Oral Answers to Questions

Cat Smith Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman makes a series of important points. It is quite right that some political activists have been leafleting on the ground in a way that current rules do not allow for, and we deprecate that across the House. His broader point is right as well, of course; we must make sure that our democratic processes are free from any taint of interference. He is also right that the role of property developers needs to be scrutinised when we are looking at how we clean up our politics, and I know that he will be as eager as I am to make sure that Unite the union does so as well.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

The advice that came from the Government this week on local elections was welcome; however, the most innovative idea appeared to be to bring your own pencil to the polls, so I would like to ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster two specific questions.

The first is on the use of schools as polling stations. Many schools are having to use school halls for teaching, which would not normally have to happen. What support will the Government give local registration officers to find appropriate venues with appropriate ventilation?

The second question is on the issue of elections falling into different areas of the tiering system, which may well be in place by May. Might there be an unfair political advantage to one candidate if the restrictions were lesser in one area than another?

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Lady raises two important questions. The first is with respect to schools. The Minister for School Standards, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), will be writing to local authorities and schools today, alongside Ministers in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, to outline how schools can be used in a safe and appropriate way, but we are also making funding available to local authorities so that alternative venues other than schools can be used where appropriate.

The hon. Lady’s second point, relating to unfairness as a result of different restrictions perhaps occurring in different local government areas, is an important one, and one that we are taking into account as we plan for these local elections.

Elections: May 2021

Cat Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office if he will make a statement on the May 2021 elections.

[The Minister for the Constitution and Devolution (Chloe Smith) [V]]

Safe and secure elections are the cornerstone of any democracy, and Parliament’s decision, as set out in primary legislation, is that these polls should go ahead in May. Due to the pandemic, many of these elections have already been delayed by a year, but voters have a right to be heard and to decide who governs them. During the pandemic, local authorities will have taken many serious decisions impacting directly on residents, on matters from council tax to road closures, and those are important issues on which elected representatives should be held to account.

Given the situation, however, we are, as the Prime Minister set out last week, keeping this position under review. Any change would require very careful consideration, including by this House, and would need to be based on robust evidence. There should be a high bar for any delay.

I remind the House that we have already seen polls go ahead despite coronavirus, in this country—for example, council elections in Edinburgh and Aberdeen—and internationally, with other countries holding general elections. Since the announcement of the postponement of the 2020 elections, we have been working towards holding them in a covid-secure manner, and we will put in place a strong set of measures to support this. Voters have a choice as to how they participate in elections—at the polling station, by proxy or by post. We want to maintain that choice, but we recognise that the pandemic may change people’s needs and preferences. We actively encourage anybody who is shielding or who would prefer not to attend a polling station to apply for an absent vote instead of going in person. We will bring forward additional measures to support absent voting, including extending the ability to appoint a proxy, so that anybody who might be affected by covid-19 in the days before the poll is still able to make their voice heard. The Government this week set out our plan to roll out vaccines at pace, which will ensure that the most vulnerable are protected and provide a route map towards relaxing the restrictions when safe to do so.

We have worked closely with the Electoral Commission on the production of guidance to aid all involved. This guidance is based on the latest public health advice and will be updated as necessary ahead of the polls. We have been working across Government to ensure that any activity required for participation in and the delivery of the polls is technically allowed under covid regulations. I thank local government officials, who have stepped up to the mark enormously in dealing with new and challenging issues, in many cases since last March. That should be recognised. We are grateful to them for all the work they have done, and we will continue to work closely with them and all involved in elections to support them in delivering the elections successfully.

Finally, hon. and right hon. Members will know very well the importance of campaigning and providing information to voters. As well as the technical aspects of elections, voters rightly expect that campaigning activity should only be carried out safely. I can confirm that the Government have also worked with the parliamentary parties panel to ensure that we are aware of the views from political parties, and we will continue to do that. We recognise the importance of parliamentary scrutiny of this area. We will continue to keep the House updated on the preparations for the safe holding of these elections, which are an important upcoming moment in our shared civic life.

[Cat Smith]

It is a pleasure to see the Minister respond to the urgent question. I wish her well with her continued recovery.

As the Minister set out, elections have been suspended for more than a year, and a record number of polls are now set to take place on the same day, with every elector able to cast a ballot in one election or another. It is deeply disappointing that the Government have failed to provide clarity on how these polls will be covid-secure.

