Airport Capacity and Airspace Policy

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Bercow

Thursday 2nd February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I thought that one Member who was seeking to catch my eye had exited the Chamber at one point during the statement, but it might be that I was experiencing an optical illusion.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Following the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab), I should like to point out that the lethal combination of the new technology, the much more precise flight paths and the Government’s current policy of concentration rather than dispersal will lead to a disaster for the people who are right underneath those routes. It should be possible to use the new technology to create an artificial degree of dispersal, as happened before under the analogue systems. Will my right hon. Friend advance on this consultation with the knowledge that this is a very important issue to address for many of our constituents?

The Government's Plan for Brexit

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Bercow

Wednesday 7th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I am fascinated by the focus on the plan and the amount of work that the hon. and learned Gentleman will invite the OBR to do. He does understand, surely, that no plan survives engagement with the enemy. [Interruption.] That is a military metaphor from assaults. Our negotiating hand is clear, and it is clear that it is not compatible with the position taken by our 27 partners. This will all change in the course of the negotiations, and we will have to leave it to the Government to make those decisions.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I recognise that the hon. Gentleman is an illustrious Member of the House as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, but even so the intervention was too long.

--- Later in debate ---

[Crispin Blunt]

My right hon. and learned Friend is, of course, absolutely right. We have to try to take the temperature down, which is why people should not exploit it when I may have said something inadvertently and I was actually saying something totally different. We are talking about our allies—most of them allies within NATO—and, in the words of the Foreign Secretary, we need to be a “flying buttress” to the future of the European Union from the outside. One reason I supported Brexit is my belief that the UK will have a much happier relationship with the nations of the EU by being outside and having engaged their support, rather than by having to fight battles as our interests diverge from those of the states that had the currency. We could see that that was going to happen over the decades. Our country has taken this decision in its medium and long-term interests, and it should be seen in that guise. It is on the other side of the table that the principal negotiating challenge sits, as the 27 nations have to reconcile all this. My right hon. and learned Friend may say that the interpretation of positions from here is difficult, but Mr Barnier and Chancellor Merkel made a mistake in rejecting the reciprocal arrangement to try to address the situation of EU citizens here and UK citizens there, and in saying that nothing must be agreed until everything is agreed. That has played into the British position, which is helpful, as we have very much to offer the EU and it needs—

[Mr Speaker]

Order.

Counter-Daesh Campaign: Iraq and Syria

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Bercow

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. This is an extremely important and sensitive matter, but may I just point out to the House that there are several Members on both sides of the House who entered the Chamber after the Foreign Secretary began his statement, but who apparently, in defiance of all convention, expect to be called, which they should not? Although this is incredibly important, we have important further business to which to proceed, so I appeal to Members to please ask brief, single-sentence supplementary questions without preamble no matter how elevated their status in the House. I call Mr Crispin Blunt.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Is the Foreign Secretary satisfied that he has resources in the stabilisation unit in the United Kingdom and the stabilisation forces in the United Nations that are adequate to the task in Mosul? Will he give us his assessment of what is going on between Turkey and Iraq—the war of words between those leaders and the massing of Turkish armour on the borders of, and indeed in, Iraq?

Standing Orders and Select Committees

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Bercow

Tuesday 11th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

The Leader of the House has just told us that we have been without Select Committees to oversee international trade and Brexit. As Chair of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, I take some mild exception to that remark, because the Foreign Affairs Committee, along with a number of other Select Committees, has been working on Brexit. Indeed, on 26 April, we produced a unanimous report on the implications of whether the United Kingdom chose to stay or leave the European Union. With a Committee split down the middle, that was a remarkable piece of work, and I hope that it served to give Members a definitively unbiased account to present to their constituents before the referendum. Subsequent to the referendum, we produced a further report, in which we were particularly critical of the Government’s failure—indeed, their instruction to Departments to do no contingency planning at all in the event that the country voted to leave the EU.

I wrote to the Government Chief Whip on 30 August and copied the letter to the Leader of the House, the Clerk of the House and the Clerk of Committees to make clear my unease about the discussion then going on about the formation of a Select Committee to oversee the Department for Exiting the European Union. I would like to take this opportunity to put my concerns on the record, as I suspect that such a Committee is likely to be set up, given the arrangements that have been made. I want what I might call the gypsy’s warning about how the Committee might work to be on the record.

