No-deal Brexit: Schedule of Tariffs

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Monday 7th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I reiterate what I said at the start of this exchange, which is that people who arrived after it began should not stand and expect to be called—[Interruption.] No, no. No matter how illustrious they are, and irrespective of the exalted office that they occupy. Other Members of this—[Interruption.] Order. I am not debating the point with the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil). I am telling him what the situation is, and that is the end of the matter.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

One of the most successful exports from my constituency is Penderyn whisky, which comes from a small village in the Brecon Beacons. If the Minister went to Wales, he must have discussed the situation of an industry such as that with Baroness Morgan. Penderyn is obviously concerned about the impact on its export potential.

Arms Export Licences (Saudi Arabia)

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Thursday 26th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

First I call the longest-serving member of the Committees on Arms Export Controls—Ann Clwyd.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Does the new Minister realise that it took almost a year, at the start of this Parliament, to set up the Committees on Arms Export Controls because the Government dragged their feet—and, I would say, dragged their feet deliberately? I am sick of hearing about “rigorous and robust”—this is neither rigorous nor robust. Representatives of the various parties in the Saudi-led coalition were recently at the arms fair. Can she give us an assurance that no new undertakings or contracts were agreed to service or export new goods to the countries involved in the coalition in Yemen?

Iran

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Wednesday 25th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I am keen to accommodate colleagues, but I am also keen to proceed to the next statement as close as possible to 6.30 pm. I am sure that colleagues will take their cue from that and will be admirably succinct.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

It was not always the case that we slammed Iran in this Chamber; 25 years ago when I stood at the Dispatch Box, I in fact congratulated Iran on helping to save the Kurdish population who were fleeing across the mountains. The Turks shut the borders and the Iranians opened the borders, so at that time we were congratulating Iran on its moves. But may I say, as somebody who has campaigned for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, that we are all concerned about the deterioration of relationships and that I would like to know exactly what we are doing? It is very vague; we are all having talks here and there. Did the Prime Minister come to some agreement with the Iranian President when he met him yesterday? What is physically being done to get Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and the other dual nationals out of jail?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Tuesday 3rd September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I will allow the next question—on the grounds that extreme brevity is required.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

11. Which (a) Ministers and (b) officials in his Department plan to attend the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition in London in September 2019.

Spring Statement

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Wednesday 13th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. We need to speed up, because I want to accommodate colleagues. Can we have a one-sentence question?

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I, too, want clarity from the Chancellor. When he talked about environmental spending in England, did he mean only England, or England and Wales? Will a certain amount of money be given to Wales? When I was first elected, 35 years ago, my constituency had one of the worst industrial polluters in the whole UK. It has left us with 27 acres of derelict land at the bottom of a valley, and a lot of wasted investment. Will he please help us to get that toxic waste cleared up and taken away so that the land can be made suitable for people to use?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Wednesday 27th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Short questions and short answers, please.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

Jim Callaghan, a Labour Prime Minister, brought thousands of jobs to Ford in south Wales. Why is a Tory Prime Minister taking those jobs away?

Points of Order

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Monday 4th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. You will be aware of reports that the Government were offering Labour MPs in economically challenged areas financial support for constituency projects in return for support for the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal. I oppose the Prime Minister’s deal, and there are no circumstances in which I would support it. If reports are correct, my area would therefore not qualify. Can you confirm that targeting individual constituencies in that way raises issues of hybridity, if targeted offers are accompanied by legislation?

“Erskine May” states that the House resolved on 22 June 1958:

“That it is contrary to the usage and derogatory to the dignity of this House that any of its Members should bring forward, promote or advocate in this House any proceeding or measure in which he may have acted or been concerned for or in consideration of any pecuniary fee or reward.”

Will you consider whether a reward includes a benefit to a Member’s constituency? It is arguable that a Member may be under pressure from constituents to accept a reward in the form of targeted support and may thereby be under pressure to vote in a particular way to secure the Government’s offer of reward. Must the offer be made to all economically challenged areas, irrespective of the way a Member chooses to vote on the Prime Minister’s deal?

