Extremism Definition and Community Engagement

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State said in his statement:

“Our definition draws on the work of Dame Sara Khan, the Government’s independent reviewer of social cohesion, and Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, before his appointment to that post.”.

In our report on the policing of protests, the Home Affairs Committee said:

“We find it surprising that the Government has not yet responded to the reports it commissioned from the Commission for Countering Extremism regarding hateful extremism, particularly the report ‘Operating with Impunity’ by Dame Sara Khan and Sir Mark Rowley. Sir John Saunders in his report in 2023 rightly said that the Home Office should respond as a matter of urgency.”

With this policy moving from the Home Office to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, has the Secretary of State had any conversations with the Home Office about whether there will be a full response to Dame Sara Khan’s report? How will this new definition affect the policing of protests?

[Michael Gove]

The Chair of the Home Affairs Committee makes some very important points. I had the opportunity to meet Dame Sara and Sir Mark to discuss our work on this new definition and, of course, I have worked very closely with the Home Secretary and, particularly, the Security Minister on framing the definition.

As the right hon. Lady will be aware, work in this space is shared between my Department and the Home Office, which is responsible for security and for supporting the police. We are responsible for funding community organisations and encouraging a greater degree of social cohesion and resilience. There will be further responses to some of the recommendations in that report, and indeed in Lord Walney’s report and Dame Sara’s additional report, which is forthcoming. I hope that, alongside the Home Secretary, I will have the opportunity to share further detail in the weeks ahead.

Oral Answers to Questions

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Yes, those residents absolutely do have somewhere to go. My hon. Friend, the excellent Member of Parliament for Carshalton and Wallington, stands up not just for his constituents, but for the most vulnerable in society, with clarity and moral authority. Our legislation will make sure that Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing and, indeed, Liberal Democrat-led Sutton Council are held to account for any failures.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Michael Gove)]

Last Thursday, I was privileged to be invited to join a meeting chaired by the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary at which we heard from the Community Security Trust about the deeply unfortunate rise in antisemitic incidents following the terrorist attack that we marked at the start of today’s sitting. The increase in antisemitic incidents recorded by the Community Security Trust and its partner, Tell MAMA, is 494%. It is a melancholy trend, and I know that everyone in this House will join me in doing everything we can to defeat antisemitism and to promote peace and justice.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I welcome the comments that the Secretary of State has just made, but may I take him to task about some of the comments that he made earlier? He talked about having conversations with Hull City Council about transport. This comes after the Government’s decade-long refusal to back the electrification of a line to Hull. It also comes after the exclusion of the northern Mayors in the decision to scrap the northern leg of HS2. Why should any of the people in Hull and East Riding—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Topicals should be short and sweet. The right hon. Lady should just finish her question very quickly.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

Why should the people of Hull and East Yorkshire trust what this Government ever say?

[Michael Gove]

I am a huge fan of the right hon. Lady. The proof of the pudding will be in the continued engagement that we have with the people of Hull and, indeed, with their Liberal Democrat council.

Voter ID

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 27th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Maclean]

I have not obfuscated or ignored the point. I have been clear that the data on people who are turned away and who later return to the polling station with accepted ID will be recorded by a polling clerk or a presiding officer at the issuing desk. As has been discussed many times in this House, with the arguments rehearsed by many hon. Members, the greeters outside the polling station have an important role to play. However, I am sure that hon. Members can appreciate that, if someone decides not to exercise the right to vote, in a free and democratic society it is not for an agent of a local authority to ask intrusively why that person decides not to vote.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I wonder whether the Minister can help me with this. Will lower turnout in the local elections next month be regarded by Ministers as a success or a failure in terms of what they are trying to achieve?

[Rachel Maclean]

What the Government are trying to achieve, and what this Conservative Government were elected to do, is to improve public confidence in the process of the exercise of our democracy. I note for the right hon. Lady that, when similar systems have been introduced in other major advanced western democracies, public confidence in the process of voting has gone up. We are an outlier at the moment and we need to bring ourselves into line with accepted practice.

