Oral Answers to Questions

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

What is taking place in Afghanistan is extremely concerning, I am afraid, with the reversal of women’s rights and women’s opportunities. One of the things we have done is to make sure that we are restoring the aid budget for women and girls, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary will be very happy to meet the group to discuss further.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

Q9. The Government’s botched Budget gave unfunded tax cuts to some of the richest companies, while across the country there are hospitals worried that their roofs might collapse at any moment: Hinchingbrooke Hospital, Frimley Park Hospital and Queen Elizabeth Hospital, which is in the Prime Minister’s own local area. Those are just three of a number of hospitals that together need hundreds of millions of pounds, some of them urgently. Will the Prime Minister promise that every affected hospital will be given the money it needs to fix those dangerous roofs in the next 12 months?

[The Prime Minister]

I want to correct the hon. Lady, because what we are doing is simply not putting up corporation tax. It is not a tax cut; we are just not raising corporation tax. I feel it would be wrong, in a time when we are trying to attract investment into our country and at a time of global economic slowdown, to be raising taxes, because it will bring less revenue in. The way we are going to get the money to fund our national health service and to fund our schools is by having a strong economy, with companies investing and creating jobs.

Health and Social Care Update

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 22nd September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

I thank my hon. Friend and appreciate her warm welcome. The House will be aware that, in effect, GPs and, indeed, dentists are private and independent practitioners. This is important. On primary care, we have already seen reasonably good success with the NHS getting doctors right across the country. I think there is a lot more to be done on dental care.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

This is not a plan; it is an ABC of Conservative failures. GPs are now seeing almost 12% more patients than they were just five years ago; the GP sector is facing a retirement timebomb; and one in five patients can only see a GP for less than five minutes. Patients need to have more fully qualified GPs. The Government set themselves a target of 6,000 by 2024. Have they now just given up?

[Dr Coffey]

No.

Tributes to Her Late Majesty The Queen

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Friday 9th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

Throughout her extraordinary reign, Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was a beacon of stability, duty and selflessness. Many of my constituents in St Albans will find it impossible to imagine Britain’s public life without her. On a personal level, I met the Queen a number of times when I worked in Commonwealth affairs trying to advance democracy and human rights. The Queen was not just a constant; a few times a year, for Commonwealth Heads Of Government meetings, Commonwealth youth meetings and the annual multi-faith, interfaith Commonwealth Day service and reception, she was literally part of the day job. The Queen and the Commonwealth—the only modern intergovernmental organisation like it—were inseparable.

Each year, we Commonwealth Secretariat staffers loved celebrating the diversity of the Commonwealth on Commonwealth Day, but it was sometimes slightly surreal. The annual Commonwealth Day reception at the secretariat was rumoured to be the only event in the Queen’s diary where she did not know who she was going to meet. There was no official line-up—it was all organic and not organised—and there was no protocol on ordering people and guests by rank or into different rooms. As a result, it was not unusual to see the Queen greeting a disorganised throng of diplomats and high commissioners—often with their husbands and wives—who were jostling to a backdrop of Fijian dancers in coconut bras, Ghanian acrobats and British pop stars from the 1980s all jockeying for position to get a glimpse of the Queen or to shake her hand.

On one day, I was tasked with taking a group of dignitaries to Buckingham Palace for an audience with Her Majesty. One such dignitary had just got a new smartphone and was particularly keen on telling all the other group members about its merits in spectacular detail. When we arrived at the Palace, we were all told, quite rightly, to turn our phones to silent and to put them away, but, during our polite conversation with the Queen, this person tried to persuade Her Majesty that she should get a phone just like his. He proceeded to take it out of his pocket and started to press buttons. He thrust it under her nose and plucked up the courage to say, “Your Majesty, I think you should get a phone like mine.” We all stood in stunned silence. She just said, “Who do you expect me to text?” It was fantastic—he blushed like a schoolboy. That one-liner was wildly refreshing, and the rest of the group were incredibly grateful.

So many people who met the Queen have many memories and stories to share, including many of my constituents. Many of them will remember the three occasions when the Queen visited St Albans cathedral and abbey, where a book of condolence is now open. The Queen’s passing feels like the end of an era, but on behalf of myself and my constituents in St Albans, I extend my thoughts and prayers to the royal family. Rest in peace, Your Majesty, and thank you.

UK Energy Costs

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

Earlier this week I raised the plight of households, small businesses and care homes in my constituency. I am sure that, like me, many of them will be truly shocked that it is the British public who will have to bear the burden of paying for this energy crisis while energy companies continue to make their millions. Today, however, I have a number of specific questions to put to Ministers, and I ask the Minister who will sum up the debate to address them.