“Erskine May” states on page 265:

“Conduct not amounting to a direct attempt improperly to influence Members in the discharge of their duties but having a tendency to impair their independence in the future performance of their duty may be treated as a contempt.”

Surely the Government’s offer breaches that principle. Will you consider that matter?

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for her characteristic courtesy in giving me advance notice of her intention to raise this subject, though not of the particular question that she had in mind. About that latter fact I make no complaint whatever; I simply say it for the benefit of people understanding the context. I knew that she wished to raise the subject, but I did not know precisely what she wished to put to me.

What I will say to the right hon. Lady off the top of my head is as follows. I am not altogether clear that the criterion of hybridity is satisfied by the circumstances she referred to, but I am happy further to reflect on the matter. On the matter of contempt, which is an extremely serious charge, if any right hon. or hon. Member seeks to level that charge against any Member, including a Minister, allegations of contempt have customarily to be raised with the Chair in writing. If the right hon. Lady is moved to allege contempt on the basis of her own conviction and from her study of “Erskine May”, she is perfectly welcome to write to me about the matter, and I will consider it.

It is obvious to me that the right hon. Lady regards the circumstances she has alluded to as, at the very least, very smelly, and that point of view will be shared by many people. That is not necessarily the same as a procedural or other impropriety, but it is very clear that she regards it as malodorous behaviour. It is for individual Members to decide how they vote on these important matters. As ever in this House, it is not unusual for others to seek to persuade Members to vote one way or another, or for Members to seek to negotiate political outcomes or ministerial undertakings.

I must say that the notion of a trade is a source of concern. I have not witnessed it in this way previously in my time, and it is a matter of concern. I weigh my words carefully because I do not want to make a hasty judgment. The right hon. Lady has raised an extremely serious matter, and she does so on the basis of very long experience in the House. I am not sure—I say this with caution—that she is alleging any specific financial impropriety, but if she were, that would again be a most serious matter. If she does have such concerns, beyond what I have already said to her, she may wish to seek the advice of the Comptroller and Auditor General. I will leave my response to the right hon. Lady there for now.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I am calling the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) in spite of time constraints. I know that she will ask a commendably brief question.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

12. If he will hold discussions with Ministers in the Welsh Government on investigations into the deaths and stillbirths of babies under Cwm Taf University health board.

No Confidence in Her Majesty’s Government

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Wednesday 16th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I am going to read a letter from a constituent—a real person—that I received this morning by email:

“Dear Ann Clwyd MP

I am your constituent and I am deeply concerned at what Brexit uncertainty is already doing to our country. No form of Brexit commands a majority among politicians. There is only one sensible road left to pursue, and that is to take the decision back to the voters and let us decide.

Parliament is deadlocked. The government’s version of Brexit has failed and been rejected by Parliament. Two years of uncertainty, divisive argument and no clear solutions to the country’s biggest problems has got us nowhere.

Best for Britain’s new research, carried out in partnership with HOPE not hate, proves 60% of people now want the final say on Brexit. Every region now supports letting the people decide. I have included the regional results below.

I would appreciate it if you could reply to this message to tell me: Do you support giving the people the final say on the Brexit deal, with the option to stay in the EU?

Please understand the strength of my feeling on this issue. There is no majority in Parliament for any form of Brexit. While Parliament is in deadlock, the country is uniting around a referendum to resolve it. Please give us the final say.”

My constituent then lists the proportion in support of a public vote on Brexit by region and country:

“East of England, 56.00%

East Midlands, 56.80%

London, 67.60%

North East, 59.80%

North West, 61.20%

South East, 57.80%

South West, 55.10%

West Midlands, 57.90%

Yorkshire and Humber, 58.90%

Scotland, 67.70%

Wales, 60.30%”.

