Points of Order
Debate between Matt Western and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster
Madam Deputy Speaker
I thank the right hon. Lady for her point of order. She raised a number of points. I have not received any notification that a statement is forthcoming—she did refer to an urgent question yesterday. I know the right hon. Lady regularly attends business questions, and this may be something she might like to press the Leader of the House on. Those on the Treasury Bench have heard what she has had to say and will feed it back. I am sure that in her role as Chair of the Home Affairs Committee she may have other means to pursue the issues she has raised, in particular in respect of reports that she may be able to ask for, but she will possibly know more than me about that.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. A year ago tomorrow, I raised with the Prime Minister a really important point about the payment of a fine to the EU of £2.3 billion. Following that question to him, I wrote to the Prime Minister asking for an explanation. A year on, I have not had a reply. I would have thought it would be in the interests of all in this House to understand how it was that a payment of £2.3 billion was paid as a fine for late payment to the EU. It is in our interests to understand what happened, so is there any recourse I can take to understand what happened?
Madam Deputy Speaker
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. Again, I do not have responsibility for answers given. It may well be that he could pursue the matter through further questions to the Table Office. Again, those on the Treasury Bench will have heard what he has had to say, and I very much hope that they will feed back this rather long list of messages to the Government.
Education Catch-Up Programme
Debate between Matt Western and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call the shadow Minister, Matt Western.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
I thank the Chair and the Select Committee for putting together this report. This is clearly not my specialist subject, as the right hon. Gentleman knows from last week, but it is clearly not Randstad’s either. The entire programme is, as the tutoring providers have said, shambolic and at risk of catastrophic failure. Having sat on Select Committees, I appreciate how words are carefully chosen and I see that the report states on page 30:
“It is not clear that the National Tutoring Programme will deliver for the pupils that need it most.”
Sometimes words get argued over. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman could elaborate on that. As I understand it, the requirement that 65% of places should be allocated to children on the pupil premium was dropped. Could he explain a bit more on that?
North Sea Oil and Gas
Debate between Matt Western and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster(2 years, 9 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
We do have another urgent question and a statement before we even come to the main business, so I urge colleagues to keep their questions brief.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
We have a Prime Minister whose approach is “Do as I say, not as I do”. In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September last year, he stated:
“We are approaching that critical turning point—in less than two months—when we must show that we are…learning, and maturing, and finally taking responsibility for the destruction we are inflicting...It is time for humanity to grow up.”
I do not care much for the Prime Minister, but I care about this country’s reputation. Has he misled the United Nations?
Points of Order
Debate between Matt Western and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving me notice of her point of order. While the Chair is not responsible for the content of statements, Mr Speaker has made it clear that important announcements should be made to the Chamber first. Clearly, what constitutes an important announcement is a matter of judgment, but the hon. Lady has placed her views on the record, and I am sure that Ministers and Whips on the Treasury Bench will have heard her concerns. As she said, Mr Speaker did grant an urgent question earlier today in which similar points were made, but her points will have been added to those, and I am sure she will find other ways to make her concerns known.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Last week, I asked the Health Secretary a very simple and honest question about a matter that is of national importance but also of local concern to my constituents, and that is the opening of the Leamington Spa mega-laboratory, a testing facility. The Secretary of State did not give me any answer to that question. I have written many times to his Department asking what is going on. Could you advise how on earth my constituents and all of us are supposed to know what is going on with that project?
Covid-19
Debate between Matt Western and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster(4 years ago)
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Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
I thank all those on the frontline at Warwick Hospital, University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire and our care homes, as well as the police, our local council and those in our schools who have worked throughout this period. I thank all the volunteers for the extraordinary work that they have done in such extraordinary times. There has been such little respite for all of them; I commend and thank them all.
Regrettably, it is going to be impossible to address all the problems that we face in four minutes, but perhaps I could say that it would have helped greatly if the Government had been able to lead by example and been more consistent in some of their policies. For example—I have mentioned this previously—how was it that, for some reason, we could allow people to travel on an aeroplane for three and a half hours, sitting cheek by jowl, but we could not allow those same people to sit in a cinema or a theatre, on a train, a bus or elsewhere? How was it that garden centres were allowed to open, but car showrooms were not? Eventually that was agreed to, and I press again for it to be allowed now.
