Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Benyon and Rory Stewart

Tuesday 23rd January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

We have established specialist teams for prisons that have particular vulnerabilities to drone attacks. I am very happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss some of the legislative issues. I also believe that there is much more we can do on basic issues such as netting and grills, as well as focusing on high technology.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Drones are one of the ways in which mobile phones are got into prisons, where they can be used for criminality alongside drugs. What measures are being taken to use technology to limit the use of mobile phones in prison?

[Rory Stewart]

Two types of technology can be used on mobile telephones. One is jamming technology, and the second, which is more commonly used in prison, is a wand to detect mobile telephones. An astonishing number of phones—at over 20,000, there are far too many—are detected in prisons. We should be addressing this in two ways. The first is by making sure that they do not get in: these are closed environments and we should be able to massively reduce the amount coming in. The second is that, by putting phones in cells to allow people to talk to their families, we can monitor the calls and control the need for phones in the first place.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Benyon and Rory Stewart

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

May I compliment my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on the way in which the tragedy for people in the north-west has been dealt with? Some people have a simplistic view about flooding, seeing it as a binary issue and, for example, saying that dredging works in all cases—we know it does not. There are circumstances where capital schemes such as the Minister has outlined are the solution, but in other cases a more nuanced approach is required. Will her team continue to make the point that every different flood event requires a specific solution?

[Rory Stewart]

First, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who was a distinguished floods Minister and is right in what he says. We need to look also at upstream mitigation, which means the planting of trees, the restoration of poached soils, and examining peat bogs and river movement. This is not only about hard defences, and the work that we will be doing over the next few months will focus exactly on those natural measures.

draft Flood Reinsurance (Scheme and Scheme Administrator designation) regulations 2015 DRAFT FLOOD REINSURANCE (SCHEME funding and administration) REGULATIONS 2015

Debate between Lord Benyon and Rory Stewart

Tuesday 15th September 2015 General Committees

[Rory Stewart]

From the insurance company’s point of view, in the case of the households that are most at risk, Flood Re provides the ability to lay off the flood component of its household and buildings insurance, which for a basic rate council tax payer is in the region of the £220 to £250 mark. There would be no reason for an individual insurance company to make the flood component of its insurance exceed that amount—that is the purpose of the £180 million pot.

I agree, however, with the hon. Gentleman on the basic questions with which he began, and we certainly need to look at this during the next 25 years: building on floodplains, climate change and increasing flood risk. That will have an impact right across the industry.

[Richard Benyon]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. Can I urge the hon. Member for Brent North to be careful about making bland criticisms such as those about building on floodplains? London and York are floodplains. Do the comments apply to those great cities? The issue is about how we build on floodplains and how much flood resistance there is. We can all think of buildings on floodplains that were lunacy and should never have happened—perhaps the Environment Agency was ignored—but such sweeping statements on this important issue need to be qualified carefully.

[Rory Stewart]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is correct. Building on floodplains is a question of doing detailed calculations; the point is not that floodplains cannot ever be built on. Scotland provides a good example in the constraints that it has placed on building on floodplains, but Scotland has certain advantages in terms of population movements and the nature of the land.

As my hon. Friend said, there are technical solutions that allow for building on floodplains in Britain in a more sensible fashion, but most important of all is the natural capital calculation. We need to be much more realistic about looking at the social and economic costs of building on floodplains. What are the likelihoods of a risk? How much is that likely to cost the householder? How much misery and distress is that likely to cause them? What impact might that have on house prices? When all that is taken into account, someone might still, for particular reasons, decide to build on a floodplain. There could be very good reasons to go ahead, but they must ensure they have gone through the due diligence and looked at the potential costs and risks of doing so.

