Debate on the Address

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 9th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

I want to move on, but I will give way later if the hon. Gentleman still wishes to intervene.

The second issue that I want to mention is state power and what has become known colloquially as the snooper’s charter. The Queen’s Speech stated that the Government intended

“to bring forward measures to maintain the ability of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access vital communications data under strict safeguards to protect the public, subject to scrutiny of draft clauses.”

I take the last part to mean that how it will happen is up for argument. That is a good thing, because I am afraid the proposal is very similar to what the Labour Government came up with. I will give way to the Deputy Prime Minister if he really wants to argue the point, but I do not recommend it, because the Government have already consulted heavily with internet service providers and producers and talked to them about what they want to do. They want to require companies to maintain large databases of contact information. If I have telephoned somebody, there will be information about who the call was to, when it was made and where from. That will lead to extremely large databases, which the state then wants to be able to access relatively freely.

Frankly, I am surprised that the Government have made the proposal, because both coalition parties opposed it in opposition, and as far as I can see, it goes against the thrust of the coalition agreement. It certainly goes against the thrust of a comment that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made when we were in opposition. He said:

“Faced with any problem, any crisis—given any excuse—Labour grasp for more information, pulling more and more people into the clutches of state data capture…And the Government doesn’t want to stop with the basic information…Scare tactics to herd more disempowered citizens into the clutches of officialdom, as people surrender more and more information about their lives, giving the state more and more power over their lives. If we want to stop the state controlling us, we must confront this surveillance state.”

We opposed those measures in opposition, not just because they were illiberal or risked turning our country into a nation of suspects, but because we believed that they were ineffective. Nearly every measure that we opposed when I was my right hon. Friend’s shadow Home Secretary we opposed because we thought that it would not work against terrorism. That is also true of the measure that we are considering.

I took advice from experts. I asked them a simple question: “If you were a terrorist, how would you avoid this scrutiny?” I stopped them when they got to the fifth method. It is pretty straightforward: for terrorists, everything from proxy servers to one-off mobile phones means that such scrutiny is easy to avoid. For criminals, it is also easy and quite cheap to avoid. However, for ordinary citizens, that scrutiny is not easy and cheap to avoid. We will therefore create something, which some Ministers said will cost £2 billion—the London School of Economics suggests that it will cost £12 billion—that will not be effective against terrorism, but constitutes general-purpose surveillance of the entire nation.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Sometimes terrorists make a mistake. If we save lives through having the information, that balances my right hon. Friend’s argument.

[Mr Davis]

The simple truth is that when the House reacted understandably to the horrific events of 9/11 and the preceding terrorist events, such as the USS Cole and the east African embassy bombings, and introduced a couple of measures—the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001—it took away many previous protections. Before RIPA, the agencies would approach British Telecom or Cable & Wireless and ask for the data, which were sometimes—not always—handed over voluntarily. The companies exercised some responsibility. In about two thirds of cases, the agencies got warrants, and the information had to be handed over. The central, though not the only issue is whether the databases are available to the agencies of the state without a warrant. They are currently available without a warrant. If we want to make such practices acceptable in a civilised, liberal state, we should have warrants first.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Dodds]

The hon. Lady puts forward an important issue for our consideration. Many of the banks are largely owned by the public at the moment. One leading business man in Northern Ireland told me recently that he regretted that we had not gone the whole way and taken complete control of the banks, to ensure that all the necessary lending could take place. Members of the public, taxpayers, ordinary hard-working families, individuals and businesses are pumping billions of pounds into the banking system, yet the banks are not doing what needs to be done to ease credit and lend in the way that they should.

I was talking about House of Lords reform, and other Members have rightly raised issues that are of real concern to the people and the communities that they represent. Before we get on to the reform of the House of Lords, I would like to see this House deal with an issue relating to the House of Commons. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland said on record during the last Session that they believe that it is wrong that Members who do not take their seats in the House of Commons are still able to receive full expenses, allowances and representational moneys, which puts them in a much more advantageous position than those of us who do take our seats. Sinn Fein, for instance, gets the equivalent of parliamentary Short money—what is called representative money—and is free to spend it, not on parliamentary activities, of course, because it does not engage in any parliamentary activities, but on party political activities. Whereas we as right hon. and hon. Members would rightly be called to account by the authorities for any spending—even a penny’s worth—for party political purposes, a group of Members who do not take their seats are quite free to spend that money to the disadvantage of their political opponents. Let us be frank: it does not particularly affect our votes, but it affects those of others in the House who are not here today and no doubt can speak for themselves in due course. The fact is that Members who do not take their seats are given an enormous advantage.

