Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 3rd July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

No. The founder of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, has been clear in his opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. He has attacked what he calls the “racist principles of Zionism”—that is, the fundamental right of the Jewish people to self-determination. The man who founded and is in charge of the BDS movement has argued that Zionist principles

“maintain Israel’s character as a colonial, ethnocentric, apartheid state.”

On that basis, he opposes any idea of a two-state solution—a secure Israel alongside a viable and democratic Palestine. Instead, the BDS movement’s leader wants a

“one-state solution…where, by definition, Jews will be a minority.”

It is entirely open to any individual to agree with that proposition, but it is no part of this Government’s determination or intent to give any heart or succour to a movement that argues that the two-state solution is wrong and that Jews should be a minority in one state.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Can my right hon. Friend help us here? As the effect of Israeli policy since 1967 has been to build out of existence the possibility of a two-state solution by settling 700,000 Jews who have arrived in the state of Israel, with their right to go there under Israeli law, it is now no longer possible for there to be a two-state solution, so what is British policy to be?

[Michael Gove]

British policy is, as my hon. Friend knows, to promote a two-state solution. I know that he has a long, passionate and committed interest in this subject and I respect the compassion and knowledge that he brings to the debate but, respectfully, I disagree with him. I believe that a two-state solution is the right approach, which the BDS movement does not believe.

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[Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

I rise to speak in support of the legislation this evening. I welcome the fact that we are following through on a manifesto commitment to bring forward legislation in this difficult, sensitive and complicated area. I very much agree with the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), and my right hon. Friends the Members for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Sir Simon Clarke) and for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers).

We have had a number of speeches striking slightly different tones. There was a very good speech from the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), who tried to strike a reasonable tone and explained the rationale behind Labour’s reasoned amendment. Unfortunately for her and for the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe), who also made a thoughtful and intelligent speech, many of the speeches from the Opposition Benches seemed to be in favour of boycotts, and wanting to keep a candle burning for being able to use boycotts, divestment and sanctions as tools at a local authority level, or among other public bodies. We on the Conservative Benches are clear that we do not want to see public money being used in that way. We are clear about the main purpose of this legislation, which is to tackle, as has already been discussed, the BDS movement, with its pernicious effects, its links to antisemitism and the very ugly and divisive character behind it. To any Conservative Member who stands up and says that that was not the purpose of our commitment in the manifesto, I say that that is just not true. The gestation of the Bill—the process that it has gone through and the internal discussion—has very much centred on trying to do something for the first time about the BDS movement.

To those Members who argue that the problem with this legislation is that it will attract legal challenge, I say that every single time we have tried to do something about the BDS movement it gets a legal challenge. We know that the BDS movement will try to fight this in the court. That is not a surprise, but that should not be a reason for us to resile from our commitment to do something about the matter.

There will be Members in the House today who believe that the BDS movement, leaving aside its ugly antisemitic characteristics, is a legitimate way of trying to challenge the state of Israel. We heard that in some of the speeches. The trouble with the BDS movement, as we know, is that time and again it singles out the state of Israel in a way that it does not do with other countries.

As for the Labour party trying to maintain a reasonableness about its position, I say look at what it does when it is in government. When the Welsh Labour Government tried to introduce a new national procurement note in 2020, what did they do? Surprise, surprise, they singled out one state for potential sanctions—the state of Israel. I am talking about Labour Ministers of the Crown today serving in the Welsh Government in Cardiff, so Members will forgive me if I do not have total confidence in the reasonableness of the Labour position that it is trying to put forward.

[Crispin Blunt]

The BDS is a Palestinian-led movement. Who else is it supposed to protest against? I realise that it has a global application, but it is a Palestinian-led movement about Palestine.

[Stephen Crabb]

My hon. Friend is right: it is a Palestinian-led movement. When we consider the individuals and organisations—Palestinian and otherwise—at the root of it, we can see that the movement is deeply problematic. I do not believe that any Conservative should be identifying and aligning themselves with any aspect of the BDS movement.

I welcome the legislation. I welcome, too, the fact that the Secretary of State has made a very strong commitment to working with others and seeing whether improvements can be made to the Bill. He has shown a genuine openness in that regard. None the less, improving the Bill cannot mean watering it down to make it ineffective, which we know the opponents of the Bill—the BDS movement outside this place—want us to do. I hope that the Government will remain robust and clear-sighted on this, but I also hope that we can work pragmatically and get good legislation on the statute book.

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[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I draw the attention of the House to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), with whom I very largely agreed.

I want to start with a challenge to my right hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) to finish off the answer to my question about BDS itself. BDS is a Palestinian-led movement, so it is not remotely surprising that its attention centres on the policies of Israel, which is in illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. It is Israeli policy that is preventing any possibility of a two-state solution from becoming a reality and BDS is the only movement within Palestinian civil society that is pursuing a non-violent course of resistance.

We need to ask ourselves some fundamental questions about what we expect of the occupied Palestinians. If we present the BDS movement in the very extreme way—described to me as “disingenuous” by someone who has messaged me in the course of this debate—it has been presented in this House, we are denying the Palestinians in that sense by banning their only legitimate way of expressing resistance to that occupation.

That is where we need to take a step or two back. We are now on the receiving end of more than 50 years of illegal Israeli occupation of somebody else’s territory. In an egregious way, Israel has occupied and settled that territory with 700,000 Jewish people. The physical result of those settlements is that a two-state solution is now in effect impossible.

There needs to be some serious consideration of the implications of Israeli policy, because it has been deliberate. We sit here parroting our support for a two-state solution, and the only point of difference I have with my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns) who is now Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee is that I am afraid I now do support a one-state solution, because a two-state solution is now impossible.

