Child Maintenance Service: Payment Recovery from Absent Parents

Debate between Deidre Brock and Peter Grant

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant]

I agree with that entirely.

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I have a constituent who is owed a substantial sum by an absent father, who lives very comfortably and flies in and out of the UK with no apparent difficulty. The only answer my constituent gets is that the service cannot touch him because it cannot establish a UK address for him. Does my hon. Friend agree that such cases need more than just ministerial hand-wringing, and that concrete action to seize passports or assets could be in order?

Leaving the EU: No Deal

Debate between Deidre Brock and Peter Grant

Wednesday 19th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Deidre Brock]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the first EU referendum was won on a tissue of lies, undeliverable promises and illegalities and that we should undo the rough wooing of the Brexit referendum and rededicate the decision to the people?

[Peter Grant]

There is no doubt at all that the EU referendum, as well as having the biggest participation of UK citizens in any democratic test, was also the most corrupt and most dishonest there has ever been and, I sincerely hope, we will ever see. Revelations are still coming out, even today, about the illegalities, some of which I suspect will never be brought to account. The penalties imposed on those who corrupt the democratic process are puny compared with what happens to a person who is found to have attempted to corrupt the full course of justice, so there is clearly a question that has to be addressed in future legislation.

We know that the calamitous effects of no deal are not what the majority of leave voters voted for.

Seasonal Migrant Workers

Debate between Deidre Brock and Peter Grant

Thursday 1st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Dydd gŵyl Dewi hapus to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to all here. Happy St David’s day—and happy first day of spring, just in case anybody did not notice. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate, and I commend the hon. Member for Angus (Kirstene Hair) for having secured it.

Many years ago—I suspect before some Members here were born—I worked for the Health and Safety Executive, based in Dundee, and I spent quite a lot of time around Angus and Perthshire visiting small local businesses. One thing that struck me then was that in addition to the significant direct employment in fruit growing and fruit processing in places such as Angus, Perthshire and Aberdeenshire, the number of small, family-owned businesses and other trades and professions that rely on agriculture is massive. There are mechanics, engineers, blacksmiths, lawyers, accountants, and haulage contractors, as well as the visible jobs, with people out working in the fields. Effectively, the whole economy of that part of Scotland is underpinned by our soft fruit and produce industry. That is why it is so important to protect it.

Scottish quality fruit and veg now adds £300 million a year to our GDP. It is 10% of our entire agriculture output—almost as much as the much more obvious Scottish farming industries of dairy and sheep farming, for example. Whatever happens with our relationship with the EU and others, I hope that those who rightly take massive pride in producing some of the best fresh fruit and veg in the world will continue to market it under Scotland, the brand, to draw attention to the fact that it is branded as being as good as anything people can get from anywhere else in the world.

I note that in a single year, one growers co-operative, actually based in Angus, reported a loss of income of £660,000, simply because of labour shortages in a single year. That is one co-operative of 18 growers that is not likely to be any different from a lot of others. This industry and this part of our economy is under severe stress and severe threat. As my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) pointed out, it is difficult this year, but if the Government do not act, and act very quickly, next year and the following year could become impossible. This has been an iconic part of Scottish culture for decades, if not centuries, but we could see an end to soft fruit growing in parts of Scotland. I will come on to the UK Government’s response to that potential threat later.

It was reported in The Guardian last summer that a survey by the NFU found that between January and May 2017, farmers in the UK recruited a total of 13,400 workers, 14 of whom were from the United Kingdom—not 14,000 or 1,400, or even 140, but 14 out of almost 13,500 came from the United Kingdom. Other speakers have commented on the complex reasons why it is simply not credible to expect overseas seasonal migrant workers to be replaced by home-grown workers any time in the next 10, 15 or 20 years, and perhaps never at all. The industry will not last that long if we cannot pick the fruit from the fields.

We also have to remember that as well as the potentially disastrous impact on parts of our agriculture sector, the Government’s attitude to immigration—they treat it as numbers to be dragged down at all costs—affects so many other things which, certainly in Scotland and many other parts of the United Kingdom, we should be proud of having built up over the years.

Relative to the size of its population, Scotland possibly has more of the world’s top universities than any other country. Part of the reason for that is the number of overseas students and the number of exceptionally talented and dedicated overseas staff, including research staff and lecturers, who have come here purely as a result of freedom of movement, and who no longer express an interest in coming because they are not sure what their rights will be.

The demands on our NHS and care services are obviously very much in our minds at this time. Those services also rely heavily on incoming workers. I hope that it is not stretching relevance, Madam Deputy Speaker, to give a special mention to a consultant surgeon in Glasgow who this morning walked for three hours in the snow to get to work in Paisley. That is the sort of dedication that we see among NHS workers, regardless of where they have come from.