I will focus my comments on the impact of covid-19 on our social care sector. If I have time, I will also mention the self-employed and furlough. The public were forgiving at the outset for many months, but they are rapidly tiring, and the Government’s actions are having a profound impact on their tolerance of and compliance with the guidance. That guidance is not clear; it is inconsistent, and people are struggling to follow. We have tier for this and tiers for that—tiers for universities and tiers for different parts of the country. But it is as we enter winter with the prospect of not being able to visit loved ones in care homes that my constituents are desperate to see family members and demand urgent action.
In the first lockdown up to 12 June, almost 20,000 residents of care homes in England died with covid-19. In fact, 28,000 excess deaths were recorded in care homes in England during the same period. In Warwickshire, we saw more than 400 excess deaths, which is why I called for—and continue to call for—an inquiry. As Amnesty International concluded in its report in early October,
“a number of decisions and policies adopted by authorities at the national and local level in England increased care home residents’ risk of exposure to the virus…notably…Mass discharges from hospital into care homes of patients infected or possibly infected with Covid-19 and advice that ‘[n]egative tests are not required prior to transfers/admissions into the care home’.”
If Amnesty has time, I would very much welcome its representatives to Warwickshire in to help me get this inquiry, which is essential and should have been done through the summer to prepare us for this second wave.
The ongoing restrictions have meant that people continue to be unable to visit their loved ones. It is a fact that over half of care home residents die within 15 months of moving into a care home. Many residents have now spent more than eight months without any visits from family or friends, with huge consequences for their wellbeing. Many care homes in Warwick and Leamington have stopped all visits due to the second wave, so it is critical that the Government act urgently to enable family members to visit their loved ones.
A simple action would be to amend visitor status. Organisations such as the Alzheimer’s Society are urging for an acceleration of the pilot key worker status scheme to enable family members and carers with access to regular testing and PPE to visit safely and provide care that people with dementia so desperately need. After all, SAGE states that infection rates from visitors to care homes are very low, and if visitors had access to PPE, weekly testing and infection control training, the risk would be significantly lower still. We also need to be clear about discharges from hospitals into care homes—a process that led to a significant proportion of care home deaths in the first wave. If there is one thing that the Government could do, it would be to change the visitor status of family members so that they could see their loved ones over the coming months and allow them the dignity that they should be afforded.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I want to try to get everybody in, so I will reduce the time limit to three minutes after the next speaker.
United Kingdom Internal Market Bill
Debate between Matt Western and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). As someone who opposed Brexit, I have bought into the fact we have left the EU. I accept exactly where we are. I guess that my frustration, like so many people around this place, is that we find ourselves at this crossroads, at this dangerous juncture, at such a late hour. I think all of us want a Brexit deal that protects our economy and protects jobs, regularises our standards and provides environmental protections, but foremost also secures our businesses, which are so dependent on relations with our nearest neighbours, within Europe.
I want to speak to new clause 11, but I will also address in passing amendment 86. We were told that we had an oven-ready deal. According to the Foreign Secretary, it was going to be a “cracking deal” for Northern Ireland. But of course, the Prime Minister was not talking turkey, certainly not in anticipation of Christmas, as we have just heard. This was a deal that the Prime Minister himself cooked up, yet now it is stated that this could break up our country—our Union. This is an historic admission of failure. New clause 11, put forward by my honourable colleagues, seeks to ensure that we get this Brexit deal done. It is a broad new clause that demands that the Government should review and report to Parliament on the workings of the Act, addressing the functioning of the UK internal market Act and the effectiveness of the market access principles that have been promised, as well as agreeing common frameworks with the devolved Administrations.
My concerns lie with the fact that the Bill, to my mind, frustrates a deal. The trade economists we on the International Trade Committee have heard from made it pretty clear that failure to get a deal will cause our manufacturing industry exports to fall by around 20%. For the automotive industry specifically, which I have a clear passion for, should we not have a deal by 31 December, we will, of course, fall to WTO rules, which will see 10% tariffs on all passenger cars, 22% tariffs on vans and trucks—another important part of our export mix—and 3.5% tariffs on components, which of course are intrinsic and critical to our manufacturing. The Government are talking about maybe getting, through our deal with Japan, a special arrangement that will enable any Japanese components that go into our products to actually count as being of UK origin. I would be amazed if the European Union would actually accept that.
