Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

7. What assessment he has made of the effect of prisoners participating in sporting activities on improving rehabilitation rates.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

14. What assessment he has made of the effect of prisoners participating in sporting activities on improving rehabilitation rates.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Dr Phillip Lee)]

There is strong evidence that physical education and sport improve the wellbeing and motivation of those in custody and ex-offenders in the community. Both improve their prospects of successful resettlement.

[Dr Lee]

Yes, I do. I hope that every Member would agree. I have commissioned Professor Rosie Meek of Royal Holloway to compile a report on the impact of sport on offenders in custody and in the community so that I can get a complete picture of what I think are the positive benefits. I look forward to her report being published in the new year.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

What is the purpose of prison? Is it punishment or rehabilitation?

[Dr Lee]

The purpose of prison is to play its part in reducing crime. That is the fundamental challenge that our Department and the Home Office face, and I believe that sports clubs can play a part. For example, the Saracens project with Feltham young offenders institution has a recidivism rate in its small pilot of about 10%, which compares very favourably to the overall rate.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 21st November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir William Cash]

The Supreme Court would be applying the European interpretation in that context, and I simply say that it will involve disapplication of law. It is a matter not of assertion but of fact and law that that is precisely what will happen.

I urge my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield and others not to press their amendments on the charter, because to do so would be totally unacceptable. I refer to what I have alluded to already: the principle set out by Lord Justice Bingham in chapter 12 of his magisterial book on “The Rule of Law and the Sovereignty of Parliament?”, in which he publicly criticised the attitude of Baroness Hale, now President of the Supreme Court, and Lord Hope of Craighead in suggesting that the courts have constitutional authority, as against an Act of Parliament. With respect to the whole question of parliamentary sovereignty and the issue of the courts, he says that various remarks had been made but:

“No authority was cited to support them, and no detailed reasons were given.

I cannot for my part accept that my colleagues’ observations are correct... To my mind, it has been convincingly shown”—

by Professor Goldsworthy, one of the greatest authorities on this subject—

“that the principle of parliamentary sovereignty has been recognised as fundamental in this country not because the judges invented it but because it has for centuries been accepted as such by judges and others officially concerned in the operation of our constitutional system. The judges did not by themselves establish the principle and they cannot by themselves change it… What is at stake”—

said Professor Goldsworthy—

“is the location of ultimate decision-making authority… If the judges were to repudiate the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, by refusing to allow Parliament to infringe on unwritten rights, they would be claiming that ultimate authority for themselves.”

Moreover, Lord Bingham went on to say that they would then be transferring the rights of Parliament to judges:

“It would be a transfer of power initiated by the judges, to protect rights chosen by them, rather than one brought about democratically by parliamentary enactment or popular referendum.”

With some irony, the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law has put some of the contrary arguments.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making some excellent points about parliamentary sovereignty, but I am not sure the point has yet been made that there has been a cosy consensus in this debate so far that everything about European human rights is wonderful and that we want to transfer those European human rights into our own law. Actually, many of us think that the advancement of European so-called human rights has been to the detriment of the rights of other people, particularly religious people, to find their own space, because European equality laws trump all other laws. When we regain parliamentary sovereignty, in this House and through our democracy, we can start asserting real human rights.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 14th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Dominic Raab)]

It is a great privilege and pleasure to speak on behalf of the Government on this essential Bill, and particularly on clause 6 and the various amendments proposed to it. The Bill is complex, but at root it boils down to achieving two basic but fundamental objectives, which it is worth bearing in mind as we consider the clause and amendments.

The first is that we are delivering on the referendum by taking back control over our laws, which is a major opportunity; that was the No. 1 reason why people voted to leave the EU in the referendum. The second thing that the Bill does is make sure there is legal certainty, with a smooth transition for citizens and businesses, mitigating one of the key risks of Brexit, which I believe is felt by people whether they voted leave or remain.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

It is essential that the Supreme Court has certainty. The first part of clause 6(2) is admirably clear:

“A court or tribunal need not have regard to anything done on or after exit day by the European Court”.

Why then have the Government included the following phrase at the end of the provision:

“but may do so if it considers it appropriate to do so”?

