Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Alex Burghart Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 28th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I beg Members’ indulgence for a few moments as I bring some sad news to the Chamber. A former Member, Sir Reginald Eyre, who represented Birmingham, Hall Green between 1965 and 1987, has passed away at the age of 94. He was very proud to represent Birmingham, having been born there in 1925. His father was a transport worker and his mother was a shopkeeper.

As a young man, Reg had a great time cycling around the city at night putting out tracer fire laid down by the Luftwaffe, and occasionally dancing on unexploded bombs for a dare. He spent the second half of the war as a midshipman in the north Atlantic and the Mediterranean. He would speak movingly of how, when he was not yet 20, he was in the Royal Naval College in Greenwich and told to go home, put his affairs in order and say goodbye to his loved ones, because the chances were that he and his friends would not be coming back. I like to think that he was delighted that, some 70 years later, he stood in the same place to give his only daughter away in marriage—to me, in fact, as he was my father-in-law. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]

After the war, Reg went to Cambridge—the first man in his family to do so—and then became a successful midlands solicitor before entering the House in a by-election in 1965. He served his country and party with great distinction. He was a Minister for the environment and for transport—he took great joy in having broken one of Livingstone’s London transport strikes. He was a vice-chair of the party, and he was also a Whip. Under different circumstances, I might be at home with my family at the moment, but from the great beyond I can hear his voice saying, “There’s a vote tonight. Don’t you dare, old chap. Don’t you dare.”

While serving in this place, Reg went on a trip to Kenya. There he met a beautiful young actress called Anne Clements. Anne was and is some decades his junior, but it was the start of a wonderful and happy marriage that lasted the rest of his life. On leaving this place, Reg went back to Birmingham and became chair of the Birmingham Heartlands Development Corporation. He was extraordinarily proud of the opportunity to breathe new life into our great second city. He leaves a great legacy behind him.

Reg was one of those people whom everyone automatically warmed to and everyone instinctively liked. He was very proud of his country and particularly proud of his city. He was proud of his party and proud of this place, but most of all he was terribly proud of his wonderful wife and his wonderful daughter. All of them, from country to family, had very good cause to be proud of him, too.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I am sure I speak on behalf of the whole House when I say that that was a very warm and loving tribute. Our condolences to you and your family.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Monday 29th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend is right to raise that. He may recall that the integration strategy, which was launched earlier this year, talked of almost 700,000 adults in Britain who speak no or very poor English. That has led to more work in this area, especially on using members of the communities concerned as mentors to try to encourage others to take up English language learning.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

2. What steps his Department is taking to encourage greater collaboration between the police and fire services.

[The Minister for Policing and the Fire Service (Mr Nick Hurd)]

I am sure there is cross-party support for wanting our emergency services to make the best use of existing resources, and the Government are extremely active in encouraging greater collaboration, whether it be through innovation funding, the work of the Emergency Services Collaboration Working Group or legislation that enables police and crime commissioners to take on fire and resource governance where a local case exists.

[Alex Burghart]

As the Minister will know, Essex is a pioneer in this area, where Roger Hirst, our police and crime commissioner, has brought fire services in. Will the Minister consider allowing the pooling of capital budgets to enable better joined-up working of back offices?

[Mr Hurd]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Roger Hirst is doing a fantastic job in seizing the opportunity to get more out of existing resources, and I completely understand the point about capital budgets. There are restrictions in place for good reasons, but Roger and other PCCs can already use police and fire budgets to invest in shared functions, such as joint back offices, although both fire and police budgets need to make an appropriate contribution to the shared service.

Salisbury Incident

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

I think that, in the middle of the negotiations, that is what we are trying to do. Our relationship with Europe post Brexit is not just about taking or giving—it is still going to be a partnership. Our security will be a partnership. Our relationships with NATO and many of the countries in NATO will be a partnership. On strategic issues like energy, it is in the interests of both the European continent, as it will be then, and us to have that strategic dialogue. We will need each other for energy policy whether we are in or out of the European Union. I would certainly share the right hon. Gentleman’s view that we must continue to work at delivering that.

