European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Vaizey of Didcot and Kit Malthouse

3rd reading: House of Commons & Committee: 3rd sitting: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 8th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

I did not accept the argument that TTIP would undermine our NHS, and I did not receive any representations from my farmers about its impact on them. I was concerned about the French introducing cultural protections, but felt that we were getting close to a free trade agreement thanks to the negotiating power of the European Union.

[Kit Malthouse]

Further to the intervention from my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), I wonder whether the logical extension of the argument of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) is that we should withdraw from the World Trade Organisation. For example, is it fair that the textile workers of Leicester were exposed through our WTO membership to the textile industry in China, which has largely meant a transfer of that industry to that country?

[Mr Vaizey]

My argument is simply that it will be very difficult to negotiate the free trade agreements that people talk about. It is a very unconstructive and unhelpful argument and will not take us very far. It is more therapy on my part because I feel so frustrated that the tone of the debate since the referendum has been so awful and unpleasant; that we forget that 48% of the country voted to stay in the European Union; and that we are unable to build a consensus on the way forward. The remain part of the House and the country has, by and large, accepted that the referendum result is clear and decisive, and that it will take us out of the EU. We want to work extremely constructively to make that happen, despite my earlier remarks. We are urging all sides to have a realistic assessment of how difficult it will be so that we can work together in the national interest.

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[Mr Vaizey]

I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says, but I have known the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy for many years and shared many warm cups of tea with him, so I accept his warm words. I fully expect him to be in his post for several years to take this forward.

[Kit Malthouse]

My right hon. Friend is concerned about Euratom. Has he considered the alternative? Given that in the last funding round Euratom had to fight very hard to try to maintain its funding, a position it is unlikely to be able to maintain in future, and the fact that the largest single contributors to Horizon 2020, the Germans, have taken the decision to phase out their civil nuclear programme all together, is he not concerned that over the next couple of decades continued membership of Euratom might expose us to diminishing research funding? Exit from the EU could provide us with the opportunity to partner bilaterally with other countries, as we do already with India and South Korea, and therefore expose ourselves to a wider pool of research.

[Mr Vaizey]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. In fact, in answering him I may slightly contradict my earlier rant. I have significant concerns that our exit from the EU could potentially damage British science because of our close collaboration with the EU, but some scientists in my constituency have pointed out that there is a danger of our becoming too inward-looking in only seeking European scientific collaboration. Whatever one thinks of other issues, China is certainly becoming a much more important player in scientific research. There may be a silver lining to the withdrawal from Euratom.

My hon. Friend is also right to point out that securing funding for nuclear fusion is no easy task. In some respects, nuclear fusion is always the gold at the end of the rainbow. Nevertheless, it is extremely important research and I support it 100%, both in general and for the impact it has on my constituency.

I have taken so long that Mrs Laing has turned into Mr Howarth. Having made a gentle jibe earlier at the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West, I see that I have taken up an inordinate amount of the Committee’s time, so I will sit down. I simply reiterate that I stand foursquare behind EU citizens living in our country. Please do not keep banging on about how easy free trade is going to be and please secure our nuclear relationships as far as possible.

A34 Safety

Debate between Lord Vaizey of Didcot and Kit Malthouse

Wednesday 26th October 2016 Westminster Hall

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing this debate in what seems to be a sauna this morning. Will he acknowledge that while the statistics he outlined are alarming, they are even more alarming if we add in the accidents that take place at intersections with other roads? For instance, I am concerned about the junction of the A303 and the A34 at Bullington Cross, which by about 100 yards is not in my constituency but which is used nevertheless by my constituents. A significant number of accidents there are reported as A303 accidents but relate to the junction between the two roads and could be attributed to either road.

[Mr Vaizey]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. I focused solely on the accidents on the small section of the A34 that concerns me as the constituency MP, but he is quite right that if one takes the statistics along the whole of the A34 and for accidents attributed to other roads in close proximity, I am afraid the toll is higher. That again leads to the central point about the need for a clear strategic plan for the whole of the A34, to improve road safety.

Having started with the most important issue of keeping people safe on the A34, it is also important to highlight the economic impact that the delays and accidents are having on my constituency, and no doubt the whole of the region. For example, I am privileged to represent Harwell Campus, which is the one of the world’s leading scientific research centres. Its director, Angus Horner, wrote to me recently and said:

“I often witness dangerous conditions on A34…Immediate term safety improvements will be strongly supported by thousands of us at Harwell Campus…The A34 is operating far beyond its designed capacity and major infrastructure investment should be allocated right now to substantially improve its capacity.”

He continued:

“In a broader context, it is essential that the UK maximises the potential of its world leading knowledge economy…UK hotspots must be properly connected….Better vehicle flow along A34 would have a substantial positive impact at Harwell by facilitating even more collaboration with our neighbours at University of Oxford, plus tens of thousands of other regular research visitors and hundreds of companies who use A34 to access Harwell’s ideas and £2 billion of international labs.”