According to the article from The Guardian that I mentioned earlier—written last year—the director of an employment agency called Hops Labour Solutions, which exists to bring in seasonal workers to support the UK agricultural sector, said:

“The grim reality is that the perception from overseas is we are xenophobic, we’re racist”.

We might take exception to those words—we might like to think that we are not xenophobic or racist—but if that is how we are perceived by even 10% of people who might have been thinking of coming to work in the United Kingdom, we have a problem. It is a sad but undeniable fact that one of the immediate impacts of the vote to leave in the referendum in June 2017 was a massive spike in racist and racially motivated crimes in many part of the UK. Thousands of EU nationals living in the UK have come before Select Committees and told us that they have experienced a significant increase in racially motivated attacks, that they have begun to feel that they are no longer welcome, and that friends who have thought about coming here have been made to feel that they might not be welcome either.

I am not saying that that was one of the Government’s intentions in calling the referendum, and I am certainly not saying that it was the intention of anything like all the 17 million people who voted to leave, but we must face up to the fact that, as one of the consequences of the referendum, a climate or undercurrent has been allowed to develop which makes people from the European Union feel less welcome and less valued than they were before. If the Government continue to ignore or deny that, the problem can only continue to get worse.

The hon. Member for Angus pointed out, very eloquently, that although some parts of our fruit and vegetable growing industry can be mechanised, others cannot at this stage, and it will be several years, if not longer, before that will be possible. Solutions that rely simply on significant investment and mechanism might work in some industries, but they certainly would not work for soft fruit growers.

When we debated the seasonal agricultural workers scheme last year, the then Minister gave an assurance that the scheme could be reintroduced within five to six months if necessary. I suggest that it is now necessary, and that the Government should be seeking to reintroduce the scheme within far less than five to six months if that is at all possible. They clearly accepted that there might be a need to change the bad decision that was made in 2013, and I suggest that the need has now been established.

[Deidre Brock]

At a recent Scottish Affairs Committee meeting in Fife, we heard the views of Jonnie Hall of NFU Scotland on that very issue. He told us how frustratingly difficult he found it to “get traction”, as he put it, with the Home Office to even meet and discuss the union’s suggested solutions for dealing with the looming crisis, including SAWS. Will my hon. Friend join me in calling on Home Office officials to meet representatives of NFUS and other experts in the sector as a matter of urgency to try to find a way out of this Brexit boorach?

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely, and I would extend that to many other areas of activity, whether in private sector industry or in our greatly stressed public services. Home Office officials need to get out of the office and meet the people who work in agriculture, the health and social care services and universities, and hear why their approach to immigration—whether it is immigration on a permanent basis or migration on a temporary basis—is simply wrong.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Deidre Brock and Peter Grant

Wednesday 6th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

9. What recent discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues on devolving powers to Scotland as a result of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

13. What recent discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues on devolving powers to Scotland as a result of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Deidre Brock and Peter Grant

Monday 13th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

7. What assessment he has made of the effect of changes to employment and support allowance work-related activity group payments on claimant poverty.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

12. What assessment he has made of the effect of changes to employment and support allowance work-related activity group payments on claimant poverty.

[The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Sarah Newton)]

There are no cash losers among those in receipt of employment and support allowance and the universal credit equivalent prior to April 2017, including those who temporarily leave ESA to try out work and then return. Since April, new claimants who are capable of preparing for work receive a rate of benefits on a par with jobseeker’s allowance.

UK Nationals in the EU: Rights

Debate between Deidre Brock and Peter Grant

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant]

I absolutely agree, and it is not only Scotland’s exceptional universities that are under threat; every research-based university and institution in the United Kingdom is in danger of losing out because of short-sighted folly.

One thing the debate has demonstrated is the absolute folly of those, particularly on the Tory Benches, who still try to tell us that we could just walk away today without a deal and it would make no difference. What a betrayal that would be of the 4.5 million people who, right now, are worried about whether their basic human rights will be respected: the right to continue to live in the house they already live in, and the right for their children to keep going to the school they already go to and keep playing with the same friends. Those rights are not ours to give and take away; they are rights that people have because they are human beings. For Ministers even to use phrases like “bargaining chips” to deny that they are treating people as such, makes it clear that somewhere, deep down inside, that is part of the thinking.

Every time we have discussed in the Chamber the rights of EU nationals living in the United Kingdom, the chorus of protest from the Conservative Benches has always been, “We are very concerned about the rights of UK citizens and UK nationals living in the European Union.” Today, those Members have been given a full 90-minute debate in which to express those concerns, and where have they all gone? They can turn up in their hundreds in the middle of the night to vote for the process to start removing the rights of those UK nationals, but when it comes to speaking out for them it is another matter. I can understand that some of them had other things to do, but when 320 of them cannot stay for the full 90-minute debate, that tells us more about where their beliefs and values really lie than anything we might say.

