Procurement Bill [Lords]

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 13th June 2023 Commons Chamber

According to research from the British Chambers of Commerce—the Minister knows that I have cited these figures before—in 2016, 25% of public sector procurement spending was awarded directly to SMEs. By 2021, that had dropped to 21%. Neither of those figures suggests a healthy procurement environment for SMEs, but it is shocking that SMEs have faced more difficulty in getting a fair share of public contracts in the past five years, despite the strong rhetoric from the Government. One important barrier for SMEs is the constant delay they face in getting access to the money they are owed within an appropriate timeframe. For SMEs that see a significant amount of money coming in via a single contract or a small pool of contracts, such delays can be devastating to the balance sheet. They can lead to missed payments, job losses and even closures of our valuable SMEs.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I applaud what the hon. Member is saying about SMEs. She is absolutely right that it is important that we support the small business sector. However, she has tabled amendments that would favour the insourcing of public services. She seems to think that we should require the public sector to deliver public contracts, rather than SMEs. Which is it?

[Florence Eshalomi]

The hon. Member is absolutely right: those SMEs will work with local councils in a local area, and they know the local area. In some cases the contracts that are outsourced are not value for money. This is about ensuring that, in public contracts, public money is spent in the right way. If we are to lower the risks faced by SMEs seeking to enter the supply chain, it is vital that the measures in the Bill have an impact.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Of course, if evaluation is built in from the beginning, the company that has been contracted to do the work would be required to collect data. They will say that that involves more cost but, over time, it would wash out. We need a better standard of data collection on all sorts of issues.

Take the example of a contractor that was asked to run a prison. The Government provided data on the prison’s maintenance, but the data was not right as it did not count the number of windows and toilets, and so on, that needed to be fixed, so the company had to come in and count them. In that case, the company had not banked on prisoners breaking more windows than the average in other buildings. There is lots of data, and we keep pushing for it to be collected, and that data could be built into evaluations.

The hon. Gentleman is bang on about making sure we do not send good money after bad. If something is not working, we need the evidence and the political courage, sometimes, to end the contract. We need to make sure that the people delivering a contract are clear that they are delivering the contract’s aims. Evaluation should have the impact of tightening procurement, tightening the management of contracts by the civil service and sharpening up those who bid for contracts to do a better job and to be proud of that job, in the knowledge that doing a good job may well mean that the contract is extended, but not if they do not do a good job. We should also reward good behaviour. I am keen to hear what the Minister has to say about that.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) tabled amendments that would ensure that organisations involved in nefarious activities are excluded from public procurement. It is extraordinary that companies that are making money in nefarious ways can bolster their activity and give themselves credibility through public procurement. Others have talked a lot about the issues around China, so I will not go into that much more. My right hon. Friend has a strong reputation in this area, and her amendments speak for themselves.

We do not want to miss this opportunity. I recognise that not everything in procurement is about legislation. It would give me some comfort, as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, if the Minister showed that that is being thought about a bit more deeply across Whitehall.

[Danny Kruger]

This has been a very interesting debate, veering from grand geopolitics to the sourcing of public services and paperclips. All of this is, in a sense, the responsibility of an independent country, so the debate is one benefit of Brexit, for which I am sure we are all very grateful.

I am pleased with the Bill and the Government amendments. I think of it as the patriotic Procurement Bill, which is exactly what we need. I particularly welcome the explicit commitment to national security that has been added to the Bill, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns) and for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), for their work and their contributions today. I am particularly grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for his tremendous speech about the dangers we face from a more hostile China.

In the Government amendments, and in Government policy in general, we see a necessary new realism in UK policy. Security is the new watchword of our times, and to me it means much more than defence against hostile states. We face all sorts of other threats to our security, including, as my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight mentioned, our extreme dependence on supply chains around the world, not only but particularly those in hostile states.