We know that back in 2001, Betty Boothroyd, the former great Speaker of the House, resisted all this for a long time. Ultimately, the decision was taken to proceed with the concessions because the then Labour Government said—it was bitterly opposed by Conservative Members—that it was important to bring people into the peace process and the political process. Whatever the arguments at that time, the fact of the matter is that there is no longer any need for this special category of expenditure on the basis of encouraging people to be part of the peace process. It is clear that people are involved in the Executive and in the Assembly at Stormont. I welcome that, and think it enormously to the credit of parties in this House and in Northern Ireland that progress has been made, but it would not make the slightest difference to the political process—nobody believes that it would—if these special arrangements were withdrawn in line with what was promised before the election and in the last parliamentary Session.

[Bob Stewart]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I want entirely to endorse every single point he has made on the matter of Short money for people who do not take their seats in this House. Those days are over; let us get this sorted out.

Party Funding

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

I am sure that if the right hon. Gentleman proposes that, it will receive due consideration.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

What was in The Sunday Times was woeful. All Members, from all parts of the House, agree on that, and it has a history, in all parts of the House. Does my right hon. Friend agree that all political leaders should give explicit instructions to those charged with raising funds that this should never happen again?

Trade Union Funding

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 29th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Frank Doran (Aberdeen North) (Lab)]

I am proud to answer the question from the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce): I am a member of the GMB union, and, yes, it has helped to fund my election campaigns. I hope it will do the same in the future, just as the businesses the hon. Lady supports are likely to support her directly or through some other medium.

The hon. Lady’s comments emphasised one of the major problems in our political system. When a party is elected, it rips up what the previous party did, and we can see the consequences of that in all sorts of areas. One section of the Tory party—it is much larger than it used to be—is focusing particularly on trade union rights. It thinks the only way we will sort out our economic and political system is by removing workers’ rights to health and safety protection at work because such things are all red tape. That is why the Tories have formed their Trade Union Reform Campaign, in the same way they formed the TaxPayers Alliance as a front and a seemingly independent organisation to get over their message and alter the debate on public finances.

I want to focus a little on how things should be. When we look at our economic competitors, it is clear that we are not at the races. Our manufacturing industry has virtually disappeared, although that is the fault of both the Labour and the Conservative parties, and I am not laying political blame. However, there are fundamental weaknesses in the way we approach industrial relations.

I was a Parliamentary Private Secretary—the lowest of the low—in the Department for Trade and Industry when Labour was elected in 1997, after 18 years out of office. One of the key issues on which we had manifesto commitments and which we wanted to tackle was the industrial relations system. Rather than taking the approach of the hon. Lady and most of her colleagues in the Conservative party, we decided to trust the trade unions and management. We asked the CBI and the TUC to go away and look at what we proposed in our manifesto programme, and then to go beyond it and look at a range of issues that we felt were a serious problem in our industrial relations system. There was not a lot of confidence that they would come back with a workable programme, but we were quite explicit: we told them to come back and tell us what they could agree about, what they did not agree about, but thought they could sort out, and what they positively disagreed about.

I remember sitting in the office of the Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett), when the TUC and the CBI came back to report on what they had worked out. We were all astonished, because they had gone much further than we had anticipated. Both sides knew the industrial landscape and the workplace, and they knew how the system worked. They came back with a formula that eventually became the Employment Relations Act 1999. The focus of that Act was not, as the hon. Lady might suggest, about Labour buying off its union funders: it was a serious attempt to change the industrial landscape. One of the key issues was to try to get the courts out of industrial relations, and I think we succeeded enormously in that respect. I am very proud of what we did in that area.

One of the key areas of conflict was recognition. We introduced a process that enabled recognition to be properly worked through in the workplace or with support from ACAS. That meant that we had a rational debate, rather than both sides following their first instinct and rushing to the courts to try to force things through.

