Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[John Thurso]

The hon. Gentleman is a noted member of the International Development Committee. There will be £800,000 for Select Committee travel in 2011-12. That is a substantial sum of money at a time of financial stringency, and the Commission believes that it will be sufficient for those occasions on which an overseas visit makes an essential contribution to an inquiry. The Committees that the hon. Gentleman has mentioned will have a clear claim to be making essential inquiries, but the way in which the budget is used is ultimately a matter for the Liaison Committee.

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his post as well; he will do a good job. Is he aware that younger, and—dare I say it?—more progressive Members of the House scrutinise the Executive using social media such as Facebook and Twitter? Twitter is free. Will he give us an unequivocal commitment that Members should be able to use Twitter to hold the Government to account?

[John Thurso]

I deeply regret to inform the hon. Gentleman that I am a dinosaur when it comes to the Twittery thing; I really have not a clue how it works. May I discuss the matter with him later to find out exactly what he is talking about?

Business of the House

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I have attended debates in Westminster Hall and listened to my colleagues holding forth. I had planned to ask the Deputy Leader of the House, who is the world’s greatest expert on parliamentary reform, to respond to the debate, but I will see if I can come along to listen to part of the proceedings.

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

The balance between security and liberty was incorrectly struck, so we need to reduce pre-charge detention powers from 28 to 14 days—so said the Minister for Immigration. He also said that the security threat is such that we need emergency powers in reserve for pre-charge detention at 28 days. That is a contradiction. Will the Leader of the House commit to put the request to the Home Secretary, made by Members on both sides of the House, that she make the statement on Monday before the emergency powers lapse, so that we can test the theory?

[Sir George Young]

My hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration made it clear that the powers would lapse on Monday, which was a clear statement of Government policy. He also said that we would put in the Library draft emergency legislation that would reach the statute book only if the House so approved. It seems to me that there is nothing inconsistent or contradictory about that at all. It is a sensible and balanced response to the twin imperatives to which the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) referred.

Business of the House

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I well understand the importance of that link for my hon. Friend’s constituents and many others in the south-west. I shall try to arrange a meeting between him, other local Members and a Transport Minister to see whether this issue can be pursued.

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

Very large machinery of Government changes were announced before Christmas, but this morning the Business Secretary could not tell the House which areas of policy he was responsible for. It is not unreasonable to ask the Leader of the House for a debate on those changes, not least because the Select Committee on which I sit does not know what work to scrutinise and for which areas it is responsible.

[Sir George Young]

I think the shadow Leader of the House asked not for a debate but for a written ministerial statement on exactly which responsibilities have been transferred. As I said a few moments ago, such a statement will be made very shortly.

Business of the House

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I have forgotten what the question was. On school partnerships, a further announcement will be made in due course about our proposals to replace the previous regime. I welcome what the hon. Gentleman said about wishing everybody a merry Christmas, and I hope that he included in that the Deputy Prime Minister.

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

The Leader of the House will have heard the concerns expressed by Members on both sides of the House this morning about the oil supply crisis in their constituencies. Schools and hospitals face shortages, and the old and vulnerable are suffering freezing cold. What provisions are available for an emergency debate next week should the rationing announced by the Minister for Energy this morning create panic buying over the weekend or should the emergency meetings he is having with the industry over the weekend need to be reported back to the House?

[Sir George Young]

I heard the hon. Gentleman share his concerns at Energy and Climate Change questions, when he put a similar question to one of my colleagues and it was adequately answered. At the start of the severe weather spell a number of precautions were taken to deal with salt supplies, the health service, cold weather payments and winter fuel payments. I know that he will be heartened to hear the last bit of my brief, which says that a winter resilience network has been set up and is chaired by the Cabinet Office.

Business of the House

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend and to the Procedure Committee for their work on electronic petitions. He will know that there is a commitment in the coalition agreement to take the issue forward. I hope that my office will be in touch with his Select Committee shortly to indicate how we plan to bridge the gap between House and country by taking forward the agenda of petitions. The commitment is that when a petition reaches 100,000, it will become eligible for a debate in this House. I am anxious to make progress on that agenda.

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

Following on from the point of the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight) on e-petitions, will the Leader of the House confirm that the Prime Minister is cancelling his No. 10 Downing street e-petitions site? If so, will he take heed of the right hon. Gentleman’s advice and speed up the process of holding that debate in the House?

[Sir George Young]

The hon. Gentleman is right that the No. 10 e-petitions site has been taken down, but we envisage carrying forward the ability to petition on the Directgov site.

