship-type event; it is a much bigger scale. These are all coming at the Bill from different angles to make sure that if this is to be enabling legislation, it is broad enough that when bodies of that scale are needed, this framework legislation is able to do it. I very much take my noble friend Lord Hayward’s point that we need to make sure we do not build overbearing full-time bureaucracies here.
The amendments in my name, and that of my noble friend Lord Parkinson, are trying to make sure that the UK is the best place possible to host these events. That is why we are asking the Secretary of State to make a report within six months on some of the impacts on and barriers to that. Noble Lords are only too aware that the recent changes to employer NI increases the cost of a worker by about £900 per year, and the minimum wage changes add another £1,000 per year to the cost of each worker. These are exactly the type of people needed to man these events and make them happen. Unfortunately, these recent changes and tax increases will have a disproportionate impact.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
When it comes to further consideration of the importance of Amendment 76, to which my noble friend is speaking at the moment, the noble Lords, Lord Mawson and Lord Addington, may well agree that we possibly need to expand on this so that we have the opportunity, not just within six months but within a year, five years and 10 years, to see that there has been an appropriate sporting, social and economic legacy, and indeed a sustainability and environmental legacy. It is really important, because so many commitments are given at the time of hosting a major sporting event. Admirable as it is to have a review after six months, for legacy this is vital. By working together we can learn a lot of lessons that can benefit other host cities around the world for major sporting events. I put that to my noble friend. Does he agree that we can at least look at that before we come to Report?
Lord Mawson (CB)
It is a rich conversation, and it is really important that we learn this lesson. One of the things we did not achieve with the London 2012 Games—and it is no one’s fault—was to have someone caring about the legacy and really worrying away on day one when we won those Games.
When we first had that meeting in Bromley-by-Bow in 1999 to worry about all this, we were blue-sky thinking and thought, “How on earth do you make movement on a thing that’s going to be impossible? Paris is going to win—they’re the next one on the list and the IOC has decided already”. Fortunately, through a good friend of mine, Ian Hargreaves, at that time the deputy editor of the Financial Times, I was taken one Saturday morning to meet the architect Richard Rogers at his house in Royal Avenue. I had never met Richard before. We had a conversation to check whether we were mad in pushing this kind of idea. When I shared the thought, he was quiet for about 10 seconds, and I thought, “He thinks we are mad”. But Richard was actually a great risk-taker and had built some amazing things. He said that he thought building a mixed community was the right idea, and that he would like to join us, with his mate Mike Davies, who was just finishing the Millennium Dome at that point. At our second meeting, we began to worry about not only where the venues might go on those 248 hectares but the detail of, for example, the press and broadcast centre. None of us had ever done this before, and we had a conversation about how many journalists there would be; we thought maybe 100 or 200. Richard said he would go away and find out. He had an interesting idea of putting the press centre under the stadium, in a way that only Richard Rogers could have thought of. He came to the next meeting and I asked, “How many is it?” He said, “Andrew, it’s about 100,000”. The press and broadcast centre was a building bigger than Canary Wharf.
During the journey, because no one was at that point owning the legacy, into that building went a massive cable that all the press could use—fantastic value despite its cost—that was then going to be removed in legacy, along with that massive building, at the taxpayer’s expense. Unless a few us—including Gavin Poole who built the Here East development, now a fantastic innovation hub in the middle of the East End of London generating jobs, skills and university investments —had owned that issue of legacy, and the significance of that cable coming into that building, it would all have been lost. My thought to government is this: how do we ensure that on these big events some individual is owning those questions from day one? When Governments put millions of pounds into these things, they need to have longer legs than just six weeks.
Lord Markham (Con)
I thank both noble Lords for their interventions, and it shows the richness of this discussion. I agree with my noble friend Lord Moynihan on review timeframes that should be not just six months but longer terms. To the point on legacy from the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, I will add my own small contribution. I was chair of London and Continental Railways around 2019 and 2020. For those noble Lords who are not aware, that was the body responsible for all the regeneration around the Stratford area, as an arm of the Department for Transport. We were developing housing on from that accommodation, and it has been a very successful site for affordable housing. One of the legacies is that on the housing and regeneration front it was massively successful.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I thank the noble Lords, Lord Addington, Lord Holmes of Richmond, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay and Lord Markham, and—although she is not in her place today—the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury, for their amendments. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Markham, that this has been a really helpful debate, in series of helpful debates on this Bill.
Amendment 60, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, would require digital modelling to be used in planning for certain sporting events, which the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, also spoke to in the example he gave of Queensland. Although the Government recognise the potential for digital tools to support transport planning for major sporting events, we do not agree that their use should be mandated through primary legislation.
Planning for such events must remain proportionate, flexible and responsive to local circumstances. Existing planning processes already allow event organisers, local authorities, transport operators and safety advisory groups to use digital modelling where that is helpful and appropriate. A city centre venue with established transport links may require a very different planning approach from a temporary venue or one in a less well-connected location.
We should also be cautious about placing specific technologies or methodologies in the Bill. Digital simulation, AI-assisted adaptation and related tools may be valuable, but technology, as noble Lords will be aware, evolves quickly and legislation should not risk becoming outdated. In addition, the proposed data-sharing requirement may raise practical questions around data governance, consistency, ownership, privacy and commercial sensitivity, even where anonymisation is envisaged. More broadly, effective transport planning for major events depends on local knowledge, venue design, crowd profile, policing, security, weather and wider network conditions. Those matters are best addressed through flexible operational planning supported by the transport measures in the Bill as needed, rather than by imposing a rigid statutory template.
On Amendment 76, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Parkinson and Lord Markham, hosting major sporting events is a highly competitive global market, with a number of rival nations investing heavily to attract and secure events. The sector continues to face challenges in delivering these events, with costs rising and consumer expectations continuing to grow. However, we disagree with a requirement to publish a report assessing the impact of the Government’s economic policies on the UK’s ability to attract and host major sporting events. We do not think that is required.
The Government remain committed to continuing to engage across the major events industry—not just sporting events—to better understand how we can support their growth, tackle these challenges, share learnings and support collaboration. Moreover, the UK’s competitive advantage is based not solely on the funding it provides or its wider economic landscape but on the strength of our overall offer. The UK is a proven, innovative and experienced host nation. We provide a stable and trusted environment, strong delivery partners, leading experts and world-class facilities. We have a world-leading reputation for excellence in event delivery because we stage complex events to the highest standards. We should be proud of this and the Bill seeks to build on this reputation. Our future pipeline of sporting events is a strong indicator of that reputation. The Bill is intended to increase regulatory certainty, further enhancing our credibility with event owners.
In June 2025, the Government committed more than £500 million to support the delivery of major sporting events hosted in the UK, including the Grand Départ for the Tour de France, the Tour de France Femmes in 2027 and UEFA Euro 2028, as well as a commitment to support the UK’s bids to host the 2029 World Athletics and World Para Athletics Championships, and the 2035 FIFA Women’s World Cup. I also want to highlight that UK Sport already evaluates the economic impact of major sporting events hosted in the UK, which naturally takes into consideration wider government policies. We will continue to work with UK Sport and partners on how we can maintain and strengthen the United Kingdom’s position globally.
Amendments 77 and 78, on accommodation and infrastructure respectively, were tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Addington. I would never say the noble Lord has got it “horribly wrong”; however, I would probably say that the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, got it right in his analysis.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I do not have favourites, but the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, wins that today. I used the words of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, so my apologies to him as well. The Government do not believe that these amendments are necessary, although I recognise that the concerns the noble Lord raises are to ensure that arrangements and infrastructure are adequate to serve major events, including, as he said, accommodation for athletes, whether that is purpose-built or repurposed. The example from London 2012 given by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, was helpful to illustrate this.
Lord Hayward (Con)
I thank the Minister for her kind comments. I ask her to encourage some of her colleagues on the ministerial Benches to acknowledge that, on occasions, there are good ideas from the Opposition Benches as well.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I would say there are on occasion. There is so much expertise in your Lordships’ House with regard to sporting events. I have always felt that where there is a good idea, we should not be partisan, so I would not disagree with the noble Lord.
However, the measures the amendments cover are exactly the type of technical requirements that are already set out in contractual hosting agreements and specified by the event owner. This means that there is a dialogue throughout the bidding process between prospective hosts and the event owner about existing capacity and infrastructure, what is required and where improvements would need to be made. Through this, prospective hosts provide the necessary assurances to the event owner that there is or will be sufficient capacity and infrastructure in place to deliver a successful event. Ahead of this, we would also expect the national governing body to work in collaboration with the relevant local authority that is ultimately responsible for delivering these key elements. As these are already accounted for in the bidding processes, these amendments could potentially place onerous or duplicative requirements on key delivery partners. I am happy to discuss that further with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, should he wish.
Amendments 80, 81 and 82 were spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, but are also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter. We recognise the important intent behind them; taken together, they aim to ensure that the UK maintains its ability to bid for major international events. We also recognise that the amendments aim to increase transparency around the prioritisation of and bidding for sporting events to provide more certainty to the sector. However, in our view, it is not necessary to set this requirement in statute. I reassure your Lordships that the Government are committed to ensuring that the UK continues to build on its already world-leading reputation in this field. At the risk of agreeing too often in one debate with the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, I agreed with many of the points he raised in this part of the debate.
There is a pre-existing process which sits behind those events the UK chooses to bid for, which is set out in the Gold Framework, as I have referenced previously. This also sets out the criteria against which events are assessed and prioritised. UK Sport undertakes a horizon-scanning of all the available hosting opportunities, and it undertakes feasibility work alongside formal engagement with the UK event co-ordination group, national governing bodies and local authorities twice a year to develop and agree the UK’s longlist of potential future major sporting event targets.