Conservative Members tend to regard “protecting” and “subsidising” domestic industry as dirty words and unorthodox policies. Nevertheless, we see around the world a growing tide of tariff barriers and domestic subsidies. Our great friends in the United States have committed to spending $500 billion on domestic manufacturers, particularly to wean themselves off Chinese imports. I welcome the Prime Minister’s commitments this week to a new US-UK economic collaboration arrangement to secure our common interests and to ensure that we have safe supply chains. We will need to rely more on our allies in future.

As we move from a just-in-time procurement model, we need to recognise, particularly on this side of the House, the role of Government in ensuring economic security. The fact is that £300 billion a year makes the Government the biggest player in the UK economy. As we have heard today, and I pay tribute to the speeches made by Opposition Members, the Government are often not very good at procurement and spending public money for public goods. We could go into the sources and origins of that, but we should recognise that since the late 1990s, and under the Blair and Brown Governments in particular, the model of new public management has created a new doctrine of how Government money should be spent on private sector providers. The principle of introducing internal markets—the purchaser-provider split—was an attempt to ensure greater efficiency, greater value for money and greater responsiveness to the users of public services, and it engendered all sorts of difficulties, too. The hon. Members for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) and for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) listed some of them, and I recognise them from my previous work. Providers have to jump through really bureaucratic processes.

There is a concentration of big suppliers. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green has done a lot of good work, although he did not speak about it today, on the importance of SME procurement. Large charities in particular can game the system, in the way that large companies can, to secure Government contracts. The Government often do not buy the best; they buy the service that gives commissioners the least risk. Those suppliers often run rings around Government. In the way services are designed and delivered, we see cost deferrals, with payment pushed back beyond the budget cycle; cost shunting, with different parts of the public sector having to carry the cost for a bad contract; the creaming of the high-value, low-cost clients or services; and the parking of high-cost, low-value services. So the providers, whether they are charitable or commercial, game the system. We see that all time, so all this needs improvement and this Bill takes important steps towards ensuring that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I am fascinated by the speech my hon. Friend is making, because he is right in one sense about this. We did a report at the Centre for Social Justice about four or five years ago where we looked at productivity. So often we make international comparisons, but the whole figure for productivity contains that which a country wants to put into it. For example, France does not put health or education into its productivity measures. Health and education have shocking productivity outcomes in terms of cost, which means that France is able to declare itself as having a higher level of productivity. London and the south-east have the highest productivity in Europe, but the real story is that the rest of the UK does not meet the average for the whole of the Europe, which tells us what our problem really is.

[Danny Kruger]

My right hon. Friend makes important points, and I recognise the difficulty of comparing our productivity figures with those of other countries. The comparison I am making is with our own recent history, but he is absolutely right in what he says. Indeed, the point about what is measured matters enormously. In our debates, we often make the mistake of thinking that the only things that matter are those that can be easily quantified. That is a great challenge we face, particularly in the social sector.

The Government are rightly committed to improving the efficiency and productivity of the public services—I absolutely support them on that—but we face another great challenge that does not get enough of a mention: the need to reduce demand on the system as a whole. We are spending so much not just because we are inefficient, but because the demand on the system is so high. I do not need to run through all the details of the enormous budgets we spend on social breakdowns and the consequences of social problems that we should have averted, in criminal justice, in the health budget, in what is called “social protection”. Some £150 billion is categorised under “social protection” in the public finances—not pensions, but paying for people who have tough lives. We should be seeking to reduce the cost of those budgets, because each one of those costs represents, in a sense, people in trouble. Both for financial and social reasons, we should be trying to reduce that expenditure.

How do we do that? We need social reform. I am not going to bore the House with long thoughts on that, but we need public sector reform, as has been mentioned a bit today, and that includes procurement reform. I acknowledge what Labour is suggesting in some of its amendments and in some of the speeches we have heard: an objection to the whole model of outsourcing. I recognise the objections to some of the failures of public service management—new public management—over the past generation, and some of the challenges of outsourcing and of competition in the public sector or for public services. However, I do not think insourcing everything is the answer. Reverting to a pre-1990 model of everything being delivered by the central state, as one of the amendments and Unison are championing, is not the right model. We need a better model of outsourcing that relies much more on civil society and, in particular, on the local, community-based services in which the UK is so rich and which do such a great job. We need to be able to measure their value properly and commission their services effectively. That is what this Bill aims to do.