Business of the House

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Thursday 11th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and of course I congratulate Harlow British Legion and Harlow council on building a special memorial to the fallen. It is particularly appropriate that my hon. Friend should have raised that particular subject today. There will be opportunities in the future—certainly between now and Christmas—to debate issues concerning our armed forces, when I hope my hon. Friend will have an opportunity to develop his case.

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

A debate on the Freedom of Information Act 2000 would allow me to return to the subject of the ministerial wine cellar. Foreign Office Ministers, in refusing my freedom of information appeal, have asked the deputy director of protocol and assistant marshal of the diplomatic corps to write to me to say that she considers that

“the public interest is best served by withholding the details of the stock list”.

May I ask the Leader of the House: what is he hiding in the cellar?

[Sir George Young]

Neither myself nor my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House has had an opportunity to taste the products of the Government’s wine cellar. I have to say that the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends are probably better placed than we are to know exactly how much was invested in wine, what the vintages were—and, indeed, how much wine was consumed.

Business of the House

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I welcome what my hon. Friend has said. We will be producing a localism Bill, the thrust of which will be to push decision making down to the local level and to engage people more effectively in decisions that affect their own community. He will know that a code of practice on consultation has been put out by the Cabinet Office and, in the light of his question, I will raise with my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office the issue of whether this consultation paper might be revisited.

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House grant a debate on the accuracy of Government statements, particularly the use of the phrase, “We are all in this together”? On 14 May, Downing street proclaimed that ministerial pay would be cut by 5%, but I have been told by the Treasury that that has not happened. Were a civil servant to be overpaid by £3,500 his boss would make him pay it back. Will the Leader of the House tell the Prime Minister that he has to pay it back?

[Sir George Young]

Speaking from experience, I am pretty certain that my own pay is 5% less than my predecessor received for performing exactly the same duties. I will, of course, make some inquiries and confirm that the Government’s policy to reduce ministerial pay by 5% has indeed been effected.

Privilege

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

Anyone can have their phone tapped by the newspapers, and they do. The House does not forget them as we debate the narrow issue of the abuse of MPs’ privilege. So that Members can decide on the merits of the motion, I should tell them that, since the urgent question on Monday, one MP has told me that their phone company has confirmed that they have been the victim of blagging. The police have been informed. Another MP was so worried that, on the advice of his lawyers, he sent his mobile PDA device to forensic technicians, who confirmed that it was almost certainly hacked. I know of at least three former senior Ministers who have not yet gone public with their serious concerns that their phones were hacked. The evidence of endemic abuse is growing by the day.

This morning, I talked to the lawyer Charlotte Harris, who informed me that she had been in contact with former News International reporter Sean Hoare, as part of her inquiries for clients who are the victims of phone hacking. He stands by his statements, and he will help the police. He also knows of others who were involved.

Something very dark lurks in the evidence files of the Mulcaire case, and dark and mysterious forces are keeping it that way. If the Standards and Privileges Committee is to get to the truth, I recommend that it interview the Culture, Media and Sport Committee refuseniks—the people associated with News International who flatly rejected our invitations to give evidence to our inquiry. They include Greg Miskiw, a former assistant news editor, who said that he was too ill to attend, and was not pursued. They also include Glenn Mulcaire. We were told through an intermediary that he would not give evidence, and he was not pursued. Clive Goodman was also asked to give evidence, but he said that he was unavailable. He was not pursued. The chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, was pursued on three separate occasions before we gave up.

[Alan Keen (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

I think it was before my hon. Friend was a member of the Select Committee that we got a very direct answer from the then Rebekah Wade, who was a senior executive of News International in this country. She was asked whether it paid the police for information, and her answer was yes. Does my hon. Friend think that that issue should be part of this inquiry?

[Mr Watson]

I think it should, and I will come to that point in a moment.

Andy Hayman, as head of the Met police’s special operations unit, was in charge of the Mulcaire inquiry. If the Committee wants to get to the bottom of which MPs were on the target list, and of who was told and who was not, News International’s Andy Hayman is their man. I strongly recommend that the Committee ask him to appear.

We can delegate power but not responsibility. I doubt that Rupert Murdoch knows about these incidents, but he is responsible for appointing to positions of great power people who should know about them. For that reason, he too should explain his actions to the Committee. It is he who appointed Rebekah Brooks as chief executive of News International. He first appointed her, and he then appointed Andy Coulson as editor of the News of the World.