I also have the pleasure of representing Milton Park. On that business park there are 250 companies employing 9,500 people. The park is located right next to the A34, and its productivity is being severely affected by delays on the road. Its director, Philip Campbell, wrote to me and said that

“the A34 is central to maximising future success of this unique and vibrant area. A safe, free-flowing A34 is critical, for our area’s future growth and prosperity and for the resilience, health and wellbeing of residents.”

He signs off with a flourish:

“The A34 needs an A1 plan!”

Our local enterprise partnerships are closely involved in campaigning for improvements. Oxlep, the Oxfordshire LEP, and the Thames Valley Berkshire LEP have written a joint letter to me and my hon. Friends in which they say:

“As a key transport artery through our respective areas we believe it critically important to address the capacity issues of the A34 now; to help mitigate the serious and all too often tragic incidents that have taken place over the last five years and to support economic growth.”

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[Kit Malthouse]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful case for the A34, and its economic impacts in particular. Does he agree that another impact— I am interested in whether he experiences this as well—is that when there is the slightest delay on the A34, the alternative routes, which are more rural in nature, become completely jammed with lorries trying to avoid the traffic? In my constituency those routes include the A343, which runs down from Highclere through Hurstbourne Tarrant to Andover.

[Mr Vaizey]

That is an excellent point. All too often I have witnessed the A34 at a complete standstill. Sometimes I am lucky and I am witnessing that from a distance when I am not actually on the road. As my hon. Friend points out, one then witnesses the traffic overspill that naturally results from that, with large lorries and a lot of commuter traffic using rural roads that are clearly unfit for purpose and go through villages and small towns.

The Oxford local transport plan, which is part of the county council’s initiative to look at improving transport in the area, notes:

“The A34 is particularly congested and adversely affecting journey time reliability. This is particularly due to its high proportion of HGV movements, which account for above 20% of daily trips.”

The Road Haulage Association has written to say that it is

“constantly hearing complaints from members of deliveries failing booking times and the cost of delays with drivers running out of their legal driving and duty hours, due to delays on the A34.”

It cited the case of a small company whose 15 vehicles get stuck in traffic for 30 minutes every morning and evening. It loses about 4,000 man hours a year, which it has calculated costs about £150,000. With that comes an environmental cost, which is the third element that should enter our thinking when looking at improvements to the A34.

Online Abuse

Debate between Lord Vaizey of Didcot and Kit Malthouse

Thursday 7th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

Let us go for the 10-minute special, then.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) for calling this important debate. I was lucky enough to work with her when she was Secretary of State. She took on two important issues at that time: Leveson and the issue of press regulation, and equal marriage. She handled both with aplomb, and she has since shown the House how one transitions from such a position to a new role. She has taken a huge and leading role in the House on women and equalities issues. She has certainly pushed forward the important agenda of online abuse, so it is no surprise at all to find her leading this debate and setting out for the Government some very clear approaches and suggestions, which it behoves us to take seriously.

It is worth recalling that when the matter has been raised in the House—for example, when my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) first raised the question of children’s access to adult content online—it has resulted in action. Debates in this House may sometimes appear to be simply an exchange of views between Government and Members of the House, but, because this agenda is so fast moving, the House has a great deal of influence on the direction of Government policy. Without wishing to single out individuals too much, I have to say that my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke has pushed the matter forward, not least the change in legislation on revenge pornography last year.

It would be remiss of me to go through every speech that has been made. Some 18 or 19 hon. Members have made contributions, all of which have been serious and worth while. Because this was a lengthy and detailed debate, I appreciated the odd moment of light-heartedness, not least when my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) told us that she responds to online abuse with a picture of a kitten. That particularly appealed to me, because I have a picture, which is now well known, of a kitten sitting on my shoulder when I visited Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. I will use that in future to respond to my online trolls.

I was also amused when my right hon. Friend the hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) complained that teenagers now live in a world in which they are surrounded by perfect people who are wonderful to look at. I wondered why he thought that that was a problem when we all exist in the perfect world of the Palace of Westminster, where people are charming and lovely, as we have particularly found during the last week or so.

Four clear issues emerged from the debate. Let me briefly pause to put them in context. The Government are, quite rightly, committed to an open internet. When I attend international forums, I find that it is very important that the UK, along with our allies, is committed to what we call the multi-stakeholder approach for internet governance. That involves civic society, business and Governments working together to keep the internet open and free. Authoritarian-inclined regimes would like to regulate the internet, restrict freedom of speech and clamp down on innovation. The Government of this country do, however, regard things that are illegal and wrong offline to be illegal and wrong online. Hon. Members have made the point that some people seem to believe that the rules of behaviour and the legal rules that we all live by in the physical world somehow do not apply on the internet. That is absolutely not the case.