I think Lord Neuberger has a point, and I give the Minister an opportunity to make the Government’s position clear.

[Dominic Raab]

I thank my hon. Friend for that, and I shall come to that point a little later. The basic point that I respectfully make to the House at the outset is that the various clauses and amendments should be judged according to those basic strategic objectives: taking back control over our laws and making sure that there is a smooth legal transition, which I believe is my hon. Friend’s point.

Clause 6 serves both objectives. It sets out how, once we have taken back control over EU law, retained EU law should be interpreted on and after exit day. It makes it clear that once the UK leaves the EU, domestic courts will not be able to refer cases to the European Court—an affirmation of the supremacy of our own courts and our own legal order.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Edward Leigh Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Our greatest parliamentary exponent of parliamentary democracy coined the phrase, “In Victory: Magnanimity.” Although, as one or two of my friends know, I am a leaver and my constituency voted 60% to leave, I think that that should be the Government’s approach, both to Parliament in the Chamber and to our European partners and allies. I do not think that it is enough just to allow time on a rainy Thursday on a one-line Whip. The Government should be as generous as possible with time, to allow the House to consider these matters. Personally, I do not see why we could not have three or four days on the Bill, as many people have put in a request to speak. After all, we spend a lot of our time discussing not very much. I would be open-hearted and generous with Parliament.

Before I refer specifically to the Bill, may I say by way of introduction that it would be useful to improve the atmosphere around the process? The truth is that this is a democratic process. Those of us who asked to leave the European Union made our arguments on the basis that we wanted to improve parliamentary democracy and put our people back in charge. That should be our whole approach, and it should be the Government’s approach.

To put that in context, I would be open-hearted and generous in the negotiations between Monsieur Barnier and the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. The important thing is that we are leaving, but I do not see why we should not be generous with the financial settlement. We should be as generous as the law dictates, but there is also the spirit of the law. As we have been in an organisation for 42 years, and as we have decided to leave—it has its own spending plans—I do not see why we should not assist it with some of its spending plans until 2021. After all, if we pay less, others will have to pay more. Some of my closest friends do not agree with that. We have the law on our side, but precisely because of that we can be generous.

On the rights of citizens, I have just spent time with Italian Senators who are visiting the building, and with the Italian ambassador. We need to be open-hearted and generous towards European citizens who live here, and proclaim now that we are absolutely committed to preserving their rights and those of every EU citizen, on benefits—[Interruption.] I know that we have done it, but we should keep repeating that we are determined to protect those rights. We should be open-hearted and generous in dealing with the House of Commons, in dealing with money, and in dealing with the rights of EU citizens. If we approach life and these negotiations in that spirit, doors might begin to open.

I listened to the shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union—a brilliant lawyer. We are both lawyers. I am just a jobbing barrister doing criminal law in London. That is what I did when I was a young man. I cannot possibly match his debating skills. He does have a point, and we Conservatives should recognise that. My right hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) has a point; the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) has a point; my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) has a point. I will, of course, vote for the Bill, because that is what the people want me to do, and it is what my constituents want me to do. There is no alternative, but amendments will be tabled when we are sitting in a Committee of the whole House. I serve on the Panel of Chairs, and I know the Government’s position is always to reject all amendments. This time, they should be positive if something improves parliamentary scrutiny. We are going to get our way; the Government have a majority, supported by the Democratic Unionist party. We should be generous with our Scottish friends. If they have a genuine desire to ensure that powers from the EU do not come to the Westminster Parliament but go to the Scottish Parliament, we should be generous towards them.

There is a lot of false anger. I have sat through many debates in which shadow Secretaries of State puffed themselves up. We have heard a lot about Henry VIII. When I was a rebel I used to care about these things. Now I am a loyalist I let the Government get away with it in many ways. Henry VIII is a bastard, but he is my kind of bastard.

