Ministers’ Severance Pay

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Wheeler]

That is an astonishing thing for the Liberal Democrats to put out. It is a straight, flat lie that they should know very well should not be put out by any political party. When the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) stands to ask a question, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for her to do, I sincerely hope she apologises and confirms that the Lib Dems will put out a clarification as large as the original piece.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I make it clear that I do not want to cast aspersions on any individual Minister.

This morning I visited the care workers of the St Monica Trust in Bristol. One worker told me that the average wage is between £16,000 and £17,000, and that the trust is asking them to take, in one case, a reduction of £6,000. The House will consider legislation later today that enables agency workers to undercut striking workers, in an atmosphere in which we are talking about levelling up. Does the Minister understand that these payments should not be made where a Minister resigns voluntarily? I understand it if a Prime Minister says, “Your services are dispensed with,” but to make any such severance payment following a voluntary resignation is really wrong.

[Mrs Wheeler]

I recall that, during the Blair and Brown years, the Labour party decided it did not need to change the legislation. The legislation is as it is, there is a three-week period, and I think that is completely fair.

CHOGM, G7 and NATO Summits

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Rwanda and the UK hosted the “Keeping 1.5 Alive” event in Kigali, but at the same time, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said that the requirement—the opportunity—to keep within 1.5° had now shifted forward from 2032 to 2025. Given that most major emitters in the G7 are not even meeting the Paris commitments that they made seven years ago, what realistic chance does the Prime Minister believe there is of the G7 stepping up to the plate in the next three years to achieve that turning down of emissions?

[The Prime Minister]

If the hon. Gentleman looked at the G7 communiqué, he would see that there was an explicit reference to making sure that anything we did was within our COP26 commitments to keeping 1.5° alive and to the commitments made in Paris.

Ukraine

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Thursday 24th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right because the plan that the G7 has agreed on, and our friends and partners have agreed on, is that Putin must fail—Putin must not succeed in this venture. We have to put in place all the steps we need to take, diplomatically, economically and, yes, militarily, in order to ensure that that is the case and that is what we are doing.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister is right to have set out the most stringent possible set of sanctions against the Government of Russia. Can he outline for the House what the implications will be for co-operation at the international space station?

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. We will have to see what further downstream effects there are on collaboration of all kinds. Hitherto, I have been broadly in favour of continuing artistic and scientific collaboration, but in the current circumstances it is hard to see how even those can continue as normal.

Sue Gray Report

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I take responsibility for everything that happened in No. 10 and that the Government did throughout the pandemic.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The Gray report is clear that there should be no excessive consumption of alcohol in a workplace. Can the Prime Minister therefore assure the House that his own consumption of alcohol was not excessive and in particular that his judgment was at no time so clouded that he was in danger of telling the truth?

[The Prime Minister]

I could not quite hear the end of the hon. Gentleman’s question, but the answer is no. If he thinks I drunk too much, no.

COP26

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

First, may I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma)? He has gained enormous international respect for the diligent, courteous and tenacious way in which he conducted the negotiations as COP26 President.

Given that article IV of the Glasgow climate pact requires us to accelerate the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies, can the Prime Minister tell us whether the 130% tax super deduction announced by the Chancellor will now have a climate filter imposed so that the taxpayer does not end up paying the full cost of projects such as the Cambo oilfield, and whether the Government will use the $27.5 billion windfall from the International Monetary Fund special drawing rights to significantly scale up their provision of climate finance to developing countries, as demanded under articles III and V?

[The Prime Minister]

What I can certainly tell the hon. Gentleman is that the 125% super deduction he rightly refers to will be of great assistance to companies across the whole of the UK in investing in new clean, green technology. That is the way forward.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend. We are already working with Rolls-Royce. We gave £20 million seed money to the Rolls-Royce-led consortium when this Government first came in to help them to develop their small modular reactor design. As I said to him the other day, we want to see that company coming forward with a fully worked out plan—a fully worked out business case—that we can all get behind.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister has set out today that he wants a high-skill, high-wage economy. He has also been on the record as saying that the tactic of fire and rehire is “unacceptable”. Surely the best way of ensuring that we have a high-wage economy is to work with the proposals in my private Member’s Bill so that we end that tactic of fire and rehire.

[The Prime Minister]

The most vivid example of fire and rehire is that conducted by the Labour party. If I recall, the leader of the Labour party himself fired his deputy leader and then rehired her as shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow Secretary of State for the future of work. The future of work under Labour is low wages and low skills driven by uncontrolled immigration. The people of this country have had enough of that; what they want to see is high wages, high skills and controlled immigration, and that is what this Government are committed to deliver.