Clarity is urgently needed by local councils, electoral staff, candidates, campaigners and, of course, the public. This is yet another example of the Conservative Government being too slow to act. Ministers have had many months to make the necessary changes to protect our democratic process. Instead, they are treating these elections like business as usual. Across the world, countries have demonstrated that elections can take place safely with the right safety measures in place. National elections were held in the US, New Zealand, Singapore, Iceland and Lithuania last year. Labour has consistently called for safer voting methods to be introduced, including voting over multiple days and an all-postal ballot. Will the Minister explain why the Government have taken no action so far? Will she also confirm whether the Conservative party chair took advice from Conservative party candidates about the timeframe for a possible delay? The scheduling of elections should come above party political advantage.

Will the Minister confirm, in no uncertain terms, that these elections will not be postponed in an irresponsible, last-minute U-turn? Unless councils are informed of changes in good time, unnecessary expenditure will be wasted on the printing of poll cards and other preparatory work. Given the crippling Government cuts, councils simply cannot afford to be caught on the hoof here. Electoral staff have expressed deep anxiety about running these elections safely without additional funding, so will the Minister produce clear guidance and training for local authorities about how to make polling stations and the count covid-secure?

High numbers of electoral staff are volunteers, with many in the high-risk category under covid-19 guidance. Does the Minister expect at-risk people to risk their health to support the safe running of these elections? The Welsh Labour Government have been working to ensure that elections can still go ahead safely. What steps have the Government taken to co-operate with the devolved nations? Finally, does the Minister share my concern that the Government’s lack of preparation will force many people to choose between their health and their right to vote?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Before I call the Minister to answer, let me say that the hon. Lady took rather longer than the time allocated to her. I simply warn everyone taking part in the statement today that I will not allow long questions or speeches from people who are meant to be asking questions. I know that the Minister will give short answers. I am determined that in one hour, we will get all 25 people on the Order Paper in to ask their questions. If we do not, those who do not get to ask their question can blame those who took too long in asking theirs.

Covid-19

Cat Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 6th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I fully understand the point that my right hon. Friend makes. I am sure that it will be borne in mind by the JCVI as it continues to make its judgments.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab) [V]]

The Chancellor announced the financial support package via a 90-second video on Twitter yesterday. With him not coming before the House, it is difficult for us to ask questions, so perhaps the Prime Minister will help. Yesterday’s announcement about grants did not say how long this new one-off grant support is intended to last. Will the Prime Minister tell us what will happen with business support should the current lockdown have to be extended or the vaccine roll-out delayed?

[The Prime Minister]

I think that the Chancellor was very clear about the £4.6 billion, with its Barnett consequentials, which he announced to the House. I must say, I do not think that anyone could fault the Chancellor for his willingness to come to the House and to explain what we are going to do.

European Union (Future Relationship) Bill

Cat Smith Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 30th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

Today, we are faced with a choice between this flawed deal or no deal. I do not welcome this deal, and there is plenty in it that I do not like, but I accept it. I accept that it is better than no deal. It is the least worst option on offer today. It is the least worst option for business. It is the least worst option for supply chains, for the economy and for jobs. Speaking to local businesses in Lancaster and Fleetwood, they tell me that they are relieved that this deal will provide some certainty, finally, after four-and-a-half years of uncertainty. Although everything in it might not be what they want, at least they have something to work with other than those Government adverts that say, “Get ready for Brexit.”

Let us face it: this deal falls far short of what the Government promised. I want to reserve most of my remarks today to fishing. Vote leave, led by the Prime Minister, promised to secure “an even better deal” than the one that was tariff-free for fishers and that offered full control over access and quota as well as frictionless trade of course. That is important because we export 80% of what we catch, mostly into the EU, and import 70% of what we eat. The industry has called for free unimpeded trade on fish and fisheries products to ensure that supply chain continuity. As we leave the common fisheries policy, it is clear that the Government’s demands in negotiations have been severely watered down in the final agreement that we see today. When it comes to over-promising and under-delivering, this Prime Minister certainly has form. The reality is that the communities, such as my own in Fleetwood, who voted to leave the EU on bold promises about the regeneration of fishing will be left very disappointed.

I want to make a few remarks about the £100 million promise that has come from the Government in recent days and I say this: it had better be more real than the promise of £350 million a week for the NHS that was plastered on the side of a bus. That £100 million will not be enough to truly transform coastal communities up and down these islands who desperately need that investment, and that is the reason why many of them chose to vote to leave the European Union.

