Oral Answers to Questions

Matt Western Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

After the COP presidency is handed over to Egypt, we will ensure that we continue to work with all our international partners to find solutions that move to renewables and clean energy.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

T2. Will the Secretary of State update us on what steps are being taken to reduce methane gas emissions by 2030, in accordance with the global methane pledge set at COP26?

Oral Answers to Questions

Matt Western Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2022 Commons Chamber

The Minister for Women and Equalities was asked—

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

1. What recent assessment she has made of trends in the levels of police-recorded hate crimes targeting individuals on the basis of their (a) race, (b) religion, (c) sexual orientation, (d) disability and (e) transgender identity.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mims Davies)]

I greatly welcome the fact that people feel more willing to report hate crime. We have seen an increase of 26% in recorded incidents and believe that the biggest driver of it is the welcome improvement in police recording. Let me be clear: hate crime is a scourge on communities and will not be tolerated, which is why we are committed to reducing all crime, including hate incidents, and are on track to recruit 20,000 extra police officers.

[Matt Western]

According to the Office for National Statistics, nationally we have seen a sixfold increase in hate crime over the past decade. Locally, in the recent efficiency, effectiveness and legitimacy inspections of Warwickshire police, criticism was made of the way in which the force supports victims in the aftermath of such crimes. This was felt by a constituent who was physically and racially assaulted; his assailant was charged with physical damage of a phone after Warwickshire police failed to complete a case action plan sent to them by the Crown Prosecution Service. Can the Minister advise us of how frequently she meets her colleagues in the Home Office? What is being done to arrest this rise in violent crime?

[Mims Davies]

As I hope the hon. Gentleman will see, I am personally committed to ensuring the best possible response to these terrible crimes and, indeed, to all crimes. There is an online hate crime hub, True Vision, which police can now directly work with; he mentions a constituent’s case, and victims of online hate can submit reports and get the right support, which is equally important. That is there on both sides—it is for the police also.

Oral Answers to Questions

Matt Western Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[David Duguid]

I must say that I am disappointed that the hon. Member chooses to double down on the hate-filled language of her party leader. I repeat that the Scottish Government have received a record amount of block grant funding—£41 billion—since devolution began, and all the other measures from which people and businesses across Scotland will benefit. Those in the most vulnerable households and on the lowest incomes will particularly benefit from the measures that this Government have taken.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

8. If he will make a comparative assessment with Cabinet colleagues of domestic energy costs in (a) Scotland and (b) the rest of the UK.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (David Duguid)]

The Government’s recently announced energy price guarantee will support households with their energy bills across the whole United Kingdom, including in Scotland. This decisive action will save the typical household at least £1,000 a year for the next two years.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

May I follow up on the question that my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) asked about the Scottish Government’s decision to abandon their plans? Will the Minister confirm what discussions he has had with his Scottish counterparts about ensuring that Scotland’s renewable potential directly benefits the people of Scotland and the people of the United Kingdom, given that the cost to the consumer of renewable energy is so much lower?

--- Later in debate ---

[The Prime Minister]

I can tell my hon. Friend that Great British Nuclear will be set up this year, and it will bring forward new nuclear projects. I am delighted about her support for Wylfa and for making sure that we have nuclear power provided in Wales. I would like to see that right across the United Kingdom.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

May I welcome the Prime Minister to her place? I am not sure how to measure a good honeymoon, but after five weeks of a crisis conceived in Downing Street—a crash in pensions, interest rates rising, mortgage market turmoil and complete financial chaos—the country has been left wanting divorce. In two recent polls, 60% of those in this country want an immediate general election. The Prime Minister claims that she is listening mode; will she give way to the public?

[The Prime Minister]

I think the last thing we need is a general election.

Tributes to Her Late Majesty the Queen

Matt Western Excerpts

Saturday 10th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Yesterday morning, I bumped into Helen, a constituent. She was visibly upset. It was an ungodly hour—quarter to 7—and she was walking in early for work at a local butcher’s shop in the heart of Royal Leamington Spa, a shop so well regarded that it holds a warrant to supply the royal household. She told me how she had dreaded the coming of this day. Like so many of us, she was shocked by the news. An hour later, as I stood in the queue for a train ticket, the guy in front of me, in jeans and a torn black leather jacket, confided that he was going to Buckingham Palace because he needed to be there. Those are two simple vignettes that, I am sure, were replayed up and down our country.