Afghanistan

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ian Blackford]

My hon. Friend is correct, and my area of the highlands has refugees from Syria, too, and they were made most welcome by the community. In view of the hostile environment that we are seeing once again from the Conservative party, let us reflect on the fact that these are people who came here to receive sanctuary and who have gone on to make a contribution to our life. They were welcome, refugees are welcome and Afghans are certainly welcome in every part of Scotland.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Before the right hon. Gentleman was rerouted by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton), he was making a powerful point about those who come across the channel in boats, and the Government’s proposals for them. Does he recognise that, according to organisations such as Safe Passage, 70% of the unaccompanied minors crossing the channel come from Afghanistan, and to criminalise them is a criminal act in itself?

[Ian Blackford]

Yes, I agree with the hon. Gentleman. The Government must reflect carefully on this over the course of the summer, and change their ways before we come back and debate these matters again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I supported the war in Afghanistan; I supported the war in Iraq. In politics, it is important to learn from your mistakes, but it is often other people who pay for them. Today, this Chamber should debate what has happened in Afghanistan with genuine humility.

There is no point in criticising the Government’s strategy; there has not been one. When President Trump announced his decision to withdraw troops last year, our Government should have prepared to relocate all those Afghan families to whom we owed a debt of honour: the interpreters, the medics, the aid workers. They should have; they did not. They should have fast-tracked all the outstanding settlement applications from British citizens wanting to bring their children and partners from Afghanistan. They should have; they did not.

Two days ago, my office phoned the Home Office hotline for MPs to ask what emergency procedures are now in place. My constituent and his three British children are in Kabul, waiting to bring their mother—his wife—to safety in the UK. The Home Office officer said that there was no such procedure and that she must apply “in the normal way”. There is no normal way! There is nowhere to sit the English language test and nowhere to submit biometric data. That was two days ago. Yesterday, we phoned again and she said, “There is something, but it’s for internal use only.” Eighteen months on, the Home Secretary has put out one internal memo.

One constituent has three sisters there. I dare not name them: they were key figures in the nation-building programme. They are in hiding, with no man to accompany them to an airport. They should have had information from our Foreign Office weeks ago about how the relocation scheme would operate to keep them safe and bring them to the UK—how we would fulfil our debt of honour to them and to all the interpreters, doctors, journalists and others now in danger. No such information came. That debt of honour has not been fulfilled.

The Afghanistan that we hoped to build 20 years ago may be lost for now, but our Government need a plan and a vision for the sort of world that we want to build. Afghanistan will be how we are judged in future. Are we to be trusted? Do we keep our word? Do we have the will to support the values that we preach? Do we have the foresight to prepare against the things that we fear will happen? Any dispassionate observer of this Government would have to answer no, but this is not just a political failure. It is a moral failure of which the price is now being paid by others: British citizens with family members trapped in Afghanistan, those who fought and served alongside our own valiant troops, the women, the religious minorities and all those who now face a well-founded fear of persecution.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab) [V]]

Today, the Chancellor has been dealing with the economic cost of coronavirus. Coronavirus is a zoonotic disease and, just like SARS and Ebola, it has come about as the result of the increasing stress that human activity has put on the natural world. As a result of coronavirus, the Chancellor admitted borrowing a record £355 billion, and for the first time in more than 50 years public debt has risen above 100% of GDP. Let me say it again: coronavirus is a zoonotic disease; there will be others.

Our species is grappling not just with one global pandemic, but with the two global emergencies of climate change and the destruction of nature through biodiversity loss. Today should not just be about the allocation of money; it should be about the management of our assets. Once we understand that our economy is bounded by nature, natural capital, we will perhaps understand the need to stop consuming each year goods and services that the planet takes 1.6 years to reproduce. Economists call this living beyond our means. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear that we need urgent and unprecedented transformational change. If this Budget had adopted the principles of the Dasgupta review, we would have got that change. It would have set out the basis of a green industrial revolution, full investment in low-carbon infrastructure and the greening of our economy. It could have created a million new jobs.

Protecting jobs and maintaining incomes through furlough is only a baseline. Alongside it, the Chancellor should have put in place incentives for companies that spread employment through job sharing while using non-employed hours engaged in a new, paid national retraining scheme for the zero-carbon industries of tomorrow. That would have been transformational and given people currently in old industries hope and security for the future. Yes, set targets for electric vehicles, but retrain the mechanics. Yes, bring in more solar and wind arrays, but train the new generation of engineers. Yes, retrofit our homes, but where is the skilled workforce to carry out the work?

