European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nuttall]

The point is that Members of the same political party may well campaign on different sides of the referendum question while at the same time being on the same side for the local elections. That is the key reason we need to have them on separate days.

[Mr Clarke]

If, on the day of the referendum poll, a member of the electorate does not realise that different Members of both the Conservative and the Labour parties—at the very least—are campaigning on different sides of the campaign, I regret to say that we will all have failed, because that member of the public will have been singularly uninformed about the progress of about 20 years of debate, during which that has always been the case. But there we are: the issue of the date has been determined. The Government have given way and have been derided for doing so, and I will spend no more time on the subject.

The more serious point—although I do not think this is a serious problem—is the suggestion that the absolute statutory rigour of purdah should be applied to the Government as a whole acting as a Government throughout the final four weeks of the referendum campaign. I have already made this point during an intervention, but it is important.

People are suggesting that the whole Government machine should be switched off for those four weeks on a whole list of issues. They say it would be improper that any public body, the Government machinery or any Minister purporting to speak as a Minister should be allowed to engage in anything that might be designed to encourage voting in the referendum or to express a Government view on any issue that might be germane and regarded by people on either side of the argument as relevant to the outcome. I ask my hon. and right hon. Friends at least to pause—as I am personally prepared to do—until Report, which, as I have discovered from this mysterious message on Twitter, is when the Government will make proposals that might reassure people but that might fall short of the full rigour of the rather odd referendum legislation that we passed a few years ago. Obviously, that legislation did not exist when we last had a referendum on Europe, when the Government were deeply divided and very odd messages came out.

Given that everybody is going to concede to my hon. and right hon. Friends anything that can reasonably be seen to put any legitimate fears to rest and to reassure them that this is a sensible approach, we cannot ignore the risk that one might, rather oddly, be closing down the whole machinery of Government for some time. I have already cautioned against conspiracy theories and paranoia. We all know that individual members of the Government will go out and give their own personal views on one side or the other—they are allowed to do that.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Tuesday 9th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I will not, because we are under a time limit and other people want to speak. I apologise to my hon. Friend. He and I have debated this frequently.

We are 1% of the world’s population and we represent 3% of the world’s GDP. As a proportion, we are declining yet further. On the question of being in the European Union, we need to get across to people that our effective voice in the world, insofar as we have one, is best deployed as a leading and influential player in the European Union. There will be less interest taken in British views by the United States, Russia, China, India and other emerging powers if we go into splendid isolation. As I have already said, the idea that we can somehow advance our future prosperity by withdrawing from the biggest organised trading bloc in the world, while at the same time, as a Conservative party, advocating wider free trade wherever it can be obtained, is an absurdity.

That leads me to the other argument: what does “out” mean and what does a no vote mean? I look forward to my Eurosceptic friends providing an answer to that, because Eurosceptics have always given different answers. My former hon. Friend who is now in the UK Independence party, the hon. Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell), has a quite different view of what a no vote means compared with some of my no voting colleagues on the Government Back Benches. Does it mean the Norwegian option? Do we stay in the trading area? That would mean we pay a large subscription, accept free movement of labour—Norway has a higher proportion of other EU nationals compared with Norwegians than we have compared with Brits—and comply with all the legislation, rules and regulations of the single market without having any say in them.

Do we go further than that and have the Swiss model? The Swiss model means we would have some access to the single market. However, in those areas we would have to comply with all the laws and rules that would be directly applied and have no influence on what they are.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Mr Clarke]

I cannot as there is a time limit.

The Swiss do not have access to large parts of the market, although I would add that they accepted the free movement of labour. They have no access to European financial services, or any other services. Swiss banks are providing investment and employment in the City of London because Switzerland is excluded from the extremely valuable part of our financial services industry, on which a lot of our prosperity depends. Normally, I find that Eurosceptics do not address that.

Do Eurosceptics wish to go into the wide blue yonder and leave the trade area altogether? That would involve tariffs. That would involve 10% tariffs on vehicle exports to Europe. I doubt whether my hon. Friends are advocating that we should cease to have any access to the market at all. We need to be absolutely clear that the Eurosceptic case is usually that we are so important to Europe that the other countries, if we negotiate strongly enough, will allow us to keep the benefits of membership and give way on the obligations.

