Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Bryant and Simon Hart(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Simon Hart
I should add, for anybody who has an interest in this particular subject, that if there are individual cases that are clearly being badly held up, they should please pass them on to the Wales Office and we will do whatever we can to expedite the service. In answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question, 850 additional staff have been brought on since April 2021, with a further 350 arriving this summer.
Chris Bryant
I simply do not believe the statistics the Government keep on giving, and I think the Secretary of State should push back on them. I have 30 cases outstanding and more coming in to my office every single day of the week. The team in Portcullis House used to be five people, but is now only three, so there is less of a service. Members of staff have to queue for two and a half hours to be able to deal with a single passport case. I have people who have been waiting for 14 weeks, some who have been waiting for 18 weeks, children who have been waiting for 14 weeks—this is simply incompetence. When will the Government get a grip of it?
Simon Hart
The hon. Gentleman knows that every MP has examples of their own. I can only restate what I said just now: where there are individual cases, we are very keen to help. Some 98.5% of applications are being dealt with within the timescale. I realise that for the people who are not in that particular bracket it is intensely frustrating, and it is frustrating for Members across the House. The situation continues to improve, but if there are ways we can help the hon. Gentleman and his constituents I am very happy to do so.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Bryant and Simon Hart(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Simon Hart
Indeed, I do. I have to say that if this Government were making suggestions of that nature that involved the constitution and voting measures, pretty well all Opposition Members would be saying that that should be subject to a public referendum at the very least. I suggest that the proper course of action for the Welsh Government is to seek the approval of their voters before they proceed with any of the extremely costly measures proposed.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Wales (Simon Hart)
My colleagues and I are aware that the number of people on universal credit has fallen both in Rhondda and across Wales over the past year. We will continue delivering for residents through schemes such as in-work progression, kickstart and our plan for jobs.
Chris Bryant
The thing is, 6,320 households in the Rhondda are in receipt of universal credit, and when the Government cut universal credit by £20 a week last year, that took £6.5 million out of the Rhondda economy. That is one reason why the food bank in Tylorstown—ironically, it is in the old Conservative club—now has to provide food to the tune of 3 tonnes a month, although families are not able to contribute so much. When will the Secretary of State restore the extra £20 a week in universal credit?
Simon Hart
The Chancellor will make interventions clear in due course. The context to the hon. Gentleman’s perfectly reasonable question is that there has been a 7% increase in the number of people in work in Rhondda and the number of people who are unemployed in Wales is down 23,000 in the past year—he did not mention that. I very much hope that the increases in the national living wage and the national minimum wage will help to offset some of the issues he has raised.
Strengthening the Union as it Relates to Wales (First sitting)
Debate between Chris Bryant and Simon Hart(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Simon Hart
My right hon. Friend is right. The decision-making point that he makes is particularly apposite, because these decisions were being made at breakneck speed in unbelievably unpredictable conditions and under significant pressure, and they turned out to be the right calls. They were made for the right reason, at the right time. It is no coincidence that the unemployment figures now show that there are over 400,000 more people in work than there were before the pandemic.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The furlough scheme was a great success, and I commend the Government for bringing it in. I do not know whether the Minister had the same experience as me, but throughout covid one of the difficulties was explaining to constituents the differences between Welsh and English policies. It was sometimes very difficult to get to the bottom of them, in particular with financial support for businesses in Wales, which could only be announced once the Welsh Government had had the money from the UK Government. That was difficult to explain to people, and to get out to people in a proportionate time. The single biggest question I have now is, why is HS2 considered to be an England and Wales project, when it does not benefit Wales at all?
Simon Hart
A neat means of getting in on the HS2 question.
As the hon. Gentleman knows, I believe that a consistent approach to interventions, whether regulations or financial interventions, would in many cases have been more desirable for exactly the reason he pointed out; it would have been simpler to understand precisely what was on offer and exactly why we were doing things in the way we were. It was unfortunate that, from time to time, those arrangements were not as consistent as they could have been.
By the way, the hon. Gentleman’s point enables me to say that it was very important that the financial contributions that we were able to make to the Welsh Government were upfronted, rather than the usual Barnett system of them being provided retrospectively.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Bryant and Simon Hart(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Wales (Simon Hart)
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury wrote to the hon. Gentleman last week to confirm that he is expecting to provide £2.5 million needed for the tip repairs in Tylorstown, in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. The letter also clarifies that the Chief Secretary is waiting to hear further from the Welsh Government on an additional request to access the reserve.