This hosting target list is also endorsed by DCMS. It is published online and is shared annually with the sector, as well as with cities, regions and nations across the UK, to facilitate event-hosting partnerships. This ensures transparency about our potential targets. It also aims to ensure that there is an ongoing 10-year major event strategic programming list in this regard. There is a balance to be struck, in our view, in ensuring that the UK does not hinder our competitive advantage by giving detailed insights to our potential competitors. UK Sport has also published Making Live Sport Matter, which sets out a series of guiding principles and key objectives for event hosting as the basis of a strategic framework for maintaining the country’s reputation as a world-leading host nation.
On noble Lords’ points around resourcing, UK Sport exists for exactly this purpose: to provide expertise. This includes conducting feasibility studies, including on alternative and sustainable delivery models, and evaluating the annual value of events. It also provides a range of strategic guidance and technical support to the sector. This includes a knowledge transfer programme to enhance and develop the sector’s expertise and develop collaborative and sustainable networks. We also believe it is important to retain the ability to be responsive and effective with public resources, as the requirements of bidding for and delivering major sporting events will change over time.
Amendment 96, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, would create a power for the Secretary of State to
“direct a qualifying person to maintain and share a cyber resilience plan … for a sporting event to which this Act applies”.
The noble Lord gave some powerful examples of the impact that cyber attacks might have, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, that it is some bad actors who create the threat, which was also illustrated by the noble Lord, Lord Foster. As he says, this is potentially a very real issue. The noble Lord talked about the gizmos in traffic lights and the advantage these may give to getting home. There were those of us at the London Assembly at the time who suspected that Boris already also had that in mind—but I move swiftly on from that.
This amendment would introduce a new statutory power, together with detailed requirements about the content, maintenance and review of cyber resilience plans. The National Cyber Security Centre guidance on cyber security for major events, to which this amendment refers, recognises that cyber security arrangements and requirements will differ according to the scale, location, systems and threat environment of the event in question. Such a legally binding list may not be relevant to every major sporting event.
Finally, there is also a practical challenge of monitoring compliance here. Details of cyber security plans are typically necessarily restricted to event organisers and do not generally involve government oversight. For those reasons, I ask that the noble Lord withdraw his amendment.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. Ultimately, sport is about winning, and it seems pretty clear that, in this group of amendments, my noble friend Lord Hayward won without even having an amendment in the group. That is, perhaps, how sport can go sometimes, as anybody who has played or spectated will very much appreciate. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have commented on my amendments, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, who brought up gizmos—you can tell he is a scientist.
I say to the Minister that the wording may not be quite right in the amendments, but I ask her to reflect on the principles, strategies and criteria that any technology, while being technology neutral, would have to meet to achieve these objectives. Would that not be worth considering in a Bill of this type as we put it together at this stage? If we take the point of criteria, for example, you can effectively be technology neutral and largely technology future-proof because you focused on criteria and principles. It will be worth reflecting on whether some of that might be of value in the Bill.
Again, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part, and, at this stage, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment and another to Clause 25 in the name of Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay would require Parliamentary consent before financial assistance can be granted.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 68, I will also speak to Amendments 72 and 73, all of which are much shorter than my previous amendment, which was just dispatched with.
The amendments in this group, which my noble friend Lord Markham has signed as well, are intended to prevent the financial assistance provisions in Clause 25 of the Bill becoming a blank cheque that successive Governments could fill out as they see fit. To do this, our amendments require that, before the appropriate national authority grants financial assistance in connection with a sporting event, the appropriate legislature must approve that assistance by resolution. This means in practice that, if the Secretary of State wants to help fund a particular event, the House of Commons must agree to any financial commitment. When the appropriate national authority is the Scottish Ministers, the Scottish Parliament must approve the funding, and where it is a Northern Ireland department, the Northern Ireland Assembly must give its consent.
It is a long-established principle that financial measures must be subject to approval by Parliament. Erskine May says in paragraph 33.2 that the “basic constitutional principle” of financial procedure is that
“the Crown requests money, the Commons grant it, and the Lords assent to the grant”.
It continues:
“In more modern terms, the Government presents to the House of Commons its detailed requirements for the financing of the public services; it is for the Commons, acting on the sole initiative of Ministers … to authorise the relevant expenditure”.
That is the crucial point: the Government must come to Parliament, specifically another place, with proposals for the sums to be spent on each object of expenditure, and those must be detailed requirements.
Of course, there are many Bills presented to Parliament which grant the Crown a more open-ended authorisation of expenditure, but, when those Bills are considered, Members of both Houses usually pass them knowing the object of the expenditure for which they are authorising, and the sums they are authorising. The impact assessment or a briefing or explanatory note from the Government would contain the Government’s estimate of how much the measures in that Bill would be likely to cost the public purse.
The Bill before us is not a usual piece of legislation, in the sense that it seeks to create a framework for future sporting events. We do not know to exactly which events the Bill will be applied in future, nor how much financial assistance the Government of the day might wish to grant those events. Clause 25 is an open-ended financial commitment, which potentially spans many decades into the future.
It is possible, without necessarily even looking many decades into the future, to envisage a Prime Minister who is fiscally less disciplined than others. I want to make sure that we are future-proofing the Bill for all eventualities.
Of course, the Bill is not accompanied by a detailed assessment of how much money the Government propose to spend as a result of Clause 25. That is not surprising. In fact, it is perfectly understandable. The very nature of an open-ended framework Bill such as this means that it is unknowable. But, if the Government are not able to tell us how much the Bill will cost in the long term, it is not just reasonable but a clear requirement to ensure that legislative consent is required for each instance of financial assistance granted under it. That will help us to ensure proper parliamentary scrutiny of each measure and, I hope, guarantee that fiscal probity is baked into the legislation.
All that our amendments seek to do is apply a very sound constitutional principle that the appropriation of public money should be agreed to by the House of Commons, elected by the people. I hope that the Minister and other noble Lords will agree. I beg to move.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay and to agree with everything that he said. I will build on his blank cheque, which was perfectly positioned phraseology. My Amendment 71 seeks to build on that in order to get the most from the moolah. If we are going to put financial assistance in place, as we do and will, it is only right and proper to make the most of that funding, to not restrict the funding and to not put issues around it that would make it less likely for us to win these major and mega sporting events. But we need to put in conditionality that will benefit the bid itself, the event and local communities and other organisations, not just at the event time but, if correctly put in place, for years and perhaps decades to come.
In no sense am I suggesting that the wording I have set out is exhaustive or covers all the issues at hand. I seek to demonstrate a sense of the threads of E, S and G running through this funding. It has to be right that local communities benefit directly from these events, because for mega events such as the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, they put up with a lot: the bid process, the extensive build process, Games time and a significant deconstruct of all the overlay and temporary venues. They deserve, and must have, an upside during that process, at the event time and, indeed, post event. It is not just the sport that should benefit. The local community is hosting these events as well and must be included in the upside and benefits that come from that.
In my other proposed subsections, I quite rightly set out to put everything around pay gap reporting, minimum wage, procurement and supply chain in the Bill. There is so much positive impact that can be driven through the procurement and supply chain process. It is worth, at least at a principles-based level, having something in the Bill to send out the signals as to what kinds of events we want to stage in this nation: not to limit the bid, not to control and not to affect the flexibility that one needs when a governing body is bidding, but rather to enhance, sharpen and add to the bid, and to the Games and the championships experience, and to have a sense that the stadia, community, part of a city and part of our country can look forward, post Games and post event—not looking back at something that has happened in the past but taking things forward that would not have happened and would not be part of that local community were it not for the staging of that event or that Games.
It is right that we seek to get the maximum and think about what we want to say about the funding put into these events. Criteria and principles seem a perfectly acceptable way of doing this. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Mawson (CB)
My Lords, I support this amendment. But, when you have spent many years at the other end of the telescope of these large events and have responsibilities for building the kit, enabling it all to work and making sure that it integrates in those communities, the detail really matters. One of the things we managed to achieve with the London Olympics—which was in no small part to do with the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, Lord Coe and others—was to get cross-party support for this very big event, which we knew would probably go through different Governments and Mayors of London, and actually I think we achieved that. It was a very big and long event—and, by the way, we are still building out the Olympic Park today, so it was a big thing.
It is really important that, while there needs to be responsibility for large amounts of taxpayers’ money— I absolutely get that—if we are serious about these events, there also needs to be responsibility among our political parties to get cross-party agreement very early on.
That needs to happen not only at a national level. One or two of our colleagues in east London who were involved in the Labour councils there—I mention in particular my colleague Paul Brickell, who was a Labour councillor in Newham and ended up playing the lead role in regeneration as executive director—spent a lot of time building working relationships with the five Labour boroughs surrounding the Olympic Park, which when we began had a long history of being at war with each other. There was a lot of detailed work over cups of tea to build the relationships that support events such as this.
So, although I am in favour of being very careful about the money and get all of that, if we are serious about going for these events, there is a responsibility across our political parties to build working relationships early on and come to an agreement, so that those of us on the leading edge with day-to-day responsibility to make fast decisions tomorrow will not be held up by politics being played out on them somewhere else.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is an interesting group of amendments that I assumed would not be needed. I assumed that we would have a series of debates about this. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, did a forensic job on the basic principles of where taxation comes from and how money is raised, going through. If the amendments are not needed, can the Minister tell us when she expects the interaction between the public system and Parliament on where the money comes from? That is a fairly reasonable question. If they have a structure behind what we are debating, we should know. I hope this is just a classic probing amendment, because that is what you should have at this point. We should know where we are going.
I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, that unless you get a commitment that everybody is prepared to buy into, there is no point doing anything, because it all needs a long-term plan. That is absolutely true, and if you start messing about with that, we just will not have any of these events, because no organising body in its right mind will come within a mile of us.
We have to have a degree of long-term planning. To get the benefits from events, we have to accept that even if Government A do something in a way that Government B do not particularly like when they come along, they will have to accept it and go along with it. Do not let your version of excellence be the enemy of the good on this.
