Civil Service Pensions
Edward Argar Excerpts(2Â months, 3Â weeks ago)
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Nick Thomas-Symonds
I am very sorry to hear about my hon. Friend’s constituent; it is a tragedy that she passed away only yesterday. I would be glad if she wrote to me about that particular case. The Parliamentary Secretary will look into it personally, because of the nature of what has happened. For that family, and for every other family with an interest in this scheme, we absolutely must restore the level of service that they rightly expect.
Edward Argar (Melton and Syston) (Con)
Sadly, it is not just Capita that is missing deadlines; it is the Government, too. I raised a constituent’s case in ministerial correspondence in mid-February and received a response from the Parliamentary Secretary only on 30 June, four-and-a-half months later. My constituents want a swift solution. Given that the April deadline has been missed and the June deadline has been missed, what confidence can they or this House have that the August deadline will be hit?
Nick Thomas-Symonds
On the right hon. Gentleman’s first point, we will look specifically at why that was the case. It should not have taken four-and-a-half months for him to receive a reply. The Parliamentary Secretary and I will look at the correspondence to see why that has happened. Secondly, on his point about confidence in the new July and August deadlines, what is critical—this is specifically why I am now looking at a range of options—is that we must be in a position where the service is being delivered properly.
Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address
Edward Argar Excerpts(3Â months, 4Â weeks ago)
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Alex Burghart
I congratulate the hon. Lady on taking the opportunity to put that on the record.
This is information that the House deserves to have. In what cases are we dealing with messages that never existed because no messages were sent, as in the hon. Lady’s case? In what cases was there auto-delete, which we know the Prime Minister had, because it was disclosed in the lobby briefing for journalists yesterday? In what cases have phones gone missing and back-ups were not done? In what cases has information been held by the police? It really ought to be possible to know that.
I know that the police and the Government are, to a certain extent, understandably being sensitive about the police investigation. However, it really ought to be possible to say to the House, “X number of messages from the Prime Minister are being held by the police, as well as Y number of emails and Z number of text messages.” There is no way that any of that could possibly interfere with any police investigation, if we know roughly what the police know. We started to move in the right direction on that on Monday, when the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister told us the categories of document that we have, but there must be other ways of giving some guidance to the House on what is being held.
We obviously have a huge amount of material that has been justifiably redacted for reasons of national security and international relations, but that does not mean that we do not have the headings. We often have email headings that say, “There was an email sent on this date from this person to that person.” We cannot see the subject, but we know that the email existed. Why can we not have the same thing for the messages that the Prime Minister sent to Peter Mandelson on this date, that date and the other date? We cannot see them, because they are part of a police investigation or subject to national security concerns. We have a discrepancy between different types of approaches to the disclosure of information.
Edward Argar (Melton and Syston) (Con)
In the context of disappearing messages, is my hon. Friend troubled by the fact that in March 2023, the Cabinet Office issued very clear guidance about the use of non-corporate communications channels by Ministers, special advisers and others? It said that disappearing messages should be used sparingly and that the use of disappearing messages does not in any way supersede the record-keeping obligations of Ministers to communicate to their private office a record of anything on their personal devices that is pertinent to the conduct of Government business.
Alex Burghart
That is entirely true. I believe that the ISC said as much in one of its responses to Government disclosure, saying it was very troubled by the fact that this guidance, which all Ministers are supposed to obey, was routinely being broken.
My right hon. Friend and I were both Ministers at the time when that guidance was brought in, and it was brought in for a very good reason. It was to reflect the fact that there are new communications channels and Ministers will want to use them—some of them are very useful for Ministers—but to make it clear that that should not get in the way of the fact that the system needs to retain a record of how decisions are made and what the decisions are. That has clearly not been done in many cases here, not least, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) pointed out, in the fact that we have a lot of empty boxes and no record of the Prime Minister assenting to the appointment of Peter Mandelson, even though we know that he did.
Oral Answers to Questions
Edward Argar Excerpts(7Â months ago)
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Edward Argar (Melton and Syston) (Con)
The Prime Minister (Keir Starmer)
Four years into Putin’s barbaric assault, the courage of Ukrainians burns bright. We are extending sanctuary to Ukrainians in their time of need and providing the weapons and aid to support them in their fight for a just peace. We are degrading Russia’s economy and planning for a ceasefire that protects Ukraine’s sovereignty. That support will never falter. Yesterday I recommitted to President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people that we stand with them in the fight for freedom, democracy and the values that we all hold dear.
