Hong Kong British National (Overseas) Visa

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Wednesday 29th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I think I explained at the beginning that this offer reflects the unique and unprecedented circumstances in Hong Kong and the UK’s historic and moral commitment to BNO citizens. It is outside the normal immigration legislation that we have in place.

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)]

My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed.

Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord mentioned something that is very much a concern at this point in time and has been in recent years as well. It is not for me, or indeed the Government, to tell IICSA what it must look into. In the main, it has been looking into institutional failures and problems in institutional settings. But I am sure that it will look into the appropriate issues at the right time.

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)]

My Lords, the time has now elapsed for this Oral Question.

Child Sex Predators

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The delays are regrettable. We will come forward with the online harms Bill as soon as we possibly can.

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)]

Lord Morris of Aberavon. Lord Morris? Baroness Walmsley.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

When I gave evidence to HASC the other week with Caroline Dinenage, she committed towards having it before the end of the year.

[The Lord Speaker]

My Lords, we have come to the end of the third Question.

National Asylum Support Service

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I did not confirm that, but I am very happy to have a virtual meeting with the noble Baroness. On healthcare, as I said earlier, all asylum accommodation providers continue to provide translated public health guidance, which is available in 12 languages, and instructions to service users. Nobody, whether an asylum seeker or not, need worry that healthcare will not be available to them.

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)]

My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has now elapsed. We now come to the second Oral Question.

Domestic Violence

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Tuesday 5th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Baroness hits on a point that will be at the heart of what happens not only during the coronavirus pandemic period but as we come out of it. We have put in £5 million of additional funding for mental health charities to support adults and children who are struggling with their mental well-being at this time. NHS England and NHS Improvement have instructed all NHS mental health trusts to establish mental health crisis lines that are clearly accessible from the trusts’ websites.

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)]

I call the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull.

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

Excuse me!

[The Lord Speaker]

I beg your pardon, Baroness Crawley.

[Baroness Crawley]

My Lords, I commend the Minister for the work she is undertaking during this difficult time. What government funding is now getting to the front line for abused children, following a recent safeguarding live survey of front-line services showing that 42% of these services felt they were not able to effectively support child victims of abuse during this time of lockdown?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I did not denounce the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy; I pointed out some of the unintended consequences of stirring up tensions when a household might already be in a very tense situation. I by no means dismiss the noble Lord’s point.

[The Lord Speaker]

I regret that the time allowed for this Question has elapsed.

Policing: Covid-19 Guidance and Legislation

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Tuesday 5th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I hope the noble Lord will be comforted by the fact that every single day I join the Home Secretary on operational calls to not only the Met police but other law enforcement agencies. We also speak each day to a regional lead. I hope this will reassure him that we are doing just that and that we remain engaged with local law enforcement as we go through a very difficult process.

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)]

My Lords, I regret that the time allowed for this Question has elapsed. If we can keep the questions and answers a little shorter, we will be able to get more questioners in.

India: Scam Call Centres

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

Is the Minister aware that I have lived, worked and visited India, and I know both good and rogue call centres there? The BBC recently exposed call centres that target UK elderly people, saying that their computer is frozen and giving them a phone number for technical support that will unfreeze it in return for payment. These are vulnerable people who are currently in self-isolation. They are elderly people with no family support and are worried stiff that they will lose their only means of visual communication, so they pay up. Will the Minister urgently link up with the City of London Police fraud action force and the National Crime Agency to put real pressure on the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation to act on this matter?

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)]

Minister. I was going to add “Baroness Williams of Trafford”, because I did not introduce you the first time.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

That is quite all right, Lord Speaker.

I thank my noble friend for that question. He raises a very pertinent point, and I myself have had representation from older people who are worried about scams. As regards our work with India and the Indian Government, my noble friend mentioned the City of London Police, which, as I said, is the lead force for economic crime and has partnered with law enforcement and industry to combat call centre fraud from India and other jurisdictions. It has, for example, partnered with Microsoft, which has led industry efforts to combat this kind of fraud, and as a consequence of that partnership the City of London Police has supported Microsoft in the initiation of a number of enforcement actions, the most recent of which occurred in the Kolkata region. Obviously, things that happen overseas are a matter for the overseas authorities. Moreover, this type of fraud is global, and quite often you cannot trace where it originated.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I know that law enforcement agencies are working extremely hard. In fact, every day I am on operational calls with various law enforcement agencies, and my mother was targeted by exactly the same scam last week. The FCA has conducted the ScamSmart campaign to raise awareness of this type of thing, particular pension and investment scams.

