High Speed Rail (West Midlands - Crewe) Bill (First sitting)

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 25th June 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Ms Ghani]

The clause introduces schedules 18 and 19, which disapply or modify controls for listed buildings and ancient monuments to allow the construction of phase 2a and to enable the installation of noise insulation in listed buildings.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

Obviously, listed buildings and ancient monuments are held in high regard nationally. Can the Minister assure us that, in addition to the views of Historic England, English Heritage and the like, the views of local historical groups and community groups will be taken into account before any decisions are made?

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Rodda]

The Minister has addressed some of these issues, but it is vital to get this right. HS2 will allow for more reliable rail services. The current Secretary of State has plunged punctuality on the railways to a new depth—a 13-year low—and we must get on top of that issue. This is a tremendous opportunity to improve connectivity, and it is vital to get urban-to-urban connectivity within the country. We are committed to delivering a transformative package of investment across the rail network in the north of England, backed by a commitment of at least £10 billion to transform connections between major northern cities. The Government have touted similar plans, sometimes described as Northern Powerhouse Rail or HS3, but there is no commitment to the funding—it is interesting that the Minister used that point to address the financial side of the programme.

Any incoming Labour Government would rescope the project to seriously reduce costs and provide far better integration. Furthermore, there is concern over the accountability and the ability of our colleagues in this House to scrutinise HS2, ensure that costs are kept under control, and address the issue of public trust. We believe there is the potential to reduce the cost of HS2 by using a number of other technical measures—I will not address those in detail now—and the operation of HS2 is also contentious. Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is being invested in HS2, and it is right that revenues go back to the Exchequer and not into the hands of private train operating companies. HS2 should be run in the public sector as a public service. I will return to some of those points later in relation to the new clauses.

The Government have been somewhat inept in handling another specific aspect. HS2 has been rightly criticised for sometimes failing to provide value for public money. For example, the Public Accounts Committee described an unauthorised redundancy bill of £1.76 million as

“a shocking waste of taxpayers’ money”,

blaming it on

“weak internal processes at HS2”,

and there have been other concerns about the project.

[Mr Dhesi]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the issue of spiralling costs concerns many of us up and down the country? If we do not get this right, it will have a huge impact on how services are delivered in our local communities in terms of housing, education, hospitals and so forth. Does he agree that the Government need to get a grip on the costs of HS2?

[Matt Rodda]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention; it is nice to have a colleague from Berkshire Labour intervening on me. The Government need to be responsible with these very large sums of public money, and it is deeply disappointing that they have fallen well short at times.

The words of the Public Accounts Committee are worth considering:

“a shocking waste of taxpayers’ money”

is a severe condemnation of the Government. There have been many other allegations about HS2’s potentially not being well planned or managed. Ensuring that HS2 secures value for money is essential if we are to retain public support for the project. There should be no blank cheque.

Draft Food and Farming (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2019 General Committees

[David Rutley]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Obviously, science will underpin our approach to genetically modified organisms, but it is worth noting that there are no genetically modified products in the approval pipeline, at least in the UK, and none is anticipated.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

My intervention will be somewhat different. Will the Minister confirm that there will be no watering down of the standards that we currently enjoy with regard to food and farming as a result of this statutory instrument?

[David Rutley]

The hon. Gentleman also makes an important point, one that the Opposition Front Benchers—perhaps I should call them the three musketeers—have consistently been making, with support from the Scottish National party spokespeople, too. I stress—as I have on numerous occasions, but it is worth doing it again for the record—that there is no intention whatever to water down our standards. I wanted to make that point, because it is easy to get concerned about these issues. As the hon. Member for Stroud will recognise in his remarks, these regulations are about operability changes; they are not about changing policy.

Draft Gaming Machine (Miscellaneous Amendments and Revocation) Regulations 2018

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2018 General Committees

[Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Ryan. I thank the Minister for her opening remarks.

This is an important day for those of us who want to see meaningful gambling reform in this country. FOBTs have long been the scourge of the high street, but today, due to the work of tireless campaigners, both inside and outside the House, we are poised to reduce the maximum FOBT stake to £2. The reduction will have a real impact on the prevention of problem gambling, so I welcome that decision.

I pay tribute to the people who got us here, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for West Bromwich East (Tom Watson) and for Swansea East and the charities GambleAware and Gambling with Lives, but it is a shame that it has taken so long. I trust that the strength of feeling shown in the House and the resignation of a Minister of State whom I greatly respected, the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford, will act as a sufficient deterrent to future Secretaries of State who may wish to put industry profits before people’s lives.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

We fully support the draft regulations, but does my hon. Friend agree that it should not have taken the resignation of a good Minister to get us into this position? The Government should have listened to vigorous campaigning by so many colleagues and charities, rather than having to be forced into this scenario.

[Dr Allin-Khan]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point: it should not have taken this long for us to reach this point, nor should it have required such extreme measures as the resignation of a fantastic Minister who will be sadly missed. Nevertheless, the draft regulations are a landmark in gambling reform, and the Government deserve some credit for eventually taking action to protect people from gambling harms. I hope that this is just the beginning.

The Opposition will not hamper the progress of the draft regulations, since they are designed to reduce problem gambling, but we have some areas of concern, which I hope the Minister will address. There is still a great deal that we can do to reduce the number of problem gamblers in the UK and prevent future generations from falling into the same traps. The whistle-to-whistle ban announced this month on gambling adverts in live sport is an encouraging sign that the gambling industry is open to reform, but we must ensure that it is meaningful, that live sport online is properly regulated, and that other media such as radio are not forgotten.

