Voyeurism (Offences) (No. 2) Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Alex Chalk and Helen Whately

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 10th July 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Chalk]

Q But would you agree that that is a key part of how this sort of legislation operates on the ground—namely, how it is enforced and the discretion that is applied to its terms?

Lisa Hallgarten: I would agree and I would say that it is really important that people understand the point of the legislation. Whether that can be described through the wording of the legislation, I do not know.

[Helen Whately]

Q You have talked very helpfully about avoiding unnecessary criminalisation of young people. That is helpful because some witnesses have argued for a more heavy-handed approach, with a much more blanket criminalisation of people. It would be helpful if you said more about the consequences of criminalising a young person when, in some of the circumstances you have described, they might not know the full seriousness of what they are doing. What do you think the best alternatives would be?

Lisa Hallgarten: It is interesting that we are going from lots of schools not even excluding a child who has been proven to be involved in sexual bullying or harassment to moving to prosecution. It would be good to think about the different steps that are appropriate at different ages for a child and different kinds of offence.

There have been situations where young women who have been raped in school—a very serious sexual assault—have had to go to school when the same children are still in the school—the people who were guilty of the offences. It feels to me that there is a big gap between ignoring the offence and prosecuting the child. There must be some sensible steps that we could take.

None of this is to say that this law should or should not happen. I am not really commenting on whether the law should exist, but I think, long before a child is prosecuted, far more steps should be taken, and much earlier. It is very unlikely that somebody would go to a serious offence from nothing. It is very likely that a child who ends up taking photos, sharing sexual images or physically assaulting somebody will have done what we would consider to be more mild offences, which will not have been picked up or taken seriously.

I know that the Women and Equalities Committee report found that lots of cases were dismissed. Lots of complaints, mainly from girls, were very easily dismissed in their school and not taken seriously. You wonder whether those boys just did not get the message that it is completely unacceptable to behave like that.

NHS Outsourcing and Privatisation

Debate between Alex Chalk and Helen Whately

Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

The allegation of privatisation of the NHS is wholly misconceived. It is a reheated and debunked myth that irresponsible elements have been trotting out for decades, and repeating it does not make it any more true. NHS outsourcing to private providers is being weaponised in a way that involves dressing it up as a threat to the NHS’s guiding principle that treatment should be provided free at the point of use and regardless of ability to pay. That is what people understand when the expression “privatisation” is used, but the reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.

That principle is fundamental, inviolable and enduring. It is all those things because it reflects so much about the kind of country we are and want to continue to be. It is the principle that says that when a member of the public is rushed into hospital needing emergency care, we take pride in the fact that the ability to pay is irrelevant. NHS staff are interested in vital signs, not pound signs. There is no appetite in this country for the Americanisation of British healthcare. Even if there were, I could never support it, my colleagues could never support it and the Government could never support it. That is why it is so important that we make that position crystal clear.

On the issue of outsourcing, we must not rewrite history. As moderate members of the Opposition concede, certain services have been provided independently since the NHS’s inception 70 years ago. Most GP practices are private partnerships; the GPs are not NHS employees. The same goes for dentists and pharmacists. Equally, the NHS has long-established partnerships for the delivery of clinical services such as radiology and pathology, and for non-clinical services such as car parking and the management of buildings and the estate. To give an everyday example, the NHS sources some of its bandages from Elastoplast. That is common sense; it would be daft if public money was diverted from frontline patient care in order to research and reinvent something that was already widely available.

That is why certain members of the Labour party have slammed this kind of argument as scaremongering. Lord Darzi, a former Health Minister, has been highly critical. In 2017, the shadow Secretary of State said on the “Today” programme that there may well be examples

“where in order to increase capacity you need to use the private sector”,

so this argument is completely misconceived. In 2009, Andy Burnham admitted that the private sector could benefit the NHS. As Labour’s Health Secretary, he said:

“the private sector puts its capacity into the NHS for the benefit of NHS patients, which I think most people in this country would celebrate.”—[Official Report, 15 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 250WH.]

[Helen Whately]

My hon. Friend is making the point extremely well that there is complete inconsistency in Labour’s argument on this point. Which of the various parts of NHS services that are provided by independent sector providers is Labour against?

[Alex Chalk]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I shall give three brief examples from my own constituency. First, Cobalt is a Cheltenham-based medical charity that is leading the way in diagnostic imaging. It provides funding for research, assists with training for healthcare professionals and provided the UK’s first high-field open MRI scanner. Is the Labour party now suggesting that that should be ditched—that we should axe that fantastic facility in my constituency?

Secondly, the Sue Ryder hospice at Leckhampton Court is part-funded by the NHS and part-funded by charitable donations; again, is that for the axe under Labour? Thirdly, what about Macmillan and its nurses? It is a fantastic organisation, yet we have the extraordinary situation in which the Labour party says, “Macmillan is all right, but another provider is not.” What is the logic of the Labour position? What about Mencap? The list goes on and on.

Let me deal briefly with the second part of Labour’s motion, whereby it wants to ensure that all communications between Ministers and their officials are revealed. The reason why that is so bogus was explained clearly by the former senior Labour Secretary of State Jack Straw in a statement that was quoted with approval in the Chilcot committee’s report. He said that meetings in Cabinet

“must be fearless. Ministers must have the confidence to challenge each other in private. They must ensure that decisions have been properly thought through, sounding out all possibilities before committing themselves to a course of action…They must not be deflected from expressing dissent”.