It is now six months since the Brexit Secretary told us that reaching an agreement on the rights of nationals in each other’s countries would be

“the first thing on our agenda”.

He went on to say:

“I would hope that we would get some agreement in principle very, very soon, as soon as the negotiation process starts.”

We are now a third of the way through that negotiation process, and the Library, in analysing the joint technical note of 31 August 2017, has indicated that there are five areas on which agreement is close and 20 on which it is nowhere near. In other words, in one third of the available negotiating time the progress on our No. 1 priority is that 80% of it is nowhere close to being agreed. That is what happens when human beings are used as bargaining chips instead of saying, right at the beginning, “This is what we’re going to do because it’s the right thing to do.”

We should never forget that the position of the UK Government in relation to the two sets of citizens is very different: we can ask other people to respect the rights of UK nationals living overseas, but we can absolutely guarantee the rights of non-UK nationals living here. Once again, I repeat the call for the UK Government to do that, not because it might make the Europeans do something we want them to do but because morally it is the only acceptable course of action.

The debate should have concluded on 24 June. The reason it has not is that the Government’s obsession with being seen to get hard on immigration has got to the point where any price, but any price, is worth paying. The economic price of losing our membership of the single market will likely be counted in hundreds of thousands of jobs and losses of tens—possibly hundreds—of billions of pounds to our economy.

[Deidre Brock]

My hon. Friend will be aware that the insurance giant, Chubb, is just one of the latest large companies to announce plans to move their headquarters from London—to Paris, in this instance—after Brexit. Would he consider it likely that those EU nationals who can still come to the UK—and still want to—might not have jobs to come to?

[Peter Grant]

It is not just that they might not have jobs to come to; the question is why on earth they would want to come when they look at the welcome they get from a leaked Government draft proposal that wants to start discriminating against people depending on the letters after their name, or when they have seen the unbridled joy on the faces of Government supporters when it was announced that every week since the referendum has seen a reduction of 1,000 in net migration from the European Union. In other words, the Government’s message to EU nationals is, “We are going to say that you’re welcome, but we’re actually happy that every week 1,000 people just like you have given up on the UK and gone to live somewhere else because they no longer feel they have a welcome future on these islands.” That should make us all feel utterly ashamed.

At its heart, the European Union was set up primarily as a trade union, an economic union. It is described as a political union, which it clearly is not. Fundamentally and most importantly, the European Union is now a social union, about the ever closer union of the peoples of Europe. Who could possibly want to see further division between those peoples? Union between the peoples of Europe should be what we all strive for. The hon. Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin) hit the nail on the head perfectly in the first few minutes of her speech—and, indeed, in the rest of it. We have spent far too long talking about constitutions and politics, quotas and legislations, and not enough talking about human beings. Today, we are talking particularly about the plight of well over a million human beings who just happen to have birth certificates that say they were born in these islands. Their rights are important, as are those of the 3 million people who live here but were born elsewhere, and those of the 60 million people who will have to cope with the aftermath of this mess, long after some of us are no longer here.

I hope that there is still time for the Government to wake up to the folly of what they are doing. It is not too late for them to say, “We have messed up completely; the only way to get out of this mess is to agree to remain in the single market and to agree that the free movement of citizens between the nations of Europe should continue in perpetuity”.

Business of the House

Debate between Deidre Brock and Peter Grant

Thursday 26th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful for that point. It is never a good idea to speculate about court cases here, especially if people have as little legal training as me, but those factors may well come back to haunt the Government in a big way.

The Prime Minister has given herself a political imperative to implement article 50 by 31 March.

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

Further to the point made by the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle), will my hon. Friend join me in taking the opportunity to thank the democracy campaigners, particularly Gina Miller? Their actions and the interventions of the courts have meant that a Prime Minister who sought to ignore Parliament and treat the powers entrusted to her as an absolute privilege has been brought back into some sort of line. The campaigners’ contribution will have long-lasting effects on this issue and others.

[Peter Grant]

I concur with my hon. Friend’s comments. It is in extremely bad taste for anyone to bad-mouth the motivation of someone who has just won a court case. Someone who has won a case in the High Court and the Supreme Court was by definition right to bring it. The treatment that Gina Miller got after the High Court case was utterly shameful and I hope that there will be no repetition of it.

To come back to the matter in hand, I would like the Government to explain why they have taken this unusual procedural step today. Why is the Bill, possibly the shortest Bill we will consider during the Session, expected to attract so many amendments that the Clerks need extra time to collect them all?