Debate on the Address

Debate between David Davis and John Redwood

Tuesday 7th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

It is a privilege to follow the Public Accounts Committee Chairman. She will understand that I have a certain affection for her in these debates because of her position.

The hon. Lady made a comment about looking forward 30 years. The whole western world faces a paradox that goes back 30 years. In the 1990s, three massive things happened in the world: first, there was a dramatic reduction in tariffs, which led to a huge increase in global trade; secondly, there was the collapse of the Soviet empire; and finally, there was a dramatic acceleration in the creation and adoption of new technology. All those things raised well over 2 billion people out of oppression by starvation and out of political oppression. They changed the world dramatically for the better, but those dramatic changes have had a number of effects.

Today, we face a series of challenges in the western world, not just in Britain, that are more complex and more difficult to deal with than any I can remember since 1979, whether it is Ukraine and the series of wars that are breaking out, whether it is the migration that results from that, whether it is domestic challenges such as the impact on the wages of the western working class—much of the impetus for Brexit was the result of working-class wages across the west being depressed by competition with the rest of the world—whether it is the impact on public finances, which derives partly from that, or whether it is the impact on public services, which are failing not just in Britain but in many countries, to some extent for the same reasons.

That is why, unlike the hon. Lady, I welcome what I think of as the common sense in the King’s Speech. There are a number of sensible measures, including on crime and justice to promote safety, justice and closure for victims, which is important, and on net zero, where the approach is intelligent and measured, rather than headline driven. That is important—the old net zero strategy would not have survived the public reaction. Like the hon. Lady, I vehemently welcome the policy on smoking. We have done far too little for many decades to focus on public health, rather than patching people up in the last three years of their life, which is what our national health service has been reduced to doing. In education, we are building on some of our successes, including in PISA—the programme for international student assessment—and our international competitiveness. There is much to recommend in the proposals in the King’s Speech, particularly with respect to apprenticeships and vocational education. The Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education is brilliant and is making a great difference.

Broadly, the proposals are sensible, but the House would be surprised and disappointed if I did not find something to criticise in the Home Office proposals. I will not surprise the House—I am going to pick up on something that I think is a fundamental mistake. I hope that Ministers will think hard before they introduce the proposal, which has been aired in briefings in the last day or two, to allow the police to search homes without a warrant. This is one of the fundamental foundation stones of a free British society, along with jury trials and the presumption of innocence. The right not to have the state kick your door down and search your house without judicial approval is a massively important British value. If anybody has any doubt about that, I have two words to say to them: “Damian Green”. They should go back and look at what happened with the Metropolitan police’s handling of the case, as it were, of my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green). The Leader of the Opposition was then the Director of Public Prosecutions, and he in effect struck down the Metropolitan police’s behaviour. We have to think about that very hard indeed, because the judicial control of the police is vital and must be preserved.

Beyond that, the education measures are good as far as they go—as I have said, particularly on skills—but I would go further, as I will explain in a moment. Indeed, all King’s Speeches are basically just frameworks, not the whole agenda for the coming year, and this one is the same. As a result, the last line of every King’s Speech is always the same:

“other measures will be laid before you.”

I want to talk about what I think those other measures ought to be.

What should those measures be? I think most of them should be in areas where the state is struggling to cope with the worldwide problem I have talked about arising over the last 30 years. By the way, it is not an accident that I say “30 years”; that covers Governments of both persuasions, and neither have managed—in some cases, I might say they have failed—to solve the things I am going to talk about. The one advantage we have when it comes to the problems I am about to lay out in education, health and housing—the three critical areas on which we need to go further—is that for the first two, technology may come to our aid to some extent. I, like the Public Accounts Committee Chairman, welcome the move on AI. I thought it was quite risky to have that conference, but it worked diplomatically. It has not got a solution yet, but that has got us on the first step.

Let me talk about health for a second. All parties have taken the approach for my entire lifetime, which is much the same as the lifetime of the health service, of putting more and more money into the health service. We are now talking about a huge amount of money; it swallows the entire amount of national insurance contributions, and what was supposed to cover health and pensions now simply covers health. We spend more money than the OECD average on health—that in itself is quite extraordinary—but it does not deliver. We can put all sorts of excuses in the way, but this is more about management than it is about money. Before we got to covid, from 2017-18 to 2018-19 we put about £3 billion extra into health in real terms—and what happened? Productivity went down by 0.75%. The next year, we put in £7 billion, and productivity went down by over 2%. That was before covid started.