Levelling-up Fund Round 2

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Frazer]

The hon. Lady should look at the technical note, which will be published in due course, to see how the assessments were made.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister and her Department for writing to me at 11.30 pm last night, an hour after the information was released to the press, to tell me that Hull City Council’s transport bid had been rejected. The bid was about Hull being the third most congested city in the country, with people waiting, on average, 73 hours a year in traffic jams. Hull has poor air quality and worse traffic than Bangkok and São Paulo. Will she admit for once that, having rejected Hull for the towns fund, the Government have absolutely no interest in levelling up Hull?

[Lucy Frazer]

The Government are very interested in levelling up Hull. There were more than 500 bids, more than we had in the first round, asking for £8 billion to be spent. Unfortunately, we did not have those funds, so only £2 billion could be allocated.

Oral Answers to Questions

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Stephenson]

I am grateful to the hosts in my hon. Friend’s constituency for the generosity and good will they have shown during the past six months, and I recognise the challenges that can bring. We remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine. For arrivals under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, the £10,500 per person we provide to councils helps to provide support to individuals and families, including in the minority of cases where someone is left without accommodation.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

With the departure of Lord Harrington, who was a Minister in both the Home Office and this Department, will the Minister explain what discussions he has had with the Home Office about how to deal with the potential homelessness of many Ukrainians under the Homes for Ukraine scheme?

[Andrew Stephenson]

I have met the Home Secretary directly since my appointment and I work very closely with the Minister of State, Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove), who is responsible for immigration. We are closely aligned on all these issues.

Homes for Ukraine Scheme

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Eddie Hughes]

One thing we have seen is a tremendous effort by charities and non-governmental organisations who are incredibly well placed to offer the guidance and support that the hon. Lady refers to. On advice for councils, I understand that in Scotland it will be the responsibility of the devolved Assembly to provide that. From the tremendous efforts that I have seen in its work so far, I think that, if that has not already been provided, it will be coming very soon.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

What action has the Department taken following the letter to the Secretary of State last week from 16 refugee and anti-trafficking charities setting out their concerns about the Homes for Ukraine scheme potentially being a Tinder for sex traffickers? We have seen men advertising for Ukrainian wives, and children posting on Facebook. Does the National Crime Agency have a view about the scheme and is it looking at sites such as Vivastreet, which advertises trafficked women—I am particularly worried about Ukrainian trafficked women—for sex? Will the Minister say what exactly the Department is doing?

[Eddie Hughes]

The Government are alive to all the concerns that the right hon. Lady mentions. We are collectively putting in effort to ensure that we close off areas where there are problems. Fundamentally, we are making sure that safety checks are completed at the point that the application is submitted and subsequently that the enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service checks are carried out. Finally, a representative from the council will see the sponsor and the guest to determine whether there are any safeguarding concerns. There are multiple gates through which people will pass in order to maximise the application of safety at all stages.

Ukraine Sponsorship Scheme

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has been working incredibly energetically with her team to provide the basis for such support.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s announcement, and we are grateful to Lord Harrington for having already agreed to appear before the Home Affairs Committee on Wednesday to answer questions.

How assured is the Secretary of State about the visa requirement that is still in place for Ukrainians coming to this country? As the Home Secretary said, 90% of Ukrainians do not have a passport and will therefore have to go to the visa application centres, which have been beset with problems—not opening as often as we want them to, online systems going down, and many other problems. They have struggled to deal with the family visa system for Ukrainian people. How assured is the Secretary of State that this will work, and will be up and running soon?

