Ukraine

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

No, we do not accept foreign donations, as the hon. Lady knows very well. What we will do is bring forward targeted sanctions, which I think are the most effective way of doing it, targeting the sanctions at the personalities that surround President Putin and making them understand the price that they will pay.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

There is no public appetite for using UK combat troops in Ukraine—absolutely none—but we do have other tools in our toolbox. Is the Prime Minister contemplating using the full-spectrum approach to cyber, including offensive cyber, that he talked about in March in connection with the integrated review?

Covid-19 Update

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The Prime Minister made the right call on restrictions before Christmas and he has made the right call today, except in one respect: the compulsory vaccination of NHS workers. Given that leaked advice to Ministers said that that is neither rational nor proportionate, and given what we now know about omicron and its behaviour, will he think again before redundancy letters start going out from 3 February?

[The Prime Minister]

That argument has been well made by colleagues across the House today. I remind my right hon. Friend that this policy is supported by the NHS for patient safety. It is a very difficult point when it comes to patients who have contracted fatal nosocomially acquired covid. People want their medical staff to be vaccinated. I repeat what I have said throughout the afternoon: I think it is the responsibility of all healthcare professionals to be vaccinated. I hope that he shares that view.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Not only are we powering past coal towards the ending of fossil fuel reliance in our energy generation by 2024, which is absolutely stunning, and we are ahead of countries throughout the world—I am glad the hon. Lady is praising me for that, although, as she knows, the Cambo oilfield is a matter for study by an independent regulator—but what we have also done, and led the world in doing, is stop the financing of overseas hydrocarbons. That is a fantastic thing, which the whole world followed.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

Q9. Net zero, levelling up and building back better cannot happen without a massive increase in the supply of critical tech minerals such as silicon, copper and lithium, but Beijing controls most of those. In the light of China’s recent tech minerals leverage on Japan, does my right hon. Friend agree that the success of our green industrial revolution hinges on advancing our indigenous silicon valley? Now that we are free of the EU, what fiscal incentives can he provide to make that happen at pace?

[The Prime Minister]

As my right hon. Friend knows, there are some very interesting and potentially very lucrative sources of minerals such as lithium in this country, whose exploration, discovery and reuse we are encouraging. As for the tax point that he rightly raised, we will ensure that we support freeports as hubs for the processing of those critical minerals here in the UK.

COP26

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I see; he is talking about India, China and others. [Interruption.] I am sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker. I think the House will forgive me; it was not entirely clear from his question which people he wanted. I want everybody brought into the tent, for the avoidance of doubt.

With India in particular, we need to work with the Indian Government, who are already doing some very impressive things, to show how, with new technology, we can help that country to power past coal. With the One Sun One World One Grid project, it has a huge amount of renewables already going, but the UK can take a leading role, with partners around the world, in building the coalitions of support and investment by the private sector to help even an economy as huge as India’s to make this transition, and make it much faster than people currently think possible. Look at the speed with which the UK has done it; other countries around the world can do the same.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the Prime Minister on his Glasgow achievements. Can he say what is being done to remedy the international shortage of critical minerals to make semiconductors, without which the achievement of our 2035 targets will be impossible? What more can he do to grow our own silicon valleys to reduce our reliance on China and Taiwan?

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. The resources are there. There are adequate supplies; the problem lies in the supply chains. That is an issue that we are working on, together with our American friends and other partners around the world, to ensure that there is no disruption in those supplies of critical things, particularly semi-conductors.

Health and Social Care

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Let me say again what I have said repeatedly: the social care workforce of this country have done an amazing job and continue to do so. They did an amazing job throughout the pandemic as well as before it and beyond. I met more of them today. What they are getting from this package of measures is not only investment in their careers and progression but the long-term structure and respect that they need as a profession and the prospect of integration between what they do and what the NHS provides. That is a massive prize.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on grasping an issue that his predecessors have been ducking for decades. Does he agree that what has been announced restores some equity to a system that relies on pooling our risk and that, in particular, people who have been excluded with dementia, neurodegenerative disease, Parkinson’s disease and the general frailty of old age, and their relatives, can look forward with some confidence to the system that has been there for others also applying to them?

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. Friend knows exactly what he is talking about, because he is a former GP who has seen these issues at the frontline. With this measure, we are not only investing in care and in the NHS but bringing the magic of averages to the rescue of millions.

Afghanistan

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

The US surrender of its wardship of a problem child is a monumental failure of statecraft, geopolitical confidence and strategic patience that has been made all the worse by the fact that it spans two Administrations. The US is diminished by this, but so are all of us in the free world. The winners are those who are lined up against us and against our values. The losers, from Taiwan to the Caucasus, are those who will see their champions as having feet of clay.