I declare an interest, in that I set up and ran for many years projects working in prisons and with youth services. I have personal acquaintance with the challenge of EU procurement, not only social fund commissioning, but central and local government contracts. None of this is easy and I am familiar with all of that. I am familiar with the frustrations of getting on the frameworks; expressing interest; bidding through tenders; and being treated as bid candy on a long contract. I am also familiar with going through a pointless competition process where there is only one obvious provider—the one that helped to design the service—which still has to jump through loads of competitive hoops only for some other random provider to come in and swipe the contract; I speak bitterly from experience. The challenges that small social enterprises face are significant.

The difference between procurement and commissioning is not often acknowledged. We often have procurement departments doing work that is too complicated for them on their own. We need to have proper commissioning where people who are paying for a service work collaboratively with providers, stakeholders, service users and other parts of the system. Everybody needs to bring their assets, resources, skills and experience to co-design the service that is needed locally. The Bill brings us much closer to that model. I greatly welcome the measures that have been included, especially around the simplification of tendering. The single portal is an important development and it is good for transparency as well. The Tell Us Once registration is essential, as is the help that will be given to SMEs and social enterprises, including the active reduction in the barriers to tendering, lower reporting requirements and so on.

Most of all there is the shift from the most economically advantageous regime to the most advantageous regime. That small excision of the word “economically” is an important recognition of the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) was just making about the need to go beyond a purely commercial estimation of the value of social projects. I would go further. In 2020, I wrote a report for the Government who were trying to maximise and sustain the enormous contributions that communities were making during the first lockdown. I suggested that we recognise and declare that the whole of Government commissioning—the whole of public service spending—is to deliver social value for the public. Essentially, that is what we all believe and it should be stated much more explicitly in my view. I just bring the House’s attention back to the Conservative Government’s Social Value Act 2012, which gets those principles right.

I recognise that we need to take enormous steps forward. I honour what the Government have been doing around national security. I also honour the steps that have been taken to ensure greater opportunities for SMEs and social enterprises, and I commend the Bill to the House.

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

I wish to associate myself with the remarks made by hon. and right hon. Members across the House about the dangers of sourcing from high-risk countries and parts of countries and those implicated in serious human rights abuses. The appalling persecution of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang is a very powerful case in point that has been echoed by many Members around the House, and I agree very strongly with that.

I rise to speak to amendment 60 and new clause 17. I welcome the provisions in the Bill that aim to help small and medium-sized enterprises to access public contracts. SMEs are often best placed to meet the needs of the communities in which they operate, providing numerous social and economic benefits. Those benefits, often referred to as a social value, cannot simply be reduced to a tick-box exercise. Nor can we allow social value to amount only to crumbs of compensation from corporate giants, while they extract wealth from our communities. Wider economic, social and environmental priorities need to be built in from the start of every procurement process.

The UK spends about £300 billion a year on public procurement. We could question whether that is a good thing. That has already been hinted at—whether some of these services at least would be better off delivered in-house by public bodies themselves rather than via contracts. However, this is probably not the place to go into that debate. I want to focus on the need to use that procurement spend as a force for good—to keep wealth in local economies, to ensure that public money goes to responsible companies and not those that exploit people and nature, and to help us meet our climate goals and to preserve a liveable future for all of us. I want to see values, not just value, at the heart of the public procurement process in public life.

That brings me to amendment 60 on the national procurement policy statement, which sets out the strategic objectives that the Government want public procurement to achieve. The amendment would require the Government to assess and report on the impact of the national procurement policy statement on meeting environmental and climate targets and to set out any steps that they intend to take to meet them.