I hope that hon. Members on the Front Bench will reflect that the people who convinced me of that were the negotiation support unit that the Department for International Development was paying for in 2002 to give the Palestinian negotiators a bit of capacity and heft in conducting negotiations with their Israeli counterparts. Diana Buttu and Michael Tarazi were themselves then in favour of a one-state solution. What is wrong with that as a vision? Indeed, it would mirror the original sense of moral purpose about the state of Israel. It was a great achievement of the 20th century to find a homeland for the Jewish people, who have been on the wrong end of history for hundreds and hundreds of years, particularly the appalling policies towards Jewish people in Europe.

I say to my colleagues: do not try to present the one-state solution as a terrorist answer driving Israelis and Jews into the sea—that is absolute nonsense and of course it will never happen. If we are about trying to create national reconciliation and a path to peace, we need now to start thinking originally. Palestinians are looking over the wall at Israel and, strangely enough, young professional Palestinians want what the Israelis have. I do not think that Israelis in a similar position want to send their children, in 20, 30 or 40 years’ time, to police the occupation.

We see today the terrible events in Jenin, which are a product of the disaster and false horizon that the Oslo process has turned out to be for the Palestinian people. There is desperate anger in occupied parts of Palestine, where everything is being taken away from people, but here we are attacking a movement that tries—although, of course, there are elements of unacceptable rhetoric—to stay within the limits of peaceful resistance to illegal occupation.

It would be thought absolutely astonishing that we are faced with this measure in the British Parliament. We need to think back on our history and the Balfour declaration. There were two parts to that declaration. We have delivered on one of them, but I am afraid that the rights of the people who were living in the territory that is now Israel have been violated in the most profound and fundamental way. We now have to deal with the dispossession that came of the establishment of the state of Israel. We need to deal with the results of this illegal occupation. We in this House are about to take away not only the ability to seek peacefully the means to do that through local authorities, but people’s right to express support for it. This is a very un-Conservative measure and it needs to be rejected at the first opportunity, which is this evening, and that is how I will be voting.

Homes for Ukraine: Child Refugees

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) on securing the debate. Our caseworkers will be immensely grateful to her for bringing attention to the issue, because they have spent an enormous amount of time pursuing cases on our behalf.

Obviously, it is a huge pleasure to have the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) present to represent the Government. I am slightly confused, however, as to why it is not a Home Office Minister who will be responding to the debate. It does not send out the right message to have the Minister for rough sleeping addressing the issue of Ukrainian children coming to the United Kingdom. This is a policy issue and there should be a policy Minister here to make a statement about the change that the Government are making, which is hugely welcome.

I want to raise one of two cases that my staff have spent an inordinate amount of time addressing, to illustrate the issue that I suspect many colleagues will speak to. I will call this 15-year-old girl Oksana, because her identity needs a certain amount of protection. She is trying to get to the United Kingdom, accompanied by her grandparents and cousin, but she does not have permission to do so under the rules. She is sitting in Germany, about to be evicted from the property there.

The family have been trying to assemble the paperwork required by the Home Office to bring Oksana here. The problem is that her father is fighting for the Ukrainian armed forces and is engaged in combat, and her mother has found herself in Russian-occupied Ukraine, where it is extremely difficult to get to her. Even so, the family have managed to get notarised documents from the mother in Russian-occupied Ukraine in order to produce the documentation to say that her cousin could be her temporary legal guardian. The family have gone to the trouble of getting that documentation out of occupied Ukraine—and the Home Office has now had the data for a month—but they are still in housing in Germany and are about to be evicted.

This whole chain of events and all those requirements are simply unacceptable, not least when one considers that the whole Border Force system appears to be prioritising Ukrainian matters, which has had an enormous knock-on effect on all the other immigration cases with which teams are having to assist. Even people who have paid for premium-priced visas in order to come to the United Kingdom are not getting the attention that they have paid for at a substantial rate.

That is why I particularly regret that there is not a Home Office Minister here to respond to the debate—because, to be frank, most of these issues are not the responsibility of the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North, who has been put forward by the Government. I understand the pressures that result in the Government sometimes sending Ministers to respond to Westminster Hall debates on subjects for which they do not have particular policy responsibility. However, given that the Government appear to be about to make a policy statement on this issue, I really think that a Minister from the right Department should be responding to this debate.

In Oksana’s case, with her mother now in Russian-occupied Ukraine and her father fighting on the frontline with the Ukrainian armed forces, the requirements that the Government have insisted on to date are utterly extraordinary. If those requirements are about to be reviewed, I am glad. But it does not give one much confidence that, even when people have gone through the enormous steps of finding the means to satisfy the Government’s requirements, they have been left waiting for a month for the decision whether to allow them to come to the United Kingdom. That is not good enough.

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[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

. Can I interrupt the Minister and say to my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate, who has been in this House for a considerable amount of time—25 years, I think—that people who speak in debates are expected to stay for the entirety of the debate? They are not expected to walk out on a whim and wander back in at whim. I hope my hon. Friend, if he wants to speak in Westminster Hall debates, will remain for the entire debate, as every other Member who has spoken in the debate is expected to do, too.

[Crispin Blunt]

Mr Davies, I stand reprimanded. I tried to indicate to you that I would be back for the Minister’s response, but I have been caught out by the fact that he is on his feet earlier than I expected.

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

The system in Westminster Hall is not the same as in the Chamber. People do not come back for the wind-ups or for the Minister’s response. People are expected to stay for the entire debate. Despite being here for 25 years, my hon. Friend might have learnt something today. I hope that he will not make that mistake again, and that that has been a useful lesson for everybody else who happens to be in the Chamber. Minister, I apologise for interrupting.