For a person of such slight figure, the Queen seemed to stand above Presidents, Prime Ministers, and other Heads of State. It was not simply her longevity or her manner; there was invariably a genuine respect for her, for her experience and her wise counsel. Her virtues were many: dedication, diligence, integrity, respect, loyalty, humility, compassion and constancy, for at times of turmoil, she provided calm. At times of national self-doubt, she reassured us, throughout her reign and even before—in wartime, after various bombings and the Aberfan disaster, and then during the pandemic, when she proposed hope and that we would meet again. Her state visit to Ireland in 2011, where she made one of her most significant speeches, was the first visit there by any British monarch for 100 years. She also celebrated with us in moments of national joy, such as VE Day—imagine the liberation she felt at being able to be out on the streets with the people—that magic moment of presenting Bobby Moore with the Jules Rimet trophy, and dropping by for the Olympics in 2012. She was the woman for all seasons.

Warwick and Leamington was blessed by her visits on three occasions. The first was in 1988, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s granting of the royal warrant to Leamington. In 1996, she visited Lord Leycester Hospital and Warwick castle, and she made her final visit in 2011, to open the Warwickshire Justice Centre. I am not sure whether she had time to drop by the butcher’s, but hopefully King Charles III will make time in the coming years.

On behalf of the good people of Warwick, Leamington, Whitnash and villages, I pay tribute and offer our thanks for the life of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, for her dignity and commitment to our service, and express our sincere condolences to His Majesty King Charles III and all the family. Her late Majesty the Queen was not given to sentimentality. She would have wanted us to look forwards, and perhaps she would have put it this way: “The firm has a new boss.” May our late Queen rest in peace. God save the King.

Confidence in Her Majesty’s Government

Matt Western Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Lord Hague was right, David Cameron was right, and in June 2019 Max Hastings said:

“I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfit to be prime minister.”

Now we have a Prime Minister squatting in No. 10 or partying at Chequers. If he needs help with moving, Gary’s Removals or Cleavers in my constituency are available. He is a Prime Minister who 10 days ago scrambled around trying to keep his premiership from sinking, but he rearranged his deckchair Cabinet, desperate to not go down as the worst Prime Minister in history.

The Government still claim that they got the big calls right, but they are rewriting history. They sought to change the rules over Owen Paterson. They disposed of PPE without replacing it, ahead of what was to be the pandemic, then they blew £37 billion on the test and trace scheme and lost £4 billion to fraud. They bodged the Brexit deal, which has led to a 4% hit to the UK economy. They claimed that they were the lead nation in supporting Ukraine, but when Crimea was invaded in 2014 they refused to provide or sell weapons to that country, preferring instead to normalise relations with Russia. Now, with the economy in crisis, we have one in 15 suffering with covid, we have ambulance services and social care in crisis and we have the worst inflation in the G7 and the worst growth anywhere in the G20 except Russia.

Now we have the Conservative party leadership contest, which is seemingly a triennial navel-gazing event. The public will not forgive this. We had it in 2016, in 2019 and now in 2022. This is like the three-year itch. I hate to disabuse this Government of their belief that they are irresistible to the public, but after Wakefield, after Chesham and Amersham, after North Shropshire and after Tiverton and Honiton, the public have stated, loud and clear, that they feel misled by this Government, who have lost the public trust. Two weeks ago, a YouGov survey found that, irrespective of the new leader, 57% of the public wanted a general election; 27% said that they were against that and 17% did not know. I fear that Conservative Members are not listening to the public. They are out of touch. They should give way to public opinion and give way to a general election. The public have no confidence in this Government, and I am on the side of the public as usual.

Extreme Heat Preparedness

Matt Western Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

The hon. Lady thinks she is asking a simple question but, as I said earlier, it is actually quite a complicated one. For example, the mitigations that we put in place on the railways to deal with extreme heat may cause problems when it gets cold. Dealing with both those issues is an engineering feat that I am afraid is beyond me here at the Dispatch Box. One thing we need to do over the next 48 hours is to learn about exactly the kind of impact she is talking about. We all hope that the system will perform well, but given that if we hit the record we will never have experienced these temperatures before, we just need to be cautious and learn from the experience.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I thank everyone working in our frontline infrastructure services that have enabled us to get here today. I also thank the people I passed at an ungodly hour this morning, as I was on my way to the station, who are providing security at the Commonwealth games bowls venue in Leamington. The Minister says the Government are focused on this crisis, but how is it that frontline workers, on whom we depend, are showing up to do their job when the Prime Minister seems to be hidden away in a Chequers fridge?

[Kit Malthouse]

That is another completely unfair question and a misunderstanding of Cobra. It is my job to chair that committee, to co-ordinate the civil contingencies secretariat, which sits in my Department, and then to brief the Prime Minister. That is exactly what I did at 8 o’clock yesterday morning.