I will vote for this Bill today, because the old divisions between leave and remain are over and the two options before us today are leaving with a flawed deal or leaving with no deal tomorrow. I shall cast my vote in the national interest. I do so not because I think that this is a good deal—and I reserve the right to criticise it, which I certainly will be doing in this House—but because I want to put the national interest first, unlike those who play politics by voting down this Bill today.

Oral Answers to Questions

Cat Smith Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

One of the partners we are working with is public health organisations and authorities, and the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: we want to ensure that everyone, whether they are officers or volunteers, is safe. We also anticipate, for example, that we will have extra demands on postal votes and so forth, and we are determined to ensure that we have the supply to meet that demand, but the issues that he raises are at the forefront of our minds.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) set out the scale of these elections very clearly. With less than five months to go until these major polls right across the United Kingdom, I hope the Minister will be able to respond to some questions that are on the minds of electoral administrators, campaigners and, most importantly, voters. Will voters be required to wear face coverings in polling stations? If so, will polling clerks be expected to enforce that, and what resources will they get to do that? If they are not required to wear face coverings, what protections will be put in place to protect staff in polling stations? What steps are the Government taking to ensure that we have adequate staffing at polling stations? As my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) set out—and I do not think the Minister adequately answered his question—so many of our volunteers are from an older demographic, and if the vaccine programme is not sufficiently rolled out, we face a shortage of staff.

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the hon. Lady for raising those issues. Hopefully, we will be in a happier place when the elections arrive because of the vaccination programme, but she raises some important issues. Just as retailers, healthcare settings and so forth have put in place measures to make them covid-secure, whether those are public health-related measures or the enforcement and policing of them, we will do the same at polling stations and at counts. We will ensure that there will still be the transparency that people want through scrutineers and so forth. We will also introduce some slight legislative changes to enable, for example, somebody who has to isolate very close to the election to still be able to cast their vote. We are working through all these issues with those organisations methodically, and we will have those elections. They will be safe, and they will still have integrity.

Public Health

Cat Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

Lancashire is an awful long way from Kent, but, as I follow the right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green), I can say that there are many parallels in the experiences that I have had this weekend with the experiences that he describes with his constituents. Tomorrow, my Lancaster and Fleetwood constituency, along with the whole of Lancashire, goes into tier 3 restrictions. However, from the outset, I want to stress that I do support necessary measures to protect public health, but those measures must have support from local communities, buy-in from local leaders and a support package for our local economies. That would mean that the regulations will be respected by local communities.

I was struck by what the right hon. Gentleman said when he paraphrased one of his constituents, which was that when the rules are stupid, why should we follow them. I feel like I have spent my weekend hearing from constituents who say that it is unfair that Lancaster and Fleetwood has been placed under tier 3 restrictions when the infection rates are far lower than those in the vast majority of London boroughs, which end up in tier 2, and lower than those in neighbouring district councils such as South Lakeland, which is in tier 2, as is the whole of Cumbria. When my constituents see an unfairness and a discrepancy in how these tiers are applied, the kickback tends to be, “Well, why should I follow them?” I have been very clear as a Member of Parliament that my constituents should follow the regulations in tier 3. I do not feel it is fair that they have been put into those restrictions, but it is important that we follow those restrictions in order to ensure that infection rates come down.

I want to set out a state of health picture. I am very grateful to the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust for setting out such a clear and open picture of how my local hospitals are doing. I stress that these are running totals and not validated data. As of last night, our area has had 317 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Currently, three wards are closed at the local hospital and bed occupancy at the Royal Lancaster Infirmary, as of last night. was running at 98%.

I understand the seriousness of this health crisis and this pandemic—all this is having an impact on regular and scheduled operations as well—but the Government really must set out how they believe that these restrictions are going to be effective and fair, because right now the second wave is having a disproportionate impact on the north, particularly when it comes to local businesses. Those businesses have made clear representations to me, as a local Member of Parliament, about the fact that the £20-a-head business support grant, which is a one-off payment to local authorities, will have to stretch for the length of time we are in tier 3 restrictions. For communities such as mine in Lancashire, that money has to stretch the same length of time as it does for, say, Cornwall, which was placed in tier 1 restrictions and had to make it last for just 28 days.

When it comes to the local economy, my constituents are quite frankly annoyed to read reports in papers such as The Sunday Times that London’s economy was taken into consideration when the decision was made to place London into tier 2, but the economy in the north of England was not taken into consideration as one of the five factors. That stinks of one rule for the south and for London and another rule for the north. That is not the message that the Government ought to be sending if they need to bring local communities and local leaders along with them in order for the restrictions to be enforced.