Building Safety

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman and all supporters of Cambridge United, and I extend my sympathies to Newcastle and Arsenal fans, given the unfortunate events of the weekend. On his very important point, I hope that the withdrawal of the consolidated advice note and its replacement with the BSI-approved PAS 9980 will play a part in helping his constituents and others to be in a position once again to operate fully in the property market. Lenders to whom I have spoken have given our proposals a fair wind so far, but obviously engagement needs to continue.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

In welcoming my right hon. Friend’s statement, may I draw his attention to the situation at Nobel House in Redhill? The development has 126 apartments, 86 of which are privately leased, but the ownership of the freehold has changed twice. The managing agents failed to make an application to the initial £1.6 billion building safety fund. I was told in June that a new fund of £3.5 billion would be coming forward, but that is yet to materialise and leaseholders are already having to pay over £2,000 each towards the cost of this exercise. Can they be fully reassured that they will get their money back, given the ownership status of the building?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend raises a very important case. I will look at what we can do to help his constituents. I will not make an absolute promise from the Dispatch Box at this point, but the situation he describes is clearly unacceptable.

Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con) [V]]

I note that we, Madam Deputy Speaker, have just entered our 25th year of service in the House. In all that time, I have been clear that there is no more important issue to the residents of the constituency of Reigate than planning. Crucially, the protection of our environment hangs on the fact that we are London’s green belt.

I just want to pose a couple of warnings for my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench. They might have noticed that in the last set of local elections only the Borough of Reigate and Banstead remains a district or borough council in Conservative control. These cases almost always turn on people feeling disenfranchised and remote from the planning process. Unless things change, it is only going to get worse. There is also the issue—despite our right hon. Friend the Paymaster General’s machine-gunning at the Dispatch Box of the deputy Leader of the Opposition—of the noise around the developer connection with the Conservative party. The delivery of a developer-led system of house provision will haunt us in future if we do not address it.

I want to point my hon. Friend the Minister to the comments made by our hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) about enabling a plan-led system. If the local authority is coming forward with its own plans, of course it should not need planning permission. The local authority will have produced a plan, which developers would then bid to build.

Within that, however, we need a more important national debate about where housing is to go and about how we are to deliver levelling up so that we can get good houses, good jobs and good infrastructure in those parts of the country where people have drifted away—provincial towns in the midlands and the north—to seek employment elsewhere. I draw my hon. Friend the Minister’s attention to the excellent article in The Times today by our former leader, our noble Friend Lord Hague. We need to address the levelling-up agenda, and we can do it within the planning system, but if we do not, we will be in the deepest trouble, because we will not be able to deliver our principal political objectives.

I want to make two other points. First, I draw the attention of my hon. Friend and his colleagues in the Department to the concern about the building safety fund and how it affects the leaseholders of Nobel House. I have written to the Secretary of State urgently, and I have now had two letters from his colleague, the noble Lord Greenhalgh. Unhappily, the last letter, which arrived today, was in response to my letter to the Secretary of State of 17 December 2020—I did have a previous response to a letter I sent a month later—but this is now absolutely urgent. These leaseholders are in the deepest trouble because of the failure of Avon Estates properly to register a claim for the building safety fund and, indeed, for the waking watch fund.

Finally, on another element of the Queen’s Speech, the welcome ban on conversion therapy lacks any detail on how it will work. The accompanying notes imply that people who are inflicting it at the moment might get protected. We need assurance on that very shortly.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Nominations closed at 5 o’clock this afternoon for candidates for the post of Chair of the Backbench Business Committee. One nomination has been received, and a ballot will therefore not be held. I congratulate Ian Mearns on his re-election as Chair of the Backbench Business Committee.

Planning and House Building

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Thursday 8th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Some time ago, I had to make a three-minute speech on why it was not a very good idea to spend £179 billion on putting our deterrent into four submarines, when I found myself as the only Conservative putting forward that view. So I am delighted that on this incredibly important issue of planning the tide of opinion seems utterly uniform: the presentation that the Government have made is potentially catastrophic for delivering the wider objectives of Government policy. I have listened to this debate, and to the great speeches made by a former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), and all the glitterati of colleagues elected at the same time as me and after who have made a better fist of their careers in this place than I have. They have demolished the algorithm, in particular, and the basis on which it is done.

However, it is necessary for us to come forward with proposals for the planning system that will help the Government to deliver. Some of the analysis is fine. It points out the lack of public trust in local planning authorities. It is hardly surprising—we are engaged in a massive con trick. Local planning authorities do not have any real authority over planning because they are given a number that they have to deliver; they then find that the number has been changed by fiat at the Dispatch Box by up to 30%, and now—in the case of Reigate and Banstead—they find that the number is going to double again. That is quite remote from local circumstances.

I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) is now my neighbour and we shall fight London’s green-belt cause determinedly, but we need a fundamental reappraisal of the whole planning system. I used to believe that if local planning authorities were given the real power, those that wanted to protect quality of life and the environment and were elected to do that would promote development in areas of the country where economic development was a more important priority, thereby leading to a natural levelling-up process. I am afraid that that is simply not good enough. It is certainly not good enough if the Government produce a target on the scale that they have done and expect it to be delivered.

The introduction to the White Paper refers to the Dutch and German planning systems. It is quite a good idea to have a look at them. We have to move to a national plan-led system. We must achieve what we are trying to do with the northern powerhouse and deliver for the honour of all our new colleagues. That means that inner cities in the north of England must have the kind of vision that we have already provided. We did it in 2000. It was a Labour Government and Lord Richard Rogers co-chaired the all-party parliamentary group for London’s green belt with me.

The message to the Government is that we have got to think again. We must think strategically about how we will deliver national and local plans and sound environmental policy.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

This is a debate in which we all have a duty to speak. It is simply inconceivable, from where we stand now, how in the last century, within 1,000 miles of this House, unspeakable evil worked systematically to destroy an entire people, those who opposed it, the disabled and those who just wanted to love freely. There is something distinctly perverse and pernicious about antisemitism, in particular its manifestation in the creation of conspiracy theories that feed off division and envy. It is supremely disheartening that between January and June last year, the Community Security Trust recorded the highest ever number of antisemitic incidents in a six-month period. None of us can be left in any doubt that we have to do more to combat the malign force of antisemitism.