I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will tell us exactly when these debates are to take place, what the structure will be going forward and what the spirit behind them is. The point is reasonable. I hope that there is an equally reasonable answer.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
My Lords, I support the amendment put forward by my noble friend Lord Parkinson. It comes to the heart of this Bill. This is, in effect, an enabling measure. It is agnostic about the events, but it is clear that it is about the major spectator sporting events of the future. It can provide a framework that will help to convince international federations, the IOC or FIFA that we are prepared, willing and ready to host one of those events. It is a pity it is agnostic because, as we heard on the first day in Committee, there are many events that would like to be included in this and, at present, we are unsure whether Wimbledon, the Open Championship et cetera could be covered.
Since the focus is on major events, such as a potential Olympic bid in 15 or 20 years’ time, it is concerning that what appears to have happened here is that we have enabling legislation that will come back to Parliament in the future through statutory instruments. When it comes to spending £10 billion at 2012 prices, that is simply not going to be acceptable to Parliament. We will require primary legislation. We will require a money Bill in order to consider whether that significant public spend is appropriate—even more so when you take the 2012 example, where the original bid was costed at £3.4 billion and it ended up at more than double that, and that is before accounting for the excellent work of the country’s intelligence and security services. I was present at a major debate about whether you included the security services’ work and costed it or you accepted that the security services would be working on something else at the time, so there was no additional cost as they simply switched across to the protection of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Leaving that aside, the important point is we had circa £10 billion-worth of public funding, and there is no way that secondary legislation on a regret Motion in your Lordships’ House is going to be sufficient for parliamentarians to come to a conclusion on that.
That brings me to the second point about the way that international sport is run under fiercely protected autonomy. To take the example of the Olympics, the bid committee is not initially set up by government to bid. The bid committee is the National Olympic Committee, and for us that is the British Olympic Association. The bid committee comes forward with the proposal for a city and it is responsible for preparing the bid documentation, which is known as the candidature file. That is formed by the city that is bidding, in the case of the Olympics, and the Olympic association of the host country. They go to their Government.
On the financing of a major event such as the Olympic Games, the role of the Government is to provide legally binding guarantees regarding, above all, funding. That is what is looked for from the Government: a legally binding guarantee regarding funding, taxation, customs and immigration. I shall take a few minutes to demonstrate this point and bring it to life in the context of what happened in London 2012. The guarantee that the Government provided in support of London 2012 was,
“to provide all necessary financial support to the Games”.
That was clearly made as a commitment by the providers of the public funding package for the Games. It was absolutely right that Parliament questioned that and asked what that guarantee meant.
The applicability of the guarantee in the context of London was confirmed by the Government in three concrete cases, where third parties requested additional assurance in respect of obligations undertaken by the organising committee. The first was Ticketmaster. The arrangement with Ticketmaster required assumption of responsibility for the refund of ticket purchases should the event be cancelled. The Government needed to step in to provide that security. Ticket revenues were a significant element of the organising committee’s budget and its cash flow. In lieu of requiring either that funds be held in escrow against potential refund claims or the provision of a costly letter of credit to support LOCOG’s undertaking to refund, Ticketmaster agreed to provide LOCOG with ticketing funds as received and recognised its obligation to refund as a binding and enforceable contractual obligation. The guarantee from the Government established the Government as the ultimate guarantor of any such shortfall. It is incumbent on a Government to let Parliament know that that is a potential financial requirement and to allow Parliament to decide whether that sort of decision can be taken by the Treasury, in the absence of coming back to Parliament, or by the relevant Minister—in the case of London, the Minister for the Olympic Games.
Another interesting point concerned the London Borough of Greenwich. One of the conditions specified in the grant of planning permission for the use of Greenwich Park required the organising committee to put in place arrangements to provide financial assistance so that the reinstatement of the park after the Games was funded and completed as envisaged in the planning applications. Again, to make sure that everybody was happy in that context, the Government provided the funding support.
In the IOC broadcast refund share agreement pursuant to the host city contract, the IOC made advance payments to LOCOG from the fees paid to the IOC by broadcast rightsholders, but, importantly, if the Games were cancelled fee rebates were due to the broadcasters. These were subject to a written assurance from the Government as the back guarantor.
I mention those three cases because I think they are important. They are significant, given the exposure of the Government and their support for that international event—in this case the Olympic Games. It is essential that, in providing that sort of support for a major international event, where the public are particularly interested in all aspects of it, the Government come back to Parliament and put into a finance measure or primary legislation the requirements that the Government are being asked to make by the International Olympic Committee, which owns the rights to the Games.
I hope the Minister will stand up and say that she accepts my noble friend Lord Parkinson’s request. He put it admirably. I have tried to add colour to it and to explain what it would mean in the practical reality of a major event. I very much hope that, if the Minister cannot accept the wording that my noble friend Lord Parkinson has put into his amendment, we can revisit this. It is of such importance for parliamentary accountability that issues of this nature should be considered in primary legislation or in debates in both Houses, rather than simply in a one-hour debate on a regret Motion.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I thank the noble Lords, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, Lord Markham and Lord Holmes of Richmond, for tabling the amendments in this group. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Addington. We do not believe the amendments are required either.
Amendments 68, 72 and 73, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Parkinson and Lord Markham, are intended to require parliamentary approval before financial assistance under Clause 25 can be given in relation to sporting events. This Government completely agree that scrutiny and transparency when it comes to public spending are vital. However, we do not believe that these amendments are necessary. First, for the avoidance of doubt, the funding power is not intended to lead to spending above and beyond what would have been provided anyway. Rather, it is a legal mechanism intended to ensure that any funding provided to sporting events has a clear statutory underpinning. This is in line with the principles set out in Managing Public Money.
Secondly, I want to be clear that this funding power is in line with established precedent for similar funding powers. Parliament already has responsibility to authorise government expenditure in this area through the supply estimates process, such as allocations for bidding for and staging major sporting events and legacy programmes.
These amendments, however, would go much further, effectively requiring the Government or devolved authorities to seek the approval of the relevant legislature every time they rely on this funding power, be it to fund a smaller-scale, grass-roots event or arts and culture programmes affiliated to sporting events. This has the potential to require parliamentary approval numerous times over the course of each year. To put this in perspective, over the past decade alone the UK secured and delivered almost 150 major sporting events, many with the support of government investment, and that is even before you count related activities. Once we add funding for domestic sporting events to the mix, the potential number of funding cases within scope goes up significantly.
I hope noble Lords understand therefore why the Government’s view is that these amendments are disproportionate and would place an unsustainable burden on Parliament. However, I assure noble Lords that, where financial assistance is provided by relying on this power, it will rightly remain subject to the same existing processes and ministerial accountability as any other spending of public money. Departments are required to produce robust business cases when spending public funds, in line with public Treasury guidance. Where funding needs are significant, this will also require a departmental spending review bid to His Majesty’s Treasury to be subject to even further scrutiny. There are a number of existing mechanisms which provide Parliament with additional ability to scrutinise such funding, including the Public Accounts Committee and the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, as well as committees in your Lordships’ House.
Amendment 71, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, would require organisers of major sporting events to publish, and commit to comply with, an environmental, social and governance impact compliance plan before funding can be provided where it exceeds £1 million in aggregate to a single recipient. As I hope I have already made clear, the Government are in full agreement with the point being made by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes that, where public money is given in support of a major sporting event, it should be used responsibly, secure value for money for the public purse, and ensure that benefits are shared with local communities. This is something the Government will be thinking about even before we consider funding a major sporting event.
As already noted, the Gold Framework is clear that, where event organisers are seeking government investment, they must demonstrate the social value of these events, including with regard to many of the criteria the noble Lord sets out. Among other expectations, it outlines that event organisers must have meaningful plans in place to generate this positive social impact even before the event has started. Where the Government do decide to support a major sporting event, this requires a robust business case proportionate to the expenditure, in alignment with Green Book and Managing Public Money guidance. These frameworks expect departments to consider environmental, social and distributional impacts, including those set out by the noble Lord, such as through the public sector equality duty and environmental principles policy statement assessments.
Finally, as has already been made clear, Clause 25 already sets out that event funding can be given where needed, subject to conditions. This could absolutely include conditions related to all these areas, where warranted. Furthermore, international federations and event owners often specify their own expectations and requirements with regard to the social and environmental impacts that prospective bidders would be required to meet. For instance, UK bids for World Athletics events are required to comprehensively integrate sustainability to align with the governing body’s mandatory Athletics for a Better World standard, with the Glasgow 2024 World Indoor Athletics Championships having secured a platinum rating, which is the highest rating possible under the standard. For these reasons, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I am grateful to the Minister for her response and to all noble Lords who spoke in support of the amendments. It was a useful discussion and I will look carefully at what the noble Baroness said as we move to the next stage of the Bill. As I said in opening, this is not an ordinary Bill. It is not normal for Parliament to be presented with a piece of legislation that permits completely open-ended financial commitments, so this is an important area for us to look at carefully.
For instance, when Parliament was considering what became the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006, the Mayor of London and the Government had already by that point entered into a memorandum of understanding, setting out how the Games would be funded were we to win the bid. Parliament, therefore, was aware of both the event for which it was legislating and approximately what the financial liability would be. My noble friend Lord Moynihan set out in great detail—adding, as he says, colour and practical reality—the complexities of the agreements and guarantees that are required when we host events of this scale.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, that cross-party support is so important. That is why we are broadly supportive of this legislation and of the Government’s ambitions in this area. But having a proper debate in Parliament, where all the parties can get their concerns off their chest and reach a resolution, is an important part of securing that cross-party agreement. My noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond in his Amendment 71 sets out just some of the many areas that Members of Parliament in both Houses will rightly want to raise when we look at these things.