Those dry numbers sound bad, but they do not quite carry the terror of the actual effect, and I am going to give an example from my own constituency to explain what I mean. I had a constituent whose name was Richard. He had had cancer, and had been operated on and cured, and as a result he had regular six-monthly check-ups thereafter to watch for any outbreak. But through administrative failure, he did not get the check-ups, so was at least six months behind the timetable. We all know that the later we diagnose a cancer, the more difficult it is to solve. The operation he was supposed to have was then delayed as well, and it got to the point where basically there was no chance of recovery for Richard. He came into my life, as it were, as I was his constituency MP and his family wanted him out of hospital for Christmas so that he could die among his friends and family rather than surrounded by strangers. That is what we are talking about thousands and thousands of times over. That is the impact of this failure. I think there are a lot of things we can with respect to the re-management of the health service, but I will talk about one.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Is my right hon. Friend aware that the Office for National Statistics published figures for the three years from 2020 to 2022, which state that public service productivity in general fell by an unprecedented 7.5%? That means that we needed to put roughly £30 billion extra into public services to achieve the same thing.

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is right: it is a systemic problem. It does not just affect Britain or the health service. Indeed, I think that numbers for those years for the health service were about 25%—so huge, huge numbers. I bring this back to the reality of the individual. If we delay diagnosis and treatment, we sentence people to death. It is as harsh as that.

I would like us dramatically to increase the amount of diagnostic capacity we have. If we look at OECD numbers on CT scans, I think we are third from worst. This is why I say it is not a single Government problem—we do not get to be third from worst in one term; it happened over the course of the whole 30 years. On MRI scans, we are the worst in the OECD. How on earth a country such as ours gets to that position is astonishing.

Debate on the Address

Debate between David Davis and John Redwood

Tuesday 10th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

The right hon. Gentleman is exactly right. If we increase national insurance for a large part of the population, and so increase their suffering and their inability to eat and to heat their house at the same time, but drop income tax one year before an election, I am afraid that would be seen in the working men’s clubs of Yorkshire as a cynical deployment of state power. I suspect it would be the same in Belfast and the rest of Northern Ireland, where, as we have heard already, the problem is even bigger than in the rest of the United Kingdom. He is right, and that is why we should give the people their money back now. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood)—

[John Redwood]

rose—

[Mr Davis]

I was about to quote my right hon. Friend; I give way to him.

[John Redwood]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that as there will be a big windfall element from extra North sea oil and gas taxation—there is already a double corporation tax windfall element, and there will be a big increase in VAT on domestic heating and a big increase in tax on pump diesel and pump petrol—that money, at least, should be given back through other tax bills?

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is right. He has been the icebreaker in this argument, which I refer to as the Redwood argument. We have record tax collections this year because of fiscal drag and for a variety of other reasons, including underestimates by the Treasury. That is money that we should give back to the people. We do not need to balance the budgets twice over. We need to get that right.

There are respects in which we need to reinforce or increase what is in the Queen’s Speech. My favourite line in the Queen’s Speech is the same every year:

“Other measures will be laid before you.”

We are Conservatives. We believe in a property-owning democracy. Governments of all powers and all persuasions for 30 or more years—since Margaret Thatcher, in truth —have failed on that issue. Two thirds of my generation bought their own home; today it is a quarter. That is a scandal. I approve of the Prime Minister talking about the right to buy for housing associations—I should do; I first came up with the policy in 2002 when it was my responsibility, and we still have not implemented that policy. However, it will not solve the problem. We are at least a million houses short, in a period in which the population has increased by 7 million. We are about 100,000 houses a year short in what we are constructing, in addition to that million.

We need to find a way of addressing the issue that does not hit what people call the nimby problem, in which people, when objecting to things, talk about protecting their environment. We need to find a way around that, and we need to look very hard at what was done in the 1920s with garden villages and garden towns. We need to use the increased wealth that they create to pay for the community centres, surgeries, schools, roads and wi-fi that are necessary. There would be plenty of added value to make the farmers rich at the same time. Politically, it would not be straightforward, but it would be an easier policy than we might think.

We Conservatives are also believers in social mobility. I think all Members are believers in social mobility. We used to be the best on that in the developed world; now we are among the worst. When inequality is greater, social mobility is more important. Indeed, the only real moral argument for an unequal society is that everybody has an opportunity and a chance to take part. In the last 20 years or so, the top 1% of the population have roughly trebled their income whereas the median has roughly flatlined, so there is a stronger argument for social mobility today than there was before.

