Business of the House

Debate between Julian Lewis and Penny Mordaunt

Thursday 23rd May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for using this Business Statement to get on record his thanks and appreciation to all of his colleague. I wish them all well and I thank them for their service to this House.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Thank you for your service to this House, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I place on the record my tribute to the director and staff of the Intelligence and Security Committee for their outstanding dedication and commitment to an area that is particularly important in this difficult and dangerous international environment? May I thank them for the work that they have done on preparing comprehensive annual reports and specialist studies on extreme right-wing terrorism, on the UK’s international intelligence partnerships, and on a very well-received report on China, with a similar one on Iran to follow as soon as the redaction process is complete?

May I just bring to the attention of the Leader of the House the fact that the Committee has resolved that it will no longer be under the aegis of the Cabinet Office? The basic conflict of interest, whereby the careers of the staff of a Committee that oversees bodies that are housed in a Department are in the hands of people in that very same Department, has become unsustainable.

Finally, may I thank the Members of the Committee from all three parties and both Houses, who kept to the tradition of leaving party politics at the door? Despite an unpromising start, when an attempt was made to do away with that important principle, they came together and have shown complete unanimity and dedication to carrying out the work of the Committee, which is necessarily not done in the public view.

[Penny Mordaunt]

I am sure the whole House will join my right hon. Friend in thanking all who enable this very important Committee to carry out its work. It is unseen work, but it is vital. I thank him also for the outputs and those important reports that will strengthen our democracy and protect this nation from those who would do us harm. May I also thank him for ensuring that the Committee can remain properly independent, which he has safeguarded with this new innovation?

Business of the House

Debate between Julian Lewis and Penny Mordaunt

Thursday 16th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I add my congratulations to the hon. Gentleman on remaining Chairman of the Backbench Business Committee, and thank him for all the work he does in that respect. I come here every week to this Dispatch Box with reasons to vote Conservative, and he has furnished us with another one, because we do not want to lose him as Chairman of that Committee. He has my assurance that we are committed to the swift establishment of the Committee. If that cannot be done before the general debate, subject to be announced, that I announced in the business question, we will take a steer from the topics that his Committee has already looked at.

I am very sorry to hear about the disruption to the hon. Gentleman’s constituents’ ability to travel. He will know that that is a concern to this Government. It is one reason why we have brought forward legislation to guarantee minimum service levels in areas such as transport and emergency services. It is incredibly important that industrial action, particularly when it takes place over long periods of time, does not disrupt people’s lives and cause them, for example, to lose their jobs, as has been happening in other parts of the country. I urge him to reflect on whether he could support those measures, particularly for specific sectors, that we will bring forward in this Session.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

About 40 years ago I had an unlikely campaigning role that involved organising counter-demonstrations to certain mass marches, but one area we never had to worry about was the vicinity of Parliament, because no demonstrations were allowed in Parliament Square. The reason given for that was that Members must not be impeded in entering or leaving the Houses of Parliament. Even if demonstrations continue to be allowed in Parliament Square, it should be a common concern to those on both sides of the House that Members find themselves getting advice from their Whips on which exits they cannot use for fear of being mobbed by an unauthorised demonstration that comes right up to the gates of Parliament. This really has gone too far. Sooner or later there will be an incident, unless security on entering and leaving the Houses of Parliament is restored.

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank my right hon. Friend for raising this important matter. It is quite right that Members of Parliament and their staff should be able to go about their business in safety and security, and should not be disrupted in doing so. Mr Speaker was particularly concerned about this even prior to yesterday’s incidents, and has been working with Palace security and other organisations to ensure the safety of Members of Parliament in particular. Since the Deputy Speaker is in the Chair, I shall make sure that Mr Speaker has heard my right hon. Friend’s concerns, and I will ask that my right hon. Friend be kept informed of progress on such matters.

Business of the House

Debate between Julian Lewis and Penny Mordaunt

Thursday 22nd September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I warmly congratulate my right hon. Friend on becoming not only Leader of the House, but Lord President of the Council. In that latter capacity, will she urge the Privy Council not to agree to the proposed change in name of Linacre College, Oxford to that of a Vietnamese billionaire who is proposing to give £155 million to the college? If we want to clean up the dirty money and dodgy donations in this country, that would be a good place to start.

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank my right hon. Friend for raising this matter. I will ensure that the Department for Education has heard what he says. I suspect that that is the more appropriate and swiftest way of resolving the issues of concern to him.

War Widows’ Pension Scheme

Debate between Julian Lewis and Penny Mordaunt

Thursday 30th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

After the knockabout of what was described as the last full debate while Britain is still a member of the European Union, we come to the last actual debate under those circumstances. The scandal—and it is a scandal—that I wish to discuss has absolutely nothing to do with the European Union whatsoever; it is entirely self-inflicted.

I am grateful to Mr Speaker for granting this debate about the sickening mistreatment of a group of 200 to 300 of the people whom we in this place above all should hold in the highest honour—namely, widows of service personnel who died in combat defending this country or as a result of terrorist offences against them because they wore the Queen’s uniform.

Yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) was elected my successor as Chairman of the Defence Committee. He won a worthy victory in a field of five very well qualified candidates, and I congratulate him once again. I take this opportunity to give my thanks to the conscientious Committee Clerks, the gifted Committee specialists and the indispensable Committee administrators, without whom, as he will find, no Committee Chairman could hope to function efficiently.

