Epilepsy

Debate between George Howarth and Steve Baker

Thursday 26th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

I add my thanks to the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) for giving us the opportunity to debate this important issue. I wholeheartedly endorse hon. Members’ comments that she will be missed in the House. Her speech was not only informative but unique, because in the many years I have been in the House, I have never before heard a Member declare themselves to be both a law-maker and a law-breaker. Even more alarmingly, she declared her intention to become a repeat offender. Her speech was also unique in that it brought before the House the experience of people who suffer this condition, and she gave us the opportunity to understand more about its dimensions.

I need to say a word about the speech made by the hon. Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker), in which he described a tragic case. Anyone who has experienced the loss of a child knows exactly the depths of misery that the people concerned will have experienced. The hon. Gentleman dealt with a difficult subject in not only a suitably moving way, but with great dignity, and I, too, pass on my sincere condolences to the family.

[Steve Baker]

I am extremely grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s kind words. I know that the family have heard him and will also be grateful.

[Mr Howarth]

The hon. Gentleman’s speech highlighted a more general point about how chronic conditions are dealt with. I have some knowledge of type 1 diabetes. When someone with that condition reaches a crisis, whether that is a psychological crisis or something that should be dealt with by a diabetologist, they cannot always get to see the right people at the right time so that they can get the right support, prescription or advice. Brilliant though our national health service is, that is one aspect that all too often breaks down, so I hope that the Minister will address that problem.

I want to concentrate on a particular issue, which I do not think has been mentioned, about which one of my constituents has contacted me: how the benefits system makes life very difficult indeed for those people who find themselves on benefits. No doubt the Minister will not be able to respond to my points, but I hope that he will pass them on to his colleagues in the relevant Department.

My constituent, who has asked to be named, Mr Adam Lane, who lives in Huyton, said:

“In regard to my DLA claim I had to go through 6 months with no money for myself, my wife and my two-year-old son. At that time we had to live on £50 a week until I went to a tribunal and won. Now I have to go through the whole process again on 13th of March for PIP. I have a letter from my epilepsy doctor stating how bad my epilepsy is. I fall and convulse without warning and have seriously damaged my knee, and have panic attacks throughout the whole experience. My seizures are occurring every week now and are very serious and now I suffer with migraines where I vomit 14 hours a day and I’m confined to bed through the process for 2 weeks at a time. I’m hoping Atos will not brush me off like last time, hoping to appease Government numbers to get people off benefits. I feel I am in need of benefits. I cannot work with my health conditions. My wife is my carer 24/7. My son has been traumatised though watching my seizures. I’m hoping my Atos interviewer sees what is in front of their eyes and not what the Government want them to see and say. Please, for others out there like me, let there be a way for people who do not abuse the system to be given a fairer crack of claiming what is deservedly theirs. Thank you.”

I thought it was worth reading that out in full because it gives a very clear picture of how this man has had to struggle to keep his family together and to support them in extremely difficult circumstances, where the benefits system seems to mount up against him to prevent him having any kind of reasonable life. I hope that such cases—there are many more of them out there—give the Government cause to think again about how people with chronic conditions are dealt with in the benefits system.

Justice and Security Bill [Lords]

Debate between George Howarth and Steve Baker

Thursday 7th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Steve Baker]

Before I deal with amendments 8 to 14, which stand in the name of, among others, my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), I should explain that my hon. Friend has been unavoidably diverted by long-standing and immovable duties in relation to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. He sends his profuse apologies to the House.

I am acutely aware of what is at stake in relation to the Intelligence and Security Committee. In 2009 the Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report entitled “Allegations of UK Complicity in Torture”, which considered the ISC’s ability to work within a circle of secrecy and yet deliver credible scrutiny. It states:

“The missing element, which the ISC has failed to provide, is proper ministerial accountability to Parliament for the activities of the Security Services. In our view, this can be achieved without comprising individual operations if the political will exists to provide more detailed information to Parliament about the policy framework, expenditure and activities of the relevant agencies.”

The provisions in the Bill are therefore welcome on the whole, but amendments 8 to 14 would remedy a crucial deficiency in the struggle to provide that political will to answer to Parliament.

The amendments would have a very simple effect. They provide for the election of a Chair of the ISC from the House of Commons on the same basis as the election of Select Committee Chairs, apart from the fact that candidates would be required to obtain the formal consent of the Prime Minister in writing before standing. Ministers would be ineligible.

There are three reasons why reform of the ISC is needed. First, it tried, but failed, to get to the bottom of British involvement in rendition; its investigation of British complicity in extraordinary rendition was a test that it failed.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

As an ISC member of seven years’ standing, may I say that I take grave offence at what the hon. Gentleman has just said? We looked very thoroughly at the evidence on rendition, and arrived at suitable conclusions. I think that to make a blanket allegation of that kind without providing any evidence to back it up, which I hope he will now do, is unacceptable.

[Steve Baker]

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention has slightly pre-empted a quotation that I was about to give. In a recent pamphlet, my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester wrote:

“The ISC found no evidence that the UK agencies were complicit in any extraordinary rendition operations and concluded that, during the critical period (from 2001 to 2003), the agencies had no knowledge of the possible consequences of US custody of detainees generally, or of Binyam Mohamed specifically.”

He went on to say:

“The opposite was the case. Successive court judgments have now made clear that the UK ‘facilitated’ the interrogation of Binyam Mohamed. Furthermore, High Court judgments in February and July 2009 concluded that crucial documents were not made available to the Committee by the Secret Intelligence Service, which led to the Committee’s Report on Rendition being inaccurate”.