Thanks to the efforts of climate campaigners across the country, we are now seeing the net zero goal and the need for climate action acknowledged in strategies and policy statements across the public sector. But these acknowledgements remain meaningless unless we assess the real world impact of those statements. Are our plans to reduce emissions actually being implemented and are they working? The amendment would signal to contracting authorities and businesses that the Government are serious about aligning procurement with climate and environmental goals. It would also enable Government to see where policy might need to be strengthened if it is not having the intended impact.

New clause 17 would require public contracts that include the supply of food to be aligned with nutritional guidelines and to specify options suitable for a plant-based diet. We know that animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to global heating and biodiversity loss, representing around 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. More and more people are choosing to move to more plant-based eating and almost one quarter of people in Britain now follow a mainly or entirely meat-free diet.

The 2022 progress report to Parliament by the Climate Change Committee urges the Government not to ignore the role of diet and notes:

“Government can influence diet shifts, through mandating plant-based options in public settings”.

My amendment would require public contracts for the supply of food to be in line with the Eatwell Guide, which drew inspiration from the nutritional guidance of what was then Public Health England, developed in conjunction with the devolved nations. Analysis by the Carbon Trust found that, thanks to lower consumption of meat, dairy and sugary foods, the environmental footprint of the Eatwell diet is around one third lower than the current national diet.

In settings such as hospitals and schools, where good nutrition can make all the difference, our public sector should lead the way by offering nutritious and sustainable food. That is too often overridden by a narrow notion of value for money, resulting in vulnerable people being given food that does not meet nutritional guidelines. As we all remember, during the pandemic the Government were forced to U-turn on school meal vouchers after widespread outrage at the poor quality and quantity of food being distributed to families. That was not just one isolated failure; it was symptomatic of a political culture that thinks we can package up children’s nutrition, health or any public service and hand it over to whichever corporate giant says it will do it most cheaply. That is the culture that has to change.

Last year the all-party parliamentary group on the green new deal, which I co-chair, produced a report setting out how local community-based solutions are key to climate action. As part of that inquiry we heard from the Sustainable Food Places network, as well as from community farms and kitchens. A key recommendation that came up again and again was to use the procurement system to support more local food and plant-based diets.

The Government’s own food strategy proposes a target of at least 50% of food spend to be on food produced locally or to high environmental standards, a move I certainly applaud. However, nine months on from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs consultation, we are still awaiting the Government’s response.

Pioneering local authorities and public bodies are leading the way, and my constituency has had some notable successes. In 2020, Brighton received the first-ever Sustainable Food Places gold award. It has brought in improved standards for procurement as part of a wider campaign to get more people eating more vegetables and its school food supplier meets the Food for Life gold standard for championing healthy, local, climate-friendly food.

A more joined-up approach to food, climate and nature and a real commitment to supporting local businesses and community organisations would have huge benefits for our health and our local economies. In addition to the provisions in this new clause, I would therefore hope to see much more support for public bodies that want to put social value at the heart of procurement, to help them to find out how best to get sustainable food from local producers into public sector canteens.

Ministerial Code: Investigation of Potential Breach

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Quin]

The British people will know that the Prime Minister will act in a professional and proper manner. He always does, and he is doing so in these circumstances. I believe that it is not totally unknown for the Labour party to have issues of a disciplinary nature that it needs to look at, and I dare say that it has processes. We too have processes, and the Prime Minister will make certain, having gathered the information, that he does next what he feels is right.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker) makes the right point about the BBC’s political editor, but here we have 50 or so Opposition Members choosing to spend their time debating this question. Does my right hon. Friend think—[Interruption.] We are here because we have been called out in defence of the Government. Does the Minister think that their constituents will be proud of the way their representatives are using their time?

[Jeremy Quin]

I have a long memory, and I recall a little while ago an urgent question being asked by a Member of the House, and the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) coming here to defend the Labour party’s actions on, among other things, the matter of Sue Gray and an appointment. I remember her saying what a complete waste of time it was for this Parliament that we were spending time and wasting our time on these issues. My hon. Friend raises a pertinent point.