The UK has led the way in approaching the issue from a perspective of self-regulation rather than legislation. Self-regulation works because it brings about partnerships and helps us to move forward more quickly. A good example is the creation of the Internet Watch Foundation, which was the first charity to focus on dealing with images of child sexual abuse. It is a model that has been copied around the world, and it became incredibly important in driving forward the recent work with search engines, such as Google, to make searching for and discovering images of child abuse online much, much more difficult. We have worked with the Internet Watch Foundation to ensure that internet service providers had the funding to increase their capacity, and we have worked with technology providers on the use of technology that enables images to be matched and traced, and that makes it easier to catch and trace perpetrators.

Similarly, by working with industry we were able to secure family-friendly filters; the default-on option means that people who log on must actively disable the filters that prevent harmful content from reaching, for example, young people. We have also worked with industry on an important and generously funded campaign, “Internet Matters”. The previous Labour Government set up the UK Council for Child Internet safety, which brings together 200 stakeholders who work on these issues. It has an important effect on driving forward policy. We continue to make progress on matters such as increasing police capability, the creation of the first Minister for Internet Safety and Security—my colleague Baroness Joanna Shields—and, with the Digital Economy Bill, the introduction of legislation to secure age verification for adult content.

As I have said, four clear issues that the Government should take forward emerged from the debate. First, although there was welcome praise for the Essex and Durham constabularies, there was an absolute recognition of the need to skill up the police force. We have the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and different arrangements in the national police service, but for cybercrime in general—it is often financial crime—and this kind of crime in particular, it should be possible to create specialist units with national capability.

The police should also think very hard about the people they recruit. There is no need for them to recruit only for conventional police training—people who can walk the beat or perform the traditional roles of policing; there is every opportunity to recruit people with specialist skills that may not be transferable to the rest of the police service but who could be recruited relatively quickly to do this work.

There was a clear call from the House for legislative clarity, both clarity in defining online abuse and clarity about the myriad different Acts and statutes that come to bear in this area. The new Government under the new Prime Minister will want to make clarifying and consolidating that legislation a priority. That was a clear call from the House that must be taken forward.

The issue of anonymity was raised, with the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (John Nicolson) debating whether it should come under our consideration. I would not want to legislate to remove anonymity. Whether to allow anonymous users should be a matter for individual platforms, just as I would not require the Royal Mail to refuse to handle any letter that had been sent anonymously. That kind of interference would be unjustified,

That point leads me on to the role of platforms. It is interesting to consider that in the online world we now suddenly have companies that in many respects are bigger and more influential than many nation states—Facebook has a population of 1.2 billion, and Twitter has a population of 300 million—yet to a certain extent are left to their own devices to create their own rules, society and regulation, without the role of Government or of civic society as a whole being taken into account. Platforms must work with Governments and civic society to create rules. I support my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke in her call for something I have been keen to make progress on, namely a clear code of conduct within the UK that clarifies what constitutes online abuse, and, even more importantly for users, gives clarity on the rapid remedies available to people who are abused in this way. We have heard some really horrific examples, but of course we all know of those examples because we see them day in, day out, either on the news or because we ourselves or our friends are being attacked.

[Kit Malthouse]

Will the Minister address the specific point raised by a number of Members about whether there should be legislation to place specific duties—in particular, a duty on child protection—on some of the very large companies that he mentioned? There was a general theme in contributions from across the House that we would either like existing legislation to be consolidated in one Bill that we could then look at in the round or we would like measures on this issue to be brought forward in the Digital Economy Bill. Is any of that likely to happen?

[Mr Vaizey]

I should have said earlier that the views of my hon. Friend need to be taken very seriously. He has very serious experience from his time as deputy mayor for policing in London. I listen to him very seriously indeed. How can I put this? I want to get the Digital Economy Bill through the House. It has a specific focus, so I would be cautious about inviting him or any other Member to load additional responsibilities on to it, particularly on issues that need careful thought and planning. But I would certainly welcome discussions with him and would never rule out appropriate regulation to push the responsibility for some of the appalling abuse that we see day in, day out on to social media. It is not enough—this also applies to issues such as intellectual property and the online theft of music and film—to view platforms as passive vehicles. They are extremely wealthy companies that rely on a large number of users to generate the advertising that creates their shareholders’ wealth. There needs to be partnership, and I do not rule out regulation.

Having said that, given a post-Brexit situation in which we are keen to encourage inward investment, I do not want to frighten the horses of companies that provide a great deal of direct and indirect employment in the UK. We need to work with the companies, and we need clear guidelines on, and definitions of, online abuse. Even more importantly, we need very quick reactions, so that all of us as constituency MPs do not have to sit in surgeries with people who are clearly utterly distressed because of online material—their lives are sometimes in absolute pieces—and cannot get any adequate response from the platform hosting it.

This has been an extremely helpful and useful debate, and I look forward to moving seamlessly into the next debate, which I am also responding to.