Within a few months of the Act—in fact, the process started before it was enacted—we had more than 1,000 new workplace agreements. Management decided to sit down with their workplace unions for the first time, and they started to enter agreements. There have been virtually no disputes since, although there have been one or two high-profile ones. In the main, however, the whole issue of industrial disputes over recognition has disappeared.

Sadly, we now have a new Government. Just this week, I met a group of trade union officials who represent the trade unions at QinetiQ, where the managing director, who has no experience of the defence industry or science, has decided that recognition will be removed from the workplace. That will be an area of conflict, and it is completely unnecessary. There was no proper consultation with unions: in fact, in that case, unions at the national level feel they have been deceived and lied to, and such comments are not made lightly in an industrial context.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I am totally in support of having unions, and it is a statutory right for unions to carry out their business unpaid in work time. However, I am worried, and I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman agrees in principle with union members being paid out of taxpayers’ money. That is the crux of the worry many people have.

[Mr Doran]

A whole phalanx of my colleagues will come in on that issue, but I want to focus on the issue I have outlined. To answer the hon. Gentleman’s question, however, I see this arrangement as a facility for management. In my constituency, which does not have a Labour council at the moment, staff are paid to do this work because it is a door for management to knock on when there is a problem. Whenever there is a difficulty, the two sides can quickly get together, and the people who represent the work force can talk with some authority; they do not have to work at the coal face in another job and then have to be briefed on an issue that has come up somewhere in another department. These things happen in the private sector as much as in the public sector because they are good for management—they oil the wheels.

Oral Answers to Questions

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I am sure there will be families with children who may have difficulties with the new benefit regime. However, would the Prime Minister care to comment on the feelings of elderly couples who have spent their entire lives working for this country, paid into the state pension system, and are now existing on about £7,000 a year, rather than £26,000?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. The fact is that if one looks at the figures today, there are still families in London receiving housing benefit worth more than £50,000 a year. Each one of those families is taking up the hard-earned taxes of many working people earning far less, who could not dream of living in such houses. The point that he makes about pensioners is right, and I am proud of the fact that the Government will be increasing the basic state pension by £5 a week, starting in April, because we believe in dignity and security for our pensioners in old age.

Individual Voter Registration

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

No, it is not. If the hon. Gentleman will listen, we have introduced proposals having learned from the experience of Northern Ireland, for example in the carry-forward, to make sure that we minimise the risk of any drop in the registered electorate before the 2015 election. Between that election and the drawing up of registers for the next boundary review, there will be another full household canvass. There are therefore good safeguards in the system to make sure that the general election and the 2015 boundary review are held on the most accurate and complete registers possible. I shall say a little more about that later.

I do not think that it is correct to say that the Government have eroded the civic duty of registering to vote. It is not an offence—this comes back to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) made—not to be registered to vote. It is an offence to refuse to provide information to an electoral registration officer on the household canvass form when required to do so. We do not propose to change that, but I must note that there is some doubt about how effective that is, given that about 15% of electors are not registered to vote. I shall say a little more about that later.

I accept that the way in which we phrased our original proposals, with regard to the opt-out and some of the language that we used—I said this when I gave evidence to the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform—could have led people to think that we wanted to weaken the extent to which we felt citizens had an obligation to register to vote. The Deputy Prime Minister and I have both said that we are minded to change that provision when we introduce our Bill. To be fair, the right hon. Member for Tooting acknowledged that.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has half-answered my question. Why are we not making the system as effective as possible, and making people register to vote properly?

[Mr Harper]

We are retaining the offence of not responding to the household form. The logic is that if someone does not respond, they affect not just themselves but perhaps other people’s right to vote. That is why we have kept that proposal. We then faced the question, in the returning of the invitation to register, of whether we really wanted to create a criminal offence and criminalise people for not registering to vote. First, I start from the position of thinking that that would not be effective. The evidence at best, if I am being generous, is very mixed about whether that is effective. Secondly, we do not want to clog up the court system with a huge number of these cases. In Northern Ireland, where someone correctly said the offence of not returning the individual form exists, the provision has in effect become meaningless because when it was used in court and someone was prosecuted, the court gave them a slap on the wrist with a fine of 1p. The provision has effectively become unusable.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

What the research has shown about the drop in the register in Northern Ireland is interesting. Some of the drop was expected because, after all, part of the point of introducing the system early in Northern Ireland was that it was understood that a number of people on the register there did not exist and we wanted to get rid of them. However, it is not clear that the drop in Northern Ireland was any larger than that in the rest of the United Kingdom. Therefore, there may well have been a drop in those who were eligible to vote because they did not go through the slightly increased bureaucracy. However, most of that seems to have been fixed by reintroducing the carry-forward, so that people who did not register the first time around are not penalised. We have learned from that. Having had Northern Ireland go first and having learned the lessons from what it has done, we can be reasonably confident that we will not run into the same problems.