As I have said, there are some things that we ought to negotiate. However, we should be wary of getting too carried away by freedom of movement of labour, which is desirable in a trading area. It is a benefit to all members, including the United Kingdom. We should, of course, stop benefit tourism. Benefit tourists are unwise if they come here, because benefits are more generous in Germany, Sweden and in many other places. No doubt they will agree with us on clarifying the exclusion of benefit tourism.

What we need to bear in mind about seeking to go further is that 2.2 million British people are living and working in the rest of the European Union, and about 2.5 million EU citizens are living and working here. If we are going to demand treaty change to permit us to discriminate against European foreign nationals—not other foreign nationals, but European foreign nationals—in our employment laws, our tax system or our benefit system, are they going to forgo doing the same thing to British residents in other countries? There are more British people drawing unemployment benefit in Germany than there are Germans drawing unemployment benefit here. I think that an Englishman working alongside a Frenchman in an international company in France should, if he is doing the same job, have the same take-home pay. I find it difficult to argue why an Englishman and a Polish person working alongside each other doing the same job in Britain should not have the same pay either. Freedom of movement of labour benefits us.

Eurosceptics love to demand treaty change. They do that because they know it is not possible to get treaty change to a complicated 28 nation state treaty before 2017. It takes five or six years. We can have legally binding protocols on particular matters, which has been resorted to, and I am sure ingenuity in the Foreign Office and in the corridors of Europe will produce legally binding protocols for anything we produce. To make a touchstone of treaty change, when there are 27 other Governments who will follow our lead in the process and all start demanding things, is not worth pursuing.

The key issue is to have a campaign, as well as a question, that is absolutely clear. This is about Britain’s role in the modern 21st-century world of interdependent nations. How do we maximise our influence? By using our powerbase in Europe. The alternative, I am afraid, is a fanciful escapist route into isolated nationalism which would greatly diminish our influence in the world and greatly damage our economy.

Victims and Witnesses Strategy

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Monday 30th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

We must ensure that the approach is proportionate and the circumstances appropriate. The hon. Gentleman, who raises a perfectly serious point, will see his question canvassed in the consultation document. It is not for me to suggest circumstances in which difficulties might arise. However, if someone was convicted for shoplifting and then, a year or two later, was the victim of an extremely serious assault in unrelated circumstances, that might be an exceptional case. If someone with a previous conviction has got themselves injured intervening to protect another victim from another crime, that, too, might be an exceptional case. I do not want to sketch out all the exceptional cases, however, because there would not be many of them. Nevertheless, I think that we can protect ourselves against challenge as long as it is possible to consider those cases. However, the bulk of criminals should not be entitled to payment from the taxpayer when they are victims of crime themselves.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

The current maximum award available under the criminal injuries compensation scheme to the most seriously injured victims of crime is much less than they would receive from a civil law claim for damages. Do the plans contain any proposals to remedy this problem?

[Mr Clarke]

That was the problem when the scheme was first set up—I remember wrestling with it 20 years ago. At that point, we had slipped into a situation in which a compensation claim was assessed as though it was a personal injuries claim in a civil court, which meant that every case took ages to litigate, lots of lawyers would turn up to make representations on the basis of large numbers of medical reports, and the costs soared. Everybody accepted that this was completely unsustainable. The compensation scheme for criminal injuries is not meant to be full compensation; it is meant to be a contribution towards covering the financial consequences of the injury. As I said earlier, it would be nice if the taxpayer could pay everybody full compensation as if it were a civil award, but frankly that was never practicable from the moment it started, and it certainly is not affordable now.

Sentencing Reform/Legal Aid

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I agree with all that the hon. Lady has said and we will try to produce programmes that deliver what she obviously hopes we will do. First, we have all the work experience in prison that we are going to provide. We will try to organise serious work as much as possible with the collaboration of outside businesses which, for social responsibility reasons, are often very attracted to getting involved in this area. The work inside prison should be more meaningful and more like the ordinary disciplines of working life outside. It should, with luck, add to the training and employability of those inside. Then we have to tie in with the Department for Work and Pensions’ Work programme and what it is doing to try to get people skills and employment outside. Having a job to go to greatly increases the chances that an offender might not offend again and have more victims—that they might start to go straight—so this is a very important area and we are proposing to make very significant changes in tackling that side of the problem.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Last year’s Conservative party manifesto stated:

“Many people feel that sentencing in Britain is dishonest and misleading.”

In order to start to restore the public’s trust and confidence in our justice system, if it is a good idea to introduce minimum prison sentences for certain knife crimes, why cannot we have such minimum sentences for other classes of crime?