I have made my point. Listen to the House, accept some amendments and ensure that this process is time limited. The key thing for our constituents is this: that we leave the EU at the end of March 2019; that any implementation period lasts only two years; and that we then become an open, free-trading nation with the whole world, with a free trade agreement with the EU. Stick to the essentials, be confident, be generous with the House and we will win this battle.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Bone]

Not for a moment, because on this particular point I think I am right: it is called the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill. I remember introducing a number of such Bills, or certainly speaking in favour of a lot of them. At that time, they were rather dismissed by the Government and we did not make much progress, so if I have an opportunity to support a Government Bill called the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, as I do tonight, then I am going to take it, and I hope other Members do too. What the Bill primarily does is end European Union legislation and control over this House when we leave, while the second bit incorporates all EU laws into our laws—“retained EU law”, it is called. It is quite right that in future we should look at all those laws and decide whether to improve, reject or keep them, but there has to be a mechanism when we come out to have all those laws in place or chaos will occur.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) raised a very important point in his intervention that has to be dealt with clearly on the Floor of the House. Personally, I am in favour of any compromise—any triage process, as suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) and others—but on this point my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) must be wrong. The House has a right and the powers, and historically it has been able to reject delegated legislation—otherwise what sort of Parliament are we in?—so he is making a wrong point.

Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

We are working very closely with the Home Office on criminal justice co-operation, and we want to secure a good deal, but it is important that we all get behind what the British people voted for and get a secure deal with the European Union.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

11. Brexit will, in a new, deregulated environment, provide a great opportunity for legal services, but what plans do the Government have to support our legal services abroad after Brexit?

[Elizabeth Truss]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; four of the 10 top global legal firms are based here in the UK. We have huge opportunities to promote English law and Scots law, and we are working on a global Britain legal summit to bring together leading figures in the industry to promote what we do overseas.

Prisons

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon]

I need to make some progress.

Nearly all these problems stem from the axing of a quarter of prison staff since 2010. The Justice Secretary’s colleague, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), asked her yesterday at Justice questions whether she thought that cut was wise. She did not answer; she has the opportunity to answer today.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

That is fine; I stand by that—we all want more prison officers. Presumably the hon. Gentleman can now commit himself to a future Labour Government recruiting all these officers, can he?

Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

The hon. Lady makes a good point about the process whereby community rehabilitation companies have to justify the grounds for recall to officials in the National Offender Management Service before going ahead. Where officials do not find grounds for recall, they will then challenge the community rehabilitation companies. It is important to recognise that sometimes recalling an offender who is in breach of their licence allows the offender manager to put in place the appropriate mechanisms to manage them in the community.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

4. What steps the Government is taking to support prison staff in maintaining order.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Elizabeth Truss)]

We are recruiting an extra 2,500 prison officers and rolling out new body-worn cameras. We are also empowering governors and providing extra funding to enhance the physical security of the prison estate.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

To be fair to the Government, I appreciate that prison violence has been a problem for decades. I remember being a PPS 28 years ago when the Home Secretary was coping with a prison riot. But was it really wise to cut the number of prison officers by a quarter in the last six years, given these problems?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I should be delighted to have a conversation with my hon. Friend about his experience looking at these issues. He is absolutely right that they have been a problem for a number of years, and it will take time to build up the front line and recruit those 2,500 additional officers. We have recently faced new challenges, with psychoactive substances, drones and mobile phones. We are taking action to deal with those, but it is vital that we have the staff on the front line who can both reform offenders and keep our prisons safe.

Policing and Crime Bill

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

Absolutely. I agree with the hon. Gentleman. That point was also raised by the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, and I am sure that the Minister will also put forward an argument for putting in place a means of making those measurements.

Having said all that, I am curious about the lateness of the arrival of the new clauses. The Minister referred positively to the consensus in Committee and to the ability of both sides to help each other out to make progress on the Bill. I commend the shadow Fire Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), for arguing for a provision to assess the ability of the fire service to carry out its functions. To the Minister’s credit, he has now tabled the new clause and the new schedule to address that issue.

I mentioned in an intervention my curiosity about whether the Government had considered the United Kingdom Accreditation Service as a potential vehicle to carry out the function that is being proposed here. The Minister knows that I had 23 years in the fire service, 13 of which were spent as an operational firefighter, and I participated in drills in the fire station as set out by Her Majesty’s inspectorate. I have to question the value of those drills, because we would train for weeks to get them right but they still did not always go entirely right. I question the value of putting in that amount of rehearsal. I wonder whether all that practice actually made the whole exercise worthless.