Finally, I stress that in Lancashire we had cross-party consensus among everyone—from the Conservative-run county council to Labour district councils to MPs such as myself—that it would have made sense to look at Lancashire district-by-district rather than county-wide, given that it is such a diverse county that looks in very many directions.

Covid-19: Winter Plan

Cat Smith Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Yes, indeed. I can tell my hon. Friend that local restrictions support grants are still available—£3,000 for every 28 days that a business is forced to close.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

Under the previous tiering system, my constituents in Lancaster and Wyre were frustrated that, although they had infection rates at the bottom of the Lancashire table of infections, they were bound by the rest of the county when it came to the tiering system. Will the Prime Minister reassure my constituents and businesses that operate in my constituency that district councils will be taken into account and consulted when deciding which tiers we are going into?

Oral Answers to Questions

Cat Smith Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Yes, my right hon. Friend makes an important point. While taxation matters are questions for the Chancellor, who will be updating the House shortly on a variety of important fiscal matters, it is nevertheless the case that outside the European Union we can lower VAT in a way that we could not within the European Union—one of the many benefits of Brexit.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

The right to vote independently and in secret should be enjoyed by every voter at an election. I draw the Minister’s attention to the recent report by the Royal National Institute of Blind People about the last general election that found that just one in 10 blind voters and less than half of partially sighted voters were able to cast their vote independently and in secret. What steps are the Government taking to turn around those terrible statistics so that blind and partially sighted voters can enjoy the right that sighted voters have to vote independently and in secret?

Oral Answers to Questions

Cat Smith Excerpts

Thursday 1st October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chloe Smith]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. He and I both know that he is an experienced hand at election matters. I welcome his scrutiny of this question because it is important. We want the elections in May next year to go ahead, because it is extremely important that we are able to continue with our normal way of life as a country, rather than seeing any further postponement of important elections.

I do not take the view that all-postal elections would be a wise move, however, for the following reason. It is principally that we have already seen around the world that elections can be run in person safely during this pandemic. We are confident that that can be the case here as well, and I am doing all the work necessary with the electoral community to make sure that is so. Indeed, I published evidence of that only recently, which I am sure the hon. Gentleman has already seen.

Furthermore, it is an important part of our elections that people can actually choose the way in which they vote—as I have already said, by post, by proxy or in person. We think that it is important to maintain that and that there is not a good enough reason to do otherwise.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

This week, we have seen thousands of Czechs who are quarantined at home participating in regional and Senate elections by voting at drive-in polling stations. From the Minister’s response to my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith), it is clear that this Government have run out of ideas about how to make sure that the May 2021 elections are both covid-secure and innovative to ensure that voter participation is high at these elections. Is it the case that this Government have really just run out of steam?

[Chloe Smith]

No, it is the hon. Lady with those reused arguments.

Draft Representation of the People (Electoral Registers Publication Date) Regulations 2020

Cat Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2020 General Committees

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mrs Miller; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, and I congratulate you on your appointment to the Panel of Chairs. It is a pleasure to have the Front-Bench election teams back together again.

I want to start by making it clear that the Labour party will not oppose the regulations. We welcome the steps that have been taken to give electoral registration officers flexibility in carrying out the annual canvass and publishing electoral registers. The two-month delay of the final deadline is a reasonable step in the circumstances. I put on the record my thanks to EROs, who do an incredibly difficult and stressful job at the best of times, but in the current context, they are doing an incredibly challenging job in difficult times. Asking them to complete the annual canvass to the usual strict deadline during a global pandemic would, of course, have been entirely unfair. The measures are practical and necessary given the health emergency that we face.

I would urge a slight word of caution: an annual canvass has not been completed since the new reform was brought in, and I have serious concerns and questions about whether that light-touch approach to electoral registration could leave troubling gaps in the electoral register. The changes could jeopardise the primary purpose of the annual canvass, which is to ensure that the electoral register is as accurate and complete as possible.

Of course, we know that there are huge issues with electoral registration: in the region of 9 million eligible voters are incorrectly registered and are denied the chance to vote. Will the Minister outline the action that she has taken to remedy that situation and to address the fact that there is a race disparity between different groups in electoral registration? White people are most likely to be on the register, at 84%. According to the Electoral Reform Society, that can drop to nearly 40% for people from other ethnic backgrounds, and of course, millions could join them in being denied their chance to vote if the Government’s voter identity plans come to fruition.

These are all inter-related and vital issues for the integrity of our democracy. I welcome the pragmatic steps taken in this legislation, but there remain some wider trends in electoral registration and participation that the Government must urgently address.