The written ministerial statement refers to an equivalent guarantee for businesses. Does that include care homes, and what additional support will they be given in view of the pressure that they are under? I also want to raise the subject of women’s street safety. I have received an email from my local council, Hertfordshire County Council, saying that the bill to keep streetlights on has increased by 60% in just a few short months, and it already costs an extra £2.3 million a year to keep them on after dark. The council is not yet talking about turning the lights off, but if it does, will there be contingency measures in place to ensure that we keep crime down and that people—particularly women—are safe on our streets after dark?

I welcome the announcement of a fund to cover park homes, and people on heat networks and those who use heating oil, but how will the fund work, how big will it be, and will there be an information campaign aimed at those who can benefit from it? The Government’s own estimates suggest that one in every 100 households is impacted by that non-conventional relationship. By my calculations, that is more than a quarter of a million properties. For each of them to receive £400, there would need to be at least £100 million in that fund.

We need a revolution in renewables. RES is the world’s largest independent renewables company and is based in my constituency of St Albans. It has more than 40 years of experience and expertise. RES tells me—and Friends of the Earth agrees—that footnote 54 of the national planning policy framework stops it from installing new onshore wind farms even in areas where there are no objections from local residents. I am absolutely no fan of fracking, but it is absolutely obscene and absurd that this Government are saying that it is okay to reopen fracking if communities are okay with it, but not onshore wind. I asked them please to review that footnote.

Finally, on solar panels, in January I asked the Housing Secretary to make it a requirement for all new suitable buildings to have solar panels. The Government have not conducted the assessment of how much roof space is available, but I urge BEIS to go further than looking at the floor space that is available in these non-domestic buildings and work out precisely how much roof space is available right now to have solar panels installed.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Sue Gray Report

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I repeat my condolences to those who suffered from covid, to those who could not get the treatment that they needed during the pandemic, and to the family of Ruby who could not see her when she was suffering from cancer. All I can say now is that we want to get on with our work, which is to clear the backlogs, particularly for cancer patients up and down the country.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

For the bereaved families of covid, this report will unleash another cruel wave of loss, grief and anger. As a bare minimum, will the Prime Minister promise that the interim findings of the covid inquiry will be published before the next general election?

[The Prime Minister]

That is a matter for the chair.

Sue Gray Report

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I must say I think the hon. Member is wrong in what she says. As for who is covering the police costs, the police are covering the police costs.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

The Prime Minister has inadvertently referred to this as “the” Gray report when, if he had read as far as the front cover, he would see that it is called an “update”. It is because it is an update that it makes public trust in the Met’s investigation even more important. The public must know that the Met will investigate without fear or favour, so can the Prime Minister confirm that, not at any single stage, has anybody in No. 10 or the Cabinet Office sought to influence the Met’s decision on delaying its initial investigation, or was the delay the result of its own incompetence?

Covid-19 Update

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend, who is completely right. We need to learn the lessons of the last two years. We need to make sure that if we are, heaven forbid, attacked by another variant—a more lethal variant than omicron—we have different ways of dealing with it, and we have resilience built in to the NHS and into the way we handle it. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health will be setting out our plans for how to live with covid, irrespective of what kind of variants we encounter.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

I was very concerned earlier to hear the Prime Minister repeat an incorrect claim. He said that the UK was able to approve the vaccines only because we had left the European Medicines Agency. That claim has been roundly and repeatedly debunked, including by Full Fact in December 2020. Was he aware that that claim is incorrect, or is it just that in the last year, nobody has told him?

[The Prime Minister]

It is not incorrect. We were the first country in the world to license a vaccine.

[Daisy Cooper]

indicated dissent.

[The Prime Minister]

That is a fact. Is the hon. Lady going to deny it? It is true.

Covid-19 Update

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I really do not think that the Opposition Front Benchers, or indeed any of them, have the faintest idea about what is going on. They have six or seven different positions on lockdown. They came to the statement this afternoon not even knowing that this country has the largest lateral flow manufacturing facility in Europe—they did not know it.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

In his statement, the Prime Minister indicated that lateral flow tests would be given to 100,000 critical workers, but the national railways alone employ almost double that number, and GPs and pharmacists in my constituency of St Albans are wondering why they have not been included as critical workers. Indeed, we could add supermarket workers to that list. Would the Prime Minister explain where that number of 100,000 came from, because it seems at the moment to have been plucked out of the air for yesterday’s press conference?

[The Prime Minister]

I understand the point that the hon. Lady makes, and I know that a lot of people will have jumped to the same conclusion as she did about what we could do. We have targeted the 100,000 that we have in mind. Obviously, all the public sector has access to free tests, including teachers and everybody else, but what we wanted to do particularly was to ensure that those vital nodes such as railway signalling hubs, and other crucial services such as HGV drivers, had access to tests.

Committee on Standards: Decision of the House

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Wendy Chamberlain]

We on these Benches are the Opposition. It is our job to oppose the Government unless they can behave otherwise. I will try to make some progress.