Papers Relating to the Home Secretary

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I am afraid that we just have to ignore the shameless politics of this motion. It is, of course, the job of the Opposition to bring this sort of motion before the House. There may come a day—a very distant day—when we sit on the Opposition Benches and make similar attacks on the Government. If the Labour party is the Government, we will have plenty of material to work with based on its last stint in office. There will be new names to add to the illustrious roster of Hinduja, Ecclestone, Mittal and so on, and perhaps even some old names will be coming back. I have the fortune of representing the noble Lord Mandelson as a constituent. I dare say that he will be back on the Front Bench of the Labour party if it is ever back in power and he, no doubt, will be resigning two or three times during his next stint in office. Our Home Secretary has only ever had to resign once, compared with him.

We should not complain, even if it is very thin stuff that Labour Members are bringing. What is going on here? Is it the context or the subtext of this motion? Labour is not attacking the Home Secretary because she shared a policy document with a fellow Privy Counsellor and a former security Minister. The document itself contained no security information. In fact, all the information in the document was already in the public domain. There was no national security breach and no private data involved. That is not the purpose of their attack. The attack is because of her approach to immigration, and I suggest that that is not a subject for this sort of political knockabout, because the topic matters to us all. Despite the knockabout, I think both sides have a legitimate concern and legitimate points to make in this debate, and deep down we all want the same thing.

It is easy to caricature one another’s positions: the Opposition say we are heartless; we say they are naive. They say we are against refugees altogether; we say they want open borders—I said that last week, and it is true of some of them, but let me be fair to the majority of our opponents and try to represent their view fairly. They want us to play our part as a country—a leading part, given our history—in the management of the great people movements of the world. They want our attitude as a country to those people huddled in boats in the English channel to be one of compassion. They want our responsibility—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman is straying—

[Danny Kruger]

I am straying, Madam Deputy Speaker—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. The hon. Gentleman needs to sit down when I am standing. Thank you. He is straying away from the terms of the motion, and he should be quite careful what he says about other Members of the House.

[Danny Kruger]

That is a fair point, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I thank you for that guidance. I do not have much more to say, then, because the topic of the debate should have been the question of how we manage migration—that is the real purpose of the Opposition’s attacks on the Home Secretary.

It is right that we on the Government side represent citizens who believe strongly in the importance of protecting our borders against illegal migration. It is preposterous that the Opposition think the Government should reveal legal advice. They cannot attack the Home Secretary for her plans on migration, because those plans are popular and right, so they attack her. I wish they would recognise that we all want a humane asylum system and secure borders; they could even work with us to secure that.

Tributes to Her Late Majesty The Queen

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Friday 9th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow such an inspiring speech by the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans). I speak on my behalf and that of my constituents in Devizes, particularly the many members—serving and former—of Her Majesty’s armed forces, who have served under her colours and sworn their oath to her.

President de Gaulle said that he had

“a certain idea of France”.

We have no need for such abstractions. We do not need an idea of the United Kingdom; we have had, for 70 years, an actual person who represented the best of our country and its character. Others have spoken of the character of the late Queen and, not knowing her, I cannot add anything to that. Those primary school visits are an absolute agony for me—I go from one classroom to another disappointing the children because I have not met the Queen. However, I want to talk briefly about what she stood for.

Philip Larkin’s poem has been quoted often today, with its perfect line, “She did not change”—she did not change, even as we did. As we heard, she presided over the most extraordinary period of change, yet she was emphatically not a relic of the past. We loved and valued her because she was a conduit of something precious, from the present to the future.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) said that we could find what we want in the Queen, whether we are a modernist or a traditionalist. We find both in her, of course. That is the real value of tradition, and not because it fossilises the past. A real traditionalist, as someone said, is someone who tends the flame of their culture, not someone who worships its ashes. Those of us with conservative instincts need to remember that.

