Investigatory Powers (Amendment)Bill [Lords]

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Beamish

Report stage
Monday 25th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Angela Eagle]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), and indeed all the fellow members of the ISC who have spoken on both sides of the House in our debate on seeking to improve this important piece of legislation. I must say that it is very rare, when one is called towards the end of a debate, for there to have been concessions on most of the areas at issue, leaving very little else to say. It makes me happy that I did not write my speech in advance, since I would have had to rip most of it up following the Security Minister’s very welcome concessions on a range of issues during our debate. They are on the record, and they are indeed extremely welcome.

However, there is one area of detail that I want to comment on, which is about the triple lock amendment—amendment 22—on the qualifications and experience of the Secretaries of State who, under the widening of the triple lock, could if the Prime Minister of the day is incapacitated for some reason, be drawn into making a warrant to intercept the communications of a Member of this Parliament, or indeed a Member of any of the devolved legislatures in the UK. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) was very explicit about why that particular protection should be in existence, and I completely agree with his analysis. One of the ways we defend our democracy is by allowing Members of Parliament to do their unique jobs without interference unless it is for an exceptional and a very good reason, and has been authorised at the highest level.

There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing while the Bill has been going through its parliamentary stages about precisely how this widening of the power to make such a warrant away from the Prime Minister, if he or she is indisposed or unable to be near secure communications, should actually be defined. We have got down to the stage where everybody agrees that to make the system robust there should be an expansion, and we have even come up with a number of Secretaries of State—five—who should be authorised in such exceptional circumstances to make that warrant.

We are now down to the last piece of disagreement between the ISC and the Minister, which is about what the qualifications of those Secretaries of State should be. In seeking to try to draw out precisely what the Government mean, we have asked as a Committee that the relevant Secretaries of State who may be down to do this duty ought already to be responsible for warrantry, or have had previous responsibility for it. Thus far, however, the Government and the Minister have been unwilling to be that deliberate in the arrangements they have made.

As the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) said in his contribution to the debate, the only qualification apart from being a Secretary of State that the Government appear to have admitted is that the person standing in for the Prime Minister ought to have had a 20-minute security briefing about warrantry.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Does my hon. Friend agree with me that this is so important, because the Secretary of State will be acting as the Prime Minister at that time? Once that decision has been taken—even though we now have the commitment from the Minister that the Prime Minister will be told, not should be told—they will not be able to overturn or review it in any way, so that person is acting as the Prime Minister at that stage.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Yes, and it is clearly important that there is a reassurance that the Secretary of State who is picked to do that job in these exceptional circumstances will either have previous experience of being responsible for warrantry and issuing warrants, or have current experience. I do not see why the Security Minister cannot concede that that is where we should be. I do not understand why, over all of the parliamentary time spent on this Bill, the Government have not been able to give us that assurance, which just shores up the important nature of the commitment to widening the triple lock.

Clearly, the Minister’s very welcome decision to make the concession on amendment 23, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) has just pointed out, strengthens the situation, because that means the Prime Minister will have to be notified of such a warrant. However, my right hon. Friend is also correct in pointing out that the warrant cannot be rescinded if it has already been granted. I therefore gently ask the Security Minister whether he will not take the opportunity, in responding to the debate, to give the ISC members and the public we all represent the reassurance that the Secretaries of State who may have this power delegated to them either will already be responsible for warranting, or will have previously had responsibility for warranting. I do not understand why he cannot just get up and give us that final assurance. If he does, I think we will have done extremely well on Report and in Committee. I am rather disappointed that the Minister is not leaping to his feet, since he has been leaping to his feet a lot while my colleagues have been making their speeches. I see no such flicker in him as I am making mine. I suspect and hope that that is because he is just thinking about how he will wind up the debate and give us that final assurance that we need.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

The measure is doable, because we are not asking for something in the Bill; it could be done in the guidance. The Minister has already agreed on changing the “should” to “will”, so this measure could be reflected in the guidance that goes alongside the Bill.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I can see that the Minister is looking pensive, so I hope that means he is thinking of some way to reassure us on this final, important point with respect to the triple lock and the widening of those powers to other Ministers who are not the Prime Minister.