We are left with a looming sense of foreboding at this ignominious end of the fourth Afghan war. It seems very likely that murderous civil war and the mother of all refugee crises will ensue, and it seems to many of us that the geopolitical plates are shifting—and they are shifting against us.

But the past 20 years have not been for nothing. Shout it from the rooftops! Four hundred and fifty-seven men and women demand it; their families demand it; and hundreds and thousands of our countrymen and countrywomen who are damaged in mind and body demand it. Twenty years of fundamentalist terror has been denied a power base, degrading its exportability to our streets. Twenty years of progress in Afghanistan cannot be erased by the brutes now in charge. They are 20 years in which the Taliban and its associates have not destabilised a fragile neighbourhood, and in which the export of opiates has been cut, to the benefit of our streets, and 20 years of Afghan dreams of a better life that will not be undreamt.

What now? What mitigation? Who will step up where the US has stepped back? Who will lead? Who will be the convener? Who will hold the pen? It must be Britain. Four hundred and fifty-seven British dead demand it. The Prime Minister has taken an early lead. I would expect nothing else, and this House must get behind him.

Afghanistan

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con) [V]]

Given the high likelihood that China will now exploit the opportunity presented by the US departure by extending the belt and road initiative, buying off the Taliban and muting their opposition to abuses in Xinjiang, what approach will my right hon. Friend take, with our allies, to the resulting greatly strengthened Beijing-Tehran axis, with all its grisly potential impact on security, prosperity and human rights?

[The Prime Minister]

The Chinese are not as yet a very major player in Afghanistan, but my right hon. Friend is absolutely right: it is vital that the people of Afghanistan should determine their own future.

Armed Forces Bill

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Leo Docherty]

Absolutely I can, and I am very pleased to.

I turn to the technical amendments. Amendments 8 to 15 relate to the armed forces covenant, amendments 16 to 23 and 31 to 38 amend the service complaints provisions, and amendments 24 to 30 relate to the provision on driving disqualification.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Leo Docherty]

I am delighted to give way to my right hon. Friend.

[Dr Murrison]

Can the Minister confirm, before he gets technical, that the overriding consideration in all this is that servicemen, servicewomen and their families should suffer no disadvantage by virtue of their military service? There will be test cases arising from the guidance to which he has referred in which people say, “Look, I’ve been disadvantaged because I’m in the armed forces.” The acid test has to be what they would have got from the system if they had not been serving. Surely that is the guiding star in all this.

[Leo Docherty]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely correct. That is the fundamental basis of all this, and that is at the heart of the statutory guidance. We are confident that local authorities will bear that in mind in the way they afford provision in the critical areas that I have described, but of course there may be test cases and we will take note of them if they arise.

A number of Opposition amendments and new clauses have been tabled. I want to concentrate on the key ones that specifically relate to the service justice system and the armed forces covenant. Amendment 7 seeks to ensure that the most serious crimes are automatically tried in the civilian courts when committed by a serviceperson in the UK, thereby undermining the current legal position that there is full concurrent jurisdiction between the service and civilian justice systems. The amendment would mean that the most serious offences, when committed in the UK, could never be dealt with in the service justice system, even though the Lyons review recommended that the most serious offences could and should continue to be tried in the service justice system with the consent of the Attorney General.

The Government have a more pragmatic approach. We are confident that the service justice system is capable of dealing with all offences, whatever their seriousness and wherever they occur, bolstered by improvements recommended by the Lyons review, such as the creation of the defence serious crime unit and improvement to the support to victims. The service police, prosecutors and judiciary are trained, skilled and experienced. Victims and witnesses receive comparable support to the civilian system, for example through the armed forces code of practice for victims of crime, which we continue to keep updated in line with civilian practices. The amendment would remove the valuable role of independent prosecutors in allocating cases to the most appropriate jurisdiction.

Clause 7 improves and strengthens the protocol between service and civilian prosecutors to determine where cases are tried. That improvement will bring much-needed clarity on how decisions on jurisdiction are made and will ensure transparency and independence from the chain of command and Government. To be clear, the aim of this approach is not to increase the number of serious crimes being tried in the court martial. The civilian prosecutor will always have the final say. I therefore urge the Committee to reject amendment 7.

