Oral Answers to Questions

John Howell Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

7. What plans he has to ensure that young offenders leave custody better equipped to avoid a life of crime.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

11. What plans he has to ensure that young offenders leave custody better equipped to avoid a life of crime.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

The Government will introduce a new pathfinder secure college in 2017, which will equip young offenders with the skills and qualifications they need to pursue a life free from crime. We are also enhancing education provision in young offenders institutions, and taking steps to improve the resettlement of young people leaving custody.

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[Jeremy Wright]

We want to see a cross-Government approach to this, and my hon. Friend is right to say that many other Departments have an interest in what we are doing. He is also right that a period of stability is vital. It may be a relatively short period of incarceration for those young people, but it is probably one of the few opportunities they have had to be clear about where their next meal will come from and where they are going to sleep, and to give us the space to address some of their significant problems. That is a large part of what we intend to do.

[John Howell]

As well as providing support to young offenders to turn their lives around, will the Minister say what regime is in place so that a young offenders institution becomes a deterrent for going back there?

[Jeremy Wright]

It is certainly important that the environment of a young offenders institution does not encourage those in it to think it is comfortable and to want to go back. For that reason, my hon. Friend will be encouraged to hear that we are looking at changes to the incentives and earned privileges scheme in young offenders institutions, in the same way as we have considered changes in the adult estate. We want to ensure that where young people have access to privileges, they get them only when they have earned them.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Howell Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vara]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for those comments. A considerable amount is being done at the moment. and he will forgive me if I say that I have not reached the relevant page in my briefing pack yet, but I will write to him with the answer, which I hope will satisfy him.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his answer, but how much harder will all these changes make it for rogue bailiffs to operate?

Church of England (Women Bishops)

John Howell Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bradshaw]

My view is that the Church should make every reasonable effort to accommodate those views, but the feeling of the overwhelming majority, both of Synod and of the Church of England, is that concessions have gone far enough. As I shall explain, the danger for opponents is that they may have overplayed their hand at the last Synod, and they will not get a deal as good as the one that was on the table then.

I want to make one more point to those who argue that this is none of our business. Many of us are members of the Church of England, and those who are not have constituents who are. Any Member of Parliament who has had contact with Churches in their constituency in the past two weeks will be aware of the enormous shock and hurt among many Anglicans about the Synod vote. We have had women priests for 20 years. The majority of new ordinands are women. Some of the deans of our great cathedrals are women. The Church has been debating women bishops for years.

Everyone thought that it was a done deal. The dioceses voted 42 out of 44 in favour. In Synod itself, the bishops voted 44 in favour and two against, with two abstentions. Three quarters of the clergy voted yes and even in the House of Laity, 64% voted in favour, but that was 2%—just six votes—short of the required two-thirds majority. If we look at the analysis of those who voted that was helpfully provided by the Thinking Anglicans website, we can see that supporters of women bishops in the House of Laity all voted yes. The blocking minority was made up, as the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) indicated, of opponents from the conservative evangelical and conservative Catholic wings. The composition of Synod is not due to change until 2015, so unless some of those who voted no this time can be persuaded to change their mind, I doubt whether the bishops can be confident of getting a revised Measure through before 2015 under the normal or even an expedited procedure that requires a two-thirds majority in every House.

The only way we might persuade some of the opponents to change sides is by offering them more concessions, but that would be anathema to the majority and would not get through Parliament. There is no guarantee, of course, that if we wait until after 2015, it would be any different.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

Is the right hon. Gentleman as surprised and delighted as I was by a petition that began in one of my smaller villages to try to persuade the Bishop of Oxford to have a shorter, much simpler process in a week? That petition has already gained 1,500 signatures.

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[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

I should begin by declaring an interest, one that is in my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am a church organist. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) rather surprised me last night when he told me that he has left in his will a stipend—hopefully a sizeable one—for me to play at his memorial service when the dread day comes.

The argument has been about Church governance and whether we should let the Church get on with it or take an interest in it ourselves. I am encouraged by the speeches that have been made, because they will allow the church to make its way through to achieving a resolution. When I was asked, prior to Synod, what members attending it should do, I told them to beware of the House of Laity; its members are representatives, not delegates, just as we are, and will vote as they wish. I said that because there is nothing unspiritual in recognising that the Church of England has to indulge in reason and discourse. I pray in aid Richard Hooker, whom the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) mentioned. He established that there were three pillars on which the Church of England rested—scripture, tradition and reason. His firm belief was that God’s purpose can be worked out as much through discourse as scripture and tradition, and that it was therefore absolutely right to indulge in that. I am not going to dissent from that view except to say that this has to be worked out at the level of the parishes, not at Synod level.

I was very much taken by the news that one of my local villages, which has a socking great abbey in the middle of it, but which is quite a small village now, was putting forward a petition to the Bishop of Oxford to try to get in place a simple, smooth process for resolving this issue. Within a few days, 1,500 people, which, by my estimate, is about double the population of the village, had signed the petition and were going to get a move on with it.

I come from a completely different wing of the Church than my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), but I would not dissent one iota from what he said about the way to tackle this and the process that needs to be sorted out.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Howell Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Djanogly]

I have been in correspondence with many of the people whom the hon. Lady mentions, and I repeat that the Government believe that it will still be possible to bring claims against multinational companies once our reforms are implemented.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

8. What steps he is taking to change incentives for claiming compensation.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)]

The Government introduced the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill on 21 June. The Bill contains provisions to take forward a fundamental reform of no win, no fee conditional fee agreements, as recommended by Lord Justice Jackson. These changes will encourage claimants to take an interest in the costs being incurred on their behalf, and will deter frivolous or unmeritorious claims from progressing to court.

[John Howell]

Does the Minister believe that implementing Lord Justice Jackson’s proposals will clamp down on bloated compensation payments, given that in the past some solicitors have profited from cherry-picking claims and are claiming high success fees from defendants, particularly public authorities?

[Mr Djanogly]

My hon. Friend is right to raise the position of public-funded authorities such as the NHS Litigation Authority and local councils, which currently have to pay substantial additional legal costs to conditional fee agreement claimants. We believe that our proposals will ameliorate that position.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Howell Excerpts

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Djanogly]

I can confirm that the Department for Work and Pensions has worked to improve the quality of the original decision making and its reconsideration process so that only appropriate appeals filter through to the Tribunals Service. I am in regular contact with the Department to discuss the matter.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

20. Which organisations he consulted in preparing guidance on the implementation of the Bribery Act 2010.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

I refer my hon. Friend to the answer that I gave in reply to Question 1.

[John Howell]

I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for his comments on statutory guidance. During the Committee stage of the Bribery Bill, there seemed to be little appreciation among Labour Members that there were such things as legitimate promotional activities for companies. Will he ensure that the guidance is both clear and practical?

[Mr Clarke]

I agree with my hon. Friend. My hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), who is now Under-Secretary of State for Justice, led for the Opposition at that time, and I believe that it was Conservative Members—including my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell)—who raised the problems that could be posed for legitimate businesses. It is because of those problems that we need the guidance, and the guidance must make it absolutely clear that ordinary, legitimate promotion—hospitality and similar activities in which people engage in order to project the quality of their company and its products or services, and to establish personal relationships with clients and customers—is all part of international trade. The Bill can be used to tackle corruption without damaging British business at a time of, we hope, revival in our international trade.