The Queen was a great futurist, as was the Duke of Edinburgh. As my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Sir Gary Streeter) said—others have made the same point—if modern Britain was founded on the rock of Queen Elizabeth, that is because her life was founded on the rock of ages, on her Christian faith. I read today that as the country became more secular in recent decades, she became more publicly religious. It is worth noting that while she dedicated her long life to the service of the people, she held herself accountable not to us, but to a higher power. This was the source of her joy and her goodness.

My sympathy goes to her family, her friends and her household in their grief, and I give my thanks to her. She is doing in death what she did in life: bringing us together, making us smile, reminding us of the things that really matter, and making us proud of our country and grateful for her example and her service. May she rest in peace.

Bill of Rights

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I think many people, but I suspect particularly my hon. Friend’s constituents, will think the real threat to human rights is allowing, and not cracking down on, this trade in human misery. She asked about how we will reform the relationship with the Strasbourg Court. First, it will be by freeing the UK courts to diverge from Strasbourg case law, and being clear that they do not need to take it into account. Secondly, it will be by making sure, in the way I have already articulated, that there is the equivalent of a democratic shield, as we relied on in relation to prisoner voting, but reinforced and made clearer, so that when it comes to the shifting goalposts, whether under judicial interpretation at home or abroad, Parliament has the last word. Finally, it will be in relation to rule 39 interim orders, and she will find all those expressly and explicitly addressed in the Bill of Rights.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

There has been much talk of Winston Churchill and the authorship of the original convention by British Conservative judges. The fact is that the text of the original convention is absolutely fine, and it is the application and extension of the convention’s original meaning by Strasbourg judges over the decades since that is the problem. I therefore very much welcome the commitment to raise the bar for article 8 judgments.

I also welcome the commitment to give UK judges the right to diverge from Strasbourg case law. My concern, however, is that some UK judges do not want to diverge from Strasbourg case law. In fact, in some cases they want to go further; I think of Baroness Hale, of blessed memory to Members here. Can my right hon. Friend assure me that we will genuinely be free of Strasbourg case law, and is it worth thinking about strengthening the obligation on judges to disregard Strasbourg cases that do not apply in our context?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

First, if my hon. Friend reads clause 3 of the Bill of Rights, I think he will find that all his concerns are addressed squarely and fully; I urge him to have a look and come back to me.

My hon. Friend made another important point about people talking as if the European convention was the exclusive authorship of Churchill and the United Kingdom. That is a perverse and neo-imperial reading of history that is totally at odds with the way in which the European convention was negotiated, which was by a mixture of European countries, including the UK—we were centrally involved—and other countries with a civil law background. The convention reflects a mix of those traditions. As a result, it is unobjectionable, but the challenge has come in relation to interpretation and application. My hon. Friend’s points are valid, but the idea that the convention was a British creation is almost neo-imperial myth making.

Standards in Public Life

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

The right hon. Lady has just suggested—and the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) made the same point—that the Prime Minister has weakened the ministerial code. Is she aware of last week’s report from the Institute for Government, which said that the code had not been weakened, that “confected” accusations had been made to that effect, and that Opposition Members should therefore correct the record? Will she do that?

[Angela Rayner]

I am glad that the hon. Member has mentioned this. I shall say more about it later. What the Prime Minister chose to do—as the Institute for Government has recognised—was cherry-pick parts of the recommendations rather than taking them in their entirety. The chair of the committee said that it was important for the recommendations to be taken as a whole and not cherry-picked, so I respectfully disagree with the hon. Member. I do not think that this strengthened the ministerial code, and I think that what the Prime Minister did constitutes a missed opportunity. What he has tried to do is get away with weakening the ministerial code so that he can say, “I have given an apology, and I think that that is the right way to go about it.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I am honoured to be called so early in this debate—among my many colleagues keen to get in. [Laughter.] No, it is a great honour.

I want to start by echoing the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) on the importance of the motion and of the report by the committee. It is also an honour to follow the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett), and I pay tribute to her work, her personal integrity and her commitment to the principles of standards in public life.