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee. Lord Harrington and I have been seeking to assure ourselves, with our Home Office colleagues, that the system that will go live from tomorrow and will enable passport holders—although, as the right hon. Lady pointed out, that is not every Ukrainian—to secure rapidly, online, the PDF form to which I referred earlier, will allow them ease of access. It is true that, as the right hon. Lady rightly observed, there have been challenges—I will not go into all the reasons now; she knows them very well—with the operation of our visa application centres, but, as well as setting up the new centre in Arras in northern France to which my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary referred last week, we have expanded opening hours in many other centres. In particular, Warsaw and Rzeszów in Poland, which were previously not open at the weekend because of complicated Polish labour laws, are now fully open. We will update the House continually on the speed and the effectiveness with which the centres are processing applications.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I start by paying tribute to all those who have secured this debate and those who have already spoken so movingly, thoughtfully and powerfully. I say to the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), who opened the debate, how moved I was by what he disclosed about the comments made to him and his family. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Ms Brown) that the solidarity of the House is with the right hon. Gentleman and his family. I also pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) for all her work in this area, over so many years.

Today marks the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, we remember those 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered during the holocaust, alongside millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution and in all subsequent genocides. This Holocaust Memorial Day is as important as ever in marking the memory of those terrible events.

I was reflecting that I visited Auschwitz some years ago with the Holocaust Educational Trust. One of my most striking memories is of the huge piles of luggage, dolls and toys, shoes and other ordinary, mundane items, which were probably those that meant the most to the people who were murdered in that camp. I will always remember that about Auschwitz—the ordinary and mundane alongside the most evil.

The holocaust is fading from lived memory, with the gradual passing of those who suffered and survived and of those in the greatest generation, who fought the Nazis and liberated the camps and Europe. It is up to all of us to ensure that this history and its lessons are never forgotten. I, like many others, pay tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust for the brilliant work that it does, and to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, as well.

After the events of recent years with covid, I look forward to once again meeting Hull’s remaining Jewish ex-servicemen and the community in Hull who gather every Remembrance Sunday to mark these events, and the immense contribution of the Jewish community to our country and to our very survival. As a member of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, I am proud of the work that we do in maintaining the graves of so many Jewish ex-servicemen and women who fell while defending our country.

As we know, we need to be vigilant as there are those who still seek to deny the facts about the holocaust, a form of fake news spread for decades by antisemites, challenging whether the holocaust actually happened or the magnitude of it, and more recently questioning the internationally agreed definition of antisemitism. Remembering what happened in the holocaust is even more important, as we have seen a rise in antisemitism abroad and here in the United Kingdom. The first half of 2021 saw the highest number of antisemitic incidents in a six-month period recorded by the Community Security Trust. It is important that we note the work that trust does, day in, day out, providing security and keeping the people of the Jewish faith safe.

We must ask ourselves, why is that trust still required and why have we failed to combat the pernicious hatred of Jews that lingers, particularly online? Online disinformation often parrots long-standing antisemitic tropes that demonise Jewish people as happened in Germany in the 1930s; now they are spread by digital technology. The right hon. Member for Newark set out some shocking statistics about what can be found on social media platforms. This House must do something about that. Other hon. Members have talked about antisemitic messages around the covid anti-vaxxers, which are sadly too prevalent on social media.

We must be aware of the different forms that antisemitism takes in the United Kingdom. It is no longer just the far right and skinheads trying to sell National Front publications in Brick Lane. Shamefully, in recent years my party allowed the stain of antisemitism to find a home in the party. Under the leadership of the current leader of the Labour party, we are working very hard indeed to combat that.

The horror of the holocaust has reshaped our understanding of international law, human rights and collective security after 1945. We have a responsibility to people throughout the world to protect them from persecution, but I regret to say that we have too often failed. I chair the all-party parliamentary group on human rights, and we are only too well aware of the growing breaches of human rights around the world. We know that too many genocides have been carried out since the holocaust—in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, to name but a few—and we should also be shamed by the current genocide being carried out against the Uyghurs in China, the plight of Christians in some countries, what happened to the Yazidi women, and what is happening now to the women in Afghanistan. Of course, there is also the stain of Islamophobia, which is still around in our communities and institutions and which needs far more attention. It is the “othering” of groups that we need to be vigilant about and take action to tackle, and we need to recognise where that “othering” can lead.