Amendments 1 to 4 would create a duty on central Government and devolved Administrations. Clause 8, as it stands, covers public functions in healthcare, housing and education exercised by the local or regional bodies that are responsible for those services. Those are the key areas of concern for our armed forces community. Central Government’s delivery of the covenant is regularly scrutinised, as I referred to in my answer to the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), and the Armed Forces Act 2006 requires the Secretary of State for Defence to lay an annual report before Parliament. Devolved Administrations and other bodies are given an opportunity to contribute their views to that report. That duty to report will remain a legal obligation, and it remains the key, highly effective method by which the Government are held to account for delivery of the covenant.

Amendments 39 to 42 seek to ensure that all service housing is regulated in line with the local minimum quality. These amendments are unnecessary because, in practice, 96.7% of MOD-provided service family accommodation meets or exceeds the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s decent homes standard. The amendments would introduce an unhelpful disparity across the UK and would not achieve their intended effect, because local authorities that fall within the scope of the current duty are not responsible for the provision of service accommodation, so these amendments should be withdrawn.

The provision of high-quality subsidised accommodation remains a fundamental part of the overall MOD offer to service personnel and their families. Over the past decade, we have invested £1.2 billion in single living accommodation and another £1.5 billion will be invested over the next 10 years. Additionally, we are rolling out the future accommodation model to improve choice, and I am pleased to report that the forces Help to Buy scheme has helped more than 24,000 personnel to buy a new home over the past seven years.

New clause 9 seeks to introduce artificial timelines for the progress of investigations. These are operationally unrealistic. They do not take account of the nature of investigations on overseas operations and could put us in breach of our international obligations, including under the European convention on human rights, to effectively investigate serious crimes. The right hon. Member for North Durham will be aware, following my letter to him on 7 June, that the detail of this new clause has been provided to Sir Richard Henriques for consideration as part of his review into investigations, and I am confident that Sir Richard will consider this matter very carefully.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: the $100 billion is a totemic figure. We are doing everything we can to ensure that we are able to deliver it by COP26. I can assure him that I am having very frank discussions with donor countries—with developed countries —to ensure that they deliver on that commitment made in 2009.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

Does the COP presidency share my concern at the reputational hit that the UK will take in the event that it continues to approve old-style carbon-belching waste incinerators such as the one proposed at Westbury in my constituency?

[The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Anne-Marie Trevelyan)]

All energy-from-waste plants in England are regulated by the Environment Agency and must comply with the strict emissions limits set in legislation. I am aware that Northacre Renewable Energy Ltd has applied for an environmental permit from the Environment Agency to operate an incinerator in Westbury, Wiltshire, and the Environment Agency is considering responses to the public consultation.

Debate on the Address

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Tuesday 11th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

Mr Deputy Speaker, I will endeavour to do the same. I very much welcome the Gracious Speech. I am in awe of the person who delivered it and in awe of its delivery. How fortunate we are in our Head of State.

I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for North West Cambridgeshire (Shailesh Vara) and for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) on delivering wonderful speeches, full of good humour and good sense, and kind and generous.

Covid mercifully appears to be retreating in the UK, at least faster than Darius from Alexander, but every day that passes has been chipping away at our liberties, the prospects of our young people, our mental health, our health in general, the economy and our institutions great and small, including this one. It is a terrible price to pay and it is time to bring it to an end. More than two-thirds of adults have now been jabbed. One-third have been jabbed twice. Yesterday, more people will statistically have died on the roads than of covid. There is no prospect of our national health service being overwhelmed, and if I am worried about a virus this wintertime, it is seasonal flu, not a covid third wave.

The Prime Minister made it clear earlier, in answer to an intervention, that there will be a full review—a comprehensive inquiry—into the management of this pandemic, and I very much welcome that. It would be remarkable if, after all of this, we did not review what had gone on and learn the lessons from it. I do so hope that it will not be a witch hunt; there is nothing to be gained from that. Throughout this, we have been in uncharted waters; there is no route map for this, and people have done the best they can in the circumstances that face them and with the information available to them.

It is important that we learn the lesson because, just around the corner, it is more than likely that we will have a new variant or new variants. It is equally likely that something else even worse may crop up. I think it is also pretty apparent that in the early stages of this pandemic, we were not as well prepared as we should have been. I have been critical in particular of our public health institutions that were, to my mind, not fit for purpose, focused, as they were, on modern pandemics to do with lifestyle in particular, which are very important in themselves, but which I think also took our eye off the ball when it came to traditional, old-fashioned public health around infectious disease.

That is a pity, because in this country we have a very strong tradition of public health. We have a very strong history in dealing with infectious diseases, and our institutions around infectious disease, bacteriology and virology are world-beating. This country, of course, was the home to west country doctor Edward Jenner and west country farmer Benjamin Jesty—less well known—who really set the science of vaccination afoot and made this country the world leader. In recent times, perhaps, we have unfortunately not learned some of the lessons as well as we should have done, and forgotten others.