The whole debate around the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill demonstrates that when threats evolve, the requirement to meet them also has to evolve. We know that this area is rapidly developing, and we know also that we will probably be back in the not-too-distant future to see how these powers can be changed again to defend our democracy and meet some of the threats of serious organised crime and terrorism, which our security forces help us deal with day in, day out. We also know that if our citizens are to give us effective permission and consent to take some of these powers, any increase in powers has to be accompanied by an increase in proper oversight, to reassure them that democracy is being defended, not undermined. That includes oversight by the ISC, which is why I am a big supporter of new clause 1 as tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis). It is important that that can be an ongoing reassurance.

I do not want to repeat a lot of the arguments made by colleagues, and it is important now to listen to what the Minister has to say. I thank him for the concessions he has made, and I hope he can make just a slight move towards us on the warrantry issue in the instance of the triple lock, so that we can be even more content than we are now.

Budget Resolutions

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Beamish

Wednesday 6th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I think that the costing of the policy in the forecast ought to be more honest and it should be taken out of the scorecard if it is not to be put into effect.

Taxes are still higher than they have been since the second world war, and the Government have continued to fritter billions on fraud and waste. Only today, we learned that taxpayers have had to pick up the bill for the legal costs of the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology and for the damages in a libel case. How much has that debacle cost us?

First, the Conservatives gave us the catastrophic mini-Budget with its unfunded tax cuts, which spooked the markets and sent mortgage costs and rents soaring for millions; and now the current Chancellor has decided to fund his election giveaways with the fiscal fiction of huge cuts in planned departmental spending scheduled to last the whole of the next Parliament. There are no detailed plans for how those cuts in spending can be safely delivered, because we are not to have a spending review. Today, the Chancellor confirmed that there will not be a spending review until after the next general election. He pencilled in a so-called increase of nearly 1% for departmental budget spending, but has not compensated for higher than expected inflation or population growth, or any extra cost pressures.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Departmental spending is not just flatlining at 1%; if my hon. Friend looks at capital on page 27 of the Red Book, she will see that most Departments are staying still or, in some cases—such as the Home Office, Education and Defence—having their budgets cut by 2024-25.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

My right hon. Friend must be able to read my mind, because that was exactly the point I was coming on to make: in real terms, there are cuts of up to 18% in unprotected Departments, going all the way through to the end of the next Parliament. That has been described by David Gauke, the Tory ex-Treasury Minister as the height of “fiscal irresponsibility”.

The legacy of this Government is burgeoning Government debt, up from 64.7% of GDP when Labour left office in 2010 to 95% now. The Chancellor will barely meet his own self-imposed fiscal rules by the tiniest of margins. Meanwhile, his neglect means that NHS waiting lists have soared, with 7.8 million treatments outstanding, and despite publishing 11 plans for growth since 2010, the trend growth rate is down from 2.3% in the 2000s to 0.8% this year. There is no regional plan, no working industrial strategy and no sign of levelling up—regional disparities are widening, not closing—and GDP is now £400 billion less than expected from the 2010 OBR growth rate forecast. Wages have stagnated, and the Government have delivered deepening levels of poverty, caused by low wages and real-terms benefits cuts, which have reduced the incomes of the poorest 20% and seen the number of people relying on food banks go from 60,000 to nearly 3 million. We have seen the last desperate throw of the dice from a failing, discredited Government, who have long since run out of ideas and are finally running out of road.

Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Beamish

2nd reading
Monday 19th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

In common with all the speakers who have made their contributions thus far on Second Reading of the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill, I will not say that I oppose the Bill or that these powers should not exist or be updated in this rapidly developing area of technology. As others have observed, the rapidly evolving technology is creating threats about which we could not have dreamed when the original Act was introduced after an ISC report on privacy and security in 2015. Although the issues are evolving, some things stay the same, namely that in a democracy it is important that the security services and all the agencies, whether they relate to police or security, can be held to account by the democratic structures that are created to make our democracy real.

