Crispin Blunt debates involving HM Treasury during the 2019 Parliament

Mon 1st Mar 2021
Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill
Commons Chamber

Consideration of Lords amendments & Consideration of Lords amendments & Consideration of Lords Amendments
Wed 1st Jul 2020
Finance Bill
Commons Chamber

Report stage:Report: 1st sitting & Report stage: House of Commons & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Commons & Report stage

Points of Order

Crispin Blunt Excerpts
Tuesday 11th July 2023

(8 months, 3 weeks ago)

Commons Chamber
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Rosie Winterton Portrait Madam Deputy Speaker
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The Minister is nodding in agreement, so I think the hon. Gentleman has succeeded in raising his case effectively. We will leave it at that.

Crispin Blunt Portrait Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
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On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I distinctly remember that during last week’s Second Reading of the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill, when the Communities Secretary was asked in an intervention whether there had been any advice against the Bill from diplomatic posts, he replied that he was not aware—that he knew of no such advice. It has now become clear that a senior official in the Foreign Secretary’s own office sent a letter to No. 10 expressing such concerns about the consequences of the Bill. I wonder whether, Madam Deputy Speaker, you have had any notice that the Foreign Secretary intends to correct the record, or whether he will rely on the fact that the Foreign Secretary’s office is not a diplomatic post in any formal sense.

Rosie Winterton Portrait Madam Deputy Speaker
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I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. He did not give me notice of it, so I have not been able to get any other information. There were two parts to his point of order: first, that the Foreign Secretary answered by saying that he was not aware, and then that there had been no such representations. The hon. Gentleman has raised the issue; if any correction is necessary, I am sure it will be made, and I am confident that those on the Government Front Bench will pass back his comments. However, it was a little difficult to work out whether the hon. Gentleman was saying that there was no awareness, or that there had been no representations.

--- Later in debate ---
Rosie Winterton Portrait Madam Deputy Speaker
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I am sorry—that is probably my fault. At first we had the Communities Secretary, then we had the Foreign Secretary. Whoever it is, I am sure they will be on this immediately, unless Mr Blunt wants to be more specific.

Crispin Blunt Portrait Crispin Blunt
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Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Communities Secretary gave the assurance to the House that he was unaware of any such advice in the context of diplomatic posts. It appears that that advice did exist, and that it came from the Foreign Secretary’s own office.

Rosie Winterton Portrait Madam Deputy Speaker
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I am sure that between those points of order, we can sort out the various channels that need to be fed back to. The hon. Gentleman has raised the issue, and I am sure it will be taken back.

Harriett Baldwin Portrait Harriett Baldwin
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I thank the right hon. Gentleman for signing the new clause, and for his Committee’s excellent report. He is right to suggest that the workplace is one of the best places for people to be given these nudges, and for employers to explore that boundary between advice and guidance.

Our constituents are craving advice of this kind, especially during this cost of living crisis. They want more guidance from their financial institutions. They are turning to online sources of often unregulated information to help them navigate their finances. They are finding the process complex and confusing. They are choosing investments that are often very high risk and not suited to them at all, such as meme stocks, crypto or spread betting.

It should not need to be this way, because the technology exists for financial services and fintech firms to guide people towards making better financial choices and following good mainstream investment opportunities, but MiFID-originated legislation is getting in the way. My new clause would enable the Treasury to introduce, with great urgency, the necessary legislation to allow regulated financial services firms to offer UK households personalised guidance. It is a great opportunity to unlock investment in our country, it will help our constituents to earn more, and it will allow innovation. Financial technology will help our constituents to level up their own economic futures. I am therefore delighted that the Economic Secretary has agreed today to look into this as a matter of urgency.

Crispin Blunt Portrait Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
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I fully support the proposed measure. Let me say something that is specifically for the ears of my hon. Friend and those on the Treasury Bench. Just is a company in Reigate, formed from a company called Just Retirement and Partnership, which provided products that challenged the existing ones, involving, for instance, equity release and life insurance for smokers. As a provider of challenger products, it was anxious for people to have access to independent advice, rather than just being directed only to its own products.

Harriett Baldwin Portrait Harriett Baldwin
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Let me end by saying that personalised guidance would offer the Economic Secretary the chance to make his mark and help all our constituents to benefit from better financial information. I am very pleased that he has committed himself today to look into it with the utmost urgency.

