Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Emma Reynolds and Rupert Lowe

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emma Reynolds]

I will ensure that my hon. Friend gets a meeting with the relevant health Minister. More broadly, the Chancellor announced last week that in the spending review next year, we will set out a new preventative departmental expenditure limit spending category to get ahead of problems before they get more expensive, because we recognise that preventing problems before they arise is a good use of taxpayers’ money.

[Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Restore Britain)]

We spend hundreds of billions of pounds on debt interest, migrant accommodation, foreign aid, public sector fraud, benefits for foreigners and, let us not forget, the healthy indolent. We are leaving a record tax burden and a shameful £3 trillion of national debt to our children and our grandchildren. Let me say this in a way that even Members on the Labour Front Bench understand: we are bankrupt. My question to the Chancellor is this: is bankrupting Britain a consequence of Government policy, or is it now the actual objective?

Financial Services Reform

Debate between Emma Reynolds and Rupert Lowe

Wednesday 16th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Emma Reynolds]

I might not be able to give my hon. Friend the specifics about her region right now, but I will say that my colleague the Pensions Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Torsten Bell), has secured an ambitious industry-led accord—the Mansion House accord—that commits 17 pension funds, representing 90% of active defined-contribution savers, to invest 10% of their funds in private assets, half of which are to be in the UK. They will be on the hunt for good firms that could be successful in the future and that need capital to start up and scale up. We are also working closely with the British Business Bank on these issues, as my hon. Friend will know.

[Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Ind)]

After 20 years in the City of London, over the last year I have had to endure a stream of what I would call financially illiterate verbal baby food. Today I hear the Chancellor talk about regulating for growth. You do not regulate for growth; you deregulate for growth. The genesis of our problems are the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority, which sprung from the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. This was a Labour Act that created the Financial Services Authority, which turned into the PRA and the FCA. Those two organisations have shut the City of London down. We are now a shadow of our former selves in terms of raising global capital, and I heard you say the opposite—