Over the past 20 months, my constituents have had to follow more rules than they have ever had to deal with before, while sadly we are governed by Ministers who seem to care far less about the rules than any predecessors in living memory. That is why we are here today. It has been reported over the weekend that Ministers are focused on pleasing their boss, not on doing what is right for this country. We have seen story after story break, including cash for honours and undeclared interests.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

On that point about cash for honours, does my hon. Friend agree that the House of Lords Appointments Commission should be put on a statutory footing, to ensure that any recommendations made to the Prime Minister cannot be ignored in the same way that the Prime Minister ignored advice given to him by the previous independent adviser on ministerial interests, recommending that the Home Secretary be sacked for bullying?

[Wendy Chamberlain]

These are all things that need to be looked at on an ongoing basis, and there are potentially areas where the different processes are in conflict. However, I will now make some progress.

Who is influencing our politics? How is taxpayers’ money being spent, and what is being done to hold those in power to account? Those questions are why we argue that we need a public inquiry, with the powers and resources to get to the depths of the situation we are in. People around the country who play by the rules deserve answers, but instead they are being let down by this Government and by a Prime Minister who will not take even the most basic of steps to turn up to this debate.

It is a great shame that the Prime Minister has not graced us with his presence this afternoon, because there is still a huge amount that we do not know about the events of last week. There are many questions that demand answers, many of them involving the Prime Minister’s personal role in this affair. This is a Prime Minister, after all, who has been under investigation more times than any other Member in recent years. The question is: who stands to benefit from getting the current standards processes out of the way? Members of the public will have to draw their own conclusions on that, with the Prime Minister not being here today.

However, the questions do not stop at the Prime Minister; they extend to all those involved in the whipping operation last week. First, why was there a whipping operation in the first place? This was House business and it should not have been whipped. The Government tried to change our procedures without our consent; and then they U-turned and tried to walk it back. But they cannot walk back the events of last week—that is why we are here, looking forward.

We have heard serious, concerning allegations today that Members breaking the whip were threatened with a removal of funding for projects in their constituencies. I ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office to address that point and whether it is this true, as the matter deserves further investigation. The idea that communities should suffer because their representative did the right thing is, frankly, abhorrent. Despite all those alleged threats, the whipping operation was only a partial success. I thank those Members on the Conservative Benches who stood up for what was right and those Members, including the Father of the House, who last week supported my application for this debate.

Afghanistan

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Watching the scenes at Kabul airport this week left me and many others with feelings of overwhelming grief and anger: grief for the millions of Afghan women and girls in particular who were promised a brighter future and the opportunity to learn, work and pursue their dreams; and anger that the many pledges made to the Afghan people over the past 20 years have been broken as they were abandoned to their fate.

The stories being told by terrified Afghans are heart-rending. There are the women students who are now hiding their diplomas and certificates for fear of punishment, and in the belief that in any case their qualifications will be useless as they will not be allowed to use them. There is the female mayor who says that she is now waiting for the Taliban to come for people like her and kill them. There is the Afghan journalist, now in hiding with his family, who said:

“There was a lot of promise, a lot of assurance. A lot of talk about values, a lot of talk about progress, about rights, about women’s rights, about freedom, about democracy. That all turned out to be hollow.”

That journalist is in danger of being proved right.

We have to do whatever we can now to honour our commitments to the people of Afghanistan. That starts with fixing our failed refugee and asylum-seeking system. For all the hand wringing of Government Ministers in the last few days, the reality is that their actions over the past few months have left thousands of ordinary Afghans in terrible danger. Interpreters and contractors who worked side by side with UK forces have been refused resettlement on the grounds that they were technically subcontractors. That is shameful.

I fear for the thousands of ordinary Afghans who supported the UK in delivering aid and supporting other projects, often in the interests of our foreign policy objectives. They are now at real risk of being seen as collaborators working against the Taliban’s interest. The NGOs they worked with are now powerless to help them, but the UK Government are not, yet we have heard very little about what the Government are doing to persuade and support them. Many are not covered by the Afghan relocation and assistance programme because they worked for UK organisations other than the Government—for NGOs and other civil society organisations, even though they were paid by UK aid. They are in extreme danger, so that ARAP programme must be expanded to encompass them, too. The scheme was far too late to get off the ground and only started in April when Taliban advances and atrocities were already all too apparent, and it has been drawn all too narrowly. It must be amended to allow visas for the family of people who would have been eligible but who have died, and for people who have fled Afghanistan but would have been eligible had they remained in country.