On the super deduction of 130% tax reliefs on investment, the Chancellor should have said that this could be used only for sustainable green investment, and not to subsidise what could be environmentally damaging infrastructure by oil and gas corporates. No wonder it took him until precisely 37 minutes into his speech before he even mentioned the word “green”—and that, ironically, came just after saying there would be no fuel duty rise. I welcome what he said about changing the remit of the Bank of England to consider environmental sustainability and net zero, but a transformative Budget would have mandated both climate and nature-related financial disclosures by listed companies. He patted himself on the back and said that he would be ready when the next crisis comes. The truth is that the next crisis is already here: it is called the climate catastrophe and environmental destruction, and this Budget has not prepared us to meet it.

Points of Order

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Wednesday 6th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

The right hon. Gentleman is a bit like me; he likes to have the last word. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) is a precious delicacy in the House, and we should not squander him too early. I will come to him.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. It has been widely reported that the Secretary of State for International Trade has advised industry representatives that he proposes to introduce measures in the event of a no-deal Brexit to reduce all import tariffs on goods to zero. The impact of that in job losses in our manufacturing and farming industries would be enormous. It would also undermine the Government’s much vaunted ambition to negotiate new trade deals by giving away what other countries would happily bargain access into their own markets to obtain. Have you, Mr Speaker, received any indication from the Government that a Minister is preparing to make a statement to this House on such a far-reaching and important matter?

[Mr Speaker]

No, not as yet, but who knows what is to follow. We live in hope. The hon. Gentleman’s grinning countenance suggests that he is satisfied with his efforts for now.

Debate on the Address

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier). I might not agree with her commentary on the Queen’s Speech or the conclusions she reached, but I think that the thoughtful way in which she approached the several subjects she discussed was commendable. It was a commendable way to debate the Queen’s Speech, particularly from the Opposition Benches, because people tend to listen to Opposition Members when they speak carefully, calmly and without hectoring. She certainly was listened to by me, and I am grateful and very happy to follow her.

I am also happy to take this opportunity to thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) for starting our deliberations this afternoon with two first-class speeches. The speeches were different in style, but both were hugely amusing and insightful. They are to be congratulated on what they had to say and the manner in which they said it.

All Queen’s Speeches can be something of a curate’s egg; they tend to include a bit of detail, a bit of general aspiration and a bit of

“Other measures will be laid before you.”

I do not suppose that this Queen’s Speech is an exception to that rule. However, I am keen to highlight three areas that appeal to me and that I think will be of interest to the country as a whole. It does not matter to me that the Bills on which I want to concentrate have a bearing only on England and Wales, because I think that the theory and public policy behind them should be of interest right across the United Kingdom.

The first issue that I want to deal with is the anti-corruption summit in London and the follow-on legislation that will tackle corruption, money laundering and tax evasion. There is absolutely no question but that for far too long the police and public policy commentators have not given enough attention to white-collar crime, as it is sometimes called. Nobody dies, there is no blood and guts, and there are no obvious victims in so many cases of corruption, money laundering and tax evasion, but none the less these are serious crimes. If somebody went into a bank with a sawn-off shotgun and stole £10 million, we would all get rather exercised about it, and in the event of a prosecution and a conviction, we would expect the offender to be given a pretty handy sentence. Yet there seems to be a rather perverse sort of admiration for people who, through computer crime or through other clever tactics, launder money, evade tax or commit acts of corruption, in this country or abroad.

All these financial and economic crimes need to be borne down on with a sense of purpose, because they not only produce victims in this country—we see pension funds ripped open and lives ruined as a consequence—but damage the developing economies in countries where corruption is, to some extent, endemic. It was interesting for me to attend the Marlborough House talks last week. I did not go to the main summit addressed by the Prime Minister but to the event the day before addressed by the noble and learned Baroness Scotland, now Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, at which a whole host of people, including the President of Nigeria, spoke with one voice about the need to tackle corruption, not only because it is wrong in itself, but because corruption in their countries damages their development, damages their economy, and makes the lives of their people, particularly poorer people, altogether more difficult. I welcome the onset of this new legislation, not least because it ties into something that I did when I was briefly in government, which was to introduce deferred prosecution agreements that allowed corporate malefactors to be dealt with pragmatically and effectively.

I am not so happy about the second thing that I want to draw attention to, which is the sentence in the Queen’s Speech that reads:

“Proposals will be brought forward for a British Bill of Rights.”