I am also pleased that, as the right hon. Member for Tooting said, we have gone about this in a conciliatory way. We published a White Paper last year. We then published draft legislation, consulted on it and asked the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee to do full pre-legislative scrutiny on it. The Committee has taken evidence from a wide range of stakeholders, including me. It has raised a number of concerns, some of which the right hon. Gentleman mentioned. The Government will respond shortly to the Committee’s report. I urge all hon. Members, particularly those who are interested in this subject, to look at our response because it will address a number of the issues that were raised. Hon. Members can be confident that we will not run into those difficulties. For example, we have already mentioned the carry-forward, and we will not require people to re-register all their details every year if they do not move house. They will simply have to confirm that they have not moved. In Northern Ireland, people have to go through the whole process every year.

I have referred a few times to data matching. We have examined other public databases in a number of local authorities to see how successful we can be in finding people who are not registered to vote. We are in the process of finalising our assessment of that programme, and the Electoral Commission will also be doing so having worked closely with us. I am confident that it will demonstrate that we can use those extra data, as happens in Northern Ireland, to improve the register.

Younger people have been mentioned, and we want to ensure that we allow people to register online in a secure way, which will particularly help younger people. To pick up on a point made by the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), it will potentially also help people who are disabled and find it easier to use electronic methods. I absolutely agree with her that people with learning disabilities are entitled to register to vote and to cast their vote. From my experience of working with Scope and attending its reception immediately after the election, and of talking to people with learning disabilities, particularly younger people, I know that they are just as able as anybody else to understand the issues involved and make decisions, and nobody should tell them that they should not. I wanted to put that on the record in strong support of what the hon. Lady said.

[Bob Stewart]

As the head of a household almost filled with very young people, it seems to me that the key to getting an understanding of who should be voting is the head of household registration form. When that form is filled out, it gives the key to who is living in the household, and then we can ensure that they are voting. I hope that that will be very much part of the system in future.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Just before the Minister responds, may I very gently remind him—I am sure he is bearing this in mind—that a very large number of Members want to speak in this debate? I am already going to reduce their time limit to eight minutes, so I hope that he may be reaching the point of being about to conclude.

Oral Answers to Questions

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

The right hon. Gentleman said he was going to try not to prejudge that report, but it sounded very much like he did. The Secretary of State for Defence was in the Chamber for an hour yesterday afternoon and gave a very good account of himself. [Interruption.] Yes, he did; I was present for Defence questions and his statement, and he gave a very good account of himself. As the Prime Minister has said, he is doing an excellent job as Defence Secretary. The Prime Minister has set up a review by the Cabinet Secretary which will deal with any remaining questions, and the right hon. Gentleman rightly said that he does not want to prejudge that.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

2. What his policy is on prisoner voting.

[The Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Nick Clegg)]

The European Court of Human Rights has granted an extension to the deadline for implementing prisoner voting rights that was set in the Greens and MT judgment against the UK. That is because the Court is considering an Italian prisoner voting rights case—Scoppola v. Italy. It is therefore right to consider the final Scoppola judgment and the wider legal context before setting out our next steps on prisoner voting. The Government will express their views on the principles raised in that case, and we will be arguing that it is for Parliament to decide the way forward on this issue.

[Bob Stewart]

The House has spoken overwhelmingly on one side of the argument on this issue: anyone serving a custodial sentence should not have a vote. I very much hope the Deputy Prime Minister will recognise this appropriately in any further dealings he has on the matter.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

As I said to my hon. Friend, the first point of principle we are seeking to establish is precisely that it is this Parliament that should be able to determine matters such as this, and we will be arguing that in the Scoppola case that is before the Court now.