I am afraid this question feels like a political attempt to create an air of panic about the next 36 hours. Indeed, it seems like a politically motivated assault on the Prime Minister, which is completely unfair. He has been in touch with our work to co-ordinate across all the nations of the United Kingdom, and I am sure he will continue to do so.

Ministers’ Severance Pay

Matt Western Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I understand that approximately £400,000 will be paid out in severance payments. Will the Minister agree to publish a full list of the amounts being paid out to those individuals? Will she confirm that these moneys will be coming from Departments, such as the Department for Education, and will therefore have an impact on the budgets of much-pressed Departments and, for example, on schools or other institutions?

[Mrs Wheeler]

The hon. Gentleman asks a perfectly reasonable question. It is laid out in statute how the amounts and payments are made, and it is in the annual accounts of the Departments.

Standards in Public Life

Matt Western Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

The hon. Lady makes a crucial point that shows why the Opposition tabled the motion today.

The bar has been lowered. Honesty, integrity, accountability, transparency, leadership in the public interest: these are the values that once cloaked the ministerial code, but to this Prime Minister they are just words. Not only that, but they are disposable words that the Prime Minister has now dispensed with, deleting them from his own contribution and airbrushing them from history—and that is just the foreword. More horrors lurk beyond.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that, when the Prime Minister says that he wants to reset the culture of Downing Street, all he wants to do is reset the rules?

[Angela Rayner]

Actions speak louder than words, and my hon. Friend hits on the point that the actions of this Prime Minister have debased the rules, have brought shame on Parliament and on the office of the Prime Minister, which is an absolute privilege, and have lost the trust of much of the public. The Prime Minister boasts about his victory in 2019, but he has now squandered all that good will with his behaviour. While people were locked down and unable to see their loved ones, cleaners were having to clean sick off the floor and wine off the walls as others were partying on down in Downing Street.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I welcome the debate because it is important. Like so many of my colleagues, I want to see the full package of recommendations in the committee’s report accepted in their entirety. We must collectively restore transparency and integrity, and improve the accountability of all our institutions. That is why an incoming Labour Government would clean up politics and restore standards in public life, starting by introducing an ethics and integrity commission—a single, independent body, removed from politicians, that would roll at least three existing bodies into one.

Standards in public life should concern us all, as Members elected to public office. It is the highest honour, and the public rightly expect us to exercise the highest of public standards. When one of us breaches those standards, we all lose. One parliamentary scandal reflects poorly not just on the governing party of the time, but on our institutions, our democracy and our willingness to govern in the interests of the British people. That is why the Opposition have tabled a motion asking Members on both sides of the House to back the full package of the committee’s recommendations. We have done so because the ministerial code has been cracked by this Prime Minister and his Government. Until now, the code included the “overarching duty” of Ministers to comply with the law and to abide by the seven principles of public life: the Nolan principles, a set of ethical standards which apply to all holders of public office, with the general principle that

“Ministers of the Crown are expected to maintain high standards of behaviour and to behave in a way that upholds the highest standards of propriety.”

The ministerial code should be important in providing an essential backstop to prevent the degrading of public standards, as indeed it once did. When viewed alongside the Nolan principles—selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership—the code provides a key cornerstone for standards in our public life. What is most damaging is that, at a time when the Prime Minister’s lawbreaking and industrial-scale rule breaking at the heart of Government have finally been exposed, and at a time when he should have been tendering his resignation, he has instead rewritten the code. I am afraid that the Prime Minister is debasing the principles of public life before our very eyes. He is doing so through careful and calculated manipulation of the rules, bending them to suit his own interests. Now, following the publication of the Sue Gray report, in which she concluded that there were

“failures of leadership and judgement in No 10 and the Cabinet Office”,

he has concentrated even greater power in his own hands, while weakening standards in public life.

Far from “resetting the culture” of No. 10, the Prime Minister promised following the report’s publication, perhaps most self-servingly of all, to end the long-standing principle that those who breach the ministerial code should have to resign automatically. That might save not only him, but all those who would be complicit in these acts. Let us recall that, back in November 2020, the then adviser Sir Alex Allan resigned his post after the Prime Minister disagreed with the finding that the Home Secretary had broken the code. We now have an absurd situation in which the person who breached the ministerial code carries on with impunity, while those who are victims of the breaches feel that their only way out is to resign. The Prime Minister has also failed to outline the concrete sanctions for major breaches of the code. Here again we have the ridiculous situation of the more major the breach, the less clear the sanction. On this side of the House, we support graduated sanctions for minor breaches of the code, but the cherry-picking of sanctions to suit the Prime Minister is plain politicking with standards in public life.