Let me also congratulate Team GB for their superb performance in the winter Olympics. They are brilliant ambassadors for our country, and I know that ParalympicsGB will also do us proud. This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House, I shall have further such meetings later today.
Edward Argar
May I associate myself with the remarks of the Prime Minister in respect of Team GB and Ukraine?
A great former Prime Minister once said,
“You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”
Like the leader of my party today, she was a leader of principle and backbone, but we know this current Government are no stranger to the U-turn. Given that, can I gently tempt the Prime Minister to add one more to the current tally and help get Britain working again by backing the fantastic shops and businesses in Melton Mowbray town centre and in high streets across my constituency and beyond to succeed and grow by scrapping the Government’s business rate changes, which will hit so many of them hard in April?
The Prime Minister
It is good to see the right hon. Member in good form, particularly—if I may say so—after his health scare, which he and I have discussed a number of times.
The right hon. Gentleman discusses a former leader of his party. He was the former Health Minister who presided over record waiting lists; he was the former Prisons Minister who left the prisons overcrowded; and he was the former economy Minister under Liz Truss. We are picking up the mess and turning it around.
Covid-19 Inquiry
Edward Argar Excerpts(2Â years, 2Â months ago)
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Edward Argar (Melton and Syston) (Con)
I thank the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster not only for early sight of his statement, for which I am grateful, but for his tone in how he addressed what is an extremely sobering report—module 1 of nine. I suspect that we will look at many more such sobering reports in the coming months.
I put on the record our gratitude to Lady Hallett and her team for the work that they have done and to all the witnesses who gave evidence, particularly those who had experienced loss and trauma. That evidence was vital, but giving it will not have been in any way easy, given what they had been through. I pay tribute to them. This module, the first of nine, is not only a hugely important piece of work, but the least this country owes to those who lost loved ones in the course of the pandemic.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster rightly talked about how this country came together in the face of an unprecedented event, about which we learned more every day as the country had to adapt to changing knowledge. I join him in paying tribute to emergency workers and all across the country who worked in whatever way to come together and help the country get through, but particularly to those who worked in the NHS and care services and those who lost someone. It was an incredibly traumatic time for the entire country.
What has been set out by the right hon. Gentleman today and by Lady Hallett yesterday is deeply sobering. It lays bare failures of the state in respect of planning, challenge, resourcing and leadership. Irrespective of Government or party in power, it is incumbent upon us all to consider it in the spirit in which Lady Hallett has put forward her recommendations.
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his recognition of the work already done since the pandemic to improve resilience in this country and ensure that we are better prepared for the next one. We started that work in government, having announced the largest overhaul of our resilience structures in decades. We created the resilience directorate within the Cabinet Office, breaking it out from day-to-day crisis management so that it could focus on resilience, horizon scanning and better preparedness. We set up the resilience academy to increase and improve the training of Ministers, MPs, civil servants and all those in civil society who respond to crises. We also announced a new national exercising programme to test our systems.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster highlighted that the focus of previous pandemic preparedness planning was around influenza. It was seen in the context of Operation Cygnus, which was often pointed to as the blueprint of how to prepare for these things. The right hon. Gentleman was right that it focused on influenza, for which we have therapeutics; in the case of the covid pandemic, we did not. As a country and a civil society, we need to look completely across the piece at how we can best prepare for whatever eventuality may occur.
In setting out his next steps, the right hon. Gentleman adopted exactly the right approach; I am grateful to him for that and for his candour. There will be many more lessons still to learn. It is incredibly important for our country, this Government and any future Government that we learn the lessons to ensure that we are ready for future pandemics, however painful those lessons are. I am also grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s commitment to respond swiftly.
I have a few questions for the right hon. Gentleman. What plans does he have to consult the devolved Administrations and local government structures on the detailed changes proposed to how they would operate in the context of a future emergency? What steps will he and the Government be taking to ensure that our emergency planning structures are more cohesively joined up if our country is to face another pandemic?
More importantly, I want to conclude by saying that we stand ready to work constructively and openly with the right hon. Gentleman and the Government in the national interest to ensure that, as a country, we learn the lessons from this module and from Lady Hallett’s future recommendations to build better resilience in our country and ensure that, irrespective of who is in government, the country is better prepared in future. That is the least that all of us in the House owe the country and those who lost loved ones or suffered in so many different ways—those whose mental health suffered, the children who suffered from not being able to go to school, those who suffered from domestic abuse, and those up and down the country who in many ways still suffer from what happened back then.
As I have said, I approach this issue in a spirit of co-operation with the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. I look forward to working with him in the national interest and to building resilience for the future.