The terrors of our past must never become the fears of our future. On Remembrance Day we say, “Lest we forget”—not just for the fallen, but for those who were killed in barbarous acts of tyranny. The holocaust memorial and education centre next to Parliament will serve as a stark reminder of our enduring responsibility to prevent such atrocities from happening again.

We must also look to the past for inspiration. This country has a proud history of advocating on behalf of the world’s most vulnerable. In 1938 the then Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, pledged that

“there will be no Government among all these Governments more sympathetic than the Government of the United Kingdom”—[Official Report, 21 November 1938; Vol. 341, c. 1475.]

and said that there would be “no Government more anxious” to solve the plight of the Jewish people.

One year later, during the second world war, a family in Oakham in my constituency of Rutland and Melton took in an eight-year-old evacuee. Upon meeting their guest, they discovered that she had travelled from her home in Berlin to London in 1939 to live with a distant relative as part of the Kindertransport. She was then evacuated to Oakham, as so many others across the country were. The family in Oakham gave that young girl a home, treated her as their own and ensured that she got the education of which she had so far been deprived. Tragically, both her parents were senselessly murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, as no doubt she would have been if the British Government had not reacted in a timely manner to Kristallnacht. That girl now lives in America with her husband, and has three children and four grandchildren—eight lives saved.

We in this House have an intrinsic responsibility to reflect on history to prevent it from repeating itself, and to respond with swift resolve to atrocities. The Kindertransport saved abundant human potential, and it is only when we truly stand together that our society can decidedly flourish. As Elie Wiesel said:

“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

I therefore commend my colleagues on both sides of the House who have so bravely spoken out against antisemitism with such conviction—from small, everyday interactions to those who have courageously stood up to systemic antisemitism on a national level, at great personal and professional cost. But we still see genocide and hatred. The Rohingya, the Yazidis, the Uyghur—these people are being massacred. It is still happening, and I will always be someone in this House who will speak out for these communities, who are too often being forgotten or pushed under the carpet.

We have spoken today about the genocide in Srebrenica—another that people still shamefully refuse to admit took place. A few years ago I had the utter privilege of going Srebrenica. I apologise to the House if my voice fails me at this point. I travelled with members of our armed forces who had served in Srebrenica and in Bosnia. Going back to Bosnia with them for the first time since they served was the privilege of my life, and one of the hardest memories that I will always take with me.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I share my hon. Friend’s recollection of that time. I have not had the privilege of travelling to Bosnia as she has, but I was special adviser to the Defence Secretary and then the Foreign Secretary during that period. The failure of the United Nations and the troops there to prevent that appalling massacre, which undoubtedly amounted to genocide given the thousands of people concerned, is something that must continue to disturb us. It must concentrate our minds on peacekeeping and on the necessity of having the capacity to ensure, when we are engaged in peacekeeping, that as an international community we are not responsible in any way for being party to such events.

[Alicia Kearns]

I agree. It was a privilege to see the work of the UN.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan) noted earlier, it is a privilege to take part in this debate, and it is a very special debate. Before the hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton) departs, I want to say just how much his speech has contributed to this debate, with the enormous emotion, which we were all moved by, that sat behind the testimony of his own family. It is of course a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who has committed so much to this issue during his time in the House.

For the beginning of my remarks, I want to pick up where the Minister began, which is by making it clear that this day marks a number of appalling horrors. He mentioned the Khmer Rouge, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester. What I would describe as my first launch into public speaking was on the issue of the Khmer Rouge, when I took part in a United Nations Association speaking competition. As a 17-year-old then, I was trying to understand how on earth 1.7 million people had been killed in Cambodia through the work of the Khmer Rouge. It was quite appalling testimony to a failure of global policy to prevent that from happening.

We heard moving testimony from my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns) about her visit to Srebrenica, and of course from my hon. and truly gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). I am utterly convinced that had he been in command of those Dutch troops who were charged with the defence of Srebrenica at the time, there would have been a very different outcome. That is the difference in the traditions and the pride that we take in our Army, and the proper latitude that we give our field commanders to deliver on their mission.

The right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) mentioned today’s judgment in the International Court of Justice about the Rohingya, which is another searing issue that is current. Srebrenica of course happened in the context of the massacre in Rwanda just a year before. The fact that the ICJ is considering the Rohingya today should mean that we understand the purpose of today’s debate: it is current. However, the single worst atrocity of the 20th century—and possibly, in scale, of all time—was of course the holocaust visited on the Jews of Europe by the Nazis under the German Government of Adolf Hitler.

This is very personal for me. My father, towards the end of the second world war, commanded a company that defended Field Marshal Montgomery’s army group headquarters. He was one of the young officers sent to go and see what had been found in Bergen-Belsen. He recalled that to explain to the German population, who had averted their gaze from what was happening very close to them, local leaders were invited to go and see what had happened.

That is the lesson. This happened in a “civilised” nation. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East gave some of the historic background. It is now in school curriculums. Pupils are taught about the causes and how it ended with this worst ever atrocity. I wholly applaud the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust. I have had the opportunity to use its resources and to go with it, with schoolchildren, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I think my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East suggested that one should be there for more than one day. I have to say that a day was more than enough. It was one of the grimmest experiences of my life. As someone interested in history from a young age, it did not tell me anything new. I can vividly remember, aged 13, the episode of “The World at War” which focused on the holocaust and the camps. I grew up with the books of authors, such as Leon Uris, who made it clear what had happened to the Jewish people of Europe.

I do not think that there is any doubt that this experience has been seared into the German soul. One can see it in its foreign policy. My hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), wholly understandably, has a Polish perspective. These events and these days are so important, so that we do not forget and that we try to learn. But we have not learnt. What we need to understand is that too often other conflicts in other parts of the world have their base in hatred. Antisemitism is the virulent hatred that led inexorably to the holocaust, which is why it is so important it is called out. Other hatreds, based on ethnicity, sexuality and other characteristics, continue to exist. We saw that with ISIS, only too recently controlling a very large area of territory in Iraq and Syria, visiting out its version of it what it thought were its values that are so appalling and so anti the very tenets of civilisation. We have to pick up and learn the lessons that we do not pass by on the other side.