[The Lord Speaker]

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, has the next supplementary question. She is not here.

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

Thank you, Lord Speaker, and well done to everyone for getting us to this point. Given the rise in Covid-related fraud and scams in the UK, where we know unscrupulous criminals are exploiting fears about the virus in order to prey on older and vulnerable people, as the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, said, what are the Government doing to ensure that local government capacity, especially in trading standards departments, is fit for purpose, and what direct enforcement action has the Competition and Markets Authority taken in respect of companies breaking the law?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I am sorry; I am looking for the appropriate bit in my notes but cannot find it. The noble Baroness raised a very important point. Particularly at this time, when people are feeling vulnerable, it is really pertinent to raise that point. Obviously I am not in the pensions department, but I will take that point back and alert my colleague, my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott, to it.

[The Lord Speaker]

My Lords, I fear that, again, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed, so we will have to move on, with apologies to those who have not been able to ask their question. We come to the fourth Oral Question, which is from the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock.

High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Thursday 14th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fowler (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. I pay tribute to her knowledge. I am stilling trying to visualise lipstick on a pig, but apart from that I go along with almost everything she has said. I congratulate my noble friend on the way he introduced the Bill, and the House generally on the way this Bill and this project has made progress, in particular the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for his outstanding contribution and speech. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Mair, on a first-class maiden speech. We should take note that this country is, I think he said, 28th in the world on infrastructure. We might also take note of the fact that this House continues to attract to it people of his expertise, which is a tremendous attribute to the House and something we should make rather better known to the outside world.

My first reaction to the Bill is how things have changed: how we are now planning ahead for railway use 20 to 30 years in the future. That contrasts—I see the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, agreeing with me—quite strongly with the position I encountered when I became Transport Secretary in the first Thatcher Government. The advice coming in then was anything but for expansion. Railways were rather the National Health Service of the transport world: all the problems were there, together with some fairly hairy solutions. I remember that one of the Prime Minister’s advisers, Alan Walters, was asked to look at the industry. One of his propositions to Cabinet was that “many experts” believed that the Government should examine the options for reducing the rail network. He never quite said who these experts were, but that was his proposition. Another fashionable proposition was that, as most people used cars, we should convert the closed lines to roads. One or two of us remember that debate as well. I am glad to say, with the help of my friends not just in government but on the other side of the House, such as the noble Lord, Lord Snape, and with one or two outside at that time, such as the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, we saw off all these rather silly propositions.

Personally, I am delighted to see the development in demand that has taken place since then. Far from being consigned to some scrapheap of transport history, railways are now so popular that they face the severe capacity problem we have heard about. Whatever decision we take, that issue needs to be faced, as the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, so rightly said. Twice as many people travel by train every day than did so 20 years ago. Most forecasts show that the trains will be increasingly full by the mid-2020s, with the prospect that, in some areas, people will queue up to get on to the train to get to work. That is a pretty fearsome prospect.

There is a problem and it will only get worse. The Government have rightly proposed an ambitious and, I admit, expensive project. The only trouble is that we in this country do not have the greatest record on such projects. I think back to Maplin, which might at this moment have saved us a lot of debate on the future of airport capacity, and to the Channel Tunnel, which took 100-odd years to come to fruition. Indeed, it was half accidental that the project got the final green light at all, because at the beginning of the Thatcher years President Mitterrand and some of his Ministers came over to London and to No. 10. As it happened, we were not exactly soulmates: my opposite number was a communist. In fact, it was a very good and civilised meeting. There was only one problem: we had to issue a communique at the end but it was difficult to know what to say about what we had agreed upon. It was then that Lady Thatcher remembered that I had been pressing the case for the Channel Tunnel. She adopted the policy, put it into the communique and the issue was agreed. Perhaps the lesson of all this is that we are always delighted to have the Department for Transport pushing forward projects—that is right—but it is even better to have No. 10 behind you as well.

Of course, we have waited a very long time for this new railway line. We are way behind countries such as France and Germany in high-speed rail. It is 120 years since we built the last mainline railway north of London. For a whole range of reasons, building it is exactly the right step to take. I was a Birmingham Member of Parliament for almost 30 years. In that time, I saw the transformation—backed in a bipartisan way—into a modern, attractive city with all the attributes you would expect: two excellent universities, a world-famous orchestra, and financial and legal centres. It is already a dynamic city but it can only improve its prospects with this high-speed line. Modern transport links make it possible for the city—indeed, for the whole West Midlands region generally—to attract new business and help develop the many good businesses already there. This is another way of saying that it is good for business and jobs. Perhaps not always recognised in quite the same way, it is also where people have the chance of relocating to a quality of life they do not necessarily get in overcrowded London or the south-east.