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “One Day”, but we must continue the work to eradicate antisemitism and hatred, in this country and throughout the world. Antisemites, of whatever variety, are invariably the enemies of peace, freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Only by defeating them, and all those who peddle hatred and prejudice, can we live in confidence that we will never see another holocaust.

Oral Answers to Questions

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

Again, I am obliged to my hon. Friend for his question. I will certainly consider the specific points he makes, but that is exactly what we want to do. Through the planning reforms we envisage, we want to ensure that developer contributions are made much more quickly in the process so that the sort of infrastructure he talks about is provided, and to ensure that greater land capture value is collected to ensure that those services can be provided to a greater extent.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

T8. I am sure the Secretary of State will have read the latest report from the all-party parliamentary group on left behind neighbourhoods, which highlighted that there is a cost to the economy of £30 billion due to health inequalities in our poorest areas. Would the Secretary of State be willing to hold a meeting with the authors of the report and the officers of the group to discuss what more needs to be in the White Paper on levelling up around health inequalities?

[Michael Gove]

I absolutely will do that. Although the White Paper will include a number of proposals to help to reduce health inequalities, as Professor Michael Marmot’s report and work—alongside the all-party group’s work—have demonstrated, significant work is required to be done on everything from obesity to cramped housing in order to deal with those issues.

Budget Resolutions

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

After the austerity decade, Brexit and nearly two years of covid, the Budget heralds a vicious spiral of low growth, high tax and a cost of living crisis for the working poor. Most concerning is the laser-like focus on squeezing real incomes by increasing unreformed, regressive taxes such as national insurance and council tax. So the poor are keeping the poor, as George Lansbury would have observed.

From Lord Heseltine’s 2012 report “No stone unturned: in pursuit of growth”, it was clear that we needed to boost UK GDP growth by taking pressure off the congested south-east and regenerating the north. However, nine years after that report, seven years after the northern powerhouse was launched and two years after a general election where levelling up promises were made, Hull and our Humber energy estuary awaits the transformative actions needed to deliver those promises. Sadly, the Budget is no game-changer for Hull, and there is certainly no sign of a London docklands experience for the Humber docklands.

I welcome Hull getting some levelling up funding for city centre sites at Whitefriargate and Albion Square, where retailers suffered so much in the austerity years, but—let us be honest—£19.5 million does not claw back the £131 million of core Government funding removed from Hull City Council between 2010 and 2019. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, said that the poorest areas saw the biggest cuts in those austerity years and, as the all-party parliamentary group on “left behind” neighbourhoods pointed out, what most needs levelling up is social and physical infrastructure outside city centres, such as in Bransholme and Orchard Park in Hull North. I am disappointed that the all-party group’s idea to use nearly £1 billion of dormant assets to create a community wealth fund for such neighbourhoods at no extra cost to the taxpayer has not been taken up. Moreover, there is only a third of the £15 billion education recovery funding that Sir Kevan Collins recommended, a three-year wait to return to 2010 per pupil funding and a cut-down version of Sure Start—certainly not levelling up.

On transport, we heard about £50,000 for a feasibility study on reinstating the Hull-Beverley-York rail line. However, if the Government were truly levelling up the Humber with London, we would see a much bolder plan to revive disused Beeching lines, with perhaps a Humber version of the docklands light railway connecting communities. We still await the integrated rail plan, where we will learn whether our freeport city will get rail electrification within the next 20 years—Ministers blocked it five years ago—whether there will be high-speed rail coast to coast across the north and whether HS2 will have any tangible benefits east of the Pennines. They are essential for levelling up the north.

With the Chancellor congratulating himself so warmly on an economic plan that he says is working so well, we can assume that the Government face not as severe an economic challenge as the 1945 Labour Government, which set up the NHS and the welfare state. Why, then, are they failing to invest in levelling up in the north, and in Hull and the Humber in particular? For the communities that I represent, the Chancellor served a dish with a very large bill but hardly any ingredients.