I am also very sympathetic to Health Ministers who, in the early stages of this pandemic, pulled levers and found that nothing really happened. That is a perception from the Back Benches, but it is why I think that I would likely support those things contained in the Gracious Speech that hint at strengthening the ability of Ministers to control some aspects of healthcare in this country. That is a difficult thing for me to say, because 10 years ago I was a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Department of Health when reforms were going through that, in the full light of day, perhaps we might have done somewhat differently and, in my opinion, have not always been helpful in managing this crisis.

I am particularly keen on further reforms to public health. I think I am the only Member of Parliament with a postgraduate qualification in public health and I take a very close interest in it. There is no question in my mind but that our public health institutions need to be strengthened in order to face down more effectively the infectious disease threats of the future. This country faces many threats. It faces threats from Putin’s Russia, from cyber and from fundamentalist terror. However, the greatest existential threat that this country faces at the moment is more at home in a Petri dish, and we need to make sure that we bend every sinew of our national life and institutions to protect the public from that threat in the future. Any Government who fail to do so will suffer the consequences. I am heartened by what I have heard in this Gracious Speech and what I have heard Ministers talk about recently in relation to building those institutions, strengthening them, and making sure that we are much better placed to face down these threats in future.

I have spent the past 10 weeks or so leading vaccination teams in south-east London and the south-west of England, and will have done or supervised thousands of those vaccinations that come up on our screens every evening to tell us how we are doing. It has been one of the greatest privileges of my professional life. Through Operation Rescript and Operation Broadshare, its overseas iteration, the armed forces have, in my opinion, done extremely well. The warmth with which soldiers, sailors and airmen have been greeted in communities—many of those communities that now have a very small military footprint, and some of them communities that are not necessarily naturally sympathetic to defence—has been extraordinary. It is my view that the participation of our armed forces in helping our NHS through this pandemic has been far more effective than any number of armed forces days with which I have been associated, and has massively advanced civilian-military relations in this country. I pay tribute to all of my colleagues in the reserves and regulars for their service in support of our national health service.

I commend the Government for bringing forward an Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill—a bit of a mouthful, but nevertheless—and I am very pleased that research features large in the Gracious Speech. I particularly commend Ministers for awarding £30 million for covid research at the MOD’s Porton Down facility near Salisbury. That is money well spent: I have no doubt that it will be met with rewards in the future, not just in this country but worldwide, where we are world leaders in this technology. I am very pleased that the Gracious Speech highlighted the Government’s leadership in promoting access to vaccination worldwide through COVAX and the UK’s approach to vaccine development and acquisition. However, just a small word of caution: we can ship out as much vaccine as we like to developing countries, but if they do not have the infrastructure with which to deliver that vaccine programme, we will be largely wasting our time, and we will find that outside the big urban centres and the élites, our good work will not be felt. It is very important that, especially when delivering surplus vaccine, we also make sure that we use expertise in this country—particularly in the national health service, and maybe even in the armed forces—to ensure that the logistics for delivery are there.

I would like to mention Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom that I have grown to love and respect very much indeed over the years. I listened with great interest, as I always do, to the comments on that subject made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). She is right: sometimes, in government, we have to do things in the greater interest that may seem alien to us, even uncomfortable. We all know the realpolitik that has caused many of us to be discomfited with the way members of the armed forces, some of them our constituents, have been handled in recent times, and none of us wants to do anything that would allow terrorists to go unpunished—allow them to get off the hook. However, that ship sailed in 1998, and we have to acknowledge that there has been a generation of relative peace since. Like my right hon. Friend, I remember those images when I was growing up, night after night. A line must be drawn so that this wonderful, wonderful corner of our country can move on, looking to the future and not the past.

Although there was no Bill in the Queen’s Speech that dealt with social care specifically, I nevertheless commend the Government for their recent language around a social care Bill. I would have liked to see a firmer commitment to it, but nevertheless I have the sense that it is a piece of work that will be done in this Parliament. I very much hope that that will mean in part a Dilnot-style cap on the cost of care. We pool risk in our national health service —that is what it is all about—but we did not do that in the 1940s. That is a piece of unfinished work, and while we will certainly debate integrated care, which is important, we also need to grasp the nettle of who pays. Mercifully, most of us will not end up needing extensive social care, but some of us will. At the moment, the costs of that fall disproportionately. The Government have an opportunity now to stamp their mark on one of the great outstanding challenges of our age. They must seize the day.