Chris Bryant
That was useless yet again. I have been asking for the money for the Rhondda for months. The Prime Minister wrote to me in June saying that he recognised that Wales had been particularly badly hit by Storm Dennis and that the UK Government would look seriously at any requests for funding. I am delighted that we have got the £2.5 million for the Tylorstown tip, but we need £60 million to mend culverts and drains and to make people’s houses secure in Pontypridd, the Rhondda and across the whole of Rhondda Cynon Taf. Make sure you earn your money by getting us the money in the Rhondda.
Simon Hart
What a contrast with the conversation the hon. Gentleman and I had last when I reported this news to him; he was charm and diplomacy itself then, yet when he gets in the Chamber with an audience, he becomes a different personality. I will remind him, just in case he has forgotten, what the Chief Secretary’s letter actually says. Among other things, he says, “I am expecting to provide the required funding.” That is in relation to the Welsh Government confirming they will make a reserve claim for 2020-21. So this process is under way. It does require the Welsh Government to come to the party, too, but they have not yet done so. Of course a lot of this is in the devolved space, so the hon. Gentleman cannot just pick and choose which bits of devolution suit his desire to make a statement in the Chamber.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Bryant and Simon Hart(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Wales (Simon Hart)
There are 205,000 self-employed in Wales, 110,000 of whom are receiving direct cash grants, totalling over £295 million, through the Government’s self-employment income support scheme. The scheme is one of a range of Government initiatives supporting the self-employed during the coronavirus outbreak.
Chris Bryant
If you will indulge me, Mr Speaker, I want to pass on my commiserations to everyone involved in the horrific car crash in Trebanog in the Rhondda earlier today. I thank the police and the fire brigade, who have been helping.
The Secretary of State is right that lots of people have received help, but an awful lot of people in the Rhondda have not had a single penny. There are people who set up a company just two years ago and have now lost their business, their home and their livelihood. There are people who have gone from having £3,000 a month in the bank to £300 a month. When we come to the next round of decisions by the Government and the Treasury, we have to do something for the 3 million people who have been excluded from every single scheme. They feel that this has been massively unfair, and we have hundreds of tradespeople in the Rhondda who have not had a single penny off the Government.
Simon Hart
I know the whole House will join me in expressing our sympathy for those involved in the accident in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency this morning. I know what a blow it is for him and everybody involved, and our thoughts are with them.
In relation to the schemes, I suspect that we all, as constituency MPs, have examples of people who have fallen through the net. I can only reiterate what the Chancellor has said on numerous occasions, which is that we will always try to look at every possible way to ensure that those who qualify for help but, for some reason, are not getting it do get it. If the hon. Gentleman wishes to raise any individual cases, which we have all had, I am happy to look at them.
Intimidation in Public Life
Debate between Chris Bryant and Simon Hart(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Simon Hart
It is a tragedy that we even have to raise the fact that the taxpayer should be asked to fund security measures of the sort my hon. Friend outlines. However, we have a duty to ensure that everyone—not just MPs but our staff and families—is protected. It is important that IPSA acknowledges that. What is more important is that we crack down on the reasons why intimidation happens in the first place. It depends which end of this problem we want to tackle it from.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I apologise for arriving a little late, Sir Gary; there is a debate in the main Chamber relating to similar areas of interest.
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I agree with the hon. Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa) about CCTV. My offices were attacked this weekend, with “traitor” painted all over them. That word is a common feature of the debate at the moment. Does the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) agree that there are no traitors in this House? Every single Member of Parliament is a full patriot; we just disagree about where that patriotism takes us. Being able to disagree openly, honestly and fairly, and to exercise freedom of speech, is a fundamental aspect of being a Member of Parliament in a free democracy. If that means that the House authorities have to step in to ensure that there is CCTV on Members’ offices, where our staff are often far more vulnerable than we are, that is what they should do.
Simon Hart
The hon. Gentleman makes an unarguable point. It is tragic that those fundamental beliefs are in jeopardy and that so few people in society are prepared to tackle intimidation, for fear, ironically, of retribution. There are numerous ways in which we can approach this problem, and proper security is one of them. However, I regret that constituency offices, from which people could previously come and go freely without fear of consequence, have been converted almost into high street banks in terms of the security around them, making us more inaccessible and remote than we have ever been, at a time when the opposite should be the case.
