Covid-19 Inquiry

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Pat McFadden]

The most fundamental thing, apart from specific recommendations or specific changes, is the underlying strength of the country and its services. That is true nowhere more than in the national health service. That is why the Budget, which has been attacked a lot, put in the resources to begin to turn the health service around. We can have the forums, the structures and the processes, but the underlying strength of the country is the most important thing.

The hon. Lady asked about the exercise this autumn. I very much hope it will not be the last; the inquiry recommended that they happen on a regular basis. It will be the first for many years and we want to make sure we learn as much from it as possible. In terms of funding for local resilience forums, they play an important role and we were able to put some increased resources into local government in the next financial year. That area, like others, will have to be considered in the round in the spending review that will be published later this year.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Middleton South) (Lab)]

I am less sanguine about the report than my right hon. Friend. The report, or what is part of a report—it is difficult to assess when we do not know what the rest will say—has been too expensive and has taken too long to produce. From reading it, it does not seem to me to include some of the fundamental questions that I and my constituents would like answered. What was the cost-benefit analysis of the decisions taken during lockdown, for instance? What about lockdown itself? Was that a benefit or a disbenefit? What was the cost of effectively closing down the NHS, apart from for covid patients? Where did the virus come from? Did it come from China, which most of the evidence seems to indicate? Those questions are not being answered. Furthermore, I do not believe that setting up a new quango in conjunction with the Cabinet Office, which has no experience of service delivery, will be the answer to any future epidemic. The report does not answer the questions I would like answered.

[Pat McFadden]

I hope my hon. Friend does not think I am sanguine; I am not sanguine at all. Anyone who reads the national risk register should not be sanguine because, as I said in my statement, we live in a world of risk and vulnerability. As for the inquiry’s work, the inquiry is independent and is not instructed by the Government on the specific areas it goes into. It has 10 modules, as decided by the inquiry because it is independent.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Graham Stringer Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Oliver Dowden]

The Paymaster General knows how much I respect conventions, but that is ultimately a matter for the other Chamber.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Middleton South) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Oliver Dowden]

I will make some progress, but I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will give way.

We should not be surprised that the Labour Government have only introduced this short Bill because they have no clear plans for wider Lords reform. In 2022, the Prime Minister endorsed Gordon Brown’s plans for an assembly of the nations and regions, but now that has been kicked into the long grass. Labour grandees such as Lord Blunkett have warned it risks mirroring “gridlock” too often seen in the United States. Lord Mandelson described the plan as a

“multi-layered cake…barely been put in the oven yet, let alone fully baked.”

Lord Adonis observed that within Labour,

“there is no consensus on reform”

and that it will be “difficult and controversial.” Even the current leader of the Lords, Baroness Smith, admitted this year that an elected Chamber risked

“losing the primacy of the Commons.”

Therein lies the dilemma for the Labour party and its new-found Commons majority. Perhaps Labour Ministers are starting to realise that Lords reform is challenging and difficult.

[Graham Stringer]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Oliver Dowden]

I will make some more progress and then I will give way.

In 1999, the reforms recognised the challenge. In this July’s King’s Speech background brief, the Labour Government asserted that the continued presence of excepted peers is “by accident”. That is simply not true. In 1999, Labour’s Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, told the other House that the presence of hereditaries was an intentional anomaly; it would ensure a future Government undertook proper and considered reform of the Lords. His fellow architect, Viscount Cranborne, called that

“the sand in the shoe”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 22 June 1999; Vol. 602, c. 791.]

Now, this Labour Government want to declare war on the past without a clear target in sight. As they cannot agree on what to do, the Prime Minister has gone for this chipolata of a Bill, the mantra of change serving as a tiny fig leaf to cover his embarrassment. The emperor has no clothes—perhaps other than from Lord Alli.

[Graham Stringer]

The right hon. Member is making a case on shifting sand, which seems to boil down to one of people not having had time to consider the issue. First, this reform has been in two Labour manifestos, one in 1997 and one this year, and it had overwhelming support from the electorate. Secondly, the compromise reached between the Labour party and the Conservative party in 1999 was nothing to do with the good work done by many hereditaries; it was to stop logjam, because the House of Lords was threatening to hold up Labour’s programme and throw the Salisbury convention aside.

[Sir Oliver Dowden]

The purpose of the 1999 compromise was to ensure that we did not remove hereditary peers without considering the wider consequences. That is precisely my concern with the approach being pursued by the Government. This meagre Bill is not motivated by considered and enlightened principle. Labour wants to remove the independent and experienced voices of excepted peers so that it can parachute in a wave of new Labour cronies. It is change in the name of an Executive power grab, not change to serve the British people.

The excepted peers are immune from the needs of political patronage. They work in the public interest for the good of the nation. Edmund Burke once described them as

“the great Oaks that shade a Country”.

The same, I am afraid, cannot be said of the saplings of the new Labour intake.