Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Murrison and Steve Brine(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Dr Murrison
That is certainly my intention—I have not seen them yet but I intend to. The hon. Lady will have seen the list of 150; I think she will be disappointed about the content of those documents when she sees them, because very few of them will give us any information that will take us any further forward. But I committed to reading them and will certainly do so in the very near future.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
Ministers know that Sir John Moore barracks in my constituency is due for disposal in 2026 as part of the future soldier programme, which will bring phase 1 capability to the Pirbright site and put 900 houses in its place. Will a Minister meet me to ensure that the current ministerial team is right behind the move and, if it is, that we have an intelligent masterplan that does not just help Winchester City Council to meet its housing targets?
Public Health
Debate between Andrew Murrison and Steve Brine(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
I certainly will be supporting these regulations tonight, with a heavy heart, but nevertheless, they are clearly required at this particular juncture. I doubt that there is anybody in this country who loathes and detests more the restrictions on liberties and livelihoods that these regulations reiterate than the Prime Minister. I am confident that he would not be recommending them to the House unless they were absolutely necessary in his judgment. However, I think it is important that the House is provided with more granularity on numbers and it needs to have a better idea of what constitutes an exit strategy and the trigger points that would allow for that strategy.
Jabs offered are not the same as jabs put in arms, which is what is crucial. We need to have published—I suggest daily, since Ministers must have this information—what is being contracted for, the factory-gate delivery against that contract, the jabs in arms and the jabs that are awaiting deployment because of the three-week downtime caused by batch and sterility testing. We need to know how many jabs have been applied in the past 24 hours by priority group.
Steve Brine
I will add one to that, if I may: jabs given per area. In Hampshire, we are in a good place—I expect to hear so tonight in our briefing call, because we can scale up when the supply is there—but I know, from talking to colleagues across the House, that it is not the same everywhere. We need to know where the weaknesses are—or, rather, the vaccine Minister does, so that he may address that.
Dr Murrison
My hon. Friend makes a fair point, and that data clearly has to be available, because it is gathered locally. That would be very useful, particularly for constituency Members of Parliament.
The thing that worries me most is the exit strategy. The Secretary of State, perfectly reasonably, said that we have a sort of exit strategy in that we now have a vaccine, which we clearly did not have at the beginning of last year. However, we need to decide—this is a political decision, ultimately—what constitutes the criteria for coming out of this lockdown. Generally, it has been suggested, that will happen when we have vaccinated everyone up to group 4 in the JCVI’s list of priorities—that is perfectly reasonable—so when everyone over the age of 70 has been jabbed, as opposed to everyone over the age of 70 being offered a jab. The two, as I said, are quite different.
We need to challenge and push back on that, however, because notwithstanding the remarks made by the hon. Gentleman who speaks for the Opposition, the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), long covid, awful though it is for those who are afflicted by it, does not constitute a reason for continued lockdown and the penalty that this country is paying societally, medically and economically for what we are about to vote on this evening. That does not stack up; what stacks up is the awful grisly calculus of lives saved.
We have a benchmark, which is the number of lives that, tragically, we are compelled to accept every year are lost to seasonal flu deaths. That gives a reasonable benchmark of what, politically, in society we might be capable of accepting and, because we can project how many deaths will happen—Ministers are keen to do that in recommending to the House, correctly, that we vote in support this evening—they must have an idea, given the number of people who have been vaccinated in key groups, how many deaths there will be in the ensuing month, or two months or whatever one might choose.
I will just push back, very finally, on one other issue: the people in group 4. It is reasonable, perhaps, for those who can be expected to remain safe through shielding to be considered part of group 5, because that will enable many of people over 65 to be vaccinated, which will enable us potentially to come out of this awful lockdown just a little bit sooner and to meet the challenging targets that have been set by the Prime Minister.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Murrison and Steve Brine(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Dr Murrison
The human rights of Palestinians are quite clearly very close to the top of our list of priorities. The hon. Lady touched on Israel, the annexation of territory and the involvement of the US. Let us be clear. We want to see a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. I hope that makes our position clear.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
At the start of Christian Aid Week, the focus of the organisation is on its maternal health work in Sierra Leone, where, since the Ebola crisis, 10 women die every day in childbirth and one in nine children die before their fifth birthday. Will the Foreign Secretary put Britain’s weight behind the campaign calling on the IMF to write off the loans it made to the African country to fight the Ebola outbreak?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Murrison and Steve Brine(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Dr Murrison
I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. Some 12,600 jobs in Scotland are linked to the defence industry. It is impossible to imagine that the jobs to which he refers will be sustained in the event of independence, given the very small number of ships that the Scottish Government would purchase, and article 346 of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union, with which I know he is familiar.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
18. Further to the question of my hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride), according to SNP plans, under independence the Scottish air force would have 12 Typhoon jets, if costed properly. Would that not be a considerable reduction in the number of jets that are currently based in Scotland, and a huge reduction in the total number of jets currently available to protect the air approaches to Scotland and, ultimately, what would be left of the UK?
Dr Murrison
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Scottish Government tell us that they would have 12 Typhoons, which means four that are operational at any one time. That is no substitute for the Royal Air Force, and neither does it come close to what is provided by the allies, which the Scottish Government like to pretend they will match: Norway has 57 jets and Denmark has 30. The Scottish Government have also made no provision for air-to-air refuelling, without which the scope for covering Scotland’s extensive air space will be dramatically reduced.
Dr Murrison
I pay tribute to Defence Munitions Beith, which does a hugely important job and is right at the very centre of defence in the United Kingdom. The straight answer to the hon. Lady’s question is no, because to pre-negotiate would place the Scottish and UK Governments in an invidious position. We do not intend to prioritise one part of the UK above another in advance of the referendum on 18 September.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
T9. Further to the exchange that the Minister and I had in the House on 16 December, can he confirm that he would expect that an MOD objection on the grounds of low- flying aircraft in the area of a proposed onshore wind farm, such as Bullingdon Cross in my constituency, would be taken extremely seriously by any planning authority and by the Planning Inspectorate?
Dr Murrison
My hon. Friend and I have discussed this matter in the past. He knows that the MOD is working hard to find a solution to mitigate the effects of onshore wind turbines on the things that we do. In the meantime, it is important that the MOD does object to planning applications that may get in the way of its defence deliverables.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Murrison and Steve Brine(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
10. What objections his Department has made to applications for onshore wind farms in the last 12 months.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Dr Andrew Murrison)
The Ministry of Defence objects to wind farm applications if they have any detrimental effect on military capability. In the past year we have received 2,200 applications and objected to 284.
Steve Brine
I thank the Minister for that answer. EDF Energy proposes to erect 14 126-metre masts on farmland at Bullington Cross in my constituency and the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young). In the impact statement submitted to the council, it said that Bullington Cross
“is an extremely busy aviation site with a high density of both military and civil aviation activity”.
Given that the site is within a Ministry of Defence low-flying area for battleground helicopters, does the Minister not agree that it is totally inappropriate to have the training of our armed forces personnel compromised by turbines higher than Winchester’s great cathedral?
Dr Murrison
I know that my hon. Friend and the Keep Hampshire Green group have been tireless in resisting the proposed development. The application remains a live planning case, and the MOD has objected to it because of possible interference with the primary surveillance radars at Middle Wallop and Boscombe down, the precision approach radar at Middle Wallop and the low-flying operations. The MOD aims to be helpful in facilitating renewables through mitigation and pre-application inquiries, but safety and key defence deliverables must have primacy.