The best mechanism for social mobility is the education system, and there are some good proposals in the education Bill in the Queen’s Speech. Adding to the academy system will help at the margins, however, and will not solve the problem; it has not solved it for the last 20 years and it will not solve it now.

The great scandal is that half of children from free school meals families are failed by the education system by the time that they are 11. They cannot meet the requirements in English or mathematics to make progress in education, so their lives are effectively over in terms of social mobility at that point. We need to get a grip of that, which means re-engineering our classrooms and helping our brilliant teachers with more artificial intelligence, more software support and more augmentation. The technology is there now—it exists, it is proven and it is available. I hope that the House will not laugh too much when I say that I went to see it demonstrated at Eton of all places, where it was brilliant at bringing on the weakest children.

Extradition (Provisional Arrest) Bill [Lords]

Debate between David Davis and John Redwood

Report stage & Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is right on several counts, and I will elaborate on the unfairness in a second, but he is right also to highlight something else, which is that international rules-based systems work only if everyone sees them treating all countries and their citizens identically. If they do not do that, they fall down. An American exceptionalist approach, therefore, destroys the systems we are trying to uphold. So there is an interesting philosophical point in his intervention, as well as the moral one that I will major on.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend confirm that when these measures came in quite a number of us on the Opposition Benches were uneasy about the asymmetry and unfairness? It is good to see him reviewing the matter at this late stage.

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right, and I was one of those, although at that time I was not allowed to say so. It was not the first time I have been overruled by my boss, and it will not be the last.

Since 2007, the United Kingdom has surrendered 135 UK nationals to the United States, 99 of them for non-violent offences. Over the whole period of the Act, 80% of the offences have been non-violent. So much for terrorism, murder and paedophilia! To put it another way, there have been only three violent offences per year requiring extradition to the United States.

The US deliberately uses its extradition arrangements to cast a wide legal net around the business world, seeking to be judge, jury and executioner for global commercial deals and aims. The Home Affairs Select Committee’s 2012 reported concluded that the United States

“has the power to reach out around the world and—provided there is a very, very tenuous connection with the US—it generally has the power to prosecute.”

Or as the distinguished extradition lawyer, Robert Dougans, puts it:

“The Department of Justice effectively uses criminal extradition as a lever for US interests in commercial matters, which is not what it is for.”

This has been shown in case after case, such as those of Ian Norris, the chairman of Morgan Crucible; the NatWest three; Christopher Tappin; and a number of others, including, most recently, Dr Mike Lynch.

How does it work? Once a person extradited from the UK arrives in the US, they are treated as guilty from the moment they land. They face invasive strip searches—that is exactly how it sounds—and they are electronically tagged. They are kept in appalling conditions completely alien to the British justice system. They are shackled and perp-walked into and out of court in front of television cameras and paparazzi, so that the US Department of Justice can claim a PR victory at the expense of the presumption of innocence.

Some of the people extradited sit in court facing allegations dressed head to toe in orange prison garb. They are then faced with enormous pressure from the US authorities to agree to a plea bargain. They are told that if they plead innocent they will face decades in these appalling conditions but if they plead guilty they will face a much lighter sentence in an open prison, with possibly half of it served back here in the UK. As the case is held in America, very often witnesses from the UK will not appear, because they themselves fear incarceration. That has certainly happened in some current cases. A massive 97% of cases are settled by plea in the United States. For a foreigner, unprotected by the US constitution, that is not a justice system; it is a very effective but not at all fair prosecution system. It is not justice.

Much of this would be better if the accused were tried in Britain, completely sidelining the need to extradite at all. The NatWest three, for example, were British citizens and their alleged crime was in Britain against a British company; at worst, they should have been tried in front of a British court, but the British authorities did not see them as having a case to answer. However, the extradition treaty does not recognise this. Anyone caught in this system faces an asymmetric and unbalanced treaty process. Unlike in the US, a person in the UK has no right to insist on probable cause before being extradited. The 2011 Joint Committee on Human Rights report called this a lack of reciprocity in the treaty, and it has resulted in the US surrendering only 11 individuals to the United Kingdom since 2007, while 135 have gone the other way. Since the United States is roughly five times bigger than the UK, this is an effective disparity of 50 in risk of extradition.