There is no monopoly of good in the world. I have in this House pointed out, and will continue to point out, that there is very unlikely to be security for Israel until there is a decent measure of justice for the Palestinians. It is the elision sometimes of these issues that makes things extremely difficult. I have, in the whirl of social media, been called an antisemite, because I have had the temerity to stand up for the Palestinians. It is deeply hurtful—I worked for four years for the first Jewish Secretary of State for Defence and for the second Jewish Foreign Secretary, who is a very close friend of mine—to have that accusation made, simply because I have expectations of the Government of the state of Israel, as an important ally of the United Kingdom and as a font of democratic values in that region, that their policy should be not only in their interests but based on the morality and law that they expect their people should have respect to. We have to continue to find a solution there.

I will finish with the words of Pastor Niemöller:

“First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me.”

It is the duty of this House, and the lesson of today’s debate, that where we see injustice in the world and it is perpetrated on the back of ethnic hatred, we call it out.

Deaths of Homeless People

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Thursday 20th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

First and foremost, let me congratulate and commend the hon. Lady for her work on the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act. It was a great moment when Mr Speaker was able to underline that the Bill had been given Royal Assent, so that it is now an Act. The hon. Lady championed the Bill so firmly, and we were pleased to support her in taking forward an important piece of legislation that I hope will start to make a real difference in the new year.

I am not going to hide away from the increase in numbers; those figures are profound. This is why we are taking the steps that we are. I pointed to a number of the complex factors that underlie this issue, but the situation is stark. I am not going to shirk from the fact that the number of those sleeping rough has increased. It is unacceptable. I am absolutely prepared to look at all evidence in relation to this issue, so that we not only learn but actually make the difference, ensure that we make rough sleeping a thing of the past and take still further action to prevent homelessness in the first place.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

The most recent briefing that I received on the scale of this problem by a researcher who is following 100 rough sleepers in our part of London said that the 100% common thread was addiction—to legal drugs such as alcohol, and to illegal drugs. What data does the Secretary of State have on the proportion of addiction to legal and illegal drugs? Does this not reinforce the case that we need a royal commission on the prohibition of narcotic drugs, so that we can assess the costs and benefits of that policy and the implications it has for preventing access to services for people in the way that my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) has just mentioned?

[James Brokenshire]

My right hon. Friend asks about the evidence. I point him to the Office for National Statistics data that has been released this morning, showing that 190 estimated deaths of homeless people in 2017 were due to drug poisoning; that is 32% of the total number. Alcohol-specific causes accounted for 62 deaths and suicides for 78 deaths, respectively 10% and 13% of the estimated deaths. There is no doubt that drugs and alcohol addiction are a core component of the challenges that we are seeing, which is why we are putting in place additional support. I am profoundly concerned about the implications of new psychoactive substances such as Spice, and the impact that they have had in places such as Manchester and certain parts of London. We are providing additional training and support in relation to those substances and their links to rough sleeping, but we must equally continue to take a very firm approach to drugs.

Oral Answers to Questions

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Monday 10th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I am not going to predict, because—[Interruption.] I am sorry to disappoint the hon. Lady. I want to see the figures coming down, because it is about helping people off the street and changing their lives. No one chooses to be out on the street. That is why we are taking all the action that we are.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

What is the Government’s estimate of the proportion of those sleeping rough who are not addicted to drugs, including alcohol?

[James Brokenshire]

We recognise that there is a significant issue with what is known as dual diagnosis of mental ill health and alcohol addiction and how the two are intertwined, along with the use of novel psychoactive substances, which has compounded the issue. That is why we have asked the national health service to provide an additional £30 million to address those issues and get better data on them.

Redhill, Reigate and District Rail Services

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

What a delight it is to have a satisfactory amount of time to debate the rail service into Reigate and Redhill. It is hard to overstate the importance of the rail service to the two main towns that I am privileged to represent. I am talking about the Brighton main line and not that for Banstead which, as the Banstead village residents’ association will point out, is formally a village, not a town. Of course, the rail services there on the Tattenham line are within zone six. The central issue I want to raise is the service on the Brighton main line and issues that are specific to Redhill and Reigate.

The rail service is a central factor in the economy of Reigate and in the quality of life of the many of my constituents who use it to commute to work, usually in London, and it sustains our economy in a very important way. This also reflects our history: Redhill has its roots as the halfway point on the early Victorian London-Brighton railway. It was, and remains in many ways, a railway town. The rail service has helped to create a vibrant housing market and local retail and service economy. Equally, the rail service has enabled Reigate and Redhill to host a wide range of businesses, including small start-ups, finance and retail organisations, and large multinational companies, whose employees were able to travel reliably into Reigate and Redhill by train. A continuing reliable service is critical to the economic success of these two towns.

It is reasonable to assume that year by year, bit by bit, public services will progressively improve. It is therefore doubly concerning that over recent years, the service has diminished to such an extent that the local economy is now at risk. People are making decisions about where they live and new companies are making decisions about where to invest because of what has happened to the rail service in the past four years. This is now a real risk factor, and there have been articles in The Sunday Times and other publications about communities that are at risk due to the failing rail service. After all the pain of the last four years, the prospect is of a materially worse service after the timetable for 2018 is finally introduced, which breaches the undertakings given to local rail users in 2012. 

I recognise that the London Bridge upgrade works have been the principal cause of Redhill to London services experiencing a disproportionate reduction, leading to infrequent, delayed, cancelled and frequently crowded trains since Christmas 2014. The industrial action then made that bad situation even worse. However, even before that, to facilitate the work at London Bridge, there were major changes to the Redhill route services between 2012 and 2014, including the removal of all London Bridge trains after 7.30 am for up to two hours, making commuting into London harder and more inconvenient for many local commuters from 2014. A previous service of nine trains became just four.