LGBT Conversion Therapy

Crispin Blunt Excerpts
Monday 8th March 2021

(3 years ago)

Westminster Hall
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Crispin Blunt Portrait Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con) [V]
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I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) on leading the debate so well, and I congratulate his Committee on securing it. I have two key points for the Government. The first is that we must legislate. Deliver the promise to protect in law. Use the work done in the Government Equalities Office before 2019. Use the examples elsewhere, particularly in Spain and the Australian state of Victoria, which have already legislated. Our common law system enables the drafting challenge of defining conversion therapy to be met. There is no need to overcomplicate this issue. The police, prosecutors and jurors will know conversion therapy when they see it. Most critically, the victims will know it too, and they will have been equipped with a defence mechanism.

Such a law is an important step as a declaratory statement, as it is as a legal tool. If someone is LGBT, the law says that the state supports them. It supports how they want to live their life. When victims find themselves under pressure that is improperly applied to convert them to something they are not, they will know that it is against the law and that they can call it out. They can say to the person or people who are the source of this—[Interruption.]

James Gray Portrait James Gray (in the Chair)
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We have lost the sound, Mr Blunt. You are mute.

Crispin Blunt Portrait Crispin Blunt
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My apologies.

The law gives the victims the opportunity to go to the police and, therefore, to have a weapon in their hand against the source of a conversion therapy. The state is on the side of victims’ freedom—the freedom that that individual is trying to take away from them.

The second point I want to make is that such protection must include trans people. They are by far and away the most vulnerable group among the LGBT community. Identity around gender dysphoria is surely a much more challenging thing to meet than a minority sexuality, but all must be protected. The law must include trans people, and not only because they are the group who need it the most. In 2018, it appeared that trans people were on a trajectory to achieve their rights and protections to live their lives as they wished, supported by the Government’s comprehensive LGBT action plan, but all that now seems to have changed. Trans people are a community under siege. Organisations whose principle raison d’être is to attack and challenge the very legitimacy of trans people have come into being, and they appear to trans people to be firmly in the ascendant.

The lived experience of trans people reflects the awful paucity of services for them in the United Kingdom, as graphically illustrated by VICE News in January and November. They also see 250 articles a year attacking them in our newspaper of record, The Times. They see that groups such as the Conservative Women’s Pledge and LGB Alliance, whose purpose seems to be to protect cisgender women from trans women, have the ear of Ministers. They see reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 abandoned, and the principle of gender-neutral legislation was reversed only last week.

Gender is much more complicated than sexuality, and the drafting of the ban on conversion therapy will need to protect those giving informed, regulated and properly peer-reviewed advice to assist those on the path to reconciling their gender dysphoria. If the legislation does not include the protection of trans people, however, it will send to them the unmistakeable message that their Government do not want to protect them, do not value them and, at some level, do not really accept that trans is really a thing. That awful message would inadvertently make the Government themselves party to the practice of conversion therapy.

Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill

Crispin Blunt Excerpts
Labour will continue to fight for these employment rights. After all, Labour has a proud history of fighting for equality, from the Equal Pay Act 1970 to the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, the Equality Act 2010 and the introduction of the national minimum wage. All those progressive pieces of equalities legislation were delivered by Labour. I look forward to the Government’s promised legislation to make further progress in this long and ongoing fight for equality and to fill in the gaps that exist in this legislation.
Crispin Blunt Portrait Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con) [V]
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Let me briefly try to set the context in which these amendments are being considered. This is an issue that goes to trans and women’s rights. It is a year since I was elected as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on global LGBT+ rights, which is the only LGBT rights APPG. While the title of the group is not meant to exclude the domestic LGBT rights agenda, it is a statement about where the focus should be, given our astonishing legal and societal progress for LGB people in the UK over the last two or so decades—progress of which I am a personal and fortunate beneficiary.

When I put it in the language of my first profession, the war on these issues had been won, and we were really in the business of rounding up the prisoners—tidying up. Much of that tidying related to the complexities generated by enabling trans people also to be able to enjoy the freedom to live their lives as they wished. The trans agenda understandably became the dominating issue for the British LGBT rights lobby in our civil society. By 2018, with the publication of the LGBT action plan and the consultation on reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, the direction of travel looked set fair for trans people to be able to enjoy those rights and live their lives as they wished.

However, to say that there has been a change of climate for trans people since my right hon. Friend the Paymaster General, who is guiding this Bill through the House, lost her responsibilities for equalities is something of an understatement. There is going to be no change to the Gender Recognition Act; self-identification, which is the global gold standard for rights in this area, is going to have to wait; and gender identity services, now acknowledged to be grossly underfunded, with enormous demand on them, are now under well-funded legal assault as well.

We currently face a situation where trans people feel under a full-on attack, yet if one listened to their lordships who were making the case for this amendment, one would have thought it was the other way round. The proponent of these amendments said in the other place:

“We are currently faced with a full-on attack on women’s sex- based rights—a misogynistic and bullying campaign which seeks to diminish women’s rights in the name of the rights of trans people.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 25 February 2021; Vol. 810, c. 962.]