That brings me to my conclusion. This has been a good and testing debate, as I have come to expect from the hon. Member for Brent North, and it means that we are now one step closer to ensuring affordable insurance. I am reassured that the Opposition are not challenging the measures. I think Members across the Committee would agree that the work done over the past few months by my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury, by the insurance industry and by many of our civil servants—who must be both relieved and exhausted at reaching this stage—has brought us to a pretty impressive model.

I would like the United Kingdom to boast about and share this model with the rest of the world, so that others can see how we have addressed the issue in a pragmatic and focused way. We have done it by working with the insurance industry instead of against it. We have included a very broad sweep of universal provision and have taken into account questions of transition. We have set up a 25-year process. All that shows long-term strategic thinking and market focus, which we should be proud of.

I thank the Committee for the opportunity to set out the Government’s approach on Flood Re and the insurance industry for its hard work. This legislative framework is a good model for balancing pragmatic considerations of how a scheme can operate with public policy objectives. I commend the regulations to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the draft Flood Reinsurance (Scheme and Scheme Administrator Designation) Regulations 2015.

Draft Flood Reinsurance (Scheme Funding and Administration) Regulations 2015

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the draft Flood Reinsurance (Scheme Funding and Administration) Regulations 2015.—(Rory Stewart.)

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Benyon and Rory Stewart

Thursday 10th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

Flood Re was established in May and will become operational in May next year. The House will have an opportunity to debate the regulations with me next week.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend reassure me that, as well as the hard engineered projects that will be funded by the large sum of money he has mentioned, there will be soft engineered projects that build on the experience in Pickering, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), which uses natural features such as woodland and coastland wetland areas, which protect coastal communities from flooding? Such schemes can be cheaper and more effective in certain circumstances.

[Rory Stewart]

My hon. Friend has an enormous amount of experience in this area. We can do much more to help on flooding, including restoration of peatland, woodland and wetland areas, which not only benefits flood alleviation, but considerably benefits habitats and the biodiversity that depends on them.

Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Debate between Lord Benyon and Rory Stewart

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend therefore disagree with the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) who said that this is a force that cannot be contained by air attack because it has no presence on the ground? My hon. Friend’s experience would rather suggest the opposite.

[Rory Stewart]

That is a very good question. The answer, of course, is that outside the heartland of the Islamic State, which is basically the Sunni areas of eastern Syria and western Iraq, it is very vulnerable. When it moves across open terrain towards Shi’a-controlled areas around Baghdad or into Kurdistan, it is out miles into the desert. It has nobody to move among. This idea that the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) presented of it swimming among the population makes sense only in the areas around the Sunni triangle—Mosul, Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa—but does not make any sense in the Kurdish and the Shi’a areas. So the notion of containing through air strikes is sensible.

The second issue—because I think almost everybody in the House has agreed to vote for these air strikes—is the much bigger issue of destroying the Islamic State. Here, what has been very impressive in this debate is the caution that has been shown in making promises about our ability to do that. We have been here before. These people whom we are fighting in western Iraq are very, very similar to al-Qaeda in Iraq, whom we fought between 2007 and 2009. We are facing an increased, exaggerated version of the same problem.

Problem No. 1 is that we do not control the borders. That is most obvious in relation to Syria, but we also have a problem with Turkey. Problem No. 2 is that there is no trust currently among the Sunni population in the Government in Baghdad. They will find it very difficult—even more difficult than they did in 2007—to trust us again. The third problem is that there is very limited will among the Iraqi army to get into those areas. The Shi’a elements of the Iraqi army will be reluctant to go into Mosul. Kurds will be reluctant to go into Mosul, and even if they could be convinced to do so, they would find it difficult to hold those areas because they would be perceived as an alien occupying force. That means, therefore, that all the hon. and right hon. Members who have spoken about a political solution and a regional solution must be right, but we cannot underestimate the difficulty of that.

Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

Debate between Lord Benyon and Rory Stewart

Wednesday 14th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

Does my hon. Friend accept, as a general philosophical principle, that one should not micro-manage the detail of a Bill to the extent that is called for in the amendments, because one would end up with endless and voluminous legislation? Does he agree that the issues of apprenticeships and financing are better left to the contracting authorities and to the administration of civil servants, and that if too much of this micro-managing happens on sectoral issues and specific projects, Parliament will be mired in complexity?

[Richard Benyon]

I agree with my hon. Friend. It would be wrong to put in the Bill requirements that might or might not suit today’s world, but that would be wrong for the future. The Government, in negotiations with private sector companies and through the planning process, are involved at many levels in the development of such contracts. We can impose our desires and our will. The companies and the Government can be held to account if they fail on these matters. I believe that to prescribe to such a level of detail would be wrong.

Thames Water is holding the launch for a jobs and skills report in the House on 20 March, to which MPs are invited. Its jobs and skills forum will promote the work that it is carrying out in this area. Thames Water will also look to gain from the experiences of other large-scale infrastructure projects. It is right for the Government to support and encourage Thames Water in those efforts.

Apprenticeships are central to ensuring that our work force are equipped to help build economic growth. There are huge opportunities in the project, if we can embrace them, for Londoners who are seeking work and training to be involved in a really high-profile scheme for a number of years. They can then take the benefits into other sectors and industries. However, we do not feel the need for further legislation to provide that encouragement. Nor is it necessary or appropriate to require the terms and conditions involved to be included in a statutory instrument. For that reason, I ask hon. Members not to press the amendments.

Environmental Protection and Green Growth

Debate between Lord Benyon and Rory Stewart

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon]

I shall certainly look at that situation in my hon. Friend’s constituency. It is vital that we take action to clean up rivers. We have put £92 million more into the budget to try to improve the quality of the water in our rivers. Anybody who is polluting should be penalised, and that is what the Environment Agency is for.

[Rory Stewart]

rose—

[Richard Benyon]

I will give way once more before making some progress.

[Rory Stewart]

In fact, we have not experienced capital cuts in Cumbria; rather, the Environment Agency is being considerably more flexible than it was six or nine months ago, responding to communities and clearing out gravel. The progress is good under the current Government; I would like to put that on the record.

[Richard Benyon]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. The new partnership scheme will end the problem of communities failing, year after year, to get just above the line needed for their schemes to go ahead. There will now be clarity in the system, so that people can see exactly where they are on the scale and what needs to be geared up, by whatever means, for their scheme to get above the line.

May I express my admiration, in a perverse way, for the nerve of the hon. Member for Wakefield for mentioning the word “broadband” in the motion and in her speech? That is masterful chutzpah. I could ridicule her for it, but part of me secretly admires it from somebody in a party that did so little in government. This country was at the bottom of every conceivable league table, and the previous Government had a scheme that involved raising huge amounts of money from some kind of telephone tax that nobody thought would work. This Government have made the issue an absolute priority.

The hon. Lady is right to make broadband an issue in a green debate. Broadband allows people to work and learn from home, which reduces congestion. The Government also believe that this is a social inclusion issue, however. Broadband will assist people who are old, ill, mentally ill, out of work or on a low income, particularly those who live in remote communities, out of all proportion to any other factor in their lives. It is therefore absolutely right to include it in this debate, and I am very happy to talk about the investment that we are making, including the £530 million that is being spent through Broadband Delivery UK and the £20 million that has been geared up from DEFRA’s funds for the hard-to-reach in our most rural communities, as well as the £150 million recently announced by the Chancellor to assist the roll-out of mobile 4G access, which can provide coverage for broadband on mobile phone networks. That is also very good news.

The hon. Lady also made some interesting points about the five-point plan for growth and jobs, but it would simply add to the scale of debt. How can we deal with the debt problem by adding to it? Nothing should add to our debt. The shadow Chancellor’s five-point plan would not be a way of gearing up jobs and growth in the green economy or in any other. As in so many areas, Labour Members have absolutely no credibility when they talk about the economy.