This morning, we have seen a strong argument for an inquiry made by former reporter Paul McMullan, who has become the seventh named News of the World employee to admit that they either knew about or took part in phone hacking. When Rebekah Brooks was editor, McMullan says:

“They were just doing what was expected of them. People were obsessed with getting celebs’ phone numbers…Everyone was surprised that Clive Goodman was the only one who went down.”

If Members want justification for supporting the motion, they need look no further than Rupert Murdoch’s Rebekah Brooks, who, as my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Alan Keen) said, admitted to Parliament that she paid police officers in the Met for stories. The Select Committee found that, “As far as we are aware, this practice is illegal for both parties, and there is no public interest defence that a jury could legitimately take into account.” When Rupert Murdoch appointed Rebekah Brooks, he did so with that knowledge.

There is one more tiny little shame that we all share. The truth is that, in this House we are all, in our own way, scared of the Rebekah Brookses of this world. If we fear agreeing this motion, let us think about this: it is almost laughable that we sit here in Parliament, the central institution of our sacred democracy—among us are some of the most powerful people in the land—yet we are scared of the power that Rebekah Brooks wields without a jot of responsibility or accountability. The barons of the media, with their red-topped assassins, are the biggest beasts in the modern jungle. They have no predators; they are untouchable. They laugh at the law; they sneer at Parliament. They have the power to hurt us, and they do, with gusto and precision, with joy and criminality. Prime Ministers quail before them, and that is how they like it. That, indeed, has become how they insist upon it, and we are powerless in the face of them. We are afraid. If we oppose this motion, it is to our shame.

That is the tawdry secret that dare not speak its name. The most powerful people in the land—Prime Ministers, Ministers, and MPs of every party—are guilty in their own way of perpetuating a media culture that allows the character of the decent to be traduced out of casual malice, for money, for spite, for sport or for any reason that the media like. If we reject the motion, we will be guilty of letting that happen. We allow it because we allow narrow party advantage to dominate our thinking, above the long-term health of our democracy.

And yet, I sense that we are at the beginning of the endgame. Things will get better because, in many senses, they cannot get worse. The little guys, the reporters on the ground who joined a newspaper to seek the truth, have ended up working in a living hell. If we want to, we in this House have the power to change that. We can make a start by getting to the bottom of the phone hacking scandal. Whatever lies in those Mulcaire files is key, and the Standards and Privileges Committee can start the process by establishing the facts. This is not the time to rehearse the questions that must be answered, but no one who believes in the law, truth or democracy can doubt that they desperately urgently need to be asked.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Monday 26th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

7. What representations he has received on the appropriateness of regulation of media ownership.

[The Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (Mr Jeremy Hunt)]

I have had no representations from anyone on cross-media ownership.

[Mr Watson]

If News Corp is successful in buying the remaining 61% shares of BSkyB, the control that it exercises over UK mass media will be greater than that of any individual in any other advanced industrial country, including Berlusconi’s Italy. The law in the US and Australia would prohibit such a takeover. Is the Secretary of State concerned about the lack of plurality of ownership in the UK media? What is the estimated tax loss if the merger takes place?

[Mr Hunt]

I cannot tell the hon. Gentleman what the estimated tax loss will be—I do not know whether there will be a tax loss. There are big tax gains from having a plurality of players in the British media market. The particular decision that he mentioned is a matter for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, who is responsible for determining whether to invoke the public interest clause about the merger. He will make a decision in due course.

Business of the House

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

The business statement does not normally include written statements. We can give prior notice of written ministerial statements, and I shall see whether that could be done in the instance that the hon. Gentleman has cited. However, we have not deviated from the policy on written ministerial statements that was adopted by the last Government, of whom he was a distinguished member.

[Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)]

If the Leader of the House granted a debate on public sector cuts, I could inform him of my plans for alternative cuts. The Foreign Office recently admitted to me that the ministerial wine cellar was worth £860,000 a year, and that it had just spent nearly £18,000 on replenishing it after the election. However, it was less candid about what was held in the collection. Does the Leader of the House think that Ministers should tell me what is in it, and should we sell it so that we are “all in it together”?

[Sir George Young]

I could have said that the Chief Secretary was not the only person who left the cupboard bare, and that the Government hospitality cellar had to be replenished when we came to office; but I will not.

It says here: “The Government hospitality cellar is a carefully managed resource that is integral to the service delivered by Government hospitality for all Government Departments. Expenditure since the election has been part of the normal buying pattern for the cellar, on which between £80,000 and £100,000 is spent per annum.”