By failing to guarantee the independence of the adviser or allow them to open investigations independently, the Prime Minister has gained a stranglehold over the whole process. He continues to retain the power to veto investigations, stripping the so-called independent adviser of any meaningful power. This is utterly wrong. In the Prime Minister’s latest diluted version, integrity, objectivity, accountability, transparency and honesty have all disappeared from the face of the code. These changes, and the lack of changes, have hollowed out the ministerial code and created a centralised, authoritarian Government.

I find it telling that, in one of the letters of no confidence published yesterday, the Prime Minister was accused of importing

“elements of a presidential system of government that is entirely foreign to our constitution and law.”

One of the consequences of a centralised presidential system is seemingly the power to do away with accountability, scrutiny and criticism. It is just a shame that more MPs from the Conservative side could not see that last night. If the ministerial code now no longer has the teeth it needs to hold Ministers to account, Labour’s call for an independent integrity and ethics commission becomes all the more powerful. Labour has shown before how committed we are to improving standards in public life and we will show it again. Back in 1997, Prime Minister Tony Blair widened the terms of reference of the Committee on Standards in Public Life to cover the funding of political parties, and more recently my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) agreed to do the decent thing and resign if they were found to have breached the covid rules. That is probity, decency and trustworthiness.

It is a sad day for high standards in public life when we have to resort to taking this out of politicians’ hands because the current governing party manipulates the process to suit its leader’s interests. A failure to act now will see a continuing erosion and degradation of standards in our public life. From Paterson to partygate to allegations of sexual assault, now is the time for Conservative Members to vote for this motion. They could restore public trust in our politics, which would be in all our interests and strengthen the foundations of our democratic institutions.

[Mr Perkins]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I referred a few moments ago to the hon. Member for Newton Abbot but I should have allocated my congratulations to the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) and I would not want them to be misallocated, so can I set the record straight?

Debate on the Address

Matt Western Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson]

Of course, the right hon. Member is correct: the EU is not doing so. I have listened to some Members of Congress, for example, lecture us on the need to abide by the protocol and to implement the protocol, yet this is a nation founded on a campaign of “No taxation without representation”. What do we have in Northern Ireland? We have tax laws—on VAT, for example—that apply to Northern Ireland, but we have no representation in how those laws are enacted. That is not the essence of democracy.

That is important because, in this Queen’s Speech, the Government state the measures they intend to take—for example, to help small businesses, to reduce regulations and to alter the way business is regulated—and one of the benefits of leaving the European Union is that we have more control over how we regulate our businesses. That will not apply to Northern Ireland, however, because we are regulated by the European Union for the manufacture of goods, for example, and we have to comply with EU standards, which means divergence from our main market—Great Britain.

We purchase four times more goods from Great Britain than we do from the European Union in its entirety, and we sell far more goods to Great Britain than we do to the whole of the European Union as well. Yet we find that the Irish sea border, this trade border within our own country, is harming our economy, damaging the ability of our businesses to expand and invest, and costing them more. I recently heard from one company, a small manufacturing business in Newtownabbey in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim (Paul Girvan). It told me that in the first year of the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol, the additional costs of bringing component parts from Great Britain, transportation costs, delays in getting the goods in, additional paperwork and customs fees amounted to more than £100,000 for that small business alone. That is costing it jobs and means it cannot invest in the expansion of its business. This is harming business in Northern Ireland, and peace and prosperity go hand in hand.

A stable Northern Ireland does not just depend on the absence of violence; it depends on the growth of our economy, on creating jobs for our young people, and on giving them hope for the future. The protocol is harming our ability to do that because it is harming our access to our biggest market, in Great Britain.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I absolutely hear the passion and anger in the right hon. Gentleman’s voice, and it must be so frustrating for the community in Northern Ireland. I was interested to hear Marks and Spencer being quoted about the additional on-costs that it faces when selling its products in Northern Ireland, relative to the mainland. This is not supposed to be a difficult question, but what was it that the Prime Minister promised when he addressed the right hon. Gentleman’s party back in autumn 2019? Did he make clear the reality behind what he would do when negotiating with the EU?

[Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson]

I can answer the hon. Gentleman clearly: the Prime Minister came to our party conference and told us that there would be an Irish sea border “over his dead body”. That is what he told us, and unfortunately the protocol created an Irish sea border and it is harming our economy. I am only asking the Prime Minister to honour the commitments that he made to us. I am not asking him to do anything more than that.