This was a chemical weapons attack that left four people fighting for their lives and one innocent woman dead. I know that the thoughts of the House will be with the friends and family of Dawn Sturgess, in particular. We will never stop pursuing justice for Dawn Sturgess and other victims, nor will we ever stop pursuing the people responsible for this malign attack. As the Prime Minister told this House last week, were the two suspects within our jurisdiction, there would be a clear basis in law for their arrest for murder.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I thank the Minister very much for the speech he is giving. I am sure that the House will be aware of the remarks made by President Putin today in saying that these are not criminals but citizens. Does he agree that if the President is so assured of that statement, he might want to encourage those individuals to come to the UK for trial?

[Mr Wallace]

I believe in the British justice system, and if those individuals are innocent, they will be acquitted. I have every faith in that, so I would urge the President to hand them over for a trial. They are suspects and they are innocent until proven guilty.

We have obtained a European arrest warrant and submitted an Interpol red notice so that if these individuals leave Russia in future, they can be apprehended and brought back to the UK to face justice. We have not made a formal extradition request, because we have learned from experience, following the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, that such a request would be futile. The UK does not have an extradition treaty with Russia, and the Russian constitution prohibits extradition of its nationals. But should either of these individuals ever again travel outside Russia, we will take every possible step to have them detained, to extradite them, and to bring them to face justice here in the United Kingdom.

As the Prime Minister also said, we have taken action against the GRU itself. The Salisbury incident is but the latest example in recent history of Russian malign activity in which the GRU has played a key part. The GRU has been involved in the botched coup in Montenegro and the illegal annexation of Crimea. Last year, we determined that GRU hackers were responsible for the indiscriminate NotPetya cyber-attack, which caused some £15 million-worth of damage in the United Kingdom. We exposed its despicable use of chemical weapons in Salisbury, we have exposed its operatives and its methods, and we will share this information with our allies in recognition of the shared threat we face. It is important to remember that the message to our international partners is that if the GRU can do it here, it can do it anywhere—in those people’s countries as well. People who are perhaps tempted to think that Russia is going to be their friend should reflect on the actions it took this year in this country with a nerve agent. We will use every means possible to counter the threat by the GRU, both covert and overt, to ensure that the threat it poses to the United Kingdom is reduced.

The use of deadly, illegal chemical weapons on our soil is part of a pattern of behaviour: Russia’s actions in Crimea, the Donbass and Montenegro; repeated violations of the national airspace of several European countries; sustained cyber-espionage and election interference; and a Russian-made missile belonging to the Russian army launched from territory held by Russian-backed separatists, bringing down civilian airliner MH17.

Immigration Detention: Shaw Review

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I look forward to the Select Committee’s scrutiny. The right hon. Lady is right to point out that, sadly, some vulnerable people will have been victims of torture. Where those claims are made, they should all be properly looked at, which is why I said in my statement that I want to look again at how rule 35 works, so that when people make those claims, they are properly and thoroughly assessed and taken seriously. On time limits and detention, I hope that she welcomes what I have said about doing more work and about having a proper review. I also want to reassure her that challenges have been built into the system. For example, independent panels will challenge whether someone still needs to be detained, and there are gatekeepers when someone arrives at the detention centre. We have learned from the Windrush cases that those systems have not always worked, so there will be more lessons to learn, and I look forward to working with her on those issues.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I am a former member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and we were given access to two of the case files of the Windrush generation who appear to have been illegally detained. I very much welcome the Home Secretary’s response to the Shaw report today. Will he confirm that he is putting in place systems to ensure that no one is detained against the evidence?