[Mr Clarke]

The honesty in sentencing issue concerns the fact that it is not currently explained to people that sentences are likely to involve so much time in prison and a further amount outside on licence but subject to recall. We will see whether we can address that and make people understand more clearly what sentences actually imply. It was the previous Government, not us, who moved the amount of sentences being served from two thirds to half—a move that we intend to reverse in the cases of the most serious sexual offenders and violent criminals when we move away from imprisonment for public protection sentences to a more sensible system of determinate sentences.

Prisons Competition

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Thursday 31st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I think I can. A cohort will be allocated rather than some carefully selected group, so a positive result will reflect some move in reoffending rates, with the consequent reduction in the number of further crimes and victims. I give credit to Serco, because when I went to Doncaster I broached the subject slightly tentatively there, because we were already in a competition process and Serco could just have proceeded perfectly ordinarily on the basis it had already agreed for the tenders with the previous Government. Yet Serco was positively enthusiastic, and I think it sees the pilot as a way of finding out whether it can enter into more such arrangements elsewhere in the criminal justice system.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

I too welcome the statement from my right hon. and learned Friend. Further to the previous question, in view of the fact that prisoners move around the prison estate, what proportion of a prisoner’s sentence must have been served at HMP Doncaster for that prisoner’s record to be taken into account in the statistics?

[Mr Clarke]

I will consult those who negotiated the details of the contracts and write to my hon. Friend with an answer to that extremely pertinent question.

Rehabilitation and Sentencing

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

We are not just going to let IPP prisoners out—any of them. Release will be by the Parole Board. The Parole Board is currently experiencing considerable difficulty in evaluating whether prisoners can prove that they are a minimal risk when they are released, because it is very difficult to demonstrate that when the prisoner is in prison. We are going to readdress IPPs, to try to make them work as they were originally intended, for a comparatively small number of very dangerous offenders who pose a continuing risk, and look at the test that the Parole Board can apply. However, no one will be released until someone has assessed whether the level of risk is acceptable. It is impossible to guarantee no risk: there is nobody in prison about whom anybody could ever say, “This person is never going to be at risk of offending again.” I am afraid that, in the real world, there is nothing we can do about human nature. Quite a number of the people in prison will inevitably commit crimes when they come out, but the number who reoffend has to be reduced, the IPP ones have to handled very carefully, and the Parole Board has to be given a proper test to apply.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Further to the reply that the Secretary of State gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), does he agree that if we are to restore the public’s trust in the criminal justice system, there must be honesty in sentencing and that convicted criminals should serve the full length of any sentence of imprisonment handed down by the court?

[Mr Clarke]

I agree with honesty in sentencing—I have always supported that idea—and we will certainly be addressing the way in which it is explained by a judge in court, so that it is clear and comprehensible to the public. That includes explaining the term of imprisonment and the term of licence that follows—what is currently called “serving half the sentence”. The first half is in prison; the second half is subject to recall to prison, but it is served on licence out in the community. To turn the full term into imprisonment, which no one has ever done, would merely involve doubling the sentence for every prisoner. The financial objections to that are only the first ones that I would raise.

Legal Aid and Civil Cost Reform

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Monday 15th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

Serious issues arise for parents in educational cases, and, obviously, the interests of the children should be paramount, as they are in most other cases. The difficulty is that the problem to be resolved usually relies more on educational expertise than on the law, and too often we are financing people who argue about the process that has been followed to resolve problems, instead of finding the best way of resolving the merits of how best to teach the child, where the child should be taught, or what support the child should have. We believe it is simply not right for the taxpayer to help inject an element of what is really legalism into problems that should in the end be resolved taking into account the best interests of the child from an educational point of view. Some of these cases can be turned into enormous legal battles, which seem to me to be very far removed from the object of ensuring that a child is best educated in school.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

One group of people my constituents in Bury North would like to see excluded from the scope of criminal legal aid are Members of Parliament. Will the Lord Chancellor ensure that, in future, legal aid is not granted to any Member of Parliament accused of wrongdoing?

[Mr Clarke]

Considerable adverse comment was made about the unfortunate case of our recent colleagues who succeeded in obtaining legal aid for their defence because, I think, their case was listed in a Crown court that had not yet introduced means-testing. I can assure my hon. Friend that all Crown court cases that might involve legal aid will be subject to means-testing in future, and although MPs are not paid a king’s ransom, all are likely to have resources that will put them beyond the reach of full legal aid, which some of our colleagues recently obtained.