I want to gently suggest that my noble Friend Lord Lucas turn the board around and see what the perspective is from the other side. The context is wild and exaggerated threats about the position of women’s rights from trans people. For example, his colleague in the other place, the noble Baroness Fox of Buckley, said:

“What is a threat to women is a particular brand of trans identity ideology. That does threaten women, but that is not the same as trans people.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 25 February 2021; Vol. 810, c. 945.]

I look forward to hearing the explanation of that, because what trans people are seeing is The Times newspaper —the newspaper of record in the United Kingdom—carrying 250 stories of this kind, generally without satisfactory supporting evidence.

We have this amendment in a Bill that deals with the maternity leave arrangements of one woman who happens to be the Attorney General. A debate in this House and the other place suddenly came out of nowhere, generating the most extraordinary amount of interest and passion for an entirely technical correction of an anomaly in ministerial maternity leave arrangements. Sitting behind the passion engaged on this are agendas, which are in public for those who are taking an interest—principally the trans community—of the Heritage Foundation and the LGB Alliance, which, if one examines its followers on Twitter, does not seem to have a huge wider interest in the subject of LGBT rights. They are hearing an agenda being used, which we heard only yesterday from Donald Trump in his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference, exploiting the issue of a potential threat to women’s sports, which need to be rescued from this threat. We know that, under the Equality Act 2010 in the United Kingdom, it is for sports administrators to make reasonable decisions to protect the integrity of their sports. These threats, in reality, do not exist.

What I want to say to trans people and their supporters is that today is not the ground on which we should stand. An innocuous sounding amendment in a tiny, technical Bill aimed at resolving the Attorney General’s maternity leave is not the place to have the fight around the principle. But there is a principle engaged here about gender-neutral language, and we have work to do to make it clear that trans rights do not come at the expense of women’s rights. We can perfectly well have both. Women’s rights must be protected, and reasonable provision must be made to protect women from threats that are real and evident. In reality, trans women pose no threat to women, but we do have those issues to address.

I therefore support the Government in accommodating this amendment, which has, to a degree, been forced upon them. But this necessary compromise must not undermine the position of the Government and what I believe to be the decent, caring majority in both Houses of Parliament who want to see trans rights properly established.

Kirsten Oswald Portrait Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP) [V]
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I am mindful that the Bill is in front of us today because the Attorney General is about to have a baby, and I wish her and her family all the best. Maternity leave is a right—it should not be a discretionary benefit—and that should no different for Ministers or MPs. More broadly, though, we are not in the best place on maternity either in this House or, more importantly, outside it. Many of us have spoken at length about the issues that the Bill does not tackle but ought to. None of that has anything particularly to do with the Attorney General’s leave, so I would not suggest putting any barrier in the way of that, but it is my firm intention to secure from the Minister some clear commitments as to what she will do next.

It is absolutely right, and not before time, that Ministers are able to go on maternity leave. Despite the protestations from those on the Government Benches when we discussed this before, I still think it is unacceptable that the Prime Minister of the day is the ultimate arbiter of whether this can actually happen. I have said it before and I say it again: it should never be necessary for women to seek the potentially grudging consent of a boss to take maternity leave. If it is beyond our wit in 2021 to find a more satisfactory way of dealing with things like that, it is a poor show.

That is because what we do here and what we do with this makes a difference to how other people deal with their maternity leave, be they MPs, where the status quo is not much use, either to MPs or to their constituents; our staff, and perhaps the Minister can say something about what changes could be made to Short money to support proper maternity provisions for staff members; or all the people outside the political world, who are just trying to get by and will rightly wonder why we can manage to press ahead with such haste in this situation—again, I am pleased to get this sorted for the Attorney General; it is right that we do that—but have not been able to make such progress, and at such speed that would make all the difference, for ordinary families.

The statistics from Pregnant Then Screwed say it all. Its survey of 20,000 women in July last year found, among other things, that 61% of women believe that their maternity leave was a factor in a redundancy decision, and self-employed women who have taken maternity leave in the last three years saw their Government support cut by a third, or even by two thirds, if they have taken two maternity leaves, compared with dads, who are not impacted at all financially by maternity leave.