At one point in her response, the Minister talked about making a departmental funding bid to the Treasury. That is fine, but it is an internal scrutiny in Government, not a role for the elected House. This was a probing amendment, as everything is in Committee, but it is probing a very important matter, so I think we ought to look at this in more detail on Report. But, with gratitude to the Minister and all those who have spoken, for now I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Addington
“(1A) The appropriate national authority may, in connection with a sporting event, set expectations as to the investment to be made by relevant organisations in—(a) grassroots sporting venues or organisations, and(b) participation in sport at grassroots level, including community sporting projects and facilities.(1B) Financial assistance under subsection (1) may, in particular, be given subject to conditions requiring the recipient to make, or to secure that another person makes, investment of a kind mentioned in subsection (1A).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, and others in Lord Addington’s name, enables the appropriate national authority to set expectations on event organisers and others who benefit commercially from a sporting event to invest in grassroots sport and community participation, and to make financial assistance under Clause 25 conditional on such investment.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I feel rather sorry for the Minister, because this amendment is once again going back to lessons learned from previous sporting events, particularly from the London Olympics. Although it was a success in many ways, one thing it did not do was encourage more people to play sport. This is universally accepted. When the committee on which I served, as did the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan —he might have led it, I cannot remember: it is a long time ago now—looked at this to find out what happened, the idea that it is just a straightforward inspiration for sport does not work. You have to do a bit more to encourage people to play sport.
There are good examples in world championships for rugby union and netball: there is argument about who devised the model first. You have a great spike in interest, but you must prepare the grass-roots clubs for people turning up who have not played. This is one of the cases when I found out just how old I am. Advertising for the Rugby World Cup totally missed me, because it was aimed at those aged 18 to 25. It was encouraging those with recent skills to get back to being involved in the game. But you had to make sure the clubs were ready for them. You have to have the grass roots ready to receive and you have to help them to do it. Big gestures from the boys at the top do not help with participation unless you have somewhere coming through where you can do it.
As has been said, these are probing amendments, but the Government need ideas. What are we actually going to do? We have this big sporting event, and we can use the models that the sports themselves have devised and take them further. That might help. I am not saying how it should be done—it may be greater capacity for playing facilities, training or coaching—but we have to make sure that we get people playing the sports. That is what this is about. This is an accepted failure from something which, other than that, was a success. We just did not do that one thing.
There is no point in someone watching something happen on television and saying, “Isn’t it marvellous?”, if we do not find out whether we have the capacity to do it, or even to start that process. We have to get them out and playing. That is what I would like, and it is what I am trying to get at: what is the Government’s thinking about getting a proper sporting legacy at grass-roots level that will give us the capacity to start finding champions? Unless we go down the route of testing everyone at the age of 14 to see who our champions are and saying, “The rest of you, just sit down and watch. There’s a box here. You press a button and watch other people”, because that is not what it is about, or it should not be.
Amendments 74 and 75 merely follow on from the spirit of Amendment 69. Can the Government tell us their thinking about encouraging people to correct the one big failure of something that has changed our whole debate about this issue—that is, the Olympics—by getting people playing sport? I beg to move.
Amendment 70 (to Amendment 69)
“(c) measures to improve the resilience of sporting infrastructure against the impacts of climate change, including flooding, extreme weather and heat.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment adds climate resilience to the list of considerations to be made by national authorities providing financial assistance to sporting events.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I fully support Amendment 69 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Obviously, major sporting events generate significant commercial benefits, but we have to ask what their legacy will be or could be. Too often we celebrate the spectacle, the television audiences and the economic boost, but the local clubs, pitches and volunteers, which sustain sport every week of the year, may see little benefit.
Amendment 69 seeks to address that by creating an expectation that those who benefit from major sporting events should also invest in grass-roots sport, community facilities and participation. After all, elite sport does not emerge from nowhere. Every international player and every Olympian starts somewhere. They start on local pitches, in community halls, in amateur clubs and in local swimming pools, with volunteer coaches giving up evenings and weekends. In many places, the local sports club is one of the few remaining community institutions where people of different ages and backgrounds come together regularly. So I warmly support the principle that grass-roots foundations, on which all sport ultimately depends, should be strengthened.
My Amendment 70 takes that further to add that the climate resilience for grass-roots sport should be included too. This is a month when I was locked out of my office because of potential flooding and, of course, we now have this incredible heatwave, so I argue that this amendment seems particularly relevant.
When we talk about investing in grass-roots facilities, we must also talk about protecting them. Across the country, grass-roots sport is already experiencing the effects of climate change. Football matches are cancelled because pitches are waterlogged, clubs face increasing repair costs after flooding and storms, and facilities are damaged by extreme weather. Heatwaves are clearly creating new challenges for us all, and these are real present-day problems for sports up and down the country.
Estimates suggest that between 120,000 and 150,000 grass-roots football matches are cancelled each season because pitches are unplayable due to rain and flooding. In parts of the country, pitches are already losing weeks of playable time every year because of changing weather patterns, and every cancelled match means lost revenue for clubs, disruption for volunteers and fewer opportunities for participation. Over time, of course, it threatens the viability of facilities that communities depend on.
The irony is that we can spend money improving a clubhouse, upgrading a pitch or expanding facilities only to find that those investments are increasingly vulnerable if resilience is not built in from the start. If public money or event-related investment is helping to support a community sports facility then surely it makes sense to ensure that the facility remains usable for years to come.
Lord Doyle (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I want to build on what the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said in one specific regard. He is obviously right in what he says about London 2012, but I want to reflect that there was an initiative that attempted to deal with this—which I know very well because I worked for it at the time—called Join In Local Sport. Indeed, Members of this House kindly got involved in events that we held.
I shall focus on what we knew was a core challenge. The noble Lord, Lord Coe, spoke to us about this at the start of our initiative: after the 1984 Olympics, on going back to his sports club, he saw that there were queues of young people there who suddenly wanted to participate, but the key resource that they were missing was volunteers. We do not speak enough about the role of volunteers or the barriers that there are for people who want to be coaches and to support teams. Parents often get involved when it is their own child who wants to participate, but we need to keep them around and supported as volunteers for longer. As we look at participation in sport, I urge the Government to make sure that one of our key focuses is the pathways, incentives and encouragement that we can give to get more people to feel valued as volunteers within sport.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
My Lords, I am not sure the Government are going to accept these amendments as drafted, although I very much hope they will. For the record, it was the noble Lord, Lord Willis of Knaresborough, who chaired the parliamentary Select Committee that looked at the sports legacy from London 2012. We suggested in an earlier amendment that there should be frequent reviews—maybe after one year, after five years and after 10 years—of the sports legacy, the urban regeneration legacy and the social legacy of the significant investment that is put behind major sports events that are covered by the Bill.
It is wise and helpful to end my few remarks by saying that I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Doyle. We lost the opportunity after London 2012 to continue to encourage the many outstanding and wonderful volunteers who made the Games. It was the volunteers who made the Games, and they could so easily have been captivated by the atmosphere of a great sporting legacy and gone down to their clubs or initiatives such as the noble Lord’s excellent initiative and continued to be involved, but we lost those people.
I shall quote from the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Willis, when we reported to the House on the sadness that the sports legacy had really not been delivered while so many other legacies had. The regeneration of the East End of London was outstanding, for example, and the Games themselves were historically wonderful in everyone’s memory, particularly the Paralympic Games, as well as the Olympic Games—they matched each other. This is what he said:
“How is it possible that the UK is world-leading in elite and professional sports, that 3 billion people across the world watch our Premier League matches in over 187 different countries and that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has consistently said, at Olympics after Olympics we are near the top of the league in terms of our elite activities, yet for decades we have failed at grass-roots level to get more people from more diverse backgrounds to be more active, despite all the investment that successive Governments have made?”
The point that he was really emphasising was that this was successive Governments; it was not a party-political point. He concluded:
“With one-third of the adult population at the moment getting less than 150 minutes of moderate activity each week; with schoolchildren doing consistently less activity both at school and at home; with PE marginalised in the school curriculum and no longer inspected by Ofsted while, as we heard in our evidence, many primary school teachers get less than three hours’ training in a three-year degree course, which is shameful, so physical literacy in most of our primary schools means nothing, frankly, because it does not appear on the league tables; with access to facilities ever more difficult; with local authorities closing swimming pools and leisure centres to save resources; and with transport non-existent for large parts of the day for large swathes of the community, we have become one of the most lazy, inactive nations in the … world. Those sections of the population with the poorest diets and the worst levels of deprivation are, not surprisingly, the least active, too, and of course the pandemic has disproportionately affected all the target groups”.—[Official Report, 4/2/22; col. 1208.]
That is the concern that many people on all sides of this Committee feel has been underestimated by successive Governments, and it is why the noble Lord, Lord Addington, has brought forward his amendment. The spirit of his amendment, and what he intends to do to remind us of these important facts, are vital. I welcome his work in that context. I hope the Minister is in a position to respond positively.
Lord Mawson (CB)
My Lords, I was not involved in this aspect of the Games, but I was aware of the conversations going on about it at the time in east London. The Government might benefit from talking to Sir Robin Wales, the then Labour Mayor of Newham, who was deeply concerned about all this, and Tessa Sanderson, who tried to engage with this area. I suggest that the problem is seeing projects such as this as being about structures rather than people. If you really want this stuff to happen, you have to get interested in the Tessas and others of this world, on the ground, who want to do something about it, and back them. If my memory serves me correctly, they felt very unsupported and doubted whether the various large structures around them would do anything consistent long term. There are lessons to be learned here. Maybe if we have a conversation with some of these people, we can learn some of those lessons.
Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)
My Lords, I want to add to this briefly. I have been sitting and listening to what has been said, and the one thing I have not heard about is working and liaising with local government. At the end of the day, it is at the forefront of providing the facilities noble Lords are talking about. Over the years, underfunding has meant that swimming pools have been closed and other sports events have not been able to function. There needs to be recognition that we in this Committee and those higher up can say what we would like to see, but we have to work with local government because it has the routes into the community and the grass-roots organisations. Those volunteers—the parents noble Lords are talking about—have the reach and their first port of call is local government.