The hon. Gentleman referred to supermarkets. Let me point out the absurdity of what the protocol means. Sainsbury’s is one of the biggest supermarket chains in Northern Ireland. It has no supermarkets in the Republic of Ireland. Yet when Sainsbury’s moves goods—even its own-brand products—from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, for sale in Sainsbury’s supermarkets in my part of the United Kingdom, it has to complete customs declarations and pay fees. There is a delay in moving those goods which, as Members will know, can be vital for food products, and it costs the supermarket more. That is driving up the cost of food in Northern Ireland. For example, it is estimated that the additional cost of chilled food products is 18% as a result of the protocol, compared with the same products in Great Britain.

As we heard earlier, the Road Haulage Association has said that the cost of bringing goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland went up by 27% as a direct result of the protocol in the first year of its operation. There can be no other impact of that additional cost than driving up the cost for the consumer when purchasing products in our supermarkets and shops. That is the reality, and when people say it is nonsense to link the cost of living to the protocol, the evidence is stark and clear. Yes, there is a cost of living crisis in Great Britain, but it is exacerbated in Northern Ireland and enhanced by the presence of the protocol and the Irish sea border.

That is why I have had to take the reluctant decision, as leader of the Democratic Unionist party, not to nominate Ministers to the Executive until this issue has been addressed. We are being asked to implement a protocol. Do not forget that Ministers in Northern Ireland oversee the ports. We are the people who are required to implement and oversee that, and it is simply not fair that as Unionists we are asked to engage in an act of self-harm against our own people in Northern Ireland, with the implementation—the imposition—of a protocol that we do not accept, do not support, and do not believe is necessary to protect the integrity of the UK internal market, or that of the EU single market.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern). I agree with her last point in that I hope that this Session is the one in which we can finally right that particular wrong and pass a measure to enable victims of great scandals and tragedies to have the legal representation they require. My experiences of working with survivors of the Grenfell tragedy lead me to believe that individuals and their families need all the support possible to help guide them through that difficult period ahead.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Amy Callaghan) and welcome her back to the House. We all admire the courage that she has shown in the struggles that she has had in recent months and welcome her back to her place.

Today, the country is in a particularly perilous position. During the debate, we have heard about the constitutional issues that we face. We have heard about the geopolitical issues, with the war not so far away in Europe, and the work we are doing to support our brave allies in Ukraine, and to help them to win and Vladimir Putin to lose. However, here at home, we see a challenging economic situation—perhaps the most challenging in my lifetime.

First, the hit to household incomes this year and next will be the greatest since records began—perhaps the greatest for 100 years. There may be a recession later this year. I do not think that that is certain, but only a fool would bet against it, given the economic indicators. There is a real risk of the start of a new inflationary era, which should concern us all. Of course, it should concern the poorest in society the most.

Secondly, economic growth is stagnant. That should worry us the most in the long term. The economy needs to generate the good jobs and tax receipts to help people into good careers and fulfilling lives and to pay for public services. In an era when public services will only cost more with an ageing population, and given the urgent need to invest in our transition to net zero and the desire shared across the House to invest in levelling up and greater productivity, we will need those tax receipts more than ever. Yet they are not forthcoming. If the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts are to be believed—they have been wrong in the recent past—we will experience several years of anaemic economic growth. We have to come together to tackle that.

Thirdly, there are a number of major issues on which the House should come together to tackle failure. Energy policy is clearly one. This year, we are reaping the whirlwind of decades of poor energy planning. There has been a failure to invest in renewables as fast as we could have done, and in nuclear power and other conventional sources of energy. That is placing an intolerable burden on individuals and families.

The other issue that comes to my mind is housing and the repeated failure of Governments to build more homes of all types and tenures, from social housing to those homes that aspirational young people want to buy to get on the ladder. We need to do more on those fronts.

In that respect, I welcome the Queen’s Speech because on several counts it outlines Bills that may answer the challenges. A series of Bills looks at longer-term economic growth, from online competition to reduce the impact of big tech and its stranglehold on our online platforms, to gene editing to help our farmers and agriculture sector compete, to improvements in financial services, when the City of London’s position is by no means secure and needs to improve if we are to continue to hold our strong position in the international community, to transport and to education. However, more needs to happen.

The Queen’s Speech is not a fiscal event, as many Members across the House have said in one way or another, but we must recognise that we have to intervene and take further steps, first, to support the poorest and most vulnerable in society. I think it is inevitable that we will uprate universal credit. That will doubtless happen at the next fiscal event as usual, but there is a strong case for doing it on a one-off, exceptional basis as soon as possible to help those poor and vulnerable families get some extra money and to alleviate some of the pain for the months ahead.