Of course, I disagree with the right hon. Lady on her judgment of the changes that the Government are making to the code. They are very important changes, but I do not think they are as exciting as she suggests. Of course, the Government are not going as far as Labour would like, but the fact is, as the Minister made clear, the code is now stronger than it was before—it is stronger than ever—and the Government are following the requests of the committee.

On the crucial point about whether the ministerial adviser is able to initiate investigations, the ministerial adviser is able to initiate investigations independently of the Government in a way that he was not able to do before. It is right and appropriate that the Prime Minister gives the green light for an investigation to proceed—there may be issues, particularly around national security, where the Prime Minister has to step in—but it would be absolutely outrageous, and it would bring down the wrath of this House and of the country, if the Prime Minister abused that power. It is right that he or she has it, and independent scrutiny, which the right hon. Lady mentioned, remains at the core of the code.

I am afraid that the criticisms that are made miss the mark. The fact is that, for all the Prime Minister’s difficulties in recent weeks, the changes that are being proposed in the code would not have helped him in this episode at all. He is just as accountable as he ever was —in fact, more so.

I want to repeat the point I made to the deputy leader of the Labour party, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), in my intervention. The Institute for Government has made a very important intervention. It has said that the charges that are being made against these changes to the code by Opposition Members are “confected.” The Institute for Government has called on Opposition Members to correct the record when they say that the ministerial code is being weakened by these changes. I invite them to do so in the interests of honesty and of the standards in public life that they claim to uphold.



The Institute for Government has praised the changes that are being made, particularly the introduction of a range of sanctions. Indeed, the Committee on Standards in Public Life has said that the changes represent a “step forward” and an “improvement in the process”. The right hon. Member for Derby South talked about grandmother’s footsteps, but the committee she sits on has talked about a step forward, and that is perhaps what she meant. We are taking steps towards a better system. It is not a perfect system—we will never have a system so perfect that nobody needs to be good—but this is getting better.

I want to finish by talking about Labour’s suggestion or its idea of a perfect system, which is a call for a single ethics commissioner. I think this is a very dangerous proposal. There is much talk of democracy, including from the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara) on the SNP Front Bench, but the proposal here is to set up an unelected individual charged with this god-like power to judge the morals of Ministers. The right hon. Member for Derby South talked about Russia, and this is an echo of the political commissars who sit alongside politicians judging them on their conformity to moral standards or to ideology. This is not the British way.

Ultimately, this House is self-regulating. We are accountable to the law, we are accountable to our consciences and, ultimately, we are accountable to the people. I appreciate that Labour Members do not like the fact that they are in a minority in this House. They do not like not getting their way, particularly on a question of public morals, and I sympathise with them. They do not like the Prime Minister, and I sympathise—[Interruption]—while I disagree. The fact is that the Government this Prime Minister leads retain the support of the majority of Members of this House. [Hon. Members: “No, he doesn’t!”] The Government have the confidence of this House—that is the ultimate accountability that any Minister needs—and I am sorry that Labour Members do not like the democracy they are part of.

Referral of Prime Minister to Committee of Privileges

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I want to open by acknowledging what I thought was the fair, measured spirit in which the Leader of the Opposition opened this debate. I thought he spoke in a fair-minded way, as have many other hon. and right hon. Members on all sides, including those friends of mine who have, sadly, decided that they can no longer support the Prime Minister, but I want to speak in his defence today, because somebody has to.

I acknowledge, in all seriousness, how big a mistake the Prime Minister made. Of course, he should apologise for it, take responsibility and accept the verdict of the police, whether or not he was surprised by that verdict. If he lied to this House, of course he should resign, but he did not—patently he did not. Patently he did not break the law deliberately, so patently he did not deliberately mislead this House, any more than the Leader of the Opposition deliberately misled the House when he said that the PM had slandered the BBC. I welcome the sort of apology that he made earlier. We can now all move on from that mistake and remember that only those who are without sin should be casting stones.