I emphasise a point that has not been stressed by others: we are living through an era during which authoritarian governments across the world are beginning to challenge the openness of democratic structures and test whether those who live in a democracy have the political will to maintain their democracy, keep it vibrant and protect it from threats. Against that background of being challenged—we do not have to look much further than Europe and the borders of Ukraine to see how some of those challenges are beginning to develop—we are being asked whether we rate the health and strength of our democracy enough to protect it. We are also being asked, which is the nature of this debate, to justify the powers we are giving to the security and police services to our constituents and those citizens of our country who wish to see their democracy protected, as well as having a proper balance between democratic oversight safety and the powers we give our security services to do their jobs.

As others have mentioned, there is a balance between the effectiveness and speed of those powers and the safeguards that this Parliament puts in place in order to ensure that there is proper oversight and use of them. We have heard how that balance and safeguarding has been developed in law. We are looking now at amendments to the existing law in order to update and modernise those powers to make them more effective, efficient and easier to use, and to ensure protecting our security, be it from criminality, terrorism, paedophilia or state actors who wish to our country harm, is balanced correctly with safeguards, openness and transparency oversight. Then we can protect our society and values, while respecting the privacy of every individual citizen who enjoys the freedom of living in our democracy.

The Bill seeks an expansion in investigatory powers and some of those powers available to agencies to deal with the evolution of this area. Our job, not only in the debate tonight, but in the scrutiny of this Bill in Committee, is to test and ask the appropriate questions about whether the right balance has been struck by Ministers and the relevant agencies in the extra powers that they want to introduce. As the newest member of the ISC, I believe that, as the investigatory powers evolve, it is also important that the powers of the Intelligence and Security Committee to do its job in these new areas are properly developed and resourced. I shall just leave that on the record. It is not a surprise to those who have read the Lords debates that this is an issue.

I draw attention to an area of the Bill where amendments were agreed in the Lords: what is known as the triple lock, rather than the double lock. That is the mechanism that protects the communications of Members of this Parliament and other relevant legislatures from being arbitrarily intercepted by agencies for no reason. In fact, it is part of the protection that one would expect in a robust democracy for those people who are elected to represent their constituents. They have a reasonable expectation, I think, to be allowed to go about their business without being subjected to that kind of intrusive power, unless there is an extremely good reason for it. Members will know that the underlying principle is that the communications of Members of this Parliament and other relevant legislators should be intercepted and read only where it is absolutely essential to do so—in the most serious of circumstances. In the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which this Bill will change, Parliament recognised that that was an issue by adding a third layer of safeguards to the approval process for warrants for targeted interception and targeted examination of communications. Those warrants are issued only by a Secretary of State and reviewed by a judicial commissioner, which is the double lock, but they are also approved by the Prime Minister personally. As my right hon. Friend said from the Dispatch Box, there is an issue if the Prime Minister is unavailable to do that. It is important that there is not a gap in security protection, which would happen if the Prime Minister is unable to be the third part of that triple lock.

Nobody disagrees with the idea that that process should be made more robust, but there is also an issue about how wide the power to issue that final approval—currently, that final approval rests only with the Prime Minister—should go. There were debates about that when the Bill went through its stages in the other place. The question of balance is how the new Bill deals with ensuring that the triple lock is robust while not creating a lacuna should the Prime Minister be indisposed and unable to issue warrants without that power going too wide. The ISC supports the intention behind this, which is to provide resilience around the current arrangements. It is important that the Prime Minister is the person who approves these things, but this may affect the operations of the intelligence agencies when they are seeking a targeted interference or a time-sensitive warrant. None the less, there was agreement that, in truly exceptional circumstances, it may be appropriate for a Secretary of State to temporarily deputise for the Prime Minister. The Committee considered that it was important that decisions in this area should be delegated only in the most exceptional circumstances, and delegated only to a limited number of Secretaries of State who are already responsible for authorising relevant warrants. We want the Prime Minister to retain sight of all warrants relating to Members of a relevant legislature. Most of that was agreed in the other place, although there is an issue about whether the relevant Secretaries of State—there can be up to five of those—are ones that already issue warrants.

[Mr Jones]

I was a little taken aback that the Home Secretary just assumed that, once these had been agreed by a substitute, they would automatically be reviewed by the Prime Minister. Clearly, that is a big assumption. Does my hon. Friend not think that it would be better if we put it in the Bill that the Prime Minister had full oversight of this warrant?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Clearly, putting such things in the Bill is often an important safeguard. Certainly, I do not understand why the delegation of these powers should not be limited to Secretaries of State who also issue warrants. I do not quite understand why there is an obsession with five Secretaries of State. We could have four and still have robust oversight.