Secondly, it is clear that taxes on working people are too high. The tax burden is at its highest level for more than 40 years and we will have to work to bring it down. I appreciate the Chancellor’s position that a tax cut will occur in 2023 or 2024, before the end of this Parliament, but that does not seem soon enough to me and my constituents. We need a more competitive tax system. That means work now, when household incomes of any level are under strain, rather than in a year or two, when, potentially, inflation will start to ease and the need for tax cuts will be somewhat diminished. I hope to see those two changes, among others, in the months ahead.

Let me look to the longer term and speak about three Bills in the Queen’s Speech of which I have some experience, having been responsible for them until recently. First, I was very pleased to see the Bill to reform the regulation of social housing. It originated under my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) when she was Prime Minister, from the experience of speaking to social housing tenants in the immediate aftermath of the Grenfell tragedy. As she said in her contribution earlier today, it was clear that too many of those individuals feel ignored and disrespected by the providers of their social housing. Some of those providers, particularly the largest housing associations, have a poor record of listening to their tenants and responding with good-quality housing and good-quality consumer service. This Bill will go some way to changing that by putting in place better regulation and a better, more consumer-focused regulator to respond to those complaints and concerns, and I strongly welcome its inclusion in the Queen’s Speech.

Secondly, a Bill will be introduced to complete the journey towards leasehold reform. In the previous Queen’s Speech, I started the first half of this two-stage legislation, which I hope will enable any leaseholder in this country to easily enfranchise their property. Leasehold is a product of our history. It is a feudal system that has little place in today’s society. We are the only major developed economy in the world to continue with that system and it does now need to come to an end. I hope that this will be an ambitious Bill that not only enables people to enfranchise their property and to purchase a share of freehold, if that is what they want, but leads to the end of leasehold. I hope that we as a House can set an end date for that system, from which point we can move wholeheartedly towards commonhold, a better system that is used and enjoyed by citizens and homeowners in every other major developed country.

Thirdly, I am pleased to see the levelling up and regeneration Bill included in the Queen’s Speech. There are two elements of this that matter to me. The first is devolution: enabling more devolution deals to be done with cities and counties across the country, those deals to be done faster, and greater power and responsibility to be handed to local communities.

Reflecting on my period as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government during the pandemic, I am very clear that the one area of our state that performed consistently well during that crisis was local government. Almost every other Government Department or area of state has, at best, a mixed record; there are triumphs and failures. Within local government, it is mostly a story of success. It is also a story of thrift and value for money.

As Secretary of State, I gave £9 billion to all the local councils in England to help to get them through that period—to look after the homeless, to dispense grants to our local businesses, to look after the most vulnerable, to do local contact tracing and many other responsibilities. That is a fraction of the funding that we gave to other areas of the state. If I have one regret it is that I did not win the battle within Government for contact tracing to be done exclusively by local government rather than the expensive system that was ultimately created of track and trace. The record of local government is good and we should build on it with further devolution.

[Matt Western]

rose—

[Robert Jenrick]

I am conscious of time, but I will give way briefly to the hon. Gentleman.

[Matt Western]

I just want to applaud the right hon. Gentleman for what he said about the terrific work of local government throughout the pandemic and about the action that it took. However, the Government did promise to do everything necessary to support local authorities financially through that time, “whatever it takes”. Unfortunately, local authorities such as Warwick District Council and Warwickshire County Council, in my area, are really struggling now because they did not receive that support.

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[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady). It was also good to see the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Amy Callaghan) back in her place earlier, and to hear the very good maiden speech by the new hon. Member for Southend West (Anna Firth). We have been reminded of the three good colleagues we have lost: David Amess, James Brokenshire, whose memorial service took place yesterday, and, of course, our own Jack Dromey. They are all missed.

I intended to say a few words about the Prime Minister, but I will save that for another day. I will touch on a few issues. The Government have put forward a higher education Bill, and I look forward to that. I am particularly interested in proposals for lifelong learning, but there are huge issues across the educational sector in terms of what is happening in our schools and nurseries. There is the haemorrhaging of teachers, teaching assistants and senior leadership teams because the budgets are not there, the pressures are so great and morale has sunk through a lack of respect from the UK Government.

The priorities that the Prime Minister is missing are around the cost of living. The Prime Minister and his Chancellor are really out of touch. We should remember that the Prime Minister said in the autumn that any talk of high inflation was unfounded. I hate to say this, but I was on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire Radio last September, saying how concerned I was that inflation might reach 6%—it was only 3.5% at the time. Of course, it has now run away.