Our departure from the EU will generate unprecedented constitutional, political and economic challenges that will affect every Department and almost all aspects of Government policy. Effective scrutiny of this process and the new Department tasked with managing it should require a made-to-measure response from the House. That response should have been to prioritise flexibility, adaptability and cost-effectiveness. I believe that what we are presented with this evening is a mistake in setting up a classic departmental Select Committee to oversee what is in a sense a project that is being organised through a Department of State but that is in the end a time-limited project that will almost certainly come to a conclusion by the end of March 2019.

The Department for Exiting the European Union is unlike any other Department. It will not originate or develop any discrete domestic policy area, and as I said, its task is time-limited. Overseeing it with a discrete Select Committee will ensure that the House is probably about six months behind the Department. No doubt, the Committee will produce reports on the Department after it has ceased to exist. The Department’s website says that it will be

“responsible for policy work to support United Kingdom negotiations”,

but in practice, existing Departments will have key roles in setting policy aims for when we leave the EU and be involved in the planning of how we achieve them.

The role of the Department for Exiting the European Union will be to oversee those negotiations and to ensure consistency and coherence across the Government. We already have existing Select Committees that have the understanding and expertise needed to hold Departments to account for their progress in preparing for Brexit. Several Committees have already launched Brexit-based inquiries, building on work conducted in advance of the referendum. Scrutiny of the Department’s oversight and cross-Government co-ordination role would in these circumstances fall rather more naturally to the Liaison Committee and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. Select Committees could also, of course, work alongside one another, pooling resources and expertise.

There are also the resources available through the European Scrutiny Committee, which could adapt its role to go beyond simply examining European Union documents, but the House will badly need its expertise when examining the future regulatory framework beyond Brexit; that will present significant opportunities for Parliament, given the inevitable lack of clarity on what will apply in advance of the negotiations.

The Foreign Affairs Committee already oversees the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and its budget and programme, but given the very close relationship between the FCO and the people staffing the Department for Exiting the European Union, there is no reason why the Foreign Affairs Committee could not also oversee that Department’s budget and resources. Indeed, it is almost certain that when the Department for Exiting the European Union ends, most of its people will be reunited with the Department that they came from: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Given the likely impact, in the short and long term, on the FCO, it would make perfect sense for the Foreign Affairs Committee to take this work.

Of course, prior to the referendum, my Committee proved itself to be balanced in its assessment of the United Kingdom’s options. Any new Committee that we set up is likely to be highly partisan on the subject of Brexit, and whether this will lend itself to effective scrutiny, rather than conflict with the Government’s stated policy on Brexit, is frankly open to doubt. Setting up a special Select Committee with 21 members, rather than the normal 11, with the costs that involves, in terms of staff and member time, also disturbs the balance in the allocation of Committee chairmanships between the parties. I am aware that the resources available to my Committee are likely to be significantly reduced in order to service this new Select Committee.

The fundamental question that the House ought to address is whether the new Committee will improve our scrutiny, or instead duplicate the work of existing Committees, as was suggested by a senior figure at the Institute for Government. The new Committee will impose an extra layer of demands on the already hard-pressed Ministers in the Department for Exiting the European Union and their officials. My view, shared by the European Union Committee in the other place in its first report of this Session, is that the existing structures of the House would serve us best.

As I acknowledged at the beginning of my remarks, I suspect that I am in a significant minority, so I do not intend to press this matter, unless I suddenly find that my arguments have surprisingly convinced a majority of those present. I invite my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House to explain to me and the House why the concerns that I have expressed will not come to pass, and how we can ensure that this new Select Committee, despite my concerns, will be able to work in a way that does not bring it into automatic conflict with the Government, rather than being an exercise of oversight, or into conflict with existing Select Committees of the House.

[Mr Speaker]

We are debating this motion separately. If the Leader of the House wants to respond briefly to the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt), he is of course welcome to do so.

Points of Order

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Bercow

Thursday 8th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I would prefer to save the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) as a specialist delicacy of the House. We will come to him in due course.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Lady has made the best case she can, and I thank her for that.