National Security Bill (Fourteenth sitting)

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Beamish

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th October 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Jones]

On a point of order, Mr Gray. I think it would be remiss not to thank the two previous Ministers—

[Dame Angela Eagle]

And the previous Whips!

[Mr Jones]

And the previous Whips, yes. One previous Minister was thrown a little more into the deep end than this one, so I want to put on the record my thanks to him.

Post Office Historical Shortfall Scheme

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Beamish

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Westminster Hall

[Dame Angela Eagle (in the Chair)]

I call Kevan Jones next. I hope to call the Minister at 20 past 11.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) for securing this debate today. He talks about culture. I have been involved in the issue for more than 10 years. It was first brought to my notice by Tom Brown, a constituent, who came to me with a similar case. A highly respected individual in the community was suddenly accused by the Post Office of stealing £86,000 because of the Horizon system. He spent two years of hell, and when he went to go before a judge at Newcastle Crown court, he arrived at the door and was told by the Post Office that it was not pursuing the case. In that time, he would have gone bankrupt and paid £86,000 back to the Post Office. In the 10 years in which I have been dealing with his case and many other cases, the culture described by the right hon. Gentleman is spot on. It is arrogant and dismissive. There is a cover-up.

We are now into a scheme that needs to be abolished. It is designed to put the onus back on the individual postmaster and postmistress and to reduce the liability of the Post Office. The scheme was open for only three months in 2020, and if someone did not get their claim in by then, they could not get a claim at all, so that was designed to reduce the numbers and reduce liability. The Post Office has no idea. In its accounts, it budgeted for £35 million of compensation. The figure is now estimated to be more than £300 million.

The scheme also excludes the 555 people, including my constituent, Tom Brown, who took action against the Post Office. We got to the truth only when the case went to court. The Government used £100 million of public money to try to stop the case going forward. They had to settle with the claimants because they ran out of money. There was a tsunami of money from the Post Office. I welcome today’s written ministerial statement about those who were convicted and who can be included in the compensation scheme. However, the scheme needs to be abolished. It should be put to one side. We need a comprehensive scheme outside the Post Office. The Government will have to put in place a scheme for everybody, including the people they have already put forward and including the 555 who took the class action. Without their taking that action, we would not have discovered the lies, deceit and cover-up by the Post Office. I am sorry, I do not accept the Government washing their hands of this and saying that the Post Office is at arm’s length from the Government. They had an active shareholder on that board who did nothing to stop the scandal. I call for the scheme to be scrapped and a comprehensive scheme to be put in place that covers everyone to be compensated. Yes, it might cost hundreds of millions of pounds, but that is because it was not the postmistresses and postmasters’ fault. It was the fault of the Government and the Post Office.

Steel Industry

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Beamish

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ms Eagle]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. The steel industry is very cyclical in nature. During the hard times and the downturns, it is very important to try to act to preserve assets of strategic importance to our country, so that we can take advantage of the upswing and the recovery when it comes.

China is currently responsible for a tsunami of cheap steel products. Last week’s Chinese state visit is over and done with, so I hope the Business Secretary will be making the case in Brussels today that we should act rapidly to stop the dumping of Chinese steel products in Europe. The scale of the new Chinese imports and the speed of their arrival is staggering. Its surplus production is nearly twice the annual production in the entire EU, and it is increasingly finding its way here. Chinese rebar has grown from having zero presence in the UK market in 2013 to comprising 37% of it a year later. There are quality concerns with some imported Chinese steel. We also know that Chinese steel production causes more environmental damage than UK production, so it is a false economy to allow it to continue.

For both those reasons, action to tackle dumping is vital and long overdue. Perhaps the Minister can tell us, when she winds up, what she managed to achieve during her recent visit to China. I can tell her that both the leader of the Labour party and I raised this issue with Premier Xi and his delegation during the recent state visit to London. Did she raise it during her visit to China? If so, what are the Government actually going to do about the huge amount of imports and the dumping? When it comes to acting on China specifically, perhaps the Government should be less interested in selling off our nuclear industry and more interested in standing up for the strategic interests of the UK.