[Sajid Javid]

I know very well the two cases to which my hon. Friend refers. As we are still working on Windrush cases, there may well be further cases, sadly, from which we will need to learn lessons as well. I can give my hon. Friend confidence that we are doing everything we can to make changes to ensure that the evidence is followed. For example, I have announced a change today to pilot an automatic bail process of two months, rather than waiting for four months. We need to learn more from the Windrush cases, which is why the lessons learned review will be important, and I am sure that it will show us what more we can do to improve detention.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

As I say, I will find out from the high commissioners whether there have been any situations where such people have been removed. I would respectfully remind the Labour party that the workplace checks were introduced by Labour in 2008. What is happening now is part of the pattern of making sure that people are here legally. I do not want any Commonwealth citizens who are here legally to be impacted in the way they have been. Frankly, some of how they have been treated has been wrong—has been appalling—and I am sorry. That is why I am setting up a new area in my Department to ensure that we have a completely new approach to how their situation is regularised.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

11. What steps she is taking to safeguard vulnerable people from online radicalisation.

[The Minister for Security and Economic Crime (Mr Ben Wallace)]

This Government have been clear there should be no safe space online for terrorists and their supporters to radicalise or inspire people. We are working closely with industry, including through the Global Internet Forum, to counter terrorism and to encourage industry to develop innovative solutions to tackle online radicalisation.

[Alex Burghart]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the world’s leading internet companies need to do much more to take down violent and terrorist material online, and that if they do not, we should make them?

[Mr Wallace]

I do agree with my hon. Friend. It was the Home Office that took the initiative to set up the counter-terrorism internet referral unit, which has seen 300,000 pieces of terrorist propaganda taken down—voluntarily, but taken down none the less. It was the Home Office that worked with ASI Data Science to develop an automatic model, which has a 99.9% accuracy rate. If we can do it, why can those companies not?

--- Later in debate ---

[Amber Rudd]

This was a fair and open competitive process. It is right to have a tendering process that looks after taxpayers’ money and of course ensures that British companies can compete. I wish that a British company had won the contract, but the process has to be carried out fairly, on the basis of quality and cost, and on that basis we saved the country £120 million. I wonder how the right hon. Gentleman would choose to spend that; I know that we can put it to good use.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

T4. Will my right hon. Friend join me in congratulating Essex police, fire and crime commissioner, Roger Hirst, who has used precept powers to increase the number of frontline police officers in Essex by 150?

[Amber Rudd]

I welcome the action of my hon. Friend’s police and crime commissioner. PCCs have been given powers to raise additional funds, if they want to do so, to provide extra policemen and women on the frontline, and most are choosing to do that.

Money Laundering

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

I met Mr Browder and he presented me with his portfolio of evidence. I have raised it a number of times with the NCA, the Serious Fraud Office and the police. I would be delighted to meet the right hon. Gentleman to discuss this specific issue directly. It is up to the operational partners to make a decision. [Interruption.] He may say it is about evidence, but we have make sure that it is evidence up to a level that can produce prosecution in court. I am happy to explore that further with him. My door is open.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

Will the Minister update the House on what is being done to confiscate the assets of those guilty of gross human rights violations?

[Mr Wallace]

If there are criminal assets, we now have the powers to do that. We will bring forward any cases where we have collected the evidence and prepared a case. As I said, the Criminal Finances Act became law on 31 January, so we now have those powers. On sanctions, the sanctions Bill is currently transiting the House. We will bring forward our amendment in due course on Report. I hope we will work across the House to ensure the amendment is acceptable.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

I met a number of Merseyside MPs recently to discuss that threat, and I speak to the hon. Lady’s chief constable on the subject every week. After the initial meeting, I looked at proposals being offered by the Home Office. I have asked that we go back and look again for more assistance for Merseyside and the wider region, because more needs to be done. That is why we are investing in the network of regional organised crime units, and I will continue to meet with police to make sure we get some results.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I am sure the whole House will welcome the fact that more women who have been victims of domestic abuse are coming forward to report crimes. What is the Home Office doing to ensure that women are properly supported by the criminal justice system and that we get more successful prosecutions?

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising this important issue. Victims of domestic violence and abuse deserve the best treatment and justice. Despite record numbers of prosecutions and convictions, sadly there are still nearly 2 million victims of domestic abuse every year in England and Wales. That is precisely why the Prime Minister put at the centre of the Queen’s Speech a new domestic abuse Bill. I look forward to it being a Bill around which we can all agree and coalesce, because it will tackle violence in the home, both helping victims and making sure the perpetrators of these vile crimes are brought to justice.