He finishes with:

“Yours sincerely,

David Matthews

Cilfynydd, Wales”.

My answer to him is: I support a referendum and I want to stay in the European Union.

[Mr Speaker]

A three-minute limit is now to apply.

NHS Complaints System: Wales

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Wednesday 4th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to talk about something that has been on my mind for a long time.

It is nearly six years since the death of my husband. Some Members will know that he spent his last two weeks on the respiratory ward at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. He was admitted on Tuesday 9 October 2012 to what should have been a caring and safe place. Instead, what we found was the opposite. I left Owen in what I thought was a place of safety, thinking that the hospital could care for him better than we could at home. How wrong I was. Owen went into the hospital mobile, yet spent two weeks crammed in a bed, on a cold, uncaring ward.

Despite the poor care that Owen received, his condition initially settled. In fact, there were provisional plans for him to come home towards the middle of the second week. Sadly, his condition took a turn for the worse. In the early hours of Monday 22 October, I was advised that there was no reasonable chance of his surviving. He lost his final battle the next day. It was then that my battle began: the battle to find out what had happened to him and why.

Many Members will have heard of my concerns regarding the 27 hours he spent on a trolley in the A&E department. A later inquiry identified a number of nursing deficiencies. Sadly, my efforts to obtain information regarding his medical care have been met with considerable obstruction from the board of UHW.

Some time ago, I received help from an experienced NHS consultant, someone who has prepared numerous cases over a period of 30 years when there are allegations relating to clinical negligence. He said—we normally converse in Welsh:

“Ann, roedd gofal Owen yn esgeulus. Hyd yn oed pe fyddai wedi goroesi ei salwch y tro hwn, byddem yn dal I deimlo fod ei ofal yn esgeulus. Yn esgeulus nid yn unig yn ôl safon 2012 ond yn ôl safon 1948, amser dechrau’r Gwasanaeth lechyd.”

That is, in his opinion, Owen’s care during his hospital stay was negligent. In fact, he said that even if Owen had survived his in-patient stay, his level of care would be considered unacceptable, not only by the standards in place in 2012 but by the standards in place at the inception of the NHS in 1948.

My medical friend has pointed out his concerns. He was astonished to find that no doctor saw Owen on either weekend, no consultant saw him and no junior doctor saw him. I should point out that he was on a respiratory ward in Wales’s flagship teaching hospital. He was not in a convalescent ward; he was not recuperating from an acute illness. My late husband was an unwell man with MS, whose long-term disabilities had been made worse by what turned out to be pneumonia that he acquired at that hospital.

Most concerning, according to my medical friend, was the failure of the medical department to have any kind of effective handover arrangement, whereby the doctor going off duty would hand over all the clinical information to the doctor coming on duty. Formal handovers are far more important these days, as the shift systems of junior doctors means reduced hours. This means that over a weekend a patient may be seen by half a dozen different doctors, all working for the same firm.

Since continuing my inquiries about Owen’s care, I have learned a number of medical terms. I now know about a “low grade temperature” and that this may indicate that there is an infection somewhere, without the doctors being able to find out exactly where. I have also become familiar with the term “inflammatory markers”. Inflammatory markers are blood tests that indicate the presence of infection. When the clinical markers change, and in particular when they increase, it suggests that there is an infection somewhere that is not under control. I will refer to just two.

One is known as the CRP—the C-reactive protein. The normal CRP is less than 10; Owen’s CRP was 22 on admission. Now, 22 is not particularly high, but it suggests that there may be an infection somewhere. Eight days later Owen’s CRP had crept up to 41. The fact that it was increasing—“going the wrong way” as the medics would put it—indicated that he could have an infection that could be going out of control. Owen’s neutrophil count—the type of white blood cell that increases during an infection—was also “going the wrong way”. The normal is less than six. It was 8.7 on his admission—[Interruption.] Excuse me, Mr Speaker; I am sorry, but that is my phone.