Labour recently published its review of problem gambling and its treatment, which proposes a handful of reforms that the Government could implement to make a very real difference. The levy on gambling operators to fund research, education and treatment should be raised from 0.1% to 1% and should be compulsory. New clinical guidelines should be developed so that problem gamblers can receive the best possible care and treatment, and the NHS’s funding should be increased so that it can provide that care and treatment across the country. Betting on credit cards should be banned, and it should be possible to block certain debit card transactions so that gamblers can be in control of their spending. Problem gambling rips families’ home lives apart. The Barclays mobile banking app is the first high street bank app to feature debit card transaction blocking, but I hope that other banks follow suit.

Those are straightforward steps that the Government could take very quickly, and I sincerely hope they do, but we also need to widen the conversation around gambling reform to ensure that we think about the industry as a whole. We know that the two main centres of gambling activity are high street betting shops and online gambling sites. By reducing FOBT stakes, we have addressed a major problem in high street betting shops, but more needs to be done. We need a conversation about whether we are prepared to accept the clustering of betting shops in areas of high deprivation, where the people who are most vulnerable are also the most targeted by gambling companies.

Preventing problem gambling in shops is crucial, but so is tackling online gambling. The most obvious issue is online gambling advertising, which is effectively not age-restricted and can be found on almost any website. However, there is also the issue of gambling within online games, whether that is betting on skins in Fortnite or betting on horse-racing in Grand Theft Auto. We need to explore the impact that these parts of games have on the minds of the young people who predominantly play them.

This is a day to remember for UK gambling reform, but more importantly it is an opportunity to recognise what is still to be done. We owe it to the people we represent not to stop here.

European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

Yes, and we are already paying a price, and have paid a price, for the uncertainty on our future trading relationship with the European Union. The sooner we can restore certainty, the sooner we can get back on to a path of solid economic growth.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

The Chancellor is being generous with his time. Can he clarify whether the Government’s analysis confirms that the half-baked Brexit deal that they are pursuing will actually leave our country permanently poorer?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

It is an honour and a privilege to participate in such an historic debate. Given the time limit, I shall dive straight in. What an utter disgrace it is that the Government tried to hold back from Parliament their legal advice on a decision of such magnitude. We now know why. On the backstop, the advice clearly shows that Northern Ireland has been sold out. The Government have lost the trust of not only the DUP, but the wider British public. They have reneged on their solemn promise. The House had to force Ministers to change their minds and release the legal opinion. What an utterly ridiculous situation.

This whole Brexit process has been blurred, botched and bungled from the very start. Has ever so much diplomatic and political capital been expended for so little result? With every passing day, with each resigning Minister and with each international snub and rebuff, it has become ever clearer that the Prime Minister and her team—I use the term lightly—are not up to the task. Her negotiation tactics, as has been illustrated by many Members today, have been to appease the hardliners within her own party. I need hardly remind the House that the craven acquiescence on the part of her predecessor is the reason why we were landed in this entire mess in the first place. Instead of patiently assembling a cross-party coalition of support for her plan, the Prime Minister has created division and discord, the social and economic consequences of which will echo long after the votes have been counted. This issue has been exercising many in my constituency who are very, very anxious indeed. Since the publication of the agreement—up to yesterday evening—I have received scores of emails from Slough constituents. More than 94% implore me to vote against the Prime Minister’s deal, which is fairly emphatic.

I am a supporter of the EU and I wanted to remain in the EU. Now, I want us to have a very close and collaborative relationship with our neighbours. The world’s economy has never been more interconnected and more dynamic, which is why, as nation states, we must form alliances to ensure that we have a very strong and stable relationship going forward—hopefully a lot more strong and stable than this crumbling Government. Now, after two years, we face a much more dangerous situation and, of course, it is a matter not just of macroeconomics and geopolitics, but for real families, real businesses and real working people.

When I meet business leaders in my Slough constituency they tell me that businesses need a stable economic environment, a backdrop, but that this withdrawal agreement leaves businesses facing years of uncertainty. When I talk to trade unions in my Slough constituency, they tell me the same thing: the Government’s deal tears up decades of negotiated deals around workplace safety and conditions. Many Government Members opposed the European social charter in the first place and would happily see it scrapped. The Government’s own analysis shows that the economy will be 3.9% smaller. Many of us cannot afford a hard Brexit. I fully support the amendments that have been tabled. I cannot support the Government’s withdrawal agreement. The Government have failed spectacularly to deliver Brexit, which is why they must stand aside and hold a general election.

Finance Bill

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Tuesday 31st October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds]

The Minister’s point exemplifies exactly what I anticipated might happen. I was just about to say that the second line of defence from the Government, after proclaiming that they would abstain from using the powers that they are so keen to give themselves, is that, in any case, they would have to bring any change to the House for a vote. Indeed, that is what has occurred just now. We are all aware of the difference between passing a measure through the ordinary legislative procedure, with the amount of scrutiny that that receives, and passing a measure through the type of approach that the Minister has mentioned just now. I regret that this appears to be part of a piece, with a broader trend to exempt new policies from the parliamentary scrutiny that they deserve and that the British public have rightly come to expect from its elected representatives.

Arrangements for those facing redundancy are not, and should not be, a matter of purely technocratic interest. The Government’s failure to raise the tax-free threshold for statutory redundancy pay has meant that it has already lost much of its original real value. That perhaps explains why, when the Government consulted on this issue, there was no conclusive evidence in the consultation either of widespread abuse in this area or of a clamour for a reduction in the threshold.

We are also asking the Government to reconsider their plans on injury to feelings payments as part of termination payments.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does she agree that the watering down of injury to feelings compensation is just another part of this Government’s plans to undermine and erode workers’ rights?

[Anneliese Dodds]

The concern is that this could be part of a piece of a broader movement to erode some rights that have existed for working people in the past.