General Election Campaign: Abuse and Intimidation

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith]

I agree that there is a duty on all Members of this House to be very considered in the language they use in all matters and to talk about policies and politics rather than personalities. Politics has been drifting towards a focus on personalities, and I think that is damaging.

The politics of hope will always win out over the politics of fear, and it played a role in the general election. It was positive that 2.5 million people voted who did not cast a vote in the previous general election, and that gives us a great sense of hope. If we want politics to be more representative, and if we want to encourage a diverse selection of candidates from all political parties to stand, we need to conduct our politics in the spirit of hope.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Cat Smith]

I will in a moment.

The Leader of the Labour party has always said that he does not do personal, and he insisted that all Labour candidates ran positive campaigns based on our policies and the Government’s record, rather than peddling attacks on individuals. He tweeted about that in 2016 and reiterated it in the “Question Time” debate during the general election.

As I said earlier, the Committee on Standards in Public Life is taking evidence this afternoon from three of the major political parties. As part of that inquiry, the Labour party submitted written evidence in which we outlined our support for the idea that political parties and their leaders should agree to a joint code of conduct with a framework for reporting, assessing and disciplining discrimination, racism and any other form of abuse. I hope the Conservative party will work with us to ensure election campaigns are run with dignity and respect for all candidates, and do not depend on highly personal attacks on opponents.

We must see some action on this issue. Abuse and the intimidation of candidates and the public have no place in our elections. I look forward to working with all parties to build a democracy that works for the many, not the few.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

It is a real pleasure to speak in a debate in which there is so much to agree with on both sides of the House. Members are not always good enough at standing up for themselves and the importance of being a Member of Parliament. I have suffered my fair share of electoral abuse, not so much in my current seat but when I was churlish enough to be a Conservative candidate in Islington North. On a daily basis, my team were chased down the street, were accused of being paedophiles and had things thrown at them. I know that many other Members across the House have had similar experiences. This is not the sort of environment in which we wish to pursue our politics.

I would like to make three brief points. The first relates largely to social media and how we can do more to call out the abuse that some of us suffer. When abuse on Twitter takes place, our instinctive reaction is normally to report it, block it and move on. I suggest that we all take the time to capture the abuse before we block it and report it. We should retweet it and share it to name and shame, and to let our followers, colleagues and opponents know the Twitter identity of the people who are putting the stuff around.

We have heard very good contributions from my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) and the hon. Member for East Lothian (Martin Whitfield) about how social media companies could do more, but I think we could do more as well. We could do more in a collegiate sense. If I saw a colleague or an opponent being abused online, I would want to block the abuser, too. We could even get together and draw up banned lists of people on Twitter who are abusing MPs. I do not mean abuse in the sense of, “X party has got its figures wrong” or “Y party doesn’t know what it’s talking about”; I mean physical threats, racism, sexism, homophobia—things that we all agree are totally unacceptable in modern political discourse. We could easily have a system whereby we report Twitter users making abusive threats to the head of the 1922 committee on the Conservative side and the head of the parliamentary Labour party and swap notes weekly.

My third point is about the language that we MPs use. This is a place where language is important. The House does not need reminding that the word “parliament” comes from the French word “parler”—“to speak”; we are perhaps one of the great talking shops in history. The language we use, therefore, is absolutely essential, so when we fail to condemn the language of other Members, even Members on our own side, we let the House down. I am not making a political point against the Labour party or its traditions, but I do want to make a point about one MP who happens to sit on its Benches. When somebody comes out of a meeting in which another Member has suggested that a female Conservative MP should be lynched, the correct response is not, “I didn’t say that myself,” but “I condemn what they said, I’ve reported them to the authorities and I hope that disciplinary action is taken against them.”