What about advice given by officials in the form of memorandums and so on? What would Labour Members say to those officials about a motion that might result in the making public of the advice of professional civil servants—people who, of course, can never answer back themselves—that they thought was given to Ministers in confidence? As I have already indicated, it would also be completely inconsistent with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which was introduced by a Labour Government. On both bases, the motion is misconceived, and I shall have no hesitation in voting against it.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Alex Chalk and Helen Whately

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 21st February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. We have put in place policies to help women. The extra free childcare for three-year-olds benefits both parents but, as women are often the main child carer, it particularly helps women who have an ambition to work.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that, since the last Labour Government were in power, youth unemployment has been cut in half? That generates opportunities, the dignity of work, the chance to get on and the chance for women and children to achieve their best in society.

[Helen Whately]

I thank my hon. Friend for making such an important point. This Government have given thousands of young people the opportunity to have a job. It was not that long ago that everyone was always talking about NEETs—the big debate was about all those young people not in education, employment or training. Those numbers have now shrunk phenomenally under this Government’s leadership.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Alex Chalk and Helen Whately

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I appreciate the hon. Lady’s point, but I still think that she very much spoke about spending and not about the content of this Finance Bill.

Our job in this House is to make difficult decisions not just on what we spend money on but on how we raise that money—who we tax and what we tax, when we are reluctant to tax people and would much rather they had the money in their pockets to spend themselves. Our aim is to make things better for our constituents, young or old and those in between. It is not our job to make promises that cannot be kept, to write cheques that we cannot cash, and just to say things that sound nice, like massive amounts of spending, but might turn out to have nasty consequences like high unemployment. Labour Members may tell us differently, but spending that we cannot afford is not the moral high ground—it is the moral low ground.

This Finance Bill builds on the tough decisions of the Governments led by Conservative Prime Ministers over the past seven years who have reduced the deficit by 75%, while as of next year debt will fall as a share of GDP. Let us not throw that all away, as Labour Members would, with uncosted proposals and unquantified borrowing. As we heard earlier, they could not answer our questions on how much their borrowing would cost.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Twenty-three times.

[Helen Whately]

I think it was at least 25 times that Labour Members were asked, and still no answer other than “See if you can look it up for yourself.” Why it could not be said at the Dispatch Box, I do not know, but I fear that they are inevitably planning to pile up debt for future generations.

I welcome three things in particular. First, there is the Government’s commitment to help people on low wages. The continued increase in the personal allowance is taking people out of tax and enabling them to keep more of what they earn to spend as they need to. Alongside that, the minimum wage is rising, but at a rate that is manageable for businesses so that they do not have to lay people off in order to pay it. Policies in the Budget to increase the supply of houses should bring down rents, which, we acknowledge, have been going up far too fast. In this Bill, there is a stamp duty cut for first-time buyers to bring buying a home within reach of more families—a particular challenge for my constituency in the south-east. As Shepherd Neame brewery is the largest employer in my constituency, I should mention the very welcome freeze on beer duty, which will be good for it and good for beer drinkers across the country.

Secondly, I welcome the actions on tax avoidance and evasion to make sure that we collect more, if not all, of the tax owed. That builds on the Government’s track record in this area, as the Financial Secretary to the Treasury pointed out. Particularly in the context of my constituency, I welcome plans to cut down on online VAT evasion, with the advantages that gives to online businesses in paying VAT, because I want us to achieve a more level playing field between online businesses and those with premises such as our high street shops. Regarding the policy on landfill tax, in my area we have an ongoing problem with rogue land fillers who start off in line with the law and seem to end up not in line with it.

Thirdly, I welcome the incredibly important commitment to addressing our productivity challenge. This has been acknowledged by this Government many times—it is not suddenly news. In fact, the measures in the Budget and the Finance Bill are the product of a huge amount of work looking at how we can improve productivity—a long-running problem in this country. It is vital that we raise productivity because that means that people get more money for every hour that they work. That is the key to improving living standards and funding the public services that we want, particularly with NHS costs going up as people need and want more care. There are many factors underlying our productivity challenge. Skills are a challenge for us. There is an issue with companies investing in workers, and workers investing in themselves. It is, to some extent, a cultural challenge. One venture capital investor told me that the key difference that he notices between British and American start-ups is that it is common to see in the business plan of American start-ups investment in training for themselves as the founders of the business. He rarely sees that in British start-up companies. That is, to some extent, a cultural challenge; we do not see investing in ourselves and our skills as part of life.

We know that we lag behind other countries in the use of technology and investment in automation. One specific example is our robot density. In Japan, there are 305 robots per 10,000 employees. In Germany the figure is 301 and in the Netherlands it is 120, but in the UK it is just 71. That is just one example of where we lag behind in investment in technology and automation. We have to drive up investment in those areas, as the Finance Bill does. Such investment cannot just come from Government spending more; we have to stimulate private investment in those areas, as my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) said eloquently. We have to mobilise private capital through incentives such as the EIS, which really works. I welcome the increases in that area, which will help to ensure that more businesses start and grow in this country, to provide the jobs and the higher wages that our constituents want.

There are no easy answers; what matters is getting the right answers. We need to help people on the lowest wages to keep more of what they earn, get a fair contribution from high earners and global businesses, build a more productive economy and invest in skills and technology. We want people to have higher wages in the jobs of the future so that they can live as they aspire to.