We decided to abolish Her Majesty’s inspectorate because of the scepticism and cynicism surrounding it—the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst referred to an old boys’ network earlier—and I would have hoped that the Government would now be proposing something new. However, they seem to be proposing a re creation of what went before. Having moved it to the Department for Communities and Local Government and then back to the Home Office, there seems to be replication so that, along with Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons, we will now have Her Majesty’s inspectorate of fire services.

I look forward to hearing more from the Minister and to listening to the debates in the other place, where I suspect the Bill will get more scrutiny than it has in this place. Public confidence in the fire service is high and has always been high, but the fire service needs professional underpinning and validation not only for public confidence and value for money, but for the safety of firefighters who put themselves on the frontline to protect the public. I look forward to a more extensive debate when the Bill goes to the other place, and to some comments from the Minister when he sums up. This is a positive step forward, but we need to make sure that the fire service can demonstrate to its own satisfaction, to our satisfaction and to that of the public that it is equipped, resourced and able to do the job we all admire it for doing and want it to carry on doing in the future.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

May I first apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker? Although I was in the Chamber for the Minister’s opening speech, I had to chair a Delegated Legislation Committee—you were kind enough to put me on the Panel of Chairs—so I am sorry that I have not been present for the whole of this debate.

I want to speak to new clause 23, which was so ably introduced by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier). I understand that it will not be pushed to a vote, that there will be a review in relation to PACE and that the Minister has listened carefully to all the arguments that have been made. If we are to have a review, there is an opportunity—I will use my brief remarks to talk about it—to have a debate in this country about face coverings generally. Many people in our country feel that it is quite un-British, and is not necessary for any reason, except in exceptional circumstances.

I do not want to suggest that we should take heavy-handed, universal action to prevent people from covering their face in this country, because that is also in a sense un-British. Fundamentally, as a nation, we actually believe in the freedom of people to live their lives in the way that, for whatever reason, they want, so long as they do not alarm or intimidate others. I know that other countries—for example, France and I believe Belgium, which are perfectly moderate, sensible, freedom-loving countries—have decided to ban face coverings in public, but we probably do not want to proceed in that way in this country.

If we are to have a review, I believe that this is an opportunity to have a debate. I certainly join my hon. Friends who have expressed concern about certain situations in which people feel intimidated, such as in the environs of a hunt, an animal research laboratory, or a demonstration outside Parliament. People are of course entitled to demonstrate—nobody is denying that—but it is very intimidating for the police and the public to see people engaged in demonstrations with any kind of face covering.

I understand that it is perfectly possible under present arrangements for the authorities to issue written instructions so that a police constable can require people to remove their face coverings and all the rest of it, but I would like us to go further. I suggest that the way to deal with this problem is to say—in a particular situation that might be threatening, intimidatory, violent or confrontational on both sides—there should certainly be a right for a police constable to require somebody to remove a face covering. It should be possible for a chief constable to have such a right, as well as to lay down general prohibitions against face coverings.

It should also be possible—there should be a public debate about this, because I know that there are different points of view—for the Home Secretary to issue a ban against face coverings in certain situations or in particularly sensitive geographical places, such as the central areas of the cities of London and Westminster, the central part of our capital city, which is sensitive for all sorts of reasons, or in hospitals, schools, law courts and doctors’ surgeries. I know not everybody in the House will agree, but many members of the public are concerned about this.

European Convention on Human Rights

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

The hon. Gentleman has made his point very well. However, I am concentrating on what the Home Secretary said. She seemed to be announcing a Government policy that the United Kingdom should leave the convention but stay in the EU. Her speech led to an urgent question, which was granted by Mr Speaker, and I—and other people who were present on that occasion—could not understand how we were going to be able to deliver the Home Secretary’s agenda on human rights if we remained in the European Union and subject to the EU charter of fundamental rights.

Questions were raised by Members during those exchanges, and it became clear that the Home Secretary—and, indeed, the Government—were indeed rather muddled about this. One of the questions that was asked was whether membership of the European Union required us to be a party to the European convention on human rights. The Home Secretary was not answering the urgent question. The Attorney General answered, as a Law Officer. He said:

“It is not…in any way clear that membership of the European Union requires membership of the European convention on human rights…there are considerable legal complexities”.—[Official Report, 26 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 1291.]