Chris Bryant
The point is not that any of us is intimidated by this behaviour. None of us is going to shy away from our full beliefs just because somebody paints something on a door or shouts something at us in the street or says something stupid on Facebook. We simply want to ensure that our staff and families are safe—and, for that matter, that constituents who come to see us are safe in the exercise of their democratic rights.
Simon Hart
As I said, this behaviour strengthens people’s resolve as much as anything. On the hon. Gentleman’s earlier point, the accusation that is bandied around that people are traitors is the most ridiculous and absurd accusation that can be made. Whether people like it or not, democracy is being played out, in a rather old-fashioned and very visible way, in exactly the place it should be played out.
Parliamentary Lobbying
Debate between Chris Bryant and Simon Hart(13 years ago)
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Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)
I will start by declaring an interest: I am a former lobbyist and an unpaid board member of a group which spends part of its time lobbying this place and other places.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) on securing this debate. I hope that I encourage him when I say that I sympathise with much—but not all—of what he has said.
The Government’s progress in their first 18 months of office is rather more promising than that which their predecessors achieved in 13 years. The coalition agreement strikes the right balance between encouraging lobbying and ensuring transparency. People should know what we are up to over and above what they can obtain from the register and under the Freedom of Information Act. None the less, we must be cautious about some of the unintended consequences. I do not want to over-simplify things because, as I have said, I am on the same page as the hon. Gentleman in so many ways. The solution is not only the register but the codes of practice and the professional standards that underpin the register. As a former lobbyist, I attach the greatest importance to those matters.
As a Government and a party, we promote and champion self-regulation over statutory regulation. Having dealt with a number of regulators in my previous life, I have some experience of such matters. My experience of the Advertising Standards Authority as a regulator was pretty good. The organisation had teeth, it did things and it applied standards with which the lobby industry was entirely comfortable. My experience with other organisations, such as the Market Research Society, was less than satisfactory. When trying to table a complaint against an individual member of the MRS, we found that the president of the MRS was the very same person against whom we were lodging the complaint. I am talking about not just blurred lines, but real confusion, and I had a similar view of the Press Complaints Commission. I am probably one of the few Members in this Chamber who took Piers Morgan to the PCC when he was editor of the Daily Mirror. I was astonished by the complete contempt that he showed for that body—it was as if it was not there. He did not give a damn. At that particular moment, it was, as far as he was concerned, a toothless organisation.
Simon Hart
The hon. Gentleman has more recent experience of the organisation than me.
Parliamentary Reform
Debate between Chris Bryant and Simon Hart(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Simon Hart
On the basis that the First Minister was sitting at the front and everybody was behind him, I suppose that there was a connection with that word. However, I felt that this week’s Prime Minister’s questions was a bit like going to the Oval to watch the cricket, only to find that it had been rained off and having to sit under an umbrella waiting for something to happen.
Fixed-term Parliaments Bill
Debate between Chris Bryant and Simon Hart(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Simon Hart
Amendment 1 was tabled by the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), the Chairman of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, who apologises for not being here in person.
I hope not to detain the House for too long. Amendment 1 is a probing amendment, which the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee agreed should be tabled to ensure that the Bill was technically sound. Clause 1(3) and (4) provide for the clock to be reset if an early general election is called, and for the date of the next scheduled general election to be shifted to four to five years after that early election. Those provisions, however, do not seem to apply to the next general election, which is scheduled to take place on 7 May 2015. The Bill seems to require an election to be held on 7 May 2015 even if an early election has been held before that date, perhaps only a few months before—although I suppose that depends on how it is interpreted. The Government have made clear their policy that the clock should be reset each time there is an early general election, and I do not suppose that they mean to make an exception for 2015.
I appreciate that the Government have already announced that the next general election will be held on 7 May 2015 and not before. Can the Minister reassure us that, in the unlikely event of an early general election during the current Parliament, the Bill as it stands would not require a further election to be held on 7 May 2015? If he cannot give that reassurance, is he prepared to accept the amendment? That would make it crystal clear that if an early election took place before May 2015, the date of the next election would be four to five years later, not in May 2015.
Chris Bryant
It is a great delight to see the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart). It is always odd when constituencies contain bits of the west and bits of the south and bits of the north, all aligned with each other. May I just notify the hon. Gentleman that I shall be in his constituency on Friday evening? Now I have got that out of the way. He will be glad to know that I shall be addressing a Labour party meeting—although I am sure he will be welcome to come along if he wishes.