I just wanted to add that to the debate so we can bear that in mind. We cannot do this in isolation. We must involve local government.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, this very helpful debate has, in many senses, continued the discussion we had thanks to the amendment from my noble friend Lord Moynihan, on day one in Committee, about the huge importance of leaving a legacy when we host a major sporting event. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, spoke very powerfully about that on Monday as well. The huge importance of our grass-roots sports organisations is clear once again. They do so much—not just when we are hosting these major events but particularly when the spotlight is shone on them—to get young people and people of all ages more active and more physically fit, helping improve their health and helping the pipeline of elite sports people for the future.
The Saturday morning football teams, the local cricket clubs and the swimming squads that meet in leisure centres up and down the land are the real heartbeat of the sporting culture in this country. The noble Baroness, Lady Dacres, is absolutely right: three-quarters of grass-roots sports clubs depend on affordable, local, publicly funded leisure facilities to provide opportunities for people to get involved, try new sports and get more active. They certainly deserve our support. That is why it is sad to see the Government, in other departments, looking at watering down the role for Sport England in the planning system in protecting grass pitches and sports facilities. I do not know whether the Minister, when she comes to respond, can say a bit more about this review of the planning system and the role of Sport England. It has drawn concern from the Lioness, Jill Scott, and organisations such as Fields in Trust, and I hope their words of warning will be heeded.
Noble Lords are right to mention the sadness, as my noble friend Lord Moynihan put it, quoting the noble Lord, Lord Willis of Knaresborough, about that aspect of the last time this country hosted the Olympic and Paralympic Games. That summer of 2012 was one of the highlights of this century for this country, but that was a part of the process that we did not get as right or make as successful as we all wanted, in spite of great initiatives such as the Sport England’s Places People Play programme and the initiative the noble Lord, Lord Doyle, mentioned, with which he was associated at the time. There is a real opportunity when we host future major sporting events to make sure that we are driving forward that grass-roots legacy and driving the improvements we all want to see for future generations. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)
My Lords, it has been a real privilege to be part of the debate today and, with my own background, I have really enjoyed the rich contributions from around the Chamber. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the other noble Lords who have supported these amendments, especially referencing the importance they rightly attach to grass-roots sport, community participation and the legacy of major sporting events.
Taken together, these four amendments seek to enable expectations to be set around investment in grass-roots sport, including community projects and facilities, as well as in climate resilience, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has raised again. I know we had opportunities to discuss this earlier, and I probably will not dwell as much on that aspect as a result with these amendments. The amendments would also ensure that any funding under Clause 25 could be made conditional on such investment.
I said I was particularly pleased to be involved because, as a former local government leader, I recognise and completely understand the comments about the importance of local partnerships. As my noble friend Lady Dacres rightly stressed, we need to make sure that local government is at the centre of these plans. That runs throughout the Government’s approach in this regard. I emphasise that the Government are fully committed to maximising the positive legacy of major sporting events and, of course, this includes protecting and upgrading world-class facilities. But they are not just for elite athletes; they have to be accessible to local communities afterwards, and I think we have heard a great deal about that.
Picking up on the points that were made, DCMS, I am very pleased to say, is developing a national plan for physical activity that will demonstrate commitment to place-based working, embedding physical activity into local systems to strengthen the ties. We cannot look at this in isolation: it is leisure, health, civil society—all the benefits coming together. Of course, I have discussed this a great deal with the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, who emphasised detail. Details matter, particularly in the setting up of local partnerships.
We have clear principles in place to do this. The Gold Framework outlines that when seeking investment from the Government, event organisers must “have “meaningful plans” in place to generate a positive “social impact” even before the event has started. This includes considering how the event could lead to improvements in sporting facilities and infrastructure, as well as helping to tackle environmental issues. Critically, the Gold Framework is clear that the best legacy programmes are developed through engagement with the communities that they are meant to support. Picking up on the well-made points from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, this is what enables us to target funding where it is truly needed.
Participation, obviously, is the key thread running through all these principles. For example, we are investing £23 million into delivering legacy initiatives for the UEFA Euro 2028, which this Bill will help us to deliver, featuring the largest-ever community programme for a Euros tournament. It is obviously a multi-city hosting model; this also means that it is committed to supporting locally led legacy programmes, directly engaging diverse communities in design and delivery. The plans will be delivered by local stakeholders in both England and Ireland—the two host countries—to harness the power of sport and culture, bringing communities together and inspiring positive change. As mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Doyle, we talk a lot about the issue of volunteers, and why we are not attracting as many as before. This is all part of the strategy that the Government are bringing forward.
The current system works: it recognises that one size does not fit all, and provides flexibility that these amendments, in our view, would not. We need to continue to be able to be guided by evidence in any provision of public funding, as we have been doing, to allow us to maximise the benefits of our world-leading sporting events for the diverse communities we serve throughout the UK—of course, sport is a devolved matter for Wales and Scotland. The Sporting Events Bill will increase the UK’s prospects of hosting even more events, and with it the potential to generate more lasting socio- economic benefits for athletes and communities across the UK.
Where needed, Clause 25 of the Bill already sets out that event funding can be given subject to conditions: these could include conditions relating to supporting these important areas where warranted. The Government are already doing what we can regardless: for example, we are investing £400 million across the next four years into new and upgraded grass-roots sports facilities, promoting health, well-being and community cohesion. Some of that money has been used to upgrade clubhouses and pitches, but reducing our carbon footprint and improving overall durability is also absolutely fundamental. We are funding the Sports Grounds Safety Authority, providing evidence-based guidance to help ensure that both physical structures and fan welfare are protected during volatile climate events.
I just want to reference—because I am very proud of it—the bringing of the Grand Départ to Yorkshire. It was one of the proudest things that I have been involved in, and legacy was a thread running through it. I live on the edge of Leeds, and I know that it was scouts going round schools who found Lizzie Armitstead, who was not a cyclist then but a runner. The scouts went to the school and discovered her talent in cycling. That was first-hand, real experience of how this can work. Most important was the parallel event running alongside the Grand Départ, with thousands of people volunteering. They kept the route open for all the amateurs to go along afterwards for the whole day. Those events, and indeed all cycling events in Yorkshire, are now flooded with participants. It can be done.
There are many other examples of positive models. I have referred just to one that I am familiar with and am very proud of, but there are examples all over the country. We need to look at those examples with great positivity and recognise the incredible benefits they bring to a wide selection of communities, and the pride from families seeing their kids participating. There is a huge amount to be positive about in the approach that the Government are taking.
I hope, with the comments I have made, that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, will feel able to withdraw his amendment at this point in the proceedings.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, when we have these debates we tend to follow this pattern: we talk about great things and wonderful events; we talk about the volunteers coming in and helping out and how wonderful it all was. But this amendment was not about that. It was about the second teams: it was about getting participation up and getting people to turn up. It is about making sure you have people playing the sport. Local government has its role, but it is all about facilitating people to do their own stuff. The Government have lots of initiatives, but we are not as good at this as we used to be, and there has been a cultural shift.
Many of our own sports have added to this. Rugby union turned pro, and great, famous clubs got rebranded and lost eight teams on a Saturday. Just think what that did to the local sporting economy. The Government have to get back to grass-roots sports, because that is where the infrastructure is to expand from: namely, from the volunteers. One can do all sorts of things, like redo a clubhouse, but unless we take advantage of that, and encourage them, we are going to miss.
There have been lots of examples about good volunteers, and we could have another amendment about that, because we know that volunteers quite like to do a finite, one-off project, and then they stop and have a rest. Somebody running a small club is a different type of volunteer: they turn up, as part of a lifetime’s commitment almost, to make sure that every new generation of children or junior players get coached properly, that somebody fills out the forms and that there is a secretary and a treasurer—that all that stuff happens.
With this amendment, I was trying to ensure that this goes down through sports, and maybe it needs to be done on a sport-by-sport basis, and some sports will be doing it anyway. When we talk about great examples, we miss the point. It is about making sure that we have something that goes down to the people who are already there—a little shot in the arm to help them carry on—because we are missing this. Parliament tends to do that. We forget about this when we talk about sport. We think about big, exciting events; most sport is not big and exciting. I know because I have played in it.
I understand the Minister’s answer, which could have come from anyone else, because they do not quite get what we are talking about. The noble Lord, Lord Doyle, started saying, “Yeah, we tried: it was all big and exciting, but we didn’t manage it”. This is because we do not go to where the actual volunteers are. The idea was to make sure we got some support, some structure, some help going down to the volunteers. Until we do that, we will continue to struggle, and then local government will say, “Oh, well, you’re not using that facility, so we can shut it down”—that is the negative side—and a few people will determinedly fight it, but they will always have the argument coming against them.
Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for giving way. I mention local government because they are part of that grass-roots nexus for local people. They are the ones to whom our local grass-roots organisations will turn in order to try to get that extra money, that extra funding, so that they can run a boxing club, for example, or facilitate other groups. They are at the core. These are the volunteers, to whom the noble Lord referred, with a lifelong commitment to helping young people. This is why we need to remember how important local government is to ensure that we can funnel those extra funds, and ensure that they reach the right people, the right groups and the underprivileged young people who really want to take part in those sports.
In addition, local authorities are closer to what local young people want to do and see. That is why, for example, you will see skateboarding parks, because that is now an Olympic sport, and BMXing is another great, accessible Olympic sport. That is why it is important to remember local government, because it reaches the people in local areas who give their lives to make sure that they are engaging and encouraging young people to take part in these sports that the noble Lord is referring to.
Lord Addington (LD)
I do not disagree with any of that. I would just say that it is not a core activity, so it tends to become a secondary choice and there is pressure on local government. If you come through and give a boost, local government might be able to deliver. Local governments provide pitches for some sports, whereas they do not get involved with other sports. It is about culture, and it is a very varied picture. It can be important: many people play football on local government pitches, but rugby union and cricket clubs tend to own their own grounds or have long-term leases. There is a cultural mix that goes down there. So, local government is important, but we need to go down to the grass-roots club that, for example, runs four teams. As I once suggested to one of our governing bodies, you must remember to write to local government and tell it what you want; that will improve the relationship. There is a struggle there, but we are getting off the topic.