Let me touch on the amendments to language that have emerged from the Lords. The Minister gave a pretty concerted defence of gender-neutral language previously, so I am interested to see the change of tack here, given that it is perfectly normal to draft in gender-neutral terms. I am not convinced that this change is either progress or progressive. That is relevant, first, because the Bill is far too narrow in scope and deals with only this one issue and, secondly, because our representation here is just not reflective of who we are more broadly; we are far less diverse as a political group than the people we represent, and the lack of proper provisions for maternity leave illustrate that well. The Bill, as far as it goes, only makes provision for maternity leave for birth mothers. It does not make provision for all the different types of leave we have talked about—parental leave, paternity leave, adoption leave, shared leave and so on. So I ask the Minister to reflect further on the fact that everyone should have access to decent parental leave, not just some new parents.

On that note, I would be grateful if the Minister could say exactly when she intends to come back to the House with concrete proposals to deal with all these other pressing issues, so that we can see improvements to maternity, paternity and parental leave provisions far more broadly. That is particularly important as we move beyond the lockdown phase of the pandemic and caring and work responsibilities need to work together, rather than against one another. For example, the right to request flexible working from the start of employment would help so many people, with women bearing the disproportionate burden of caring responsibilities being particularly in need of that kind of progress. That is often an issue post maternity leave.

While we are dealing with this one narrow Bill, we need to appreciate that the status quo is far from good enough. The UK has the second lowest payment rates for maternity leave of OECD countries, with less than a third of gross average earnings replaced by maternity payments. Despite lengthy maternity leave entitlements, full-rate equivalent paid maternity leave lasts for only 12 weeks and a maternity allowance of just £151.20, which is worth about half the national minimum wage for a full-time worker, is obviously completely unacceptable. The fact that that is increasing by a grand total of 77p a week in April is shockingly inadequate. The Minister has to recognise that. She also has to recognise that we really need legislation to expand eligibility for statutory maternity leave and pay for workers who still do not qualify, including people on insecure contracts such as agency workers or zero-hours contract workers.

Much needs to be done. We need action on those insecure workers, maternity leave, parental leave and paternity pay, and we need policies that take account of the different shapes of families and different kinds of support that will be necessary. All these matters have to be addressed with some urgency. I realise that they are not the specific issues in front of us today, but it all fits together into a lack of care and direction from the UK Government.

Although the SNP supports the Bill, there is no getting away from the fact that the UK ranks very poorly in terms of maternity provision, and the very particular narrow nature of the Bill does nothing to remedy that. In fact, it just demonstrates how archaic Westminster can be. It is worth reflecting that an independent Scotland could do so much better on maternity and parental leave—not just for Ministers, but for everyone.

Covid-19: Disparate Impact

Crispin Blunt Excerpts
Thursday 22nd October 2020

(3 years, 5 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Kemi Badenoch Portrait Kemi Badenoch
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The hon. Lady is absolutely right. This is an issue that we have looked at; for instance, the Government have looked at sourcing personal protective equipment for people who need to lip read, so that they can continue to communicate. She is also right to point out that some people are affected in multiple ways, but looking at each issue separately does not mean that one aspect will be forgotten. They will be helped by all the separate work that is being done across the board to look at vulnerability.

Crispin Blunt Portrait Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con) [V]
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I thank my hon. Friend for her comprehensive statement; I note that she seems to be on a bit of a roll in the Chamber this week. Will she recognise that there remains a paucity of data around health outcomes for LGBT people, perhaps not least in respect of the intersectionality with BAME people in respect of covid? The data deficit was identified in the LGBT action plan. Will she recommit the Government to securing the data, not least by ensuring that future public health surveys record data on all protected characteristics?

Kemi Badenoch Portrait Kemi Badenoch
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My hon. Friend is right that we are looking across the board, but I just remind him that we are looking at those who have been most disproportionately affected and are most vulnerable. Although we have not found that LGBT groups specifically have been disproportionately affected, we know that they are losing out where healthcare services have been unavailable because they have had to close or provide other services to deal with the pandemic. We are looking to improve that, but the review that I am carrying out looks specifically at vulnerability and disproportionate impact.

Finance Bill

Crispin Blunt Excerpts
Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 1st July 2020

(3 years, 9 months ago)

Commons Chamber
Read Full debate Finance Act 2020 View all Finance Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 1 July 2020 - large font accessible version - (1 Jul 2020)
David Davis Portrait Mr Davis
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The right hon. Gentleman makes a good point, but he should make it to the Speaker rather than me, as he well knows. He has been a Member nearly as long as I have.

Crispin Blunt Portrait Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
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On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Forgive me; I might have missed the reason why are we are not going to be able to divide on new clause 31, but I would be grateful if you could explain it to me. I have today become the longest serving Member for Reigate since the Great Reform Act, so I might have missed one or two things that are going on, but I would be obliged if you could tell me why we are not going to have the opportunity to divide on new clause 31.

Nigel Evans Portrait Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
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I thank the hon. Member for his point of order, but I think we have to wait until the end of the debate before these decisions are made.