[Mr Speaker]

That is an extraordinary musical intervention on the right hon. Lady, but I am not sure it is up to her high intellectual standards—but the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) has come to the rescue, being a selfless public servant as he is.

[Ann Clwyd]

The normal is less than six; it was 8.7 on Owen’s admission, and eight days later it was 10.6.

Doctors will tell us that they do not just look at the results of blood tests; they also look at the patient. In Owen’s case, they failed to look at the blood tests and they failed to look at the patient. Members will no doubt be surprised to hear that although Owen’s inflammatory markers had increased during his second week in hospital, this was not recorded in his clinical notes. The tests that noted the increase in CRP and the neutrophil count were done on the Friday. That was four days before his death from hospital-acquired pneumonia. No one saw the results. No one saw Owen. No doctor saw him on Saturday. No doctor saw him on Sunday. By Monday, it was too late. I think it is reasonable to assume that if Owen had received effective antibiotics when his inflammatory markers were increasing, he would have stood a fighting chance and would have survived that infection.

I continue to be shocked by the way the hospital board has dealt with my concerns. Members might have heard of so-called independent reports. There was nothing independent about this particular report. All the members were employees of the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. The chair was the deputy nursing director, Mandy Rayani. The board’s investigation failed to comment on the medical deficiencies that I have mentioned, but it very quickly acknowledged my “adverse perception” of what happened.

Most of my claims of poor care were denied. Of the 31 concerns that I raised, 21 were rejected. This was despite the fact that a few weeks after my husband’s death, Health Inspectorate Wales, the body that inspects Welsh hospitals, visited the ward where my husband had been a patient. While it was inspecting the ward, it noticed that senior nurses went off for their lunch leaving patients who needed assistance to eat without any help, that some patients were found without buzzers to call for assistance, and that individual care plans were not in place for the patients, yet my concerns were dismissed as my “adverse perception” by the deputy director of nursing, Mandy Rayani, in UHW’s so-called independent report.

I remain unhappy with the attitude of the health board. When Owen died, the chief executive was Adam Cairns. He has now left the country and is working in the middle east. When he left, I took my complaint up with other executives and I have found—as I did when I was writing my report for the Government on hospital complaints—that the culture of deny, delay and defend has continued.

I wrote to Maria Battle, the chair of the health board. I wanted to know why no one had spotted the abnormal blood results. I wanted to know why Owen’s low grade temperature did not appear to be of concern to anyone. The first meeting was postponed. We eventually met on 2 August last year. Despite my PA telephoning the board to ask for a copy of its response a week earlier, my medical colleague and I were not allowed to see the report until we arrived in the building for our meeting. I was astonished to hear Ruth Walker, the senior nurse, saying that she had taken it upon herself not to release the report prior to the meeting. I would have expected such a decision to be made by Maria Battle as chair of the board, by Dr Graham Shortland, the medical director, given that the matters mainly related to medical care, or by Dr Sharon Hopkins, who at that time was the acting chief executive.

I believe that the decision of the board to refuse to release this document beforehand reflects its dismissive, insulting and gratuitous attitude to members of the public and to the families of loved ones. It reflects the overall cover-up mentality that is all-pervasive in this health board.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

The right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) has perambulated away from her normal position, but we are nevertheless delighted to see her.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I agree with the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) that thousands of journalists, as well as thousands of academics and other individuals, are being held without trial in jail in Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of people are being held without trial in prison there, including political leaders and members of Parliament. I ask the Foreign Office to be robust in its discussions with President Erdoğan on the safety of those people and their right to a fair trial.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Tuesday 21st November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

The right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) should not worry; I have preserved her contribution for the belated adoration of the House.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. What assessment has the Foreign Office made of the current political situation in Cambodia?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ann Clwyd and John Bercow

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

With exemplary brevity, Ann Clwyd.

[Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Given the historical child abuse in north Wales, will Ministers now place in the Library the unredacted copy of Lady Macur’s report on the Waterhouse inquiry, which relates to many of the children involved?