I think we should have another look at this, because we are still not making sure that we engage with those people on the ground. I hope that the Government will, shall we say, have a little bit more robustness in their answer. The Minister can only read out what is in front of her, but we are going down here to get the Government to give us a better answer on this one. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Beith) (LD)
Before the noble Lord can withdraw his amendment, we need to give the noble Baroness the opportunity to indicate what she wants to do with her amendment to his amendment.
Lord Markham
“Limitation of football banning ordersAfter section 14J of the Football Spectators Act 1989 (offences) insert—“14K Banning orders: protection of freedom of expressionIn relation to sporting events to which the Sporting Events Act 2026 applies, or banning orders that result from offences under the Sporting Events Act 2026, nothing in this Act shall be read, or given effect, in a way which prohibits or restricts expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse that do not incite violence or disorder.””Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is intended to ensure that behaviour at sporting events which is fleeting, non-violent and part of the charged, emotional atmosphere of live sport does not lead to the imposition of football banning orders.
Lord Markham (Con)
Noble Lords will notice that I am not my noble friend Lord Young of Acton, who, unfortunately, cannot be here this evening. Unfortunately, my noble friend Lady Davies is also not able to be here. But I would be grateful if the Minister is able to reply to their amendments.
It is my pleasure to introduce this last group: the last lap of the race, which, while not a 100-metre sprint and definitely not a marathon, I think we would all agree has been a well-honed and fast-paced middle-distance 1,500-metre race. It has been a blue-ribbon debate on making sure that we get the best opportunities to bid for the Olympics and the World Cup.
I will move and speak to Amendment 86, on behalf of my noble friend Lady Sater. I know this is an area of great concern. Grass-roots sports participation has been a running theme through all this. Unfortunately, the CQC’s proposed regulations to make all medics at events CQC registered, at a cost of £1,000 and a lengthy registration process, are in danger of destroying a lot of grass-roots sports. We will freely admit—
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Beith) (LD)
Just to be clear, the noble Lord is moving Amendment 83. Amendment 86 is in this group, and the noble Lord is free to speak to it, but he is moving Amendment 83.
Lord Markham (Con)
Yes, I am moving Amendment 83 and speaking to Amendment 86 from my noble friend Lady Sater.
As I was saying, there is real concern about the impact of the CQC regulations on these grass-roots sports. If my noble friend Lady Sater was here, she would freely admit that this has been somewhat shoehorned into this debate, but I know that the Minister will understand that, as she participated in the debate on the secondary legislation from the Department of Health and Social Care. There is a real concern that, if volunteers have to spend all this money, they simply will not turn up to events. They will not do them, and that will mean that we will lose a lot of youth football events, rugby tournaments, point-to-point racing and athletics. You name it—we will probably lose it in all this.
We have talked many times about the importance of creating a sporting legacy; that means making sure that these grass-roots events can run. That is why this amendment would require that, within one month of the Bill’s passage, the Secretary of State makes a statement on the impact of these proposals. Clearly, we are not expecting the Secretary of State to do this. This is a probing amendment, but one very much designed to keep this at the top of the agenda. Again, I know that the Minister absolutely understands that, because she participated in the earlier debate, but I am afraid that we—I am looking at the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson—have been fairly disappointed about the CQC’s response to date, and I know that that is true of many of the sports organisations. This amendment is therefore designed to make sure that this is kept at the top of the agenda, because, if you speak to lots of sporting bodies, there is a concern that we are going to lose a lot of grass-roots events through the CQC’s actions.
I look forward to the Minister’s response. While I have not been able to speak to the amendments from my noble friends Lord Young and Lady Davies, and while they are not able to do so either, I am sure that they will be grateful if the Minister could include those amendments in her reply.
Lord Doyle (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 83. I appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Markham, is not responsible for its content, but since he moved it, I feel obliged to put my objections to it, in the debate that we are having on this group, on record. I object not just to the specifics; this amendment goes against a core value of sport and the sporting events that we have been discussing very positively over the last couple of days of Committee: the power of sport to bring people together. It cannot be right, therefore, that the language of Amendment 83 states that it is only concerned with insults and abuse that “incite violence or disorder”. Surely that is not the bar that we want to set or the culture that we want sport to promote. After all, in recent years we have seen significant progress on the status of, and pay in, both women’s and disability sport. We have seen initiatives such as Kick It Out in football do great work to tackle discrimination in all forms. We now have a situation where there are more than 50 LGBT supporters’ groups within football through the Pride in Football network.
I mention football because, as in all sports, there is much more to do. However, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton—I am sorry that he is not here to hear me say this—quoted some homophobic language on Second Reading that he thought we should all be relaxed about and not be concerned by, in the way that authorities are, or the way in which banning orders are a necessary tool within sport.
I simply urge the noble Lord to reflect on the real-world impact of chants from the stands or language down the pub. Why is it that in football, which was the example he cited, in the men’s game we have no out gay players and yet in the women’s game we do? Hosting events surely is about coming together, showcasing not just the best of sport but the best of us as a country, where nobody is intimidated out of taking part and all our citizens can enjoy watching it.
Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)
My Lords, I support Amendment 86 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sater. I am very grateful to her for tabling it and to the noble Lord, Lord Markham, for speaking to it, because I think this is very helpful to keep the discussion on the CQC live. I understand where we have got to with the new guidance that is coming out on the back of the Manchester bombings. It is completely understandable. It has elicited very strong views in the sector. I thank the CQC for the meeting, but I think many of us have probably come away from that more confused than we were at the start. A better explanation of the plan would have helped.
As the noble Lord, Lord Markham, said, on what is an individual, what would happen when a parent steps in at an event? I think of a local rugby event; if there is a doctor there and they are asked to step in, they may not be covered by insurance. It has set a lot of hares running within the sector, which I do not think necessarily needed to happen. I also realise that the consultation is ongoing. The big events—I spoke to the London Marathon—will be fine, because they are already set up to deal with this, but I am thinking of the smaller events. I know there is a cut-off or a line at 200 people, but lots of very local events would have more than 200 people taking part. Yes, they are run under the auspices of a national governing body, but unless we get this absolutely right there is a real risk that volunteers will not continue to step up to run these events.
Yes, there will be risk assessments, but they might not have access to threat assessments. You could end up in an unforeseen circumstance and end up in court for something you have done. While we are waiting for case law, which could take several years, there could be a very big detrimental effect of volunteers stepping back, so understanding the impact is very important. I certainly think it is important to keep this discussion going, and more clarity on this would be really helpful as we go forward.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Doyle, on Amendment 83. As I said earlier, this amendment is just basically wrong—end of.
On Amendment 86, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. It conforms with my experience that you have to be flexible; you have to understand about local events, and you have to keep the structure going. Clarity is required here about what is wanted, so I hope we step towards that clarity or at least find out when it is coming. That is one thing about Bills in Parliament: you do get a chance to pin a Minister down for a worthwhile answer. I hope we have assurances on both of these.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
My Lords, I will be equally brief, but let me preface my remarks by saying that I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Dacres, is contributing to this debate. We both have a long history in Lewisham, and Lewisham East in particular. It is a very sporting constituency, as it happens, with Chris Chataway being the first Conservative Member of Parliament for that seat. I was nothing like as eminent as he was when he was a fairly impressive pacemaker in the historic 1954 Bannister run, when he broke the four-minute mile. The noble Baroness is a much-loved mayor in Lewisham, very hard working and very respected, so it is great to see her contribute to a sports debate.
Equally, when the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, acting as Minister at the time just now, spoke of talent transfer, it is important to recognise the outstanding work that the noble Baroness, Lady Grainger, has done in that context in UK sport. Talent transfer has been an absolute pillar of the success of many of our sports in recent years, since we really professionalised elite sport. My friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Grainger, was critically important in that work, and it is a great delight to see her in your Lordships’ House.
I support the comments made about Amendment 86 in the name of my noble friend Lady Sater. It is very important indeed that these CQC regulations remain on the agenda, and I hope the Minister is going to give us some comfort today and say that they should be looked at again in the context of the smaller events, the ones that local authorities run. The noble Baroness, Lady Dacres, was completely right in what she said about the role of local authorities in grass-roots sport. These CQC regulations are really quite critical now to the cost of running those smaller events that are so important in the development of sport. I hope they can be kept under review and looked at again by the Government. My noble friend Lady Sater’s amendment, and the comments made in particular by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, just underline how important it is to be reviewed now so that it does not do irreparable damage to many of the sporting events that we are talking about.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Markham, for introducing and speaking to the amendments on behalf of the noble Baronesses, Lady Davies of Devonport and Lady Sater, and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton.
Amendment 83, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, would carve out a broad category of criminal conduct from the preventive football banning order regime by seeking to exclude behaviour framed as “expression”, even where that conduct has crossed the threshold into criminality. This carve-out is intended to include conduct at sporting events to which the Bill applies, or banning orders resulting from offences under the Bill. On the latter, to be clear, the offences under the Bill will not be added to the football banning regime. On the former, football banning orders may be imposed only by a court and are a very serious measure. They arise either following conviction for a relevant offence listed in Schedule 1 to the Football Spectators Act 1989 or where the court is satisfied that the individual poses an ongoing risk of involvement in football-related violence or disorder. As the noble Lord, Lord Doyle, said, this amendment is not the bar we want to set. Sport should indeed, as the noble Lord said, be the best of us. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, echoed that sentiment.