We should have had an emergency Budget. Why do we not have one? People are hurting badly. One in seven people are food insecure and an estimated 2 million people are unable to eat every day. People going to food banks are saying, “I’m sorry, but I won’t take food that needs cooking. I’ll only take food that’s cold because we can’t afford to cook it.” I know that from visiting food banks in recent weeks. That is the harsh reality.

The Business, Enterprise and Skills Committee heard from the energy companies, which anticipate that 40% of UK households will be in energy poverty by the autumn. They estimate that a typical annual bill will be £2,900 for households come the autumn. That is why the chief executive of ScottishPower said the other day that he believes that 10 million homes will need something like £1,000 per household to see them through the energy crisis. Of course, no money on anything like that scale is coming from the Government.

Yet we could have that—we have proposed a windfall tax. When we hear the figure of £9 billion a quarter, it sounds like a telephone number—it is hard to get our heads around it. Just 12 years ago, the company I worked for was worth £3 billion, and that was the Peugeot-Citroën corporation globally, yet here we are considering £9 billion in one quarter. It is a huge amount of money and a windfall tax could allay so much of the financial crisis for households throughout the country. The energy cap in France was 4%. How can they do that, but we cannot?

On inflation, the Federal Reserve says that it is a serious problem that will be sustained, whereas the Bank of England is being slightly too optimistic in its forecast.

The outlook for the economy is not good. We will have the worst economic performance of the G7 countries next year. We also had the worst economic performance in 2019, before the pandemic, so we are the hardest hit. I am not sure how that is getting the big calls right. That is probably the most marked indicator of how the Government and this Prime Minister got it wrong. We have had 15 tax increases since the Chancellor took over two years ago.

I would have liked some talk of an industrial strategy in the Queen’s Speech, addressing the challenges of our automotive industry, which has seen a 34% reduction in production this year. Last year was not that great, either. We need to address the global supply chain issues and the issue of semi-conductors. We also need to urgently get our heads around the need for the transition to electric vehicles and hydrogen motor power, sourcing lithium production, cheaper energy and the gigafactories, such as the one proposed in Coventry, that we desperately need.

On the energy Bill, Warwickshire is one of the few counties that has no onshore wind turbines. We desperately need that. It is the cheapest form of energy and we should be investing in it.

On housing, I cannot believe that we are so way off the pace on the sort of housing that we need, the mix and the volume. The fact is that zero-carbon homes should have been built from 2016. The last Labour Government would have delivered 1 million zero-carbon homes. Instead, I see houses, to this day, with 50mm insulation, which is nothing. That is why we have the worst housing stock in Europe when it comes to energy efficiency.

I would love to see what is going to come out on planning. We had the national planning policy framework in 2012. The Localism Act 2011 promised the public and communities more say, but guess what? That did not happen. Communities up and down my constituency do not have the required infrastructure—the bus services, the shops, the cycle routes and so on.

There is a lot of other legislation on which I would love to touch, including the issues for renters and the precarity that they face, with the increase in the private rental market. There were a lot of warm words on the environment. We have to address that with the onshore wind energy that I mentioned earlier. Fracking is not the right solution. It would be deeply damaging to our environment. It is not necessary and we could have anticipated the energy shortages a long time ago by building in resilience.

On justice and the police, of course we want safer streets, but we have lost 7,000 police since 2015. It was clear what was going to happen on our streets—hence the rise in knife crime in constituencies such as Warwick and Leamington, a rise in drugs, a rise in antisocial behaviour, a rise in speeding and so on. We need more community support officers on our streets and the police hubs to go with them.

When it comes to security, we should be talking much more about food security and sourcing more food from the UK. My constituency has some excellent farmers, but we are losing land to housing development and potentially to quarries, as is happening just outside Barford.

There are several omissions in the legislation that the Government have put forward. I have only touched on some of the Bills that have been proposed, but I see that there is nothing in terms of legislation on business reforms. For example, there is a need for legislation on auditing and governance. Let us think about the £4 billion that was lost in covid loans. How did that happen? There is no true oversight. We need an audit watchdog, which is something that the Institute of Directors has been calling for. It is disappointing that the Government’s football measures have been dropped from the Queen’s Speech. We desperately need them and clubs such as Leamington FC and Racing Club Warwick would have loved to see them as well.

A lot of legislation is being proposed by the Government. I hope that they can change their priorities because the public are desperate to be heard and desperate for their needs to be met. The cost of living is such an immediate crisis, as is the climate crisis. So many of these issues are inter-related. I fear that, without the right strategies in place, such as the industrial strategy that I mentioned, for housing and for the automotive industries, those priorities will not be met.