I make one proviso: I do not want to suggest that this one line, however important, should crowd out all other development spending. In the West Midlands, there are other, vital cities and towns. For example, the right reverend Prelate pointed out the position regarding Coventry and the surrounding area. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, that we should share the advantages of rail development. However, it takes me as long to travel to Portsmouth, for example, as it does to get to Birmingham, although it is about half the distance. That is not a satisfactory position.

As far as my other bit of travel by rail is concerned—on underground rail—I thought the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, was rather kind about transport in London. I point to the District line and the Wimbledon service, for which I hold the Minister personally and absolutely responsible. There, you see people struggling down iron staircases with enormous suitcases. You see young mothers with their buggies. There is not a lift or an escalator in sight. To my personal knowledge, that situation has been going on for the past 30 or 40 years, and there is still no prospect of change. When the annunciator system says that the next train is going to Victoria, you can bet your bottom dollar it will go to Edgware Road. I make one proposition to the Minister—it is the easiest pledge he will have to make today. I know that he will agree to accompany me one morning on one of these journeys down the District line from Wimbledon. I look forward to that.

Lastly, there are already calls for public ownership of the railways, including in the context of this line. Frankly, I am not an entirely uncritical supporter of the present structure but I say as gently and objectively as I can that people should be careful exactly what they wish for. For two and a half years, I was Secretary of State in charge of a nationalised industry: the railways. The actual position was that British Rail had Ministers and transport department civil servants peering over its shoulder, and then it had Treasury officials debating constantly and usually refusing every request for investment. Try getting electrification past the Treasury. We did that in the end, but we waded through blood to do so. That is not the ideal way to run an industry. Whatever else, I hope we can agree that the last nationalisation model was not a perfect example.

There are obviously important issues to sort out, not least the connections in London—a point rightly emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw. However, I totally support the concept generally. It will mark the beginning of a transformation in the railway links in this country to the benefit of industry, commerce and jobs. I look forward to discussing my ideas further with my noble friend on our journey down the District line.

Buses: Concessionary Fares

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I will review the recommendations of the noble Baroness’s full report, which I have not yet done, and perhaps we can meet in that regard after I have done so. But she is quite right—I agree with her that we need to ensure concessionary schemes across the country that provide good open access to all those who require it. However, we also need to emphasise the point that local authorities carry responsibility in this regard.

[Lord Fowler (Con)]

My Lords, would not it be sensible to look at the whole free bus scheme again and try to make some distinction between those who can afford to pay a full fare and people—such as children—who, very often, cannot?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

Affordability is an important issue to recognise. Of course, the definition is one area that sometimes causes confusion, because there are different definitions in different concessionary schemes of what constitutes a young person. I shall certainly take on board what my noble friend says. Anecdotally, for example, even across Europe, I was Spain recently, only to be confronted by a Spanish inspector who had no English—and I speak very little Spanish—who told me that my four year-old was required to pay an adult fare. Perhaps we need to look at these schemes in a wider context.

Criminal Justice: Anonymity

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Fowler]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they propose to protect those who have not been charged with any offence from being named as under investigation.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Bates) (Con)]

My Lords, decisions to release the name of a suspect in an investigation are for the police to take. Such decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis, and the police should not release the names of those who are arrested or suspected of a crime except in exceptional circumstances.

[Lord Fowler (Con)]

While I thank the Minister for that Reply, does he realise that in the case of our late and respected colleague Leon Brittan, the CPS told the police not once but four times that, in respect of an alleged case of rape half a century previously, he had no case to answer? However, that did not prevent his name being critically plastered over the media, even on the very day that he died. There have been similar cases, such as that of Paul Gambaccini, who, again, was named but never charged with any offence. Rigorous investigation should clearly take place in cases of rape and sexual abuse, but surely that should not be at the price of public injustice to innocent men and women.

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend is absolutely right to draw attention to this. When accusations of this vile nature are made against people who are subsequently found to be not guilty, it is a matter of incredible distress to them and their families. The police guidance on this is very clear. It says that the police should not release the names of those who are arrested or suspected of a crime unless there are clear circumstances to justify it. That means that such a decision should be taken by a chief officer and should not be the subject of informal press briefing: it ought to be communicated above the line. I am aware, as is my noble friend, that the Metropolitan Police has itself looked into this and has issued a letter of apology to Lady Brittan in respect of some allegations and conduct. It has also invited another constabulary to review its procedures. In this case, as in any other, there is also the possibility of referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.