As for the hon. Gentleman’s argument about amendment 1, I entirely agree with him that the drafting of the Bill is deficient in this regard. The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has done a remarkable piece of work in the short time it was given to do its work, and I am glad it has been able to come up with this amendment. I had worried that there was not going to be a Committee member to move it, because neither of the two Committee members whose names are attached to it is present this evening, which is a shame.
I also want to speak to amendments 10 and 11 in the name of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, the shadow Lord Chancellor my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), and myself. Amendment 10 would amend clause 1 by adding that “no notice” should be
“taken of any early parliamentary general election as provided for in section 2.”
That is basically to say that, notwithstanding that there might have been an early general election, the next general election will be on the date that had already been specified.
Ignoring for a moment the fact that one of our primary objections to the Bill is that it refers to five-year Parliaments rather than four-year Parliaments, which we would prefer, we none the less subscribe to the belief that it is good for parliamentary democracy to have an expectation about when the next general election will be, and for Parliaments to be for fixed terms, especially because our broader electoral system is now analogous to that of the United States of America in that we have local elections on a four-year cycle, Assembly elections in Wales and Northern Ireland on a four-year cycle and the parliamentary elections in Scotland on a four-year cycle. We know the dates when they will take place in perpetuity into the future, so it makes sense to have the same pattern and rhythm in elections to this House. That is why we have advanced this amendment, which, in essence, would mean that we would not start the clock again. Consequently, we would know whether elections were going to coincide with certain local elections or elections for the devolved Administrations. That is a better model than the slightly haphazard manner in which we may proceed if the Bill proceeds unamended in this respect.
There is one other advantage. The Government have written to the devolved Administrations about the fact that the next general election would coincide with their elections in 2015 unless the Prime Minister brings our general election forward by two months or delays it by two months, and the Minister has written asking them whether they think it would be better to have a new power added giving them the right to delay their elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by six months. I have spoken to various Members of the Welsh Assembly, including the First Minister, and he is clear that it would be wrong suddenly to change the date of the Welsh Assembly elections because Parliament had decided that its elections were to be at a certain point in 2015, thereby either prolonging the next Welsh Assembly by six months or shortening the one thereafter by six months. Moreover, if we are deciding that the best time of the year to have elections is the first Thursday in May, it would seem wrong suddenly to decide that everyone else should have to get out of the way and have their elections in November. Also, just shunting the devolved Administrations’ elections away by a month or two months is likely to harm those elections substantially, because I do not think that voters want to come out very regularly, within a month or two of another general election.
Defence Spending (Wales)
Debate between Chris Bryant and Simon Hart(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Simon Hart
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He troubles me, because, surely, defence of the realm is the most important thing on which to base our decisions in this context. Delightful though it is, this is not a job creation scheme. This is about defending the nation in the context of an extremely complicated and rather depressing financial background and the £38-billion black hole in defence procurement spending, with which we were left.
Simon Hart
The choices are almost too tempting. Who was first? I believe the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) was the patient one.
Chris Bryant
I had almost given up on the hon. Gentleman, but now I am on my feet I am grateful to him for giving way. He referred to the completely fallacious figure of £36 billion—or he may have inflated it to £38 billion. The National Audit Office made it clear that if there was a gap at all, it was of £6 billion. He should not perpetuate these myths.
Simon Hart
The hon. Gentleman will be pleased that I am able to quote. The black hole of £38 billion in unfunded procurement commitments to which I referred is from an MOD brief, post-SDSR defence SB, from 19 October 2010. If that is good enough for the MOD, it is good enough for me. I am sorry that it is not good enough for him.
Mr Robathan
My hon. Friend is making a very powerful case. The figure is not fallacious; the MOD budget was projected to be overspent by £38 billion over the next 10 years.
Simon Hart
I thank the Minister for his intervention.
Let me turn briefly to St Athan. It is not my normal habit to come to the defence of my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns), but he is actually in the Vale of Glamorgan today, where he is working hard on behalf of his constituents.
Simon Hart
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen), I am not, sadly, in possession of the diary of my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan. [Interruption.] I wish I had not bothered to do this. However, nobody can doubt my hon. Friend’s commitment to the future of St Athan. [Interruption.] I would love to continue, but if anybody wishes to intervene, they can do so.