My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) then cited article 6.3 of the treaty on European Union, which states:

“Fundamental rights, as guaranteed by the European Convention…shall constitute general principles of the Union’s law.”

He went on to refer to the fact that the Commission had said that any member country of the European Union that sought to disengage from the European convention on human rights might have its voting rights suspended.

Then, as so often happens in this House, my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) asked a really pertinent question. He said:

“Can a country remain in the European Union and still come out of the convention? What is his legal opinion on that?”

The Attorney General replied:

“As I have suggested, the legal position is not clear.”

He went on to say that he did not

“have the time to go into all the ins and outs of that particular question now, but I suggest it would also be wrong to say that it is clear in the opposite direction.”—[Official Report, 26 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 1301.]

So that was what the Government were saying about this particular matter.

This morning, I heard the Prime Minister chiding Brexiteers for having no clear comprehensive plan for life outside the EU, but that was a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. As I have just said, the Prime Minister and the Government have no clear plan for life inside the European Union if there is a remain vote on 23 June. They do not know what will happen to their human rights agenda. There are many other examples beyond that.

It is a failure by the Government not to address this issue up front, and to leave it hanging in the air pending the referendum. We have had some quite clear advice from lawyers of great distinction. For example, Lord Woolf said:

“You can legally reconcile the doctrine of the sovereignty of Parliament with the European Convention on Human Rights. You cannot do that with regard to the European Charter, because the position there is that you can trump a statute.”

Lord Woolf was being quoted there in the House of Lords paper 139, which was published today. We now have a situation in which the Home Secretary seems to be arguing that we would be more secure if we left the convention on human rights but retained European law relating to fundamental rights.

I should like to give the House some examples of how EU law is undermining our security. In The Sunday Telegraph yesterday, it was reported that six Algerian terror suspects with links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were to be allowed to stay here after a 10-year battle in the courts. I think that the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) has made the point that the number of people fraudulently trying to gain entry into the United Kingdom has almost doubled in a year. That is because those people realise that we do not have the power to turn them away at our borders if they are waving a European Union identity document.

I was speaking at a conference on European freight security last week, at which it became apparent that we are not allowed to X-ray lorries in Calais to see whether they contain illegal migrants because it might be damaging to the human rights and health of those illegal migrants. That is another example of how human rights laws undermine our ability to keep our borders secure. Another example is that we are not allowed to take DNA samples from migrants who refuse to give their fingerprints when they enter the European Union, which is expressly prohibited by the Eurodac regulations.

Then we have the example, which came out a couple of months ago, of Abu Hamza’s daughter-in-law. We found out that she was his daughter-in-law only through a freedom of information request. An advocate-general in the European Court of Justice said that it was in principle contrary to European Union treaties to remove the lady from the United Kingdom, notwithstanding the fact that she had been convicted and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. It was subsequently revealed that she had been convicted of attempting to smuggle a Sim card to Abu Hamza while he was in a high-security prison, but even that grave crime was insufficient to allow the courts to remove her from the United Kingdom because of the intervention of the European Court of Justice, which exercised its powers under the EU’s fundamental rights laws.

I cannot understand how the Home Secretary can consistently argue that we should stay in the European Union when the logic of everything she said in her speech was that we should be leaving the EU. It is potentially misleading for members of the public to think that they can have their cake and eat it by leaving the European convention on human rights while still remaining subject to the European Court of Justice.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Perhaps all these complexities explain why so little progress is being made on our manifesto commitment to leave the European convention on human rights. When the Minister replies, I hope that he will make it clear that the Government have not gone cold on that.

[Mr Chope]

I hope that the Minister will be able to respond to that. We had a debate towards the beginning of this parliamentary Session in which the Minister made it clear that the Government intended to bring forward a consultation document on this sooner rather than later. I think he envisaged that that would be before Christmas, but it then became after Christmas and now it is after the referendum. They were talking about a consultation document, so why can we not have even a discussion? I fear that it has been kicked into the long grass on the instructions of No. 10, because it was realised that it would lead to lot of awkward questions. The Government have demonstrated throughout the course of the referendum debate that they are quite happy to ask hypothetical questions and complain when people are unable to answer them, but they are unwilling to respond positively to the questions that people are asking them.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Dominic Raab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) on securing tonight’s debate and pay tribute to his recent work as chair of the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He is very knowledgeable in this field and he made a very powerful speech.