Standing up for British steel means standing up for the high-quality skills that have built some of the UK’s, and indeed the world’s, most iconic landmarks. British steel built Canary Wharf, the new Wembley stadium and Sydney Harbour bridge, and it will be building the Freedom Tower in New York. We should all be proud of what the UK steel industry has achieved, but the Government cannot treat it as some relic of the past; it has to be a vital part of our country’s future. That is why the Government must do more—much more—to see the industry through these tough times and prepare it to seize future opportunities. The Government should publish an industrial strategy for steel and be open about how they envisage maintaining the strategic steelmaking assets in this country during hard times. It is only firm action now that will guarantee any future at all for UK production.

I commend the campaign by the Daily Mirror, which is setting out daily the compelling case to save our steel. Just in case Ministers were in any doubt about the urgency, Gareth Stace of UK Steel has today described the industry as being like a patient on the operating table “likely to die” without help.

Community, the main steel union, has called for an urgent meeting with the Business Secretary because of the ongoing threat to jobs, as it has emerged that no representative of the workforce, be it Community, the GMB or Unite, has yet been invited on to any of the working groups set up after the steel summit. [Interruption.] The Minister says there is no need to invite representatives of the workforce on to these working parties. Ministers should meet the workers from steelmaking communities, including Teesside, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and south Wales, who are lobbying Parliament to hear at first hand, as I have, the real cost of Government inaction.

The Prime Minister claims the Government are acting on procurement. Just yesterday, the Minister told the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee:

“I would say buy British because it’s quality.”

However, the inadequacy of the Government’s response was laid bare on the very same day, when it was revealed that the Government had just spent more than £3 billion on three new Royal Navy ships and 589 Scout specialist vehicles for the Army, which will use imported Swedish steel.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

The Minister is a former Defence Minister, and her own Department announced this year the new £200 million icebreaker for the polar research undertaking. I tabled a question to the Minister for Universities and Science, who could give no commitment from the Business Department that the ship, which is being built at Birkenhead, would use British steel. Is that not a great example of where the Department could put its money where its mouth is?

[Ms Eagle]

I hope we can get some progress on procurement, not least from BIS, which is contracting out the icebreaker research vessel as we speak. Otherwise, all of this is a missed opportunity. The UK steel industry needs action, not good intentions. The Government need to act much more effectively on procurement, and if they do, we will support them, but we will judge them on the contracts awarded that guarantee a future for UK steel; we will not judge them on warm words or grand but meaningless press releases.

The Government should explore the scope for acting temporarily on business rates. Failure to act is not cost-free, as the hard closure at Redcar demonstrated. With redundancy costs and employment support of £80 million and on-site clean-up costs running into hundreds of millions of pounds, it might well be that in the long run strategic support is far better value than the cost of total closure.

Last week, the Business Secretary said that the Government would

“do everything within their power to support”

the industry, and he said to our steel communities:

“We will not abandon you now, in your time of greatest need.”—[Official Report, 20 October 2015; Vol. 600, c. 815.]

The Prime Minister had previously stated that the Government would

“do everything we can to keep steelmaking in Redcar.”—[Official Report, 16 September 2015; Vol. 599, c. 1046.]

The Government then abandoned the people of Redcar by refusing to mothball the plant and save the assets, which would have kept alive the possibility of a return to steelmaking in the future. In fact, the Minister said yesterday in evidence to the Select Committee:

“It needed that awful moment in Redcar to concentrate all political minds in Government”.

So, Redcar has been sacrificed and minds have been concentrated, and now we need to know what the Government are planning to do to safeguard the future of UK steel and what is left of our steel communities. In Redcar, Scunthorpe, Clydebridge, Dalzell and Rotherham, those facing uncertainty across the midlands and Wales—men and women who have spent years developing highly specialised skills but who now have to find alternative employment in local economies shattered by steel plant closures—are waiting to see how the Government intend to deliver on their warm words.

Sittings of the House (22 March)

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Beamish

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ms Eagle]

There was far more of a mandate. Indeed, the Conservative party, which was then in opposition, supported that.