I do not minimise the importance of this scandal. Many people are outraged by what has gone on and have written to me to that effect. Many are just the usual haters who always despised the Prime Minister, but many are the respectable tendency of our country—often Conservative voters—who just want a steady, decent, respectable Government. I think particularly of my councillors in Devizes and party members who have written to me in despair at what the Prime Minister has done. They are right to want a steady, decent, responsible Government; we do not have to have a soap opera in Downing Street. But we do need a Government and a Prime Minister who can see the big picture and make the big calls—one who does not always play for safety, does not always do the conventional thing that officials suggest and does not always think, “What would John Major do?”

Let me finish with a word about the character of the Prime Minister, who I have known a little for many years, and with whom I had the privilege of working closely in Downing Street in those crazy months in the second half of 2019, when he and my other old friend Dominic Cummings drove through the strategy that finally got Brexit done. There was a lot of smoke and noise in those months, but in the midst of it all I saw the Prime Minister in relentless pursuit of the mission, with total flexibility about the methods to be used, including a proportionate response to the tactics taken by the other side in its attempts to subvert the democratic process. The European Union saw how serious he was at that time, and it is because of that that it finally accepted a deal that we could also accept. The country saw it, and it responded with a landslide election victory for our party, and I do not believe that any other leader would have done it.

None of this would justify lying to this House, but I do not believe that the Prime Minister did lie, and those are the reasons I follow him in spite of everything—in spite of his accepting a slice of birthday cake when he should not have, in spite of overseeing a No. 10 operation that let the country down, in spite of some policies that I am unhappy with. I support him because he was anointed by the people in 2019 to deliver a great mission to unite and level up the country, and because he can make the big calls that are needed at this time.

Oral Answers to Questions

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mike Freer]

I can give my right hon. Friend the commitment that the Government remain committed to bringing forward the legislation. It is a matter for business managers when the exact parliamentary slot will be, but a Bill team has been stood up and we are progressing at pace.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I very much understand the intentions behind the proposed Bill, but can my hon. Friend tell the House what evidence has come to light of unacceptable conversion therapy practices in the UK, by which I mean practices that are not already illegal, but that the Government think should be banned?

[Mike Freer]

My hon. Friend raises a very fair point. Both the national LGBT survey of over 100,000 LGBT people and the in-depth Coventry report demonstrated that violent and harmful talking conversion practices continue to take place. That is why we need to act.

Covid-19 Update

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

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

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I make an appeal to the Front Benches on both sides of the House. We voted for the compulsory vaccination of NHS staff on the basis of the argument that it significantly reduces transmission, but it now appears that the evidence is changing. I note the careful words that the Prime Minister used to my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) when he said that he would reflect on the policy. I hope that both Front Benches will reflect on it and consider the advice of the Royal College of Nursing that we should at least delay the implementation of the policy until the evidence is clearer.

[The Prime Minister]

I repeat my careful words to my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper). I also repeat what I think is common ground, that it is the responsibility of every healthcare professional to get vaccinated.

Afghanistan

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

No, I cannot accept what the right hon. Lady has said, because this country has been extremely generous—more generous than most countries around the world—not just in bringing people immediately from Afghanistan but in setting out a safe and legal route for 20,000 more to come. That is a big number and the route for those people is clear.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I am very pleased to hear about Operation Warm Welcome. Wiltshire, my county, is home to many thousands of British soldiers who have served with Afghan colleagues over the past 20 years. I hope the Prime Minister will join me in congratulating Wiltshire Council and the communities of Wiltshire, including the military communities, for the welcome that they are offering to the refugees. Will he assure the House that councils across the country will get the resources they need to support those evacuees?

[The Prime Minister]

Yes. I thank my hon. Friend. Of course I congratulate Wiltshire Council on what it is doing, as I congratulate all councils that are stepping up to the plate and helping Afghans to settle and to integrate at this time. I can tell him that Wiltshire Council and all other councils involved will get the support and funding they need.