I see the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) shaking his head, and I regret that he is offended, but the reality is that allegations have been made about the Committee’s performance, and made credibly, by my hon. Friend. What the amendments seek to do is not to haul the Committee over the coals, but to demonstrate that there is a strong, clear case for the Chair to be elected.

The ISC thought that it had reached the truth, but it had not. MI6 had been complicit in extraordinary rendition, and it was left to the courts to expose the truth.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Baker]

Let me take both those points. I do not wish to cast any doubt on particular members, but we are in a position where the Committee’s success can be questioned and we need to deal with that on an institutional basis. Yes, the substance of the amendment would preclude a Member of the other House from being the Chairman of the Committee.

Amendments 8 and 9 provide for the election of the Chair from the House of Commons on the same basis as departmental Select Committee Chairs, with the exception that they would have to have the Prime Minister’s consent to their candidature. The amendments do not make provision for the election of members of the Committee. We think that together these amendments would lead to increased authority and credibility for the Chair, which is not to cast any aspersions on my right hon. and learned Friend. I feel sure that if he stood for election, I would be strongly inclined to vote for him. The point is to set up the institutions so that they are beyond reproach. Amendments 10 to 14 are consequential on amendments 8 and 9.

In conclusion, as I said, the problem is that terrorism and fear of terrorism have led Governments—for honourable reasons, I do not doubt—to erode principles that ordinarily we would regard as sacred principles of our systems of justice and liberty. I refer in particular to closed material procedures, but also to terrorism prevention and investigation measures, which have been dealt with on other occasions. In that context, it is vital that the House, the wider public and non-governmental organisations are reassured that the security agencies are answerable to the House, albeit in secret, through a Chair who enjoys the authority conveyed on him by Members. That is why we have tabled the amendments, and I hope that the House will adopt them.

[Mr George Howarth]

I shall try to be brief because I know that a great deal of ground needs to be covered in these debates. The hon. Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker) has served a useful purpose by ventilating the issue through the amendments. I do not want in any way to detract from that. First, however, he bases the argument on an event that he portrays inaccurately, and I will say a word about that in a moment. Secondly, in trying to make the role of the Chair subject to the will of the whole House, he fails to understand the nature of the composition of such a Committee and the responsibilities placed on it, and I will also say a few words about that.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) was the Chair of the Committee when we examined the issue of extraordinary rendition. The way that the hon. Gentleman portrayed what we did grossly misrepresented the process that we went through. First, as my right hon. Friend has just reminded me, there was a break at one point in our consideration of the Bill at the request of the then Government while further information was forthcoming.

Secondly, the hon. Gentleman implied that vital information had not been put before us. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen said in an intervention, the information that we did not have at the time did not change our conclusions at all. We subsequently got that information and, in further annual reports, we pointed out that there was a problem with retrieval of the information that the agencies held. It was never a deliberate attempt on their part to mislead us and the information concerned did not materially affect the conclusions that we drew. So the example that the hon. Gentleman uses to justify his case is, frankly, wrong.

[Steve Baker]

Does the right hon. Gentleman not accept the substance of the court judgments made around the Binyam Mohamed case?

[Mr Howarth]

There is a whole separate debate to be had about that. The hon. Gentleman rightly referred earlier to part 2 of the Bill, which deals with closed material proceedings. There are a number of problems with the Binyam Mohamed case, the main one of which concerned the doctrine known as the control principle. That creates serious problems for our relationships with partner agencies, particularly the United States, but if I were to go too far down that road, Mr Deputy Speaker would pull me up because we have already dealt with amendments to part 2. The process of considering the issues by the Intelligence and Security Committee is not as the hon. Gentleman portrayed it.

On my second point, I shall be brief because in his intervention the Chair of the Committee cleared that up. We have gone a very long way to making the ISC more like a Select Committee, but it never can be identical to a Select Committee, as I think the hon. Gentleman acknowledged, because of the nature of the material that we have to deal with. As a member of the Committee, I am content that the appropriate person to have the final say and to have the recommending powers on who is an appropriate person to chair that Committee should be the Prime Minister of the day—not that I do not trust the House of Commons. As a long-standing Member of the House, I have every confidence in it, but in this one exceptional circumstance I do not think that that is the appropriate way to do it. Although in democratic terms the hon. Gentleman’s amendment is well intentioned, I do not think it is appropriate.

[Steve Baker]

rose—

[Mr Howarth]

I will give way, then I intend to conclude.

[Steve Baker]

Why does the right hon. Gentleman consider it inappropriate to give the Prime Minister of the day the opportunity to approve—or reject—the candidacy of particular Members and then allow them to go forward, with the benefit of that approval, to be elected by the whole House so that they can enjoy the authority of the whole House? My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), who is no longer in his place, advanced the argument that the Prime Minister would be in an invidious position, but that does not seem to be what the right hon. Gentleman is concerned about. Why should we not have prime ministerial approval and then an election?

[Mr Howarth]

Because, as I have already said and as the hon. Gentleman acknowledges, the ISC is a different kind of Committee. The people concerned are handling different information—information that they cannot share—and there are occasions when there is an ongoing operation, things are moving at a fast pace, it is impossible to convene a meeting of the full Committee, and the Prime Minister, the heads of agencies and the Foreign Secretary—whoever is relevant—have to be able to talk to somebody. On some occasions the Chair has been the person they speak with, which is entirely appropriate, but in order for them to be able to do so the Chair must have the confidence of senior Ministers and the heads of the agencies. I think that is an important principle. Otherwise, they will feel inhibited about sharing vital information, which often has to be provided at very short notice, with the Chair at least.