Libya

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Monday 5th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I believe that Musa Kusa is currently in Doha, where he has spent quite a lot of time, but I understand that he is co-operating fully with the police inquiry and has been questioned by the police. No special or sweetheart deals were done in respect of Musa Kusa, and, as I have said, I hope that the police investigation will continue.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

The act of surrendering is probably the most dangerous thing that a combatant has to do. How can we encourage the forces of the NTC to act within the rules of war, and specifically within the Geneva convention? If they do, the remnants of Gaddafi’s forces will be encouraged to surrender more quickly, and there will be less loss of life.

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend speaks with great knowledge of this matter, and he is right to make that point. I have been impressed by the fact that the Free Libya Forces have extended the deadline for Gaddafi forces to surrender. Of course, there have been reports of abuse on all sides, although the Gaddafi war crimes put everything else into perspective. On the whole, however, it has been remarkable how the Free Libya forces have tried to behave properly and to integrate people who want to give up and reconcile.

Public Disorder

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I think my hon. Friend refers to the petition that is gathering signatures, and, as I have said, we should look at additional powers to ensure not only that we confiscate things from people who have committed crimes, but that the punishments that they receive, whether prison or not, are robust.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

When Mark Duggan was shot last week, the IPCC immediately went in and sealed the crime scene, but then no statement was made, and that gave an excuse to the rioters. It would be good if the IPCC, or someone, made a definitive statement on what happened. Otherwise, conspiracy theories build up.

[The Prime Minister]

The difficulty with my hon. Friend’s suggestion is that the IPCC has got to get across the detail before it makes a statement. There is a huge danger on such occasions of making statements that turn out not to be true and that inflame passions either at the time or afterwards when their veracity is questioned. This is an extremely difficult situation, but we must have confidence and faith in the IPCC system, which is independent of the police and can, therefore, give victims confidence.

Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am going to go further in a minute in my speech and suggest that it may be the case that we should take politicians out of all decisions about media mergers altogether, but I was recognising the fact that if you are the leader of a party, you are trying to win over newspapers, television and all the rest of it, so the more you can take yourself out of decisions about future media structures, frankly, the better for all concerned. I do not understand why the right hon. Gentleman does not get that.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

It is quite clear that relationships between our political leaders and leadership in the media are going to continue, so does my right hon. Friend agree that it is up to our political leaders, and this House, to get as soon as we can a system for dealing with this that is sound, proper, transparent and healthy?

[The Prime Minister]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and I am going to address that directly in the speech that I will make in a moment. This is an opportunity to reset the clock, and we should take it.

Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Absolutely.

Then there were the subsequent civil cases, which could only be brought once The Guardian had run its story suggesting that there were many more victims of phone hacking. Some people started writing in to the Metropolitan police and then suing the police to force them to give them the information, so that they could then take action against News International and get full disclosure from it. It is only as a result of those cases that the cover-up has effectively been smashed apart.

There remains this issue of the material that was gathered and put into a file in 2007, including various e-mails and other pieces of paper, and given to Harbottle & Lewis. Only this year, it was shown to the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, who said that, within three minutes of looking at it, he could see that there was material relating to the payment of police officers that should always have been given to the Metropolitan police. That seems to me a far greater criminal offence than the original criminal offence of phone hacking. That is why my concern is about the cover-up at the heart of this.

Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch was asked whether he was responsible and he said, “No,” but I am afraid that in this country we have to have a much stronger concept of responsibility. It is not just about whether something happens on one’s watch—that is ludicrously broad. If someone has taken all due diligence steps to try to ensure that criminality has not happened, then of course they are not personally responsible. But if someone’s argument is, “Our company is so big that I could not possibly be expected to know whether my journalists were being arrested for criminal activity or whether I was paying out £2 million in hush money,” one must question whether they have a proper corporate governance structure or system in place to make sure that the same thing does not happen again next year or next week—or even that it is not happening now.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

This is the difference between responsibility and fault. Rupert Murdoch was responsible for what happened in his corporation, but he may not have been at fault for what happened. However, that responsibility includes the real responsibility for checking that things were done properly. I think I support what the hon. Gentleman is saying.

[Chris Bryant]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman, whom—this will ruin his career—I think of as a friend. He knows that if the colonel of a regiment had not done everything in his power to make sure that his privates understood the law on how somebody in Abu Ghraib was dealt with, for example, that colonel would be negligent and therefore, in part, responsible for that.