Debate on the Address

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Cheryl Gillan

Wednesday 27th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Gillan]

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman, who has done an awful lot of work in this area. I notice that his Committee was time-limited and has now been rolled in to the Public Administration Committee, which now again covers the constitution. I had the pleasure of serving on the latter Committee in the last Parliament. If I have the pleasure of serving on it again, I can assure him that we will scrutinise this area very carefully, and I believe that that would show the House at its best. We do not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater in this instance.

After the election, I sensed great relief at the result among many of the people I talked to, and—as we would expect from a Conservative Government—the Queen’s speech proposes many important measures to ensure greater accountability and people’s security and safety. We are also offering people the opportunity to improve their lives. Job creation, job security and tax certainty lie at the heart of much of our legislative programme, but the Queen’s Speech also pays attention to the whole picture, relaxing and relieving the burdens on the lowest paid and the smallest businesses, widening home ownership and securing retirement prospects. There is no area that the Queen’s Speech does not touch.

The Gracious Speech also recognises our place on the world stage, and specifically our responsibilities to Ukraine and Iraq. The challenges that we face from extremism and increasing population movement will continue to occupy Government and the House for the whole of the next five years, not just this Session. I appreciate that some of our new neighbours will always be looking for opportunities to find the differences between us, but I hope that they will also look for opportunities to find common purpose, as we face a common enemy and protect the interests of the whole of this country.

I was a fresh starter, in both senses of the word, back in the 1990s, when the Maastricht treaty was debated in this House and the EU had only 12 members. The European Union referendum Bill will give new Members the opportunity early in their careers to reflect on our relationship with the now 27 other countries of the EU. In truth, every country would like to see some reforms, and like many of my constituents I look forward to seeing what the Prime Minister can achieve before putting the question to a public UK-wide vote. I hope the Government will resist the attempts to dilute the opinion of the UK electorate by introducing a four-country hurdle, as suggested by the SNP. It is the UK as a whole that is the member state, not the individual nations. I hope also that the Prime Minister will resist the temptation substantially to change the franchise in any way for the referendum.

I think every Government starts with an education Bill, and the present Government are no different. We have excellent schools in Chesham and Amersham, as we do in the rest of Buckinghamshire, and I share the Government’s determination to drive up standards and declare war on mediocrity and failure; but our schools in Buckinghamshire are not funded as well as those in other parts of the country and we do not receive the same level of grant from the Government. The national average per pupil is now £4,611 and we receive only £4,297, so I hope the Government will revisit what amounts to unfair funding. In our case, the unfairness is exacerbated by the fact that of the three elements that make up the funding in Buckinghamshire—the schools block, the early years block and the high needs block—we received no increase in early years or high needs funding, although there are increasing demands.

During the election, it became even more obvious to me that we are not engaging our young people in politics, no matter where they live. I want a new civic studies course or element to be introduced in the national curriculum, so that students can learn about the structures and relevance of our administrative systems and governance. As some parties are keen to change the franchise to include 16-year-olds, I would have expected universal support across the House for some real education in this area. It would also help me to explain to some of my constituents why they cannot vote for Nicola Sturgeon or Leanne Wood.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a very cogent speech. May I say how much I agree with her that we need more constitutional studies in our schools? Many of the youngsters I came across during the election said they were not going to vote, and when I asked why, they replied, “Because we don’t know enough about this political system—how it works in this country.” We need our youngsters to be better informed.

[Mrs Gillan]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s support. I know how much you have done, Mr Speaker, to improve the education of young people across the country, and I hope that this would be a natural sequitur to the work we do here in Parliament.

In Buckinghamshire, we have seen close-up the ongoing fallout from the terrible activities of one Jimmy Savile in child sexual grooming in cases such as the successful prosecution of the former head of Caldicott school. I hope the Government will now look again at securing mandatory reporting in regulated activities, so that we can increase the safeguarding surrounding our young people and schoolchildren.

I have had my brush with devolution, and devolution features quite strongly in this Queen’s Speech. I, like many others with shire constituencies, will study the city devolution Bill very carefully. It is all very well to hand more power to the city regions and I am supportive of the principle of putting decisions closer to people, provided that the consequences for other parts of the country are carefully considered. For example, I have a democratic deficit in Chesham and Amersham as a consequence of the governance of London, because Transport for London and London Underground own my stations, and to try to get step-free access at Amersham station involves an almighty battle, because the money is usually wanted elsewhere in London and not in my area, which does not have a vote in the London Assembly. In addition, we need to ensure that in implementing the new policy, the shire counties and other areas of the country not directly within or in the area of a city region do not have their funding squeezed or get forced into alliances that take decisions further away from their electorate.