[Crispin Blunt]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This is pursuant to the point of order raised by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) yesterday. There has been a further development, increasing the seriousness of it, which you acknowledged yesterday. On Monday, The Guardian reported the central recommendation of a draft report being put to the Committees on Arms Export Controls. The meeting to consider this was held yesterday in private. On Tuesday, “Newsnight” produced exerts of the text of the draft report, and that was the excepts subject of the hon. Gentleman’s point of order.

Yesterday, the Committees met and resolved to report the matter to the Liaison Committee. As I understand our procedures, the Liaison Committee will have to consider the matter and decide whether it should be referred to the Privileges Committee, which would then have to decide whether and how to pursue this matter. Subsequently, last night, “Newsnight” reported extracts of the amendments tabled by the right hon. Member for Warley (Mr Spellar) and me, which can only have come from the consolidated list of amendments circulated to members of the Committees on Tuesday.

Separately, Patrick Wintour in The Guardian today—this was put online at 00.01—reported the number of amendments we had tabled to the report, a fact which was not reported on “Newsnight”. “Newsnight” chose to contextualise the amendments tabled by the right hon. Gentleman and me in the light of our previous membership of the all-party group on Saudi Arabia, work I did in the middle east 12 years ago and the right hon. Gentleman’s record of supporting employment provided by the British defence industry. “Newsnight” emphasised that none of this was improper,

“but it gives you a sense of where people stand”.

In parallel, members of the Committees received between 1,500 and 2,000 emails on Tuesday and overnight, which appear to have been organised on someone’s behalf by Avaaz, a self-styled global citizens movement, which was aware that the Committees were meeting to consider this issue. The right hon. Gentleman believes one of them was from a constituent, but my office did not identify any constituents before it called the organisation to invite it to desist.

Mr Speaker, this amounts to a prima facie case of a deliberate campaign to influence a Select Committee, relying on in-confidence information provided by a Member of this House or their staff. Conceivably, the information could have come from Committee staff, but I think you would agree that that is highly unlikely. I cannot recall an example of such deliberate and repeated leaking of information in our time in the House.

Will you confirm, Mr Speaker, that it would not be open to the Privileges Committee, if this is referred to it, to call in the police, as this is not a criminal matter, but that it would be able to call on the services of private investigators? They would have the capacity to interrogate the electronic records, including deleted emails, relating to potential sources for this confidential and private consideration by Committees of matters, in this instance, of the greatest seriousness, involving life and death issues and the employment of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens. Will you encourage the Liaison Committee to consider this as a matter of urgency, and confirm your view of the seriousness of this attempt to undermine the work of Select Committees?

EU Council

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Bercow

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Does the Prime Minister agree with the unanimous view of the Foreign Affairs Committee that the construction of article 50 means that it is perfectly likely that there will be no agreement on the other side of the negotiations, which will require qualified majority voting, or agreement in the European Parliament at the end of the two years? As such, we would still have access to the single market but would be subject to World Trade Organisation most-favoured-nation terms. Since that would mean no free movement of people and no payments into the budget, that would represent a perfectly sound bottom line for the United Kingdom in the negotiations. It is likely that other advances will be made on that before we arrive at a deeper, comprehensive free trade agreement.

Will the Prime Minister also tell us about the fate of the British presidency next year? We will still be a full member, so are we going to take up our responsibilities?

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Gentleman must practice. We will be hearing from him regularly given the illustrious position that he holds, but I am afraid he must be briefer than that.

Junior Doctors’ Contract Negotiations

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Bercow

Monday 8th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I am sure that nobody who toddled into the Chamber after the urgent question started would expect to be called. That would be quite out of keeping with our parliamentary traditions. I think I need say no more.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I wonder whether the Minister can help me. The messaging I have heard from the BMA is that the dispute is nothing to do with pay. We have heard the issue described as a “nut” by the shadow Secretary of State, yet it has led to a national strike for the first time in 40 years and we face industrial action again. What is going on here?

Business of the House

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Bercow

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

May we have a debate in Government time on the airport commission’s report, particularly in the light of the shambolic performance last week with the non-decision and the manner of its non-announcement to this House, to discuss the unanimous conclusions of the five commissioners that Heathrow was the right site for a new runway? Can the terms of that debate be set widely enough to include consideration of the extraordinary proposition from Gatwick that it can put five times as many passengers up the Brighton main line, particularly in the light of Southern Rail’s performance in the past week?