Let me say to the Minister, who may well refer to the timetable in his response, that I suspect that the start date is really 2012 rather than 2014, when the service “fell over”. That made things worse, but it was in 2012 that the service could reasonably be regarded by my constituents as unsatisfactory, in terms of the number of trains that were serving those commuting to London.

The second blow to local rail users was the long period of industrial action that followed the introduction of driver-only operation on the Southern network. While, of course, all services across the franchise were affected, the Redhill line once again took the brunt of the cancellations on the emergency timetables that were used on strike days. Moreover, Redhill and Merstham stations, which were not served by the fast line—the so-called Quarry line—were, and are, frequently bypassed to enable delayed trains to travel more quickly from Horley to East Croydon and vice versa, so that they could catch up when delays had been inflicted on them. That means that my constituents are the ones who are not being served by the trains by which they would otherwise expect to be served.

Both the planned May 2018 Govia Thameslink Railway timetable and its introduction have added insult to injury. Indeed, they have caused both insult and injury to an already injured travelling public, whose quality of life has now been assaulted for a period longer than the United States spent as a belligerent in the second world war. In November 2014, David Scorey, who was then GTR’s passenger service director, spoke at a public meeting organised by Reigate, Redhill and District Rail Users Association—I was there, and I have the honour to be its president—and publicly stated that the service from Redhill would be significantly better than it was in 2012. However, the new timetable has resulted in a further diminution of the services available to Redhill line users, in terms of both service frequency and journey times. There are now no direct trains from Redhill to the south coast, including Brighton, and no direct services from Reigate to London Bridge, a key commuter route.

In 2012, during the key two-hour morning peak, there were 15 trains to London. By 2018, that figure had been reduced to 12, which constituted a reduction in peak service—a drop from 112 coaches to 104. There was also a significant reduction in the number of seats. The new trains have about 90 fewer seats: the old 12-coach class 377s had 754 seats, and the new Class 700s have 666.

Anyone who is lucky enough to get a seat at Redhill on a train that has travelled all the way up from the south coast will be largely unable to work, because most of the tables have been taken away. I know constituents who are not by any means grossly obese—they look like any other ordinary citizens—but who can no longer fit into those seats, and will therefore choose to stand anyway. It seems that all these issues arise, and then along comes a bright new train, and the bright new train itself produces a worse service—it has fewer, harder seats, and is less compatible with the work that people want to do on the way to their workplaces.

If we cause people to spend more time commuting and then make it more difficult for them to use that extra time to work on the train, we have had a serious impact on their quality of life. I realise that the decisions about rolling stock were made some time before the Minister took up his post, but I cite it as yet another reason why rail users in my constituency are hurting.

Although the new timetable restored and extended Redhill to London Bridge services through Thameslink, following the London Bridge upgrade cuts, it did not restore the fast trains that formerly took 25 to 27 minutes from Redhill, the fastest of which now take 31 minutes in peak hours. The service from Redhill to Victoria was significantly reduced from seven trains between 7 am and 9 am to just four. Furthermore, those trains now take 39 minutes, whereas in 2012 the 0703 took 30 minutes. From neighbouring Earlswood, the 0718 service that took 43 minutes in 2012 has been replaced by trains taking 51 minutes. Off-peak and evening scheduling to and from Victoria has also seen journey times increased from 28 minutes in 2012 to 38 minutes in the new timetable. This is, by any standard, a very significant reduction in service quality.

Under the Thameslink contract specification for train services, most stations were given a minimum journey time to London. For example, Brighton has 62 minutes guaranteed in the peak and 56 in the off-peak, but Redhill route stations are among the very few absent from getting any such guarantees of minimum journey times, and thus we now have increased journey times to both Victoria and London Bridge in the new May 2018 timetable. I can only speculate as to the reasons why those stations were omitted, and I suspect that it has something to do with their position on the line, as their being the halfway point down to the Brighton line might give the managers of the rail service greater flexibility to be able to deliver on other service delivery points. Again, I would be grateful to understand the reason for this. Why did my constituents not get minimum guaranteed journey times in the way that most other rail users did?

In November 2017, the Reigate, Redhill and District Rail Users Association gave its members an opportunity to add their voice to these concerns, and a petition was raised, signed by over 2,000 local rail users, to ask the Department for Transport and GTR to readdress this weakening of services, which directly contradicted the promises made by David Scorey on behalf of GTR in 2014 and caused what I believe are unacceptable cuts to Redhill services while the majority of the Brighton main line maintained a reasonable service. Reigate, Redhill and District has subsequently suffered inordinately from the chaos following the introduction of the new timetable, enduring more cuts and cancellations during this time than other local stations. To add insult to injury, following the new timetable disruption, passengers from Reigate station, who are forced to travel via Redhill to connect to Thameslink services to London Bridge as there are now no direct Reigate to London Bridge services, have since been excluded from the GTR enhanced passenger compensation scheme, despite suffering all the inconvenience caused during the timetable introduction.

The Minister was kind enough to receive me last week and explain why the Department had taken the position that it was not going to move on the compensation issue. All I can say is that that decision has been received with enormous disappointment, and of course it is in the context of a rail service that has been endured by local people, rather than one that has served their lives in the way we would all have hoped.

I now want to turn to the central issue. There is an opportunity to address all these issues. One would hope that the substantial investment from the ministerial team and the £300 million that the Secretary of State has secured, in addition to the London Bridge works, to sort out the lines north of and around Croydon, will deal with an important bottleneck that has been the driver of much of the service difficulties over many years. When that is associated with the major investment into London Bridge, it becomes an almost catastrophic pinch point. I can see that the Government investment will give the opportunity, some years hence when the investment is completed, to produce better service provision, and, one would hope, to address the timetable issues.