[Mr Jones]

Is it not also a fact that the motion was carried on the votes of Conservative Members, which they may conveniently have forgotten?

[Ms Eagle]

Yes, that is absolutely true. Perhaps in future the hon. Lady should check the record before she makes points as defective as that.

Charging for Access to Parliament

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Beamish

Thursday 15th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ms Eagle]

That is a very timely intervention from the hon. Gentleman as I was about to deal with that point, especially as I am a very new member of the House of Commons Commission. I have been in the House for 20 years and always thought that the way in which the House was managed was rather antediluvian and opaque, to put it kindly. I expected when I was given this job that I would dash into the Commission and everything would be revealed. I thought that I would see how the House and all of its domestic Committees worked. I have to confess that after a few months I am still rather of the hon. Gentleman’s view, and light, transparency and more debate about such matters should be organised. We need to think as a Parliament about how we can bring that about.

We are all busy. Doubtless everybody read the e-mails that were sent in 2010 about this issue, but perhaps they did not fully take them in. I therefore have much sympathy with the hon. Gentleman’s point, and we should consider how we might ventilate the serious issues that the Management Board has to deal with so that hon. Members on both sides of the House become aware of them in a more timely way. E-mails go out, but we cannot force Members to notice them or read them in detail. The system is antediluvian and lacks transparency, and we might want to think about more modern approaches.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

One of the points made by the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) is very important. We have the Administration Committee, which I sit on and which has made various recommendations to the Commission that have been overruled without any justification. Surely that is not a transparent or fair system, especially when we are considering cost savings.

[Ms Eagle]

I have considerable sympathy with that point, and perhaps we can all thank the hon. Member for Harlow for bringing this issue to the attention of the House so that we can consider how we might manage the House in a more modern way that brings people along at an earlier stage in the process and ventilates some of the darker, cobwebby areas of the old management systems.

Finance Bill

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Beamish

Thursday 15th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jones]

Let us not forget that one. However, the proposal in clause 5 will leave a big black hole in the deficit reduction strategy. The Economic Secretary hinted, “Well, we might not do it, or we might do something different.” I am sorry, but if we are to have a thought-out plan to reduce the deficit, that is not the way to approach the matter. What we need is firm figures that do not make the poorest in society pay, which the proposal clearly will. She needs to explain to the House why neither she nor the Liberal Democrats went into the election saying that they would make this change. A lot of pensioners will find it very difficult to stomach.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Does my hon. Friend agree that neither partner in the coalition Government went into the general election telling pensioners that they would change the definition of indexation from the retail prices index to the consumer prices index, either?

Finance Bill

Debate between Angela Eagle and Lord Beamish

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jones]

The increase is going to affect every single organisation that provides public services, including local councils––the increase will cost them a lot of money. As we saw earlier, certain commitments were given on VAT, and I have here the Liberal Democrat poster from 8 April—and I must say that it is very good. I am sorry if I am going to pour more scorn on to the Liberal Democrats, but I enjoy doing it, and I am sure that some of their Tory colleagues will enjoy it as well. The poster says:

“Tory VAT bombshell.

You’d pay £389 more a year in VAT under the Conservatives”.

The Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) made quite a few comments on VAT before the election. He referred to it on the “Today” programme on 7 April 2010, saying that VAT

“let’s remember, is a regressive tax”.

What has changed since then? What is being proposed will affect the poorest in our society.

The Deputy Prime Minister is not the only one who has form in this area. When the then Leader of the Opposition appeared in Exeter in something called Cameron Direct on 8 May 2009, he said:

“You could try as you say put it on VAT, sales tax, but again if you look at the effect of sales tax, it’s very regressive, it hits the poorest the hardest. It does, I absolutely promise you.”

So what is different now? What has actually changed, apart from the fact that the Government now have their posteriors on the Treasury Bench and in their ministerial limousines?

[Ms Angela Eagle]

My hon. Friend is making a perfectly good point and an extremely good speech. I should like to update the House about the website of the Deputy Prime Minister. The “Tory VAT bombshell” poster, which was on the website until very recently, has just been removed.

[Mr Jones]

I congratulate the hon. Member who raised the matter earlier. Someone obviously had to scurry away and take the poster down very quickly.