For all the contentious debate about human rights, few argue against the common-sense list of rights set out in the text of the European convention on human rights. The Government are and will remain committed to the protection of those rights. The United Kingdom was a founder member of the convention and was instrumental in its drafting. I have said on a number of occasions that those who suggest it was somehow an exclusively British creation are overegging the pudding or rewriting history. The negotiation of the convention saw an interesting contest of views between the common law and civil law traditions, as evidenced clearly in the travaux préparatoires of the convention, which are available online. The convention—the product of those negotiations —reflects the compromise between those two very different traditions and approaches.

Nevertheless, the concerns that have arisen about the convention are far less about being objections to the strict list of rights set out there; they lie more with its interpretation and application, which has been expanded and extended exponentially, well beyond what the original drafters intended. That is partly the result of judicial legislation by the Strasbourg Court, but it has been compounded by the design and structure of the Human Rights Act. It should be pointed out at this stage that serious criticisms have come from Labour Lord Chancellors, lawyers across the spectrum and senior British judges, as well as from Government Members. These problems have fuelled a rights inflation that has undermined this country’s liberal tradition of freedom and its approach to human rights, which is founded in Magna Carta and in the thinking of great British philosophers from John Locke and John Stuart Mill through to Isaiah Berlin. We have shifted towards imposing more and more obligations on government that require it to provide, rather than merely insisting that it refrain from acting in certain arbitrary ways, which was very much the history and tradition of the liberal approach. These developments have exposed us unnecessarily to judicial legislation at home and in Strasbourg that takes decisions out of the hands of this House.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The Minister is making a powerful critique of the convention, so perhaps he can now tell the House when we are going to fulfil our manifesto commitment to get out of it.

Transitional State Pension Arrangements for Women

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes that the e-petition 110776, Make fair transitional state pension arrangements for 1950s women, has attracted more than 150,000 signatures; and calls on the Government to bring forward proposals for transitional arrangements for women adversely affected by the acceleration of the increase in the state pension age.

I want to start today’s important debate by saying how lucky I am to come from a family in which there have always been such strong and hard-working women—my mother and grandmothers, and now my wife and daughter. If there is one thing I have learned from all of them, it is that no one should ever try to pull the wool over their eyes—to take them for fools—because I guarantee they will always be found out.

That is a lesson the Tories really should have learned back in 1991—when they first started planning to equalise the pension age for women with that for men—because that is precisely what has happened: they have been found out. They have been found to have failed in their duty to inform women properly about the changes that were planned. They have been found to have left hundreds of thousands of women ill-prepared for a decision that would see the worst affected lose up to £36,000 in pension payments. They were found to have compounded their error in 2011, when a further delay to the pension age—to 66—was rammed through with barely two years’ notice. In the words of their current Pensions Minister, they have been found to have “pulled the rug” from under 2.6 million British women. Today, Labour will speak for those 2.6 million women and demand that the Government tell us what they plan to do to make amends.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Before we get too party political about this, it can indeed be said that an individual notice should have been given back in 1995. However, shortly after that, Labour came in, and there were perhaps a dozen Labour Pensions Ministers during all of Labour’s time in office. We are 20 years on. Can the hon. Gentleman not accept that we all have lessons to learn? An individual notice should have been sent out by at least one of those Governments—by the Conservative Government or the Labour Government. The hon. Gentleman had an opportunity to do that over all those years.

[Owen Smith]

With respect, I did not have an opportunity because I was not here at the time. The hon. Gentleman is right that successive Governments have lessons to learn from this sorry affair, but the truth, as I intend to spell out, is that a change was first mooted in 1991, and the then Tory Government made no substantive efforts between 1991 and 1997, when they left office, to offer people a proper notice. Thereafter, the Labour Government did attempt to do that, and I will enumerate exactly the ways we tried to make amends. However, the problem was compounded by the coalition Government’s actions in 2011. If anybody has lessons to learn, it is the Conservative party, which has the greatest responsibility for these changes, and which now has a duty to make amends.