Debate on the Address

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Cheryl Gillan

Wednesday 4th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Gillan]

I am glad my hon. Friend entirely agrees on that important point.

I am pleased that the Government are now going to limit large pay-offs for people who leave the public sector, but that conflicts with a recent request from HS2’s chief executive to lift all pay controls on HS2 personnel so that she can get the best people for the job from the marketplace. That implies that the best people would not be satisfied with the public sector salaries available to our very good officials right across the board. There seems to be some tension between that and what the Government are doing. I hope they will make sure that those working on Government projects will get the same rate across the board. That is important.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I, like my right hon. Friend, have been involved in HS2 for a long time and sympathise with her constituents who are affected by it. Does she agree that those whose properties are affected deserve provision for generous terms of compensation from the Committee studying the hybrid Bill, and that if the Government were to concede that, there would be far less opposition to the Bill?

[Mrs Gillan]

The matter of compensation has been extremely badly handled. Not only did the courts find against the Government, but we are still waiting for a compensation consultation. We do not have the dates yet and we still do not know what the final compensation package will be. I have always said that if the Government are going to press ahead with HS2, they must do two things: they must protect absolutely the area of outstanding natural beauty that will be violated by it and they must deliver the best possible compensation to the people most affected. Nothing else will do. I am sure the House will look at the issue. The Chair of the hybrid Bill Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms), is present and I hope he will have noted my words, which were not directed at my Front-Bench colleagues on this occasion.

Media reports lead me to think that the long-awaited power of recall will be reasonably controversial. Personally, I do not think it is necessary. However, if it is there to make sure that people trust and have confidence in their elected representatives, I will support it, because that is considerably more important than any luxury we may have to serve continuously even if we commit a crime, including one that results in a custodial sentence. There is, however, an inequity: if MPs are going to be subject to the power of recall, why not other elected representatives, such as Welsh Assembly Members, Members of the Scottish Parliament and Northern Assembly Members?

High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Cheryl Gillan

Monday 28th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am delighted, Madam Deputy Speaker, to catch your eye in this debate. Many Members wish to speak and so our time is constrained. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on spending so much time in the Chamber, but having done so, I hope that he will listen to some of the concerns that have been raised, because we will have spent almost £1 billion on HS2 Ltd planning this railway by the end of this Parliament, and, as far as I can see, there have been no changes whatever from when it started to now. It seems to me that this is a visionary concept, but it could be made so much better if some of the concerns that have been raised tonight were taken on board.

My hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) was right to say that we live in an increasingly interconnected world. I have just come back from China where a large number of high-speed lines have been built. It was right to do so because its environmental pollution is horrendous. This is where I start to get involved in this whole concept, because 80% of my Cotswolds constituents who travel 75 miles to Heathrow go by car. If HS2, with proper connectivity to Heathrow, were better designed, 80% of them would go by rail.

Our forefathers, almost 200 years ago, bequeathed us a visionary rail system that enabled the industrial revolution to take place, and we have the opportunity to do the same thing today. We need to get the route and the details right, which is why I formed an integrated transport group, with my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (James Wharton). We have done a lot of work on this subject. We have produced a comprehensive report. If any Member has insomnia one night, they might like to read it, or at least the two-page executive summary. We make a number of points in the report that are worth repeating in the short time that I have available today.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), called in all the evidence at the last moment. HS1 was going to come in via south of London, but the route was changed and it then came in via Stratford. Had he not done that, the Olympics would never have taken place. It is a huge shame that the instructions to the Committee have taken out the HS1-HS2 link. It is still something we should consider, because passengers coming from Europe and flying into this country will want to get on an interconnected railway from this country to Europe. If there are problems with Camden, let us tunnel underneath London; let us be visionary about it, but let us ensure that we do have the HS1-HS2 link.

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) made a very good point. I thought that I was going to disagree with everything he said in his speech, but he made one very good point towards the end, and I ask the Secretary of State to listen to this very carefully. If this railway had been a fast railway going at 300 kph rather than 360 kph, we could have varied the route very slightly, but with huge benefit, especially to the Chilterns. HS1 was built along the existing transport corridors—along the motorways and often along the existing rail links. If we had built a fast rail rather than a high-speed rail, we could have swept it out along the M40 and tunnelled under the shortest bit of the Chilterns. We would not have done any environmental degradation to the Chilterns at all.

[Mrs Gillan]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and for coming well behind me to defend the Chilterns. Is it not true that, in the run-up to the last election, that is the route that we believed would be adopted by any Government of whatever complexion? Imagining that they would go through the widest route of an area of outstanding natural beauty and damage it so greatly was almost beyond credibility. We were going to go through the narrowest route, and should that not have been where it went anyway?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My right hon. Friend is entirely right, and she has been basing her case on that. The advantage of doing that is that roads, rail, freight and air would have all coalesced into one Heathrow hub. The one thing that has not been said in this debate is that we need to be visionary about this, because 15 years ago, the latest technology, the internet, was just coming into its infancy. Who knows what technology will be available in the next 15 years?