The resettlement scheme announced by the Government last night is welcome, but it is not enough. Places must be based on need, not on numbers. There should be no artificial cap. When the Government are already failing to achieve their existing target of settling 5,000 refugees a year, we need to hear an awful lot more about how Ministers are planning to deliver for Afghan refugees and guarantees that local government will be properly funded to work with them.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that it is vital for local councils that have been willing for some time to take on additional refugees, such as mine in St Albans, to be given additional finance? For local government to support those refugees, it needs funding to help with finding furniture, relocation and connecting with utilities. All that support is needed so that the council itself can support refugees.

[Caroline Lucas]

I absolutely support the hon. Lady’s comments. Such support is vital.

I call on the Home Secretary today to abandon the resettlement-only plans set out in the Nationality and Borders Bill, which would criminalise, or deny full refugee status to, those who make their own journeys to seek asylum in the UK. I call on her to grant immediate asylum to Afghans already waiting for status in the UK, release all Afghan nationals from detention, and urgently expand the family reunion route so that Afghans can be joined by other members of their family, including siblings and their parents. I was contacted by a constituent who used to work for the EU delegation in Kabul and whose siblings all worked for allied forces. He has asylum here in the UK and his siblings have asylum elsewhere, but his mother is left alone, desperate and very much a target. We absolutely need to widen the family reunion rules.

We also need not just to properly restore aid, but to increase it. The Foreign Secretary said that it is being doubled; I welcome that, but it is still less than the 2019 figure. We need to recognise that the need today is so much greater than it was even in 2019.

There are many lessons to be learned from this disaster. It looks as if our intelligence might well have been inadequate, our promises to the Afghan people worthless and our duty of care to ordinary Afghans who worked with us patchy and unreliable. More than that, this Afghan tragedy should be the catalyst that finally forces us to rethink how the so-called war on terror is fought. The debacle in Afghanistan, with the loss of almost a quarter of a million lives, is just one of four failed conflicts in the past 20 years. Western military action in Libya and Iraq and the air war against ISIS in Syria have all failed to achieve their objectives: ISIS is still active in Iraq and Syria, ISIS and al-Qaeda are active across the Sahel and eastern Africa, and there are still links with Afghanistan.

We urgently need to learn the lessons of failed wars of intervention and take an honest look at the objectives behind our foreign policy. For too long, protecting British interests has been about stability and safety through access to oil, maintaining the current balance of power and a very inconsistent approach—to put it mildly—to human rights and democracy. When we ally ourselves with countries such as Saudi Arabia, our moral credibility to speak about human rights is fundamentally undermined. We need a longer-term approach, including stopping arms sales to oppressive regimes that do not abide by international law, and a more consistent approach to democracy across the world.

The Government like to boast of our country being global Britain. If that is to mean anything, it surely has to be an opportunity to finally develop the ethical foreign policy that we have spoken about for so long, focused on seeking to build international consensus with co-operation, security and human rights at its heart.

--- Later in debate ---

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

The appalling scenes that we have witnessed over the last few days will certainly outlive us all, but equally moving are the accounts on the ground that I am sure we have all heard. The brother of my neighbour, Assad, is a Hazara, one of the most persecuted minority communities in Afghanistan. He has not left the house in weeks, not because of covid, but because of fear—already—of being killed, and he is one of millions. We must not be fooled. Despite what the Taliban say, they do not mean it. My good friend Nemat, an Afghan academic who is luckily now in Australia, said to me, “The Taliban are professional liars”. Behind their empty promises and their weasel words lies a devastating reality, and shame on us for believing them twice.

This Government must do all they can to ensure that people have an escape route. The airport in Kabul seems to be working, but what of those who cannot get there? What about those who cannot get to Kabul itself at all? That is why the Liberal Democrats have been calling for a safe corridor. We must utilise every diplomatic tool available. I note that in his opening remarks, the Prime Minister said that he had spoken to Prime Minister Khan. Did he raise this? We know that the Inter-Services Intelligence has been providing support for the Taliban for some time. We have leverage with Pakistan, and Pakistan has leverage with them. Was that even broached?

On the refugees that we are to take in, 20,000 sounds good, but we have had 20 years of involvement. If we take the 5,000 and break it down by constituency, that is seven per constituency. For 20,000, it is 30 per constituency. Surely we can do better than that? That should be a starting point, not a target. When they come, we need to recognise that councils need to be well funded in providing services such as housing, education, language provision, and mental health support—all that must be part of what is provided.

For my very final remarks, on women and girls, I hand my voice to a woman on the ground. She said:

“Like every other woman I have been staying home and am afraid to go out. Women are not allowed to leave their homes without a government official... Their safety, hopes, dreams have to be locked once again, we just live to exist, nothing else.”

Imagine what that must be like. Imagine the pictures of young girls being posted on social media as spoils of war, to be married off to the fighters.

[Daisy Cooper]

In times of crisis, the voices of women are often missing. Does my hon. Friend agree that whatever the UK Government and the international community do next, the protection of the rights of Afghan women and girls must be put front and centre?