Your Lordships’ Committee will recall the disgraceful racist abuse directed at Black England players following the Euro 2020 final. The noble Lord, Lord Doyle, rightly pointed out the lack of out gay male footballers in the sport. That behaviour at Euro 2020 was rightly condemned across your Lordships’ House, and it underpins why the banning order regime was strengthened to include communications offences to ensure that those who engage in such hateful, harmful conduct can be excluded from the game. It would therefore be inappropriate to carve out a category of criminal behaviour from the football banning order regime simply because it is described as “expression”. Parliament has already determined that such conduct can meet the criminal threshold. Weakening that framework risks undermining the ability of courts and police to deal effectively with those who jeopardise safety and enjoyment for the vast majority of decent fans, and indeed for sportspeople.
Amendment 85, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Davies of Devonport—who is not able to be in her place today—proposes, in the context of events to which the framework provisions are applied, a duty to ensure provision of single-sex competitions and facilities. It also sets out that where the rules of a sporting competition are framed by reference to the gender or sex of the participants, that reference must be to biological sex. Any events to which the Bill’s framework will apply must comply with existing legislation and guidance. In the UK, the Supreme Court ruling provides clarity around the definition of sex within the Equality Act on the basis of biological sex. The EHRC’s updated statutory code of practice has been laid before Parliament, providing essential legal clarity for sports providers, national governing bodies and participants around the country. National governing bodies of sport, local authorities and sports organisations also have guidance and policies in place. We will continue to engage closely with our arm’s-length bodies, Sport England and UK Sport, and the wider sporting sector as Parliament considers the updated EHRC guidance.
Amendment 86 was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, and introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Markham. I accept the spirit in which this amendment was laid, and I noted the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, who also spoke to this amendment, as did the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan. This amendment requires a review of the impact of recent regulatory changes that allow the Care Quality Commission to regulate the treatment of disease, disorder and injury—TDDI—at sporting and cultural events. These regulatory changes bring sporting and cultural events in line with other settings where the treatment of TDDI is regulated, such as within hospitals and care homes.
The change means that TDDI health provision at sporting and cultural events will be delivered by professionals with the right set of skills, training and equipment so that the audience and participants receive the right type of help when they need it. It means it will be easier for organisers to pick skilled and safe providers, as they will be listed on the CQC website. As noble Lords are aware, the changes were made following the recommendations by the Manchester Arena inquiry.
During its parliamentary passage, it was clear that Members of both Houses were concerned that this change may have unintended impacts. Ministers at the Department of Health and Social Care have undertaken to work with stakeholders to consider options to mitigate any unintended consequences. The concerns included the impact on events staffed by volunteers, or on specific groups such as search and rescue teams and athletes. Noble Lords who spoke to this also spoke about volunteers, which was a theme in the debate in the Grand Committee I was present at.
This work is ongoing. The Care Quality Commission has met with a broad range of representatives as part of its consultation on this change. DHSC officials are due to meet with chief medical officers from a range of sporting and cultural bodies to discuss this matter further, and I will attempt to clarify when those meetings will take place. Department of Health and Social Care Ministers are in the process of convening a round table with the Peers who spoke during the debate on the statutory instrument on the CQC regulation amendment on 15 April, and I will ask my noble friend Lady Merron to make sure that those who spoke today but were not present at that meeting will be invited. I will also make my noble friend aware of this debate. In the meantime, I ask that the noble Lord withdraw the amendment.
Lord Markham (Con)
I thank the noble Lords for their contribution to this debate. As I believe I get almost the last word of the whole Committee stage, I thank everyone. We have had some expert contributions over the two days. We have had Olympic medallists, Games organisers, local government leaders and some keen, if not very able, sports participants: me, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and others.
We have heard it all. We have heard about Olympic sausages, we have heard about gizmos and we have had the gold medal performance, to say the least, of the Minister agreeing with my noble friend Lord Hayward on a few matters. But there has been a large degree of consensus in this whole debate and a lot of passion and enthusiasm, which has been great to see—particularly in the Leeds contribution. It was honestly really heartwarming to see all our enthusiasm in the Chamber for wanting to make sure that Britain is the winner in all this and in sports events. That is absolutely the spirit of all this.
On the specific CQC point, I know the Minister gets it and hears our concern about the real impact this has. We know that these are well-intentioned CQC changes, but they could have a lot of unintended consequences for grass-roots events. So we would be grateful if, as she said, she can keep us informed and keep this at the top of the agenda. With that, I beg to leave to withdraw the amendment.
Clergy Conduct Measure
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
That this House do direct that, in accordance with the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919, the Clergy Conduct Measure be presented to His Majesty for the Royal Assent.
Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, I have it in command from His Majesty the King to acquaint the House that His Majesty, having been informed of the purport of the Clergy Conduct Measure, has consented to place his interest, as far as affected by the Measure, at the disposal of Parliament for the purpose of the Measure.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
My Lords, the Clergy Conduct Measure is a vital part of the Church of England’s ongoing reform of clergy discipline and safeguarding. During the passage of this Measure through the General Synod, the Church has acknowledged that the current clergy discipline system does not always serve complainants well. Too often, they have found the process opaque and painfully slow. Equally, it has not served clergy well, leaving many in a state of prolonged anxiety and limbo, worried they will lose house and job.
This new Measure is the result of six years of detailed work to address that situation. The key principle at its heart is proportionality. The system introduces three different tracks that complaints will be allocated to: as a grievance, as misconduct or as serious misconduct. Each of those tracks has its own independent procedure for the investigation and resolution of the complaint. So, by triaging cases effectively from the outset, the Measure seeks to ensure that every complaint is handled appropriately and at the right level of seriousness. Crucially, this will, we believe, lead to a much quicker process.
The Measure makes vital strides in aligning safeguarding and discipline processes. The one-year limitation period is abolished for allegations of serious misconduct, meaning that somebody who has been seriously harmed will be able to bring a complaint, regardless of when the alleged conduct took place, without having to seek special permission. In cases involving children or vulnerable adults, safeguarding professionals will automatically become a party to the complaint, providing critical input into the decision-making process. This alignment will be significantly better for both complainants and respondents. It ensures that safeguarding is treated not as some sort of separate silo but as absolutely central to and integrated within the disciplinary framework.
Alongside this, new statutory duties are to be placed on bishops to implement support for all those who are affected by a complaint. There are also significant protections for clergy: the introduction of restraint orders against those who persistently bring vexatious complaints—and we have them. For the most serious cases, where the cleric is prohibited from ministry for life, we have reintroduced deposition from holy orders: what used to be called being “defrocked”. That disappeared with the last clergy discipline Measure, but one thing that came out of the IICSA inquiry was the need often for victims and survivors to know that this person is no longer even legally a member of the clergy, whether or not they are allowed to function as a member of the clergy.
The Measure will be supplemented by rules made under secondary legislation. That will be considered by the General Synod next month and then laid before Parliament. I have been part of the committee drafting those rules, and I can assure noble Lords that they provide further safeguards, including robust case management powers for tribunal judges, greater protection for vulnerable witnesses by way of special measures when giving evidence, the power to appoint litigation friends for children and those with a disability or who lack capacity, and prohibitions on harmful cross-examination during hearings, unless an advocate has been appointed. These provisions basically mirror the best practice nowadays in the secular courts.
During the passage of the Measure to the General Synod, a very wide consultation took place. I am very pleased that the Church of England employee and clergy advocates, who are part of the faith workers’ branch of Unite and represent over 2,500 clergy and employees, have this week confirmed to me their support for the Measure being passed by your Lordships. I will leave it to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler- Sloss, to take us through this in a little more detail in a few minutes’ time but, as noble Lords will be aware, when we first took this to the Ecclesiastical Committee, it found it “not expedient”. That had not happened since the early 2000s, but it is scrutinising us with great assiduity at the moment, which we appreciate.
The principal concern was that the original draft of Section 31(3) provided that disciplinary hearings would be held in private. The committee asked the Church to look again at that, and we did. The Measure was reintroduced to the General Synod in February and that section was amended, so that the presumption is now that hearings will take place in public—although not always, and I may say more on that later if noble Lords are interested. The Church is very grateful for the work of the Ecclesiastical Committee and, indeed, your Lordships’ House in scrutinising our Measures. We have better legislation because of it, just as the nation has better legislation in secular law. The revised Measure obtained overwhelming support on final approval in the General Synod. There were no votes against, which, considering the wide range of people on the General Synod of the Church of England, is quite something.
The Church is very aware that there remains further work to be done on our safeguarding structures. That work is continuing. It will come to the General Synod and to Parliament in due course, as will the rules for this Measure. The Measure is not a silver bullet—it does not resolve all past safeguarding issues in the Church—but it is a necessary and important step forward in how discipline is administered, and one that will be a benefit to all those who take part, both those who have proper complaints or grievances and those who are respondents to those matters. The road to reform has been a long one and I know there are many well beyond this Chamber who, according to your Lordships’ pleasure, would wish to see this Measure now obtain Royal Assent. I beg to move.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Finlay of Llandaff) (CB)
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I invite the noble Baroness to speak.
Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interest that one of my sons is a priest in the Church of England.
I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester for introducing the Measure to your Lordships’ House today, and the Ecclesiastical Committee for its helpful report on the revised Clergy Conduct Measure, published earlier this month, both of which have been very helpful. I also thank those people who have provided briefings and comments ahead of this debate.
My Front-Bench portfolio—victims and vulnerable people—means that I have a particular interest in formal processes to investigate and remedy complaints, whether minor or very serious. I should also add that, as president of the Lib Dems between 2015 and 2019, I was a witness at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse regarding historical sexual abuse by a senior Liberal Party MP. As president, I was involved with changes to our own party’s disciplinary process and worked with the Committee on Standards in Public Life, as well as my opposite numbers in other parties at that time. Some of my questions today reflect my experience of those processes a few years down the line.
Assessing how process works in practice is where I want to start. The statement of purpose for the CCM currently speaks of preserving
“the collective good standing of clergy”.
If viewed from the Church of England’s perspective, this is logical. A new Measure should work so well that it will root out established poor behaviour through a transparent process in which all participants feel heard, even if one party disagrees with the outcome. That would certainly speak to the continuing of the collective good standing of the clergy.