This idea of a British Bill of Rights has been knocking around the lampshade like a demented moth for some little while, and it may well be that if it has an armour-plated head, it can carry on knocking itself around the lampshade for a good while longer. I really do think it is a waste of intellectual and political energy for this—to mix my metaphors—dead horse to be revived. Of course the European convention on human rights and its application in our own courts, and in the Strasbourg Court, can occasionally be rather annoying, but that is not the point. The point of the convention, the point of the Strasbourg Court and the point of applying the convention law in our own courts, right across the United Kingdom, is to ensure that the courts can protect the interests of the people—the citizens.

I am not going to get too apoplectic about this, because I find that life is far too exciting already without getting apoplectic about a British Bill of Rights, and I will wait until the consultation is over—perhaps my obituary will have been written by then—before I deconstruct it. However, I urge the Government to make the consultation very thorough and to consider long and hard whether this is worth the political damage and in-fighting that it may well cause. I think it was the right hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) who said that there is no majority in this House, let alone in the other place, for a wholesale attack on the structure of human rights in this country. I suspect that he is right, but let us see what the Government come up with when they have finished consulting. I wish them all the best in their endeavours.

To come on to the meat of what I want to say— I promise to take just a little time, not far too long—I congratulate the Government on their prison reform proposals. One of the things in which I have become interested in the past 11 years is prison reform. When my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister became Leader of the Opposition in 2005 and rearranged the Opposition Front Bench, he invited me to become the shadow Minister for prisons, then shadowing the Home Office. I think that the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), who is in the Chamber, was the then Minister for prisons; if not, he certainly took on that role shortly after I became the shadow Minister.

The Prime Minister asked me to find out what was going on in the prisons of England and Wales, because the prisons world is, except to the few enthusiasts about such issues, an entirely secret world. Over the course of the next three or four years, I set about visiting about 65 of the 140 prisons, young offender institutions and secure training units in England and Wales. In all those prisons and places of custody, I found dedicated prison officers and hard-working senior management teams, including prison governors. They were all interested in doing a good job, but unfortunately the good things that went on in some prisons were not replicated in others. There was no general pattern of a sensible application of policy.

The inevitable problem that one saw as one went from prison to prison—this was quite easy to see whether one visited the big Victorian prisons of Manchester, Leeds, Wandsworth, Pentonville or Wormwood Scrubs, or more modern prisons such as Gartree in my constituency or Glen Parva, a YOI that straddles the border of my constituency and that of South Leicestershire—was that of overcrowding. Although the Government’s proposed measures are entirely laudable and welcome, nothing of lasting value seriously can be done to reform and improve the condition of our prisons and prisoners—and thus to make them fitter to come out into the community and lead sensible and straight lives so that they can look after their dependants and themselves, get a job and become tax-paying members of society—unless we stop overcrowding our prisons.

Overcrowded prisons lead to churn. Someone sentenced in Canterbury Crown court for a particular offence might go straight to Canterbury prison, but probably not if it still specialises in overseas prisoners, in which case they will probably go to a relatively local prison. If Canterbury Crown court sends 10 or 15 people to prison every day and the local prison does not have sufficient space to house the inflow of just-sentenced prisoners, they have to be moved from Canterbury to Lewes or Maidstone, but how do those prisons fit in the 15, 30 and 45 prisoners that have been sent there? They remove 15, 30 and 45 of their own prisoners and shove them down the line, so there is a metaphorical jumbo jet of prisoners going around England, moving from prison to prison. One could say, “Well, that’s just bad luck.” However, their records and education certificates do not move with them, so when Prisoner Jones goes from Canterbury to Lewes to Exeter to Bristol to Birmingham, his medical and educational records are three or four prisons behind him. It is bananas, it is incompetent, it is inefficient, and it is a waste of life and public money.

We do that because in the past, we had Governments who were good at talking about prison reform, but did not get round to doing it. Now we must, and I think we have a Government who will, because the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Justice are genuinely interested in this issue. If the Prime Minister, who has said that he will not serve another term after this Parliament, leaves nothing behind him other than real proof that what we do to prisoners and what we do within prisons can allow our prisoners to emerge from prison as better citizens—off drugs, able to read and write, having received the mental health treatment they required and fit for a job—he will have done a really wonderful thing.

