Business of the House

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Lady is proving that she can do her job  by raising this important issue. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has made regular statements where he can be questioned. Adjournment debates do allow other hon. Members to intervene. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is sitting in his usual place, regularly intervenes very helpfully in Adjournment debates. It is important that the debates in this House are with people who are physically here, but the hon. Lady has proved that she can raise her point in these interrogative sessions.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con) [V]]

Mr Speaker, you quite rightly have held the Government to account for releasing statements to the media before they have been announced to this House. Last weekend, when the funding deal to bail out Transport for London was negotiated and embargoed until Monday, I was outraged and horrified that the Mayor of London broke the embargo and released a press release on Sunday, setting out the details, incorrectly, of that press release. Can we have a statement from the Secretary of State for Transport to the House on exactly the terms of the bail-out for Transport for London, so that we MPs can hold him to account and ensure that the record is set straight in terms of what the deal is?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The record is something that we must set very straight, which is that the Mayor of London is incompetent and that he has run Transport for London hopelessly. That is what we get when we have socialists in Government. The London transport network has been run very poorly and its finances are in a bad state because of a political refusal to increase any ticket fees over four years. Anyone who thinks that TfL is any good needs look only at Hammersmith bridge, which remains unrepaired, inconveniencing tens of thousands of people and causing great inconvenience without Transport for London managing to lift a finger and saying, I think, that it will do 7 feet a month and that it will take it so long to do it. Moreover, Crossrail continues to be delayed. It is an extraordinary record of failure, and it is a record of failure that should be put straight. We should have a Conservative Mayor next year and then it will be broad sunlit uplands.