Let us future-proof this railway as much as we possibly can. There will be all sorts of new technology to track people and suitcases and to make travel on an international scale hugely better than it is today. If we do not do that, we will already be losing business by the day because of the experience of passengers who have to go through Heathrow. If we do not get this right, we will lose even more business to the likes of Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle and Munich. The complete passenger experience, door-to-door, is what will matter. People will simply not come into Old Oak Common and take the underground for one station to get to HS1; they will fly from wherever they were coming from in the first place straight to continental Europe and further afield.

We need to consider HS1-HS2, the route and a Heathrow hub. We must think about how we will link to the world’s busiest airport. I have little doubt that when push comes to shove, Davies will come up with Heathrow as our major hub airport, yet we are not going to link the most expensive civil engineering project ever carried out in this country with our major airport. That is crazy.

I want to make two final points. First, I do not believe the case for business being sucked from the north to the south is true, which is why earlier I advocated starting equally from the north and the south if we can afford the cash. Finally, I must tell my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that I am one of the very few chartered surveyors in this House. I know how the law on compensation for property works and the French and Germans are far more generous than we are. If he is generous with the compensation, he will have far fewer opponents to the railway line, which will be built far quicker without so many legal battles.

Hybrid Bill Procedure

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Cheryl Gillan

Wednesday 26th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)]

I would like answers to all the questions the shadow Leader of the House has so rightly asked about these standing orders and the alterations. This is a particularly tortuous and complex process, and because it so tortuous and complex, it is neither accessible nor transparent to the stakeholders and the people who are affected by it. They must be able to understand what is required of them. I therefore ask the Leader of the House to consider how he is going to produce explanatory notes on this hybrid Bill process and these changes to standing orders, and make them available, particularly to those people who have been part of the consultations and the community forums up and down the line, but also to the environmental organisations, many of whom contain volunteers and others who are not familiar with our practices and procedures here, and who certainly have no idea of how to navigate their way around the hybrid Bill process.

I would like to know the date when the hybrid Bill and the environmental statement will be deposited, because it now appears that we are going to have 50,000-plus pages in this environmental statement, which amounts not so much to 17 large trees, but more to 17 large white elephants, to refer to the symbol that has been adopted by many of the anti-HS2 groups up and down the line. Making that date known will enable organisations throughout the country—many of which have very scarce resources or rely on voluntary contributions—to plan how to deal with this better. I am worried that moving to electronic tabling for something as large as this may cause technical problems. What checks will be made on the IT systems of local authorities up and down the line where these documents will be deposited, to establish that those systems can take these documents and people can navigate them with ease? It is all very well talking about making documents available electronically; when I was looking at the Department for Transport’s business statement today on the No. 10 website, it was almost impossible to navigate or download it in a timely fashion. That business plan was not very long, but if that is the standard the Government set for the ease of navigating documents, it does not reflect well on their IT systems. We need to know that full checks have been made of those systems, and that they can take the documents in question.

I do not want to prolong the debate and I will not seek to divide the House on this issue—these are Standing Orders—but I would like two reassurances. First, if a significant number of the environmental organisations that will need to engage in this process ask for an extension to the 56-day deadline, I want the Leader of the House to undertake at least to listen to them and to consider an extension.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The shadow Leader of the House told us that the environmental statement for Crossrail extended to some 2,500 pages. This statement will extend to some 50,000 pages. Does my right hon. Friend really think that 56 days is a practical amount of time in which to examine that amount of material?

[Mrs Gillan]

No, and that is why I am asking the Leader of the House whether, after taking advice from organisations that need to examine the document in detail, he will consider extending the deadline, or whether it would be possible to change the Standing Orders to that end. A standard consultation period, as under the last Government, was deemed to be 12 weeks. The Government have concertina’d it and seem to be adopting an eight-week standard, which is not satisfactory when we are dealing with something as precious as an area of outstanding natural beauty such as the Chiltern hills. Many details will need to be examined once the statement is forthcoming, and I would like to know what the various possibilities are.

At a time when we are cutting budgets and expecting local authorities and other organisations to cut back in the interests of paying down the debt left to us by the last Labour Government, what funds will be available to our local authorities to maintain and make available these documents through electronic means? There may have to be extra IT maintenance and people on duty. I need to be able to reassure my own local authorities that they will not be out of pocket as a result of something imposed on them by central Government.

I shall leave it there and look forward to hearing the Leader of the House’s response.