I should also like particularly to pay tribute to the four Labour members of the 11-person Committee that I last chaired in the previous Parliament who lost their seats: Madeleine Moon, Ruth Smeeth, Phil Wilson and Graham Jones. Like all the other members of the Committee, I never had to give a moment’s consideration to which party they belonged to. All they cared about was their belief in a strong defence for the United Kingdom. They should be very proud of their work on the Committee; I certainly am.

The early general election inevitably left a few inquiries unfinished, but time and again, during the dozens of hearings that we held on two Committees from 2015 right through to the end of 2019, we referred and returned to the atrocious treatment meted out to an estimated 265 war widows who lost their war widow’s pension on remarriage or cohabitation and who still await its restoration.

On 8 November 2014, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced that from April 2015, war widows would be able to continue to claim their war widow’s pension when they remarried or cohabited. That commitment was repeated at Defence questions on 24 November 2014, when I asked the then Minister, Anna Soubry,

“whether it is the case that a war widow who lost her widow’s pension on remarriage but who has subsequently become single again is eligible to have it reinstated and never taken away under any circumstances thereafter?”—[Official Report, 24 November 2014; Vol. 588, c. 644.]

She replied that she thought the answer was yes, but that she might be wrong. I am sure that if Anna is watching this, she will smile when I record the fact that that was probably the only time in her prominent and distinguished parliamentary career that she admitted that she might be wrong about anything.

However, the following day it turned out that the Minister had in fact been right, because she replied in a written answer to two written questions I had tabled on 17 November 2014. She said:

“From 1 April 2015 the spouse or civil partner of all members of the Armed Forces Pension Scheme 75 and any War Pension Scheme widow will retain their pension for life if they have not already surrendered it due to remarriage or cohabitation.

From 1 April 2015 those who have already surrendered their pension due to remarriage or cohabitation can apply to have their pension restored for life, should the relationship end or they cease cohabiting.”

I sent this reply to a remarried war widow, the widow of someone who had been killed liberating the Falkland Islands in 1982, who lived in my constituency. I noted at the time that:

“It seems to me that this will lead to some rather odd situations, given that—once restored—the pension could never again be taken away. Therefore, there may be a perverse incentive for couples to break up in order to have the pension reinstated and then get together again now that it cannot be removed a second time.”

The remarks I am going to make from now on are a continuation of a speech that I made on 22 November 2018. That date in itself signifies how unsatisfactory the situation is. I really should not have to be still banging on in 2020 about the same problem that was fully explored a year ago and more. At that time, I paid tribute to the fact that the Commissioner for Victims and Survivors, Judith Thompson, had—with the assistance of the chairman of the War Widows Association, Mary Moreland, who is present with colleagues today—compiled the testimony of a number of war widows in an attempt to enable me to convey to this House what it really meant to have had their sacrifice acknowledged by the award of a war widow’s pension, only then to have it snatched back on finding somebody with whom to spend the rest of their lives.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for securing this debate. Does he recognise that, as well as that terrible slight, many of these women will have made huge financial sacrifices personally so that their husband could serve, making them very fragile financially, and therefore to ask them to choose between their security and a new partner is not just a disservice to them but also, I would say, a breach of the contract we would have had with that fallen serviceman?

[Dr Lewis]

May I just say that it is typical of my right hon. Friend, a former Secretary of State for Defence, to make sure that she was present today, as she notified me she would be, to make that very point? Indeed, as I would have expected, she goes to the heart of the matter. As we will hear later, what really needs to be done is to stop looking at this award as the award of a pension or a benefit when in reality it is meant to be recognition of and compensation for a sacrifice, which should be untouchable under any circumstances.

In fact, however, that is not the case because, as Judith Thompson, the commissioner, spelled out at the time:

“If your spouse died or left Military or War Service before 31 March 1973 and you also receive the War Pension Scheme Supplementary Pension you keep your War Widow’s Pension for life.”

So if it is before 1973, they are okay. She went on:

“If you were widowed after 5 April 2005 and receive Survivors Guaranteed Income Payment from the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme you keep your War Widow’s Pension for life.”

In between, however, we have this cohort—now reduced to between 200 and 300—of war widows who lost the pension under a change in the rules and have not had it reinstated. I said in that earlier debate that that basically created a perverse incentive for people who, by definition, have already suffered the greatest trauma and tragedy, to part from the person with whom they have found renewed happiness, and go through a charade of this sort if they wish their pension to be permanently reinstated.

At that time, the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson), who sat on the Defence Committee on behalf of the Democratic Unionist party, pointed out an additional perversity, which was that widows of members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who served and died alongside members of the Ulster Defence Regiment and other regiments, had had the issue resolved locally in Northern Ireland. Because members of the Ulster Defence Regiment were in the Army, which is covered by defence and not a devolved matter, their widows had not had that issue resolved, and were still being denied the reinstatement of their war widow’s pension.

I then read extracts from five of seven testimonies—that was all I had time for—from war widows who explained what this issue meant to them. I shall now abbreviate those testimonies, but I urge anyone who is interested in reading the full account of what those five widows had to say to look at the speech from, I believe, November 2018, which can easily be found in the appropriate section of my website—[Interruption.]