I want to register how unhappy my constituents are about the timetable issues. When the opportunity comes to make serious improvements, after the Minister and his colleagues have addressed the capacity constraints, will he ensure that my long-suffering constituents are first in the queue for those major improvements, given the 20% reduction in the journey times on the service and the corresponding reduction in the number of trains?

The central unfairness is the underlying and long-standing issue of fares for rail users from Reigate and Redhill. This historical anomaly, which is colloquially referred to as the Redhill hump, means that tickets purchased in Reigate and Redhill are more expensive than those available at stations further down the line. It costs 47% more to get an annual all-zone ticket from Redhill than it does from Coulsdon South, which is just two stops closer to London and in zone 6. Much of the work that I did during 2015 and 2016 was to try to convince the Minister’s predecessors that pulling zone 6 down to Gatwick would be the right way to address this issue. Bringing Gatwick into zone 6—in the same way that Heathrow is within London zoning—would produce an overall increase in income from fares, to make up for what would be a nominally reduced fare income based on current usage rates, because that zoning would bring an increase in usage, as was experienced when London Underground introduced zoning in the first place. I did not succeed in my argument, however, and part of that failure was down to the wretched complexity of the management of the railway, particularly when London issues are brought in alongside the issues of Network Rail, the service provider and the Department for Transport.

When it is £204 cheaper to buy an all-zone season ticket from Three Bridges, which is five stations further away from London than Redhill, we can understand why people are beginning to notice that they are paying top dollar and over the odds for a service that has been way short of anything close to satisfactory for the past four years. It is astonishing, given that the taxpayer has invested billions in the London Bridge upgrade and that the current Secretary of State was able to secure £300 million of extra investment in this line, that the service for my constituents is getting worse and there is no prospect of improvement that I can present to them. In short, rail users in my constituency are now at the end of their tether. They are forced to pay unreasonably high fare prices for a poor and diminishing service.

The main local capital improvement—a potential new 12-car platform at Reigate station that would enable Thameslink trains to terminate there and then return to London, providing additional regular fast direct trains to London Bridge via Redhill—is on the first stage of the drawing board only due to sustained pressure from me and to the commitment of the local director of National Rail. The reason that we even got that far was the prospect of a development gain bonanza from a wholly inappropriate development of larger houses at Redhill aerodrome. That development would have given the developer a massive gain of well north of £1 billion, and I was planning to make a serious effort to retrieve a very good share of that utterly unmerited profit for use in major local infrastructure projects. I am grateful that, for the time being, that shocker of a green belt violation has been seen off, but the duty to address our hard and soft infrastructure deficit, following decades of strong local housing growth, remains.

One of the smaller and most urgent improvements involves enabling Reigate station to cope with its growing passenger demand. On one level, that growth represents a huge success. The number of passengers using Reigate station is growing, and we have been sustaining the growth of Reigate and the quality of life that explains why people want to live and bring up their families there. Not only does the change need making in its own right, we need to get this line working at a capacity that offers the service that it should be providing if one is to address the welcome improvements north of Croydon. I hope that the Minister will able to consider the proposal on both those grounds. I cannot find a large development to target to get investment into the local community, so I hope that he will consider the allocation of budgets within his Department’s spend, obviously on a wholly proper basis, to try to ensure that the capital infrastructure can at least be properly planned through the next stage, leaving the final decision to be made when the funds are available to construct it. If we are doing Croydon at the same time, it would make complete sense to advance that process.

Naturally, my constituents have expected me to remonstrate on their behalf and to press for service improvements to reverse the service catastrophes that the Redhill line has endured over the past four years. I have therefore had meetings with successive Secretaries of State and Rail Ministers to bring these serious matters to their direct attention and to request compensatory action of one sort of another. Through the Reigate, Redhill and District Rail Users Association, of which I have been honorary president since my election in 1997, local rail users have helped me put expert and costed proposals to Ministers and their officials.

With one small exception, I am sorry to say that all my efforts seem to have been largely in vain. My protests have been heard by successive Ministers, but none has been able to consider implementing any significant improvements, despite undertakings that they were going to try. At least one Rail Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), resigned her position in 2015 due to frustration over the delivery of the GTR service and the London bridge investment programme.

The only significant result that I have achieved was a partial fare freeze for some ticketholders last year as a result of an intervention by the then Rail Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard). Inevitably, the reality was not quite as widespread across all ticket types, but it was a start. In my meeting with the new Rail Minister in May, I was promised that the proposal to address the Redhill hump would be ready by the summer and that someone had been employed to work up a proposal. Finally, the issue seemed to be getting serious attention. However, when I met my hon. Friend the Minister last week, he advised me that the proposal was still on the drawing board and would not be ready for preliminary discussion with experts from the RRDRUA until the second half of November. Indeed, unhappily, the Minister’s only concrete news for me at that point was confirmation that compensation for the failure of the 2018 timetable introduction would definitely not be available for those using the service from Reigate.

I want to be clear that I am not asking for special treatment for local rail users. I am asking for a reasonable service, fare pricing, and equitable compensation. These four years of being told that my rail users are a priority, without any significant change, have made it very difficult for me to continue to defend to my constituents the Government’s position. Redhill and Reigate are heavily used stations that provide transport to members of the public who contribute hugely to the British economy. The cost of the disproportionate level of disruption that they have endured in recent years is incalculable, and surely greater than the cost of rectifying the anomalies that have made their commuting lives so miserable and have been so damaging to their productivity. I simply ask for reasonable treatment for them.

I am aware that many rail users throughout the UK have been hugely concerned about the Department for Transport’s role in the 2018 fiasco, but, coming after years of disruption relating to the London Bridge investment, the long-suffering Southern commuters are in a class of their own. I can fairly argue that they are a special case within the special case of Southern commuters. This has been a running sore for the people I represent within a wider overall shambles.