Let me repeat a tweet from my constituent Jonathan Freeman, managing director of a Prince of Wales charity, who was travelling to work. He wrote:

“Really @SouthernRailUK?!Again?!Are you on some sort of sponsored screw up?”

We realise how desperate the situation is, when he says:

“CrispinBluntMP-you are our only hope!”

[Mr Speaker]

The situation was clearly deeply wretched. I think we are in danger of getting into the detail of the policy. As reference was made earlier to the fact that there was no statement on the day in question—on the Thursday—I should just say that it was a very regrettable state of affairs. The Secretary of State did deliver a statement on the Monday, and there can be no doubt that a Minister was going to have to appear at that Dispatch Box either to deliver a statement or to respond to an urgent question, as the Leader of the House knows. In future, rather than delivering the statement belatedly when it was going to have to be delivered, it should be delivered on time, as courtesy to the House of Commons requires.

Points of Order

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Bercow

Thursday 3rd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker, of which I have given notice to the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), who, on 3 November, following publication of the second report by the Foreign Affairs Committee, tweeted:

“Read the FAC report on UK involvement in Syria: role of ctte is to scrutinise current government policy—not set conditions on any future policy.”

Standing Order No. 152 says that Select Committees are

“appointed to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of…government departments”.

How they do that is up to them. The Liaison Committee said in its second report of the Session 2012-13 on Select Committee effectiveness that

“select committees should influence policy and have an impact on Government departments”.

It also said:

“The extent of this influence and impact is the primary measure of the effectiveness of select committees.”

Furthermore, on 5 November the Minister answered an urgent question on human rights in Egypt and expressed the hope that I was speaking as an individual and not as the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Chairs are plainly unable to secure the opinion of their Committee in response to an urgent question, but they do have a mandate, as a Chair elected by the whole House, and it seemed at least a discourtesy to that mandate for a Minister to try to diminish that authority. Through the Foreign Secretary’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, I drew the Minister’s attention to Standing Order No. 152 and sought a private assurance from him that he now understood the position of Select Committees and their Chairs. Despite repeated requests to receive that private assurance, it has not been forthcoming, and I regret that I now need to seek your clarification that my understanding of Standing Orders and the appropriate courtesy for the Minister in the Chamber is indeed correct.

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving me notice of this point of order. First, I can confirm that it is entirely a matter for Select Committees to interpret the terms of reference set by the House and to decide for themselves what subjects of inquiry to pursue. I would suggest that it is both inappropriate and unwise for Ministers to comment on such matters. To put it bluntly, they should stick to their last. They have responsibilities, and it is to the execution of those responsibilities that they should dedicate themselves. They need not, and should not, stray beyond that.

Secondly, I can confirm that the Liaison Committee has recommended that Select Committees should seek to influence Government policy, and indeed the House has endorsed that recommendation. I would go further and say that it is a matter of some concern if there are Ministers who are unaware of that important fact. I hope that from now on they will not be.

Thirdly, I can confirm that the Chairs of departmental Select Committees, including, obviously, the hon. Gentleman, have been directly elected by the House, and that gives them a particular status and authority. Of course, on many occasions they will want to speak in a personal capacity and not in that role. Once again, we do not need Ministers telling Select Committee Chairmen what they should or should not be doing. In terms of what is orderly conduct in the House, Ministers, like everybody else, can leave that to the Chair.

May I take this opportunity to thank the hon. Gentleman for the valuable contribution that his Committee and its report on the extension of offensive British military operations to Syria have made to discussions in the House in the past few weeks? I believe, and I hope I can say this without fear of contradiction, that Members in all parts of the House, whatever their views on that matter, have found the Committee’s exposition of the issues very helpful indeed.

G7

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Bercow

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call Mr Richard Graham. [Interruption.] Have I already called Mr Graham? Yes, I have. How could I have forgotten the pearls of wisdom with which he just favoured the House? It was very remiss of me and I apologise to the hon. Gentleman. I call Mr Crispin Blunt.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Islamic State is an enemy of civilisation, which is why it finds a coalition of 60 countries ranged against it. It requires military defeat, and the sooner that task is undertaken, the easier it will be. However, it is not going to happen if the regional powers are not co-ordinating their policies. What discussion was there at the G7 about getting Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, at the very least, to co-ordinate their policies towards Islamic State?