Jaguar Land Rover has warned that it could be forced to close plants if the right Brexit deal is not agreed, jeopardising £80 billion of planned investment. Ford has said that no deal would be disastrous and would make it reconsider its investments in the UK. Nissan has said that its operations in Sunderland would struggle to survive the extra tariffs imposed by a no deal. Toyota has said it would be forced to halt car production in the UK, temporarily closing its plant in Derbyshire. BMW has said that it could shift production of the Mini from Cowley to the Netherlands if there is a no-deal Brexit. These are not idle threats; this is the reality faced by many multinational businesses.
I am afraid that the Prime Minister is prepared to play Russian roulette—hardly a surprise, given the nature of his sponsors—with our businesses, our jobs and our prosperity in this country. That has to be our concern. Although there might be talk about the possibility of a US trade deal, we have heard in recent days that the passing of this Bill would jeopardise any UK-US trade deal. It is very unlikely to pass through Congress, such is the strength and purpose of the Irish caucus in Washington.
Let me turn to international law and Britain’s reputation. This is not simply about Brexit. Do we want to be a trustworthy nation—one that stands up for the rule of law? Does the Prime Minister really want to throw that all away by disregarding international treaties, in particular one that he personally negotiated and signed up to? That will undermine our standing in the world.
I am reminded of the incredibly powerful speech yesterday by the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who said:
“whether a decision to break international law is taken by a Minister or by this Parliament; it is still a decision to break international law. This can only weaken the UK in the eyes of the world… It will lead to untold damage to the United Kingdom’s reputation”.—[Official Report, 21 September 2020; Vol. 680, c. 667-668.]
We have heard it from Lord Howard, from Sir John Major, from David Cameron—from so many former Prime Ministers.
It is clear that our Prime Minister is being reckless. Can Members imagine what the co-founder of the modern Conservative party, Robert Peel, would be thinking now—a person who championed law and order? In our Prime Minister, we have a man who is legendary for wrecking restaurants in Oxford. Does he not see that by his behaviour and actions, he is damaging Britain’s reputation—doing a modern-day Ratner? Members may recall Gerald Ratner, the entrepreneur who set up an incredible business empire and then destroyed his entire business with a few ill-chosen words. We risk not just tarnishing our reputation but seriously damaging it. We must be concerned about that.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I turn to new clause 11(4) and the need to preserve the Union. It is clear that while we are in danger of destabilising the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, we also risk undermining the devolution settlement. With the Bill, the Government are seeking to usurp the process of agreeing common frameworks on key devolved matters such as agriculture and food standards. The Welsh Government have made it clear that this is seen as a power grab, a centralisation of powers and an emasculation of the devolved Government. They have described it as
“an attack on democracy and an affront to the people of Wales”.
The voice of the Welsh Government is echoed by the Scottish Government in Holyrood, who say that it is “impossible to recommend” that the Scottish Parliament give its consent to the Bill. It has been condemned by the First Minister and Scottish Labour.
Finally, let me turn to the situation with state aid. For me, this is a red herring. I listened closely to the comments made by the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), who has served this House for many decades and championed the cause of leaving the European Union. To my mind, however, what I have witnessed over decades is how intelligently other nations have used state aid to their benefit. They have long provided aid, support, guarantees—call it what you will, even state ownership. I do not believe that this has been to their disadvantage and I do not believe it would be to the disadvantage of Northern Ireland either—I think it would actually be to its great advantage. I heard the comments by the hon. Member for North West Durham (Mr Holden), but as I see it, both Germany and France have stronger steel industries, and they have made the system of state aid work for them. For all those reasons, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will be opposing the Bill.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. Just a gentle reminder that because we are in Committee, it is usually customary to call me “Chair” rather than “Deputy Speaker”. I know that it is difficult to follow, because we said this at the beginning and people are in and out of the Chamber, but that is just a reminder.