Where the responsibility lies is complex, arising from how the service was privatised back in the 1990s. I ask the Minister to help improve the experience of local rail users, who have been very unfairly treated. I made fair fares a central issue in my 2015 general election campaign, and I have since continued to campaign on that issue. If there is one issue, above all others, that can and should be addressed it is that, because of historical ticketing anomalies, the rail-traveling public I represent are not getting a fair economic deal from the service they are buying relative to everyone else.

I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Joseph Johnson)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) on securing this debate and on continuing his tireless campaign on behalf of his constituents in Reigate. He and I have discussed these issues on many occasions over the months I have been in this role. I understand his frustration at his relatively poor progress over the years on behalf of his residents, and I am pleased to say that I will have good news for him later in my remarks. His core concern is the Redhill hump, but, before I come to the meat of that, I will touch on some of the other issues he mentioned.

Thameslink performance through Redhill has improved, as I hope my hon. Friend will acknowledge, since the introduction of an amended timetable on 15 July. Services on the Brighton main line were some of the worst hit following the introduction of the timetable on 20 May, and I am glad that things are now improving. In fact, we have seen a public performance measure above 80% on Thameslink services through his constituency. Of course there is always room for improvement, and the Department is carefully monitoring the performance.

I am aware that services from Reigate have been affected by external issues, including trespass incidents in recent weeks. None the less, the long-term signs are moving in the right direction, which is why it is important that we are seeing the progressive reintroduction of services that were withdrawn from the proposed May 2018 timetable.

In a couple of months’ time, in December, GTR will bring in a further 200 additional services every weekday across its network, including, as my hon. Friend will be pleased to hear, 18 services calling at Redhill and 14 calling at Merstham. I have made it clear to GTR that its improved performance has to be maintained as those services are introduced and that we must not see any slippage or return to the disruption associated with the past introduction of new services. I am confident that continued good performance, and those additional services from December, will allow passengers from Reigate to start feeling the benefits of the new timetable.

My hon. Friend also mentioned the constraints imposed by the current infrastructure, which we are in the process of addressing through the £300 million upgrade to the Brighton main line. One of those limitations is the short platforms at Reigate. The Reigate works will form an important part of the potential range of interventions in the Brighton main line upgrade programme, and they would allow the station to accommodate direct Thameslink services and provide greater operational flexibility for Thameslink. A study to investigate the feasibility and cost of this eventually necessary infrastructure has recently been completed by Network Rail.

Stoats Nest junction, to the south of Coulsdon, is also recognised as a constraint, and it is a potential part of the Brighton main line upgrade programme. We will look to future opportunities to progress the programme, subject to the development of positive business cases and the availability of funding.

My hon. Friend raised the question of compensation and special compensation. I certainly appreciate his points about the special compensation scheme following the May disruption for people travelling from Reigate, and I understand that passengers interchanging on to Thameslink services also suffered disruption—a point he made very forcefully to me in our meeting last week. However, to ensure that passengers were treated fairly and so that those who were most affected by the disruption received appropriate compensation, it was inevitably necessary to put in place clear criteria to define the scope of the scheme.

Passengers travelling from Reigate who would normally change on to Thameslink services were still able to travel on the less disrupted Southern services to Victoria and use the tube network to reach London Bridge. Ticket acceptance on the tube and between Thameslink, Southern and Gatwick Express services was in place at the height of disruption. As a result, as I said to my hon. Friend last week, there are no plans to amend the compensation scheme for passengers who change trains at a level 1 station or who buy tickets from a station not served by Thameslink or Great Northern services.

My hon. Friend has also been campaigning relentlessly for Reigate to be included in an extended Oyster zone. The Department set out in its strategic vision for rail, published in November last year, that its goal was to ensure that across regional and urban commuter areas smart ticketing can deliver the kind of pay-as-you-go structure that is used in London, with a system to automatically charge fares at the appropriate level.

We are actively exploring options for how that might be achieved, and I hope that my hon. Friend’s constituency will, in time, and hopefully not within too much time, be one of those that benefits from the broader approach we will be taking.

We want to deliver pay-as-you-go travel across regional and urban commuter areas rather than singling out particular stations, such as his own, at this point. Pay-as-you-go travel and the associated simplified fare structure will bring substantial passenger benefits and the Department will be working very hard to achieve that.

Finally, let me return to what my hon. Friend rightly described as his core issue, the Redhill fares hump. Historically, this has arisen because separate operators on the Brighton main line have put in place specific fares that were intended to make their service more competitive. Now, all services on the Brighton main line are run by the same operator. This has led to a situation where the fares in his constituency are unnecessarily complex and unhelpfully perverse, with fares from Gatwick airport into London at a lower price than those in all surrounding stations. This is a truly exceptional situation. I made a commitment to him that we would work on this issue and provide a solution, and I am pleased to say that we have done exactly that.

Today, I can make a commitment that we will see this issue resolved by the end of the current franchise in 2021, with a reduction in fares coming into effect from this coming January. I hope that my hon. Friend will welcome that news, which results directly from his tireless and effective campaign on behalf of all his constituents.

[Crispin Blunt]

I have managed to scrape in before the Minister’s last word. Obviously, his concluding remarks are immensely welcome, and it would be ungracious of me not to be delighted on behalf of my constituents that he has had the opportunity to reflect and put a plan in place to get this issue addressed. I am immensely grateful. I am afraid that we will continue to have meetings on the merits of the other issues, but I am delighted that we will get Oyster as it is rolled out across the piece. He will probably continue to be lobbied by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), I am afraid, as his constituents who travel to the further education colleges in my constituency are caught by this problem, but, overall, I am very grateful to the Minister.

[Joseph Johnson]

I am delighted that we have a happy customer in Reigate and Redhill. I am always ready to receive further lobbying from my hon. Friend on the points that he raised.

Question put and agreed to.