I am biased. First, as I said a moment ago, in 2005 I became the shadow prisons Minister and went on a literal and metaphorical journey to find out what was going on in prisons. I also researched and wrote a paper called “Prisons with a Purpose”, which I hope has informed, to some extent, the discussion we are now having on prison reform. It is inevitable that, as Front Benches change, other people come in and want to do things their way, rather than the way of their predecessors, but I like to think, in a rather self-regarding way, that the paper I wrote has proved to be valuable. If, unconsciously or consciously, my successors have drawn on it to produce good policy, that is a good thing.

The other reason I am biased is that when I came out of government in September 2012, I was fortunate enough to be invited to become a patron of Unlock, a prisons charity, and a little while later I became a trustee of the Prison Reform Trust. It is a happy coincidence that my hon. Friend the Minister for Children and Families is sitting on the Front Bench, because his brother James has just become the chairman of the Prison Reform Trust, and the name Timpson and doing good things for prisons and prisoners run together. In a number of prisons—possibly in Liverpool and Manchester, and certainly in Wandsworth—Timpson workshops train guys who can then go out and work.

As General Ramsbotham, the unlikely but marvellous inspector of prisons, said, the three things that a released prisoner needs are a strong relationship—whether with their family, wife, husband or partner—somewhere to live and a job. The Timpson trick is to allow ex-offenders and ex-prisoners to set up shop, run it on their own and handle money. The business trusts those people and, in return, they pay back by earning money, supporting their families and providing a service to their customers. Yes, of course, the odd one fails, but the risk is worth taking. I hope the Government will feel encouraged by that example, and that they will feel that the public attitude towards prisons, prisoners and prison reform is not as conservative, with a small c, as old-fashioned or as ill-considered as many would have us believe. There is a fund of enthusiasm for good work in prisons, and I urge the Government to push hard for it and not to be upset by the occasional recidivist or the occasional disaster, because the overall direction of travel is good.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman take this opportunity to pay tribute to the mother of the Minister for Children and Families? I believe that she recently passed away. She was the primary driving force behind the amazing things that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has just talked about.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

Of course I will—I do not want to make this a Timpson-fest, but I am happy to pay tribute to the Minister’s mother. I was fortunate enough to meet her, and I was very sad when she died, as I know my hon. Friend the Minister obviously was.

That family’s story, which goes beyond the fostering of a lot of disadvantaged children and the setting up of workshops in prisons, demonstrates what private enterprises, charities and individuals can do to turn things around. If the Government can harness that work and borrow the enthusiasm and spirit of volunteers, charities, professionals in the probation world and so on, they can produce an understanding that going to prison is not the solution for a prisoner but part of a much longer journey. I have been a Crown court recorder and sentenced people to prison, and from reading their histories I know that they are often the children of prisoners or from broken families. They are often mentally ill, and they are largely illiterate and unable to function. I have sentenced people to community sentences who do not even know how to tell the time. They are told, “You are required to be at such-and-such a place at 10 o’clock next Friday, where you will meet the probation officer,” and they ask, “How many sleeps is that?” It is as rum as that.

I hope that the Government will push this agenda on with great enthusiasm. There are charities that do good work for the mentally ill and for prisoners, but we need to join things up so that ex-servicemen, for example, who are under the care of the Ministry of Defence and get into trouble when they leave the Army, can be properly treated by that Department and by the Department of Health, and do not fall through the gaps between the departmental budgets. As I have said, we have to deal with overcrowding and stop the churn, and we must be braver and have more releases on temporary licence—that issue was spoken about over the weekend.

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the Chair of the Select Committee on Justice, for the Committee’s report. It sounds the alarm bells and tells a story, but that story has been told and told and told. Now it must stop being told and something must be done. I hope that when the next Queen’s Speech is given this time next year, Her Majesty will not need to say:

“My Government will legislate to reform prisons and courts to give individuals a second chance”,

because that work will already have started.

I will speak finally about another pet subject of mine. The law on sentencing in this country is incredibly complicated—I would say impenetrable. I resigned as a Crown court recorder because when I went on a judges’ refresher course last October at Warwick University, I discovered that three pieces of legislation were passed at the end of the 2010 to 2015 Parliament that I had never heard of—and I follow criminal justice legislation carefully. Ludicrous. Ludicrous of me, one may say. We must stop treating this place as a criminal justice sausage machine, concentrate, and pass sensible legislation that does not repeat itself, and allows the courts to do justice, protect the public and enable wrong to be set right. I hope that one way in which we can do that is by codifying the criminal sentencing law in one easy, though no doubt big, volume so that judges can see what the law is, what has been amended, what has been repealed, what is still there and what is not yet in force, rather than having to look at 25 different books or internet sites to find out the correct sentence. That is not much to ask of the Government, and perhaps they could start.