Deep Seabed Mining

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the integrated review quite rightly stresses the need to be an international lawmaker, and the United Kingdom should play a vital part in that. Given that the International Seabed Authority is part of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and that the United States has still failed to ratify that convention, will the Government use COP 26 and any other forum to ensure that the United States signs up to these international agreements?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Baroness is quite right: the US is not part of the UNCLOS treaty; a number of other states are also not part of it. Of course we continue to engage with all our friends and partners internationally to encourage them to take part in these initiatives.

Post Office Update

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Monday 24th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

It is for the Post Office to determine the next steps, but Ministers are closely following the situation. We are keen for it to act as speedily as possible and get on with the process, as we all want to see these people fairly compensated.

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the Minister is making a valiant attempt at defending the split between the Government as a shareholder and allowing the Post Office to conduct its own operations in relation to compensation. The path we are currently going down is only adding insult to injury. To say that the outcome of the inquiry can be used for future compensation claims and further civil action simply delays wrong being put right. I urge the Minister to reconsider this and not hide behind the operational and shareholder split on this issue.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I assure the noble Baroness that I am not trying to hide behind anything. I totally accept that the Government need to accept their share of responsibility, as do the Post Office management and Fujitsu, but all these matters will be brought out. That is what the inquiry is for: to determine what went wrong, what lessons can be learned and who was responsible. So we need to wait for that inquiry. But as I have said, we want to ensure that the compensation process proceeds as swiftly as possible.

Post Office Court of Appeal Judgment

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The Government are committed to fully cooperating with Sir Wyn’s inquiry; whatever information or access he needs will of course be provided. I am not sure whether we have submitted evidence, but I will certainly get back to the noble Lord on that. As I said, the inquiry is making swift progress and we look forward to receiving Sir Wyn’s report. However, as I said in my earlier remarks, if there are instances of any stakeholder in this area not co-operating, we will certainly not hesitate to take further action.

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the tragedy of this case is not just the length of time it took to put this wrong right but the number of players who individually felt they had nothing to answer for other than just to say that they were sorry, which is not sufficient. We need to find out why this happened.

I return to the issue of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. It was set up as a royal commission to speed up the process in the wake of the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and a number of serious miscarriages of justice. When you look up the funding structure of that body over the years, we see a combination of increased workload and reduction of funding. The very least that we can do is to fund it so that it can perform its function as it was set up to do, and not allow this sub-postmasters miscarriage of justice to be added to that list of grave injustices which have not been righted in the proper way.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

As I said in my answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, we support the work of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which does some powerfully valuable work in its independent investigating of possible miscarriages of justice. I know that it has worked hard to complete the review into the Post Office Horizon cases with the necessary speed and thoroughness. However, as I said to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, we will pass on the remarks of a number of noble Lords to the Ministry of Justice to see what more can be done to support its work.

Industrial Strategy Consultation

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

The Chair of the Education Committee is absolutely right. I hope that he and his Committee might make a contribution to the consultation to help us as we establish precisely that pathway, which starts in school but goes beyond people’s commencement of work, because people often need to retrain and take on new skills during their working life.

[Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)]

I welcome the desire to transform technical education—something of a recurring theme ever since the days of Prince Albert. In trying to help the Secretary of State to make it a success this time, may I ask him to pay greater attention to the 14 to 19-year-olds at university technical colleges like the one at Aston University? Could I persuade him to give the training levy to the newly elected regional mayors, who can then make strategic training decisions that are appropriate to the regions they represent?

[Greg Clark]

The right hon. Lady makes two important points. First, as others in the past have recognised, it is vital to recognise the importance of technical education and to improve it, and that is certainly our intention. On the particular proposal that she mentions, if she would care to discuss it with me, we could feed it into the consultation.