Referral of Prime Minister to Committee of Privileges

Matt Western Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Listening to this debate, I am reminded of the Conservative party leadership election during the summer of 2019. I was surprised that a number of my constituents approached me to ask who I thought should become leader. I said, in all honesty, that I really hoped that it would be the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), because I feared what might otherwise happen, and I believe that our country must always come first.

Whether we are Back Benchers or Front Benchers, and whether we are Government or Opposition Members, we must be steadfast in our commitment to the truth and the principles of the law. That is certainly the case for the person occupying the most powerful elected position in the land—that of Prime Minister, a great public office that has been respected for centuries, but which is, we fear, in danger of being debased. The position of Prime Minister is the most elevated of all. The public always has and always will look up to it for leadership, and throughout the pandemic we have seen how important the roles of the Government and the Prime Minister are. The public looked to them not just for leadership, but for how to behave. The public have reacted to what has happened with ridicule. We have seen the memes online, and we have seen and heard children talking online about the Boris parties.

This is a question of the Government’s credibility. Virtually every night, the public watched their screens or listened to their radios to hear the Prime Minister tell them—he implored them—how to behave. They also saw the advertisements telling them to obey the rules. Then for months we had rumours and speculation about how the Prime Minister had behaved, but the Government’s counterpoint was that he had not misled Parliament or the public. That resulted in a corrosion of public trust and a change in behaviour. It became almost impossible to reverse what was happening in society because, given the behaviour of the Prime Minister and the Government, people did not trust or believe what was being said.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

The issue of trust is the important point that we have to consider today. The public have made their mind up. We have seen the opinion polls, and it is overwhelmingly clear that the public do not trust the Prime Minister in these affairs. This is also about trust in this House. If we are not able to police our own rules and bring to task those who break them, whoever they are, the resulting lack of public trust will damage not just the holder of the office of Prime Minister but all of us.

[Matt Western]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He is absolutely right. This notion of trust is so fragile and so precious. For those who were around in the 2000s, in the run-up to the expenses scandal and other issues that have affected this House, the primacy of trust in this place is critical to how it operates.

If we are to restore faith and trust in this place, we cannot defend the indefensible. The Government tried that with the Owen Paterson affair. I really felt for Conservative Members, the Back Benchers particularly, who were humiliated by what they were led through by the Prime Minister. We must restore the standards and principles of this place and we must have adhesion to the ministerial code, which has to be brought on to a different legal setting.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I think the big distinction with Owen Paterson is that, when outside investigation showed what he had done was wrong, he did not accept it.

[Matt Western]

I thank the Father of the House for his intervention and I accept the point he makes, but I am not entirely sure that the Prime Minister has fully accepted that he has misled this place.

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

I appreciate the point made by the Father of the House, but surely the issue here is the persistent breaches of the rules that seem to have taken place, the fact that that contrasts in such an appalling way with the sacrifices made by the British people, and that we all expect so much better.

[Matt Western]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I am actually going to come on to that point. The first offence was in summer 2020, and by then in Warwickshire alone we had already had 436 excess deaths in Warwickshire care homes, 347 due to covid. Thousands of people were unable to visit their relatives. Of those many cases, perhaps I could just cite one—that of Jill. Her dad, who had been a naval commander in world war two, was a very proud serviceman, and she was unable to visit him between March and his death in July.

The Government claim that the Prime Minister was under exceptional pressure. I think we can say that about all the frontline services—all the people working in healthcare, our teachers; it was across the piece—working to keep us safe. I am sure many people here would not have celebrated their birthdays, did not have parties and did not have office parties. I certainly did not, and I do not believe the Prime Minister should have at all.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

The Prime Minister was certainly not under pressure in December on those matters when he did mislead the House. As the hon. Member for Belfast South (Claire Hanna) highlighted earlier, this is not the only time. The entirety of Northern Ireland was misled on paper, or a lack of paper, on the borders and the protocol, so there is a pattern going on here. The House has to take this one seriously: it was in here it happened.

[Matt Western]

I think the hon. Member may be deviating from the subject and I do want to keep to the motion itself, but I understand the point he is making.

The defences being used to defend the Prime Minister are not really worthy of this place or those who espouse them—ambushed by cake; a work event, not a party; or the comparison with a speeding ticket. This is really all indefensible stuff, and then they talk about Ukraine. Of course, we are all concerned by the situation in Ukraine, but I do not believe that should be used as a smokescreen for the failings of this Prime Minister.

In referring this to the Committee of Privileges, it is vital—and I really hope—that there will be great support on the far side, because it is essential for every one of us that we restore public confidence in this place. That is why, of course, I will be voting for the motion.