However, those with experience of past complaints under previous Measures that were unsatisfactory might be concerned that this would repeat the old practice, where the good standing of the clergy was there to protect the Church of England, regardless of the claimant and the cleric. That, of course, would be a failure, so it is good to hear the Bishop explain to your Lordships’ House how this system will work.
My first question is: what review and reporting structures will there be to ensure that it is the former and not the latter outcome? Which bodies in the Church will see annual general reports on how the system is working? If minor changes need to be made in practice, is there capacity to do this without starting all over again through synod and then Parliament?
I move on to the details of the process. The division into four categories of complaint is helpful, as is the flexibility for the assessor and/or the bishop to change or reallocate the complaint, in the words of the Measure, if further evidence surfaced so that it needed to move into a different category. I am pleased to see a formal process for vexatious complaints and litigants. It is a sad part of the tribalisation of our society that far too many people move straight to complaints and use the law repeatedly, rather than all parties being more considered and discussing things earlier on in the process —where that is appropriate, of course. It is clearly not in some of the more serious cases that are likely to appear.
The changes in process to reflect the IICSA recommendations are also clear and helpful, and it is right that the penalty by consent, where a penalty was agreed with a bishop entirely in private, has been abolished. The previous arrangement would inevitably lead complainants to believe that deals were being done behind the scenes. That is never good, so it is good that it has gone.
I also want to examine the boundaries between safeguarding and the complaints procedure, because the safeguarding procedure and the complaints procedure are separate but interlinked. IICSA’s full report demonstrated the failures of a number of organisations in our society that at best ignored warnings about abuse and at worst hid appalling long-term abuse by people involved. How will the Church judge the very different needs of a safeguarding service and a conduct process? It is vital that they are not separated but that they are different.
Finally, I note that the Ecclesiastical Committee report expresses concern that it was disappointed that its comments in a previous report about meeting in public were not taken into account, so it was good to hear from the right reverend Prelate that this has now been accepted. Accountability and safeguarding must be at the heart of any process like this, and transparency is also vital. As long as synod and other relevant bodies regularly see the annual data on complaints, including those unfounded or vexatious complaints and allegations of sexual behaviour, then the Church has the mechanism to monitor the type of cases and the judgments in those cases over time. Only that way will the Church get a clear idea of whether it has a fully functioning process. That is because the Church must be firm on dealing with those who are perpetrators of abuse, but also clear when vexatious claims are made to undermine clergy. That is a hard task, but I believe this Measure and its process appears to have the capability to do so. I wish it well.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, I will speak to the report that I seek leave to present to the House, as chairman of the Ecclesiastical Committee. I will leave the answers to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to the right reverend Prelate, although I will make just one or two comments.
I chair the Ecclesiastical Committee, which was created in 1919 as a statutory committee, oddly, and not a Select Committee, which means we do not have parliamentary privilege—which every now again I need to remind the 15 MPs and 15 Peers who are its members. Our entire duty is to scrutinise the Measures of General Synod before they reach both Houses of Parliament. The right reverend Prelate gave the exact date, 2003, when there was last a finding by a previous committee of a Measure being inexpedient. Since then, every Measure passed has been accepted by the committee that I now chair.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester for introducing the Measure and to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, for setting out the work that the committee that she chairs and that Members, from your Lordships’ House and another place, have done as part of the scrutiny.
As the right reverend Prelate says, the Measure has been a long time in the making. It was first proposed in 2020 and originally approved by General Synod in 2025, but one can go back even further, because, as he and others have said, it implements the recommendations that were made by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead set up when she was the Home Secretary, in 2014, when I had the privilege of working for her as a special adviser.
Like many noble Lords, I was moved and impressed to hear the discussion between my noble friend and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, who took part in the “Today” programme—my noble friend guest edited it over the Christmas period—talking about the extensive work that the Church has been doing to make sure that it is delivering for victims and survivors of abuse and speeding up the processes that it has to investigate questions of conduct. It is to be commended for that and for the attitude reflected by the comments of the right reverend Prelate that this is still ongoing work and that there is always more to do to make sure that the processes are working for victims and survivors. Our first thoughts must be with all of them today, as they have been in the debates throughout this Measure.
As we heard, slightly unusually, the Measure was first declared not expedient by the Ecclesiastical Committee. The dialogue between the two parliamentary bodies is a good one when looking at important Measures such as this. I welcome the engagement of the Church on that.
I have a few questions that relate to the changes that have been made to Section 31(3) and the central question of whether the court and tribunal hearings will now happen in public. I completely agree with what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said about the importance of transparency and accountability, and can understand why that change has been made, but these are complex issues that we are dealing with, and the Church is not a regular employer and this is not a regular type of job; this is a vocation and much broader. We ask a lot of our clergy; it is not a nine-to-five job or a Monday-to-Friday job either.
As the Measure sets out in Section 3(1)(d), the meaning of misconduct can include
“conduct which fails to meet the standards required of a clerk in Holy Orders”,
which is a broad term. As the Measure later sets out, supporting a particular political party or even voicing that support can be drawn into it. If a clerk in Holy Orders is divorced, they must tell their bishop within 28 days. Of course, some clergy are not permitted to marry: if you are a gay cleric, you are allowed to form a civil partnership, but it must be a celibate one. These are sensitive issues that do not apply to regular workplaces.
Can the right reverend Prelate say a little about whether allegations of previous relationships that clergy might have had would be covered by the hearing in public or by the new provisions of Section 31(3)(b)? These allow future rules to set out circumstances where, in sensitive cases, they can be heard without some of the prurient details of people’s private lives being brought into it. That would be useful to hear.
The Living Ministry study has found that, of clergy surveyed, 40% feel isolated in their ministry, 41% feel demoralised and 35% have shown signs of mild or clinical depression. Speeding up the system is good for those who are accused, as well as for those who bring complaints. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, I welcome the provisions on vexatious complaints. I agree with her about not being speedy in our litigiousness and sorting things out in a human way, as well as having these proper and formal structures to investigate more serious complaints.
We all appreciate that this is a deeply sensitive and complex area. We are appreciative of the work that has gone into this, in the General Synod and the Ecclesiastical Committee here. I note in the report that the committee is picking up the point about the Henry VIII powers. We are strict with Governments in this House on that and, seeing as it is to Henry VIII that we owe the existence of the Church of England, we will be no more sparing in our criticism of secondary powers with the Lords spiritual.
If the right reverend Prelate can say a bit about that, we would welcome it. I thank him and colleagues for the work that they have done and look forward to this new Measure delivering speedier justice for victims and those accused alike.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this short debate and for the questions that have been raised. I particularly thank the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, for the scrutiny that she and her committee have given to this matter. I would be grateful if she could pass that on to the committee when it is next in session.
The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, referred to IICSA. I was another person who gave evidence in person at IICSA. I was the expert on Anglican religious monastic communities before IICSA. It was a gruelling experience to hear some of the horrific things that had been done by people who were claiming that this was an expression of monastic life when it was far from it. The noble Baroness asked about review and reporting structures. Under the existing Clergy Discipline Measure, there is a clergy discipline commission. Similarly, there will be a clergy conduct commission as part of the new Measure, which will constantly review how the Measure is working and whether it needs tweaking here or there. It will produce regular reports to the General Synod, as its predecessor has done. That will allow us to keep the Measure under review at all times.
This raises the question, as the noble Baroness said, of how you make minor changes. We hope that minor changes will largely be made to the rules or to the code. The rules will be laid before Parliament under the negative procedure, if I recollect correctly, so there will be an opportunity for Parliament to comment if there are issues with them. Minor changes that way can be dealt with fairly quickly. I expect that at some time in its life the Measure will need more substantial amendments: that has been the case with the existing Measure. It was produced in 2003, but a number of amendments have been made to it in the years since—particularly in areas around safeguarding, not least so that in safeguarding cases the one-year rule of timing out complaints did not apply. We are extending that in the new Measure to all things that fall at the serious misconduct level, rather than just those that are about safeguarding abuse.
Safeguarding is well integrated. We are going through a process, diocese by diocese and cathedral by cathedral, of independent audits by the INEQE organisation. Manchester gets its turn in May of next year. I have been struck by how positive many of those reports have been as they have come out. They have shown a very different picture of safeguarding in the Church of England today from what it clearly was sometimes in the past. While we are not complacent and those reports are providing us with further areas of work to do, we are conscious that significant progress has been made. That external scrutiny by an organisation that has nothing to do with the Church of England I am sure will continue on a regular basis. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, that there will be that kind of auditing of what is going on, and not the Church marking its own homework.
Again on safeguarding, earlier this year your Lordships’ House approved the safeguarding redress Measure. I was the vice-chair of the committee that produced that Measure. Once it is completed, the legal processes will offer a means of redress that is far beyond anything that has been possible before. It picks up much of what was in the IICSA report. IICSA did suggest that government might want to have some sort of redress scheme. We have not seen that yet from Governments of either party, but we have seen that from the Church of England.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, reminded us that having the hearings in public is one way of giving the public confidence in how matters are being dealt with. But the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, rightly asks what we do about matters where the interest might be prurience, or where details are discussed where a member of the clergy has a failing in some respect that is not necessarily appropriate for airing in public. Under the existing Measure it is done in private, and I have not yet seen a complaint of that nature ever brought to me in the many complaints I have had to deal with over more than 25 years as a bishop. There will be provision under the new system, and the rules will specify in greater detail that cases, or parts of cases dealing with such details, can be heard in private. That will allow sensitive details to be handled, for matters that should not be coming into the public domain. I hope the noble Lord will accept my assurances on that.
If this was a nine-to-five job, I would have gone home quite a while ago. It is not, but it is one I owe to King Henry VIII, because I sit in this House and indeed in my see by virtue of powers appropriated by the Crown that previously to Henry VIII belonged to the papacy. I have much for which to be grateful to the late King. I hope that with those comments, your Lordships will feel it right to let this go through.