Business of the House

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mel Stride]

First, let me congratulate my right hon. Friend on the strength and veracity of her campaigning on this matter, albeit that the direction of travel is not exactly as she would wish. She raises the specific issue of transparency. I would be very happy to facilitate a meeting with any Minister whom she may wish to approach in order to discuss that matter.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

As the Leader of the House has announced, the Backbench Business Committee has debates on both Wednesday and Thursday of next week, but, of course, it also determines which Department’s estimates will be debated on Monday and Tuesday, so it is a clean sweep for the week: four days of business determined by the Backbench Business Committee. Under those circumstances, it would be churlish of me to ask the Leader of the House for more time on this particular occasion.

I have a bit of sadness from my locality. I and my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist), who is in her place, discovered this week that, as we anticipated, 170 members of the workforce at De La Rue are being made redundant as a result of the Government awarding the contract to manufacture the British passport to a French-Dutch company. In future, the passports will be manufactured in Poland. One hundred and seventy workers lose their jobs in Gateshead, and our post-Brexit blue British passport is to be manufactured in Poland—you just could not make this stuff up.

Finally, let me make a very impassioned plea. A Nigerian mother and her three children live in my constituency. I will not give their names out at the moment, but I am very, very concerned that, if they are deported as they are threatened to be, the smallest child, a two-year-old girl who was born in this country, will be sent back to Nigeria where the family will subject her to female genital mutilation. It must not happen. Please, can we get it stopped?

[Mel Stride]

The hon. Gentleman is right to draw attention to his prowess in bringing forward the various motions and debates to the House. I just have this feeling that all this will end up, on around 23 July, with him standing at this Dispatch Box. It cannot be inconceivable in the impenetrable combinations of what might happen between now and, for example, the end of October.

The hon. Gentleman raised the issue of De La Rue and the passports, which I know will have been noted and is on the record. As to the very serious matter that he raised at the end of his remarks around the Nigerian family facing deportation, I say not only that my door is open, but that I would be personally very keen to sit down with him and look at that in some detail so that we can determine between us the best way forward.