Similarly, in being careful about the language we use, we have to stay away from phrases such as “day of rage”. Rage is the language of uncontrolled emotion. Perhaps I am being oversensitive—perhaps it is the language of the barricade and of romantic revolution, or perhaps just a little political Viagra to some doddery old militants—but it is also the language of the flick-knife, of the boot in the face, of the garrotte; it is the language of violence, and it does not belong in the mouths of hon. Members of this Chamber.

Health, Social Care and Security

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. How very nice it is to see you back in your rightful place.

I am honoured to stand before the House as the newly elected Member for Brentwood and Ongar, that most beautiful constituency in the most beautiful county of Essex in this, our most beautiful country. At the heart of our community is the Brentwood-Shenfield-Hutton conurbation, a very hive of Thatcherite prosperity. We have the UK headquarters of Ford, a major BT office, many hundreds of people who work hard in the square mile to feed and fuel the City, and a large number of small, medium and large enterprises built by the sweat of local people. We have high employment and high home ownership. We have good schools. I would not say that our mission should be to make the rest of the country more like Brentwood and Ongar, but there are certainly parts of the country that could benefit from being more like it.

Brentwood is surrounded by the numinous beauty of the much-neglected Essex countryside, which contains many wonderful rural villages. I think just of one: Greensted by Ongar. It is mentioned in the Domesday Book, when it had 44 families and 520 pigs, which makes it slightly larger than it is today. It also has a small wooden church, which is unremarkable but for its beauty and its age, both of which are very great. You see, it is the oldest wooden church to be found anywhere in the world. It was built in the mid-9th century, and it is a somewhat stirring thought that some of those families mentioned in the Domesday Book might have shared the space that we can occupy today.

Such things matter to me not because I am a sentimental old fool—although I am—but because I was for a long time a student and a teacher of medieval history. One of my friends was kind enough to suggest that that was the perfect training for becoming a Conservative MP, and in that they may have been right, but perhaps not in the way they intended. I see a great many resonances between that period and our own. Let us take the peasants’ revolt of 1381, which started on the high street in Brentwood. It was a rebellion against vexatious taxation levied by a distant, overbearing Government. I warn the House that my constituents’ attitude to taxation has changed very little in the intervening 636 years.

I think also of the writings of the Venerable Bede, who said that in the mid-7th century, the East Saxons formed a great friendship with that great man of the north, King Oswiu. In our own time, the people of my constituency formed a great friendship with another great man of the north: Sir Eric Pickles. For 25 years, he was a great servant of his constituency, his party and his country. He was much loved, and he will be much missed. Sir Eric and I are alike in some ways. He and I are both great defenders of a property-owning democracy. But we are not alike in all ways. He is a great man and a great Yorkshireman, to boot, whereas I am a mere novice and a man of Wessex.

I was born in Dorset, the son of two state school teachers who taught me everything I needed to know about the importance of hard work, of family, of education and of home. While those are all things that are important to my constituents today, I suspect that they were important to the people of my area in the mid-14th century and, who knows, maybe in the mid-7th century. I would not go so far as to say that they are everything, but we are nothing without them. That view has been reinforced in me through my work with the Centre for Social Justice, which was founded by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), and by my work in the Department for Education on the Munro review of child protection, which was established under the aegis of my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton).

Wherever in our country we find an absence of work, wherever we find families who have been broken by poor mental health, addiction or domestic abuse, wherever we find children failing in schools or families struggling with home life, we find the social problems that are so knotty. They are the challenges of our time, and the best of way tackling poverty and those problems is by tackling the root causes. We have a good record of that in government: we have record employment; we have 1.8 million more children in good and outstanding schools; we have a troubled families programme that helps 400,000 families with complex problems to get back on their feet; and we have a huge programme of house building. But there will always be more to do in this area. This House will face many challenges in this Parliament—historic challenges. To quote a former Prime Minister, we will

“feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.”

Who knows—but we may at times find its hand on other bits of our anatomy. The challenge of social justice is something that will continue throughout this Parliament and beyond, and I am here to try to do my part and to serve my constituents.