Business of the House (13 May)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 8th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Christopher Chope]

One issue is that people can be arrested and not know whether they will be charged for months, if not years. During that period, they are in limbo and under suspicion, but are, under the principles of justice in this country, innocent until proven guilty. I think it is reasonable, if somebody is charged with an offence, that the matter is moved on, and that their identity is known. However, quite often, people may be arrested and their identity will not be known.

The point I am making is that this is a controversial subject. The new motion that the Leader of the House has brought before us is more in line with what is proposed in the other place, which probably has even more legal wisdom than this House. It decided in a similar debate that it would be wrong to exclude Members from the parliamentary estate on the basis of suspicion or mere arrest, and that a charge was needed. I submit that it is desirable to have consistent rules across the whole parliamentary estate, because people can move freely between the different parts of the estate, so if somebody in the other place is subject to a different regime from somebody in this place, that will create extraordinary anomalies.

[Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

However many hours we spend debating this, is the fundamental problem not that the aim is to do this by motion, rather than by legislation, and that any exclusion of a Member except by a specific vote on that Member needs to be a legislative requirement for attendance of the House, not a mere motion?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I absolutely agree. My purpose in speaking to this motion today is to try to illustrate by example the scope of the motion that is down for debate on Monday, and why two hours, in my submission, is an inadequate amount of time in which to discuss such a motion.

[Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The motion before the House today suggests that Standing Order No. 41A, on deferred Divisions, shall not apply. I wonder whether my hon. Friend thinks it is wise to put before the House motions that randomly suspend Standing Orders, or whether it is not important to maintain the integrity of Standing Orders, which, Madam Deputy Speaker, is clearly a legitimate part of today’s motion.

Liaison Committee

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Absolutely. I do not know—perhaps we will find out later—the extent to which the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee has been consulted on this and has agreed that, on Government strategic thinking, it will have its role usurped by the Liaison Committee. I am sure that all will be revealed in due course. If my hon. Friends want to intervene on these issues, I will be happy to take interventions.

The next item of the terms of reference is:

“What additional machinery of Government, knowledge and skills are necessary to support strategic thinking and effective strategy and delivery, both within individual departments, and across two or more departments, and how strategy and strategic thinking can be sustained by building consensus between the main parties”.

The fourth item on which evidence can be given is:

“Which governments around the world demonstrate best practice in strategic thinking”.

That is an opportunity for some overseas visits, no doubt, to go and see which Governments across the world are demonstrating best practice in strategic thinking.

The next item of the terms of reference—the sixth—contains the first reference to Select Committees:

“How Select Committees consider strategic questions, including any recent examples of scrutiny of Government strategic plans and/or their delivery; and elements of Government strategy- and delivery that are repeatedly identified by Select Committees as effective or as deficient”.

At least that item on which evidence is sought is relevant to the purported nature of the inquiry. The next item in the terms of reference is:

“The engagement of individual departments, and Whitehall as a whole, with Select Committees on strategic challenges, including through the provision of information necessary for effective scrutiny.”

The next one is:

“What additional resources”—

more taxpayer’s money is going into this, I can see—

“parliamentary procedure, knowledge and skills are necessary to support effective Select Committee scrutiny of strategic thinking and effective strategy-making, as well as monitoring implementation of any Government action in response”.

This is a great one:

“How other parliaments around the world are engaging with the strategic thinking of their respective governments.”

Well, what an inquiry. It could take years, could it not? Woe betide whoever is appointed a special adviser under the terms of the motion before us. They will need to be handsomely remunerated, will they not, for the time and effort they put into the inquiry? They will have a global remit.

I speak as a member of two Select Committees—the Procedure Committee and the Environmental Audit Committee. The Environmental Audit Committee is cross-cutting and looks at the effect of the Government’s environmental policies across a whole range of areas. The Liaison Committee seems to be creating a new cross- cutting Select Committee covering public administration, strategic thinking, oversees democracy and so on. I want to hear the justification for that, what the cost is likely to be and how this idea ever got a start. Was it discussed by the Liaison Committee? Did it agree those very wide terms of reference? Did it think through the implications? In supporting the motion, has the Leader of the House thought through exactly what that strategic thinking is all about?

[Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I apologise for not being in the Chamber for the start of the debate, but I have been listening to my hon. Friend carefully on the television.

[Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg]

This is such an important debate and my hon. Friend is raising such an important point about the fundamentals of the Liaison Committee. Do I understand from what he is saying that the Committee would need to change its name if it takes on those responsibilities, because its job is simply liaison, not to go further than that?

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Absolutely. That is why I am worried about the mission creep. We have the Liaison Committee proposal set out in the press release to which I have been referring, but it bears little resemblance to the motion on the Order Paper, which states that

“the Liaison Committee shall have power to appoint specialist advisers in relation to its inquiry on Strategic thinking in Government.”

Its inquiry purports to be on the ability of Select Committees to scrutinise strategic thinking across Government, which is completely different. As anybody who has been listening to the terms of reference will know, it is not limited to strategic thinking across our Government, but restricted to strategic thinking across all Governments that are members of the United Nations. So it has an enormously wide remit.

I must say that I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex, the Chair of the Committee, on his imagination and breadth of vision. He could have a job for life fulfilling this important role. But our job in questioning matters like this, which are put on the Order Paper and would otherwise go through on the nod, is to say, “Well, hang on a minute, what are we about? Have the members of the rest of the Select Committees thought about the implications, the costs and the dangerous precedent that is being set?” It is only in this Parliament that we got the exception to have a Chair of the Liaison Committee who is not already a Chair of another Select Committee, but how will the members of the Liaison Committee be able to give their time and devotion to this particular subject?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Thursday 9th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am glad to say we have Corporal Hindsight on duty in the Chamber this morning. The socialists were calling for bounce back loans to be issued faster, and therefore, inevitably, with fewer checks at the time. The public sector fraud authority is being set up and the fraud departments within Government are working with the British Business Bank and with banks—I have seen a number of them personally—to get them to use their systems to claim the money back from people who have taken it fraudulently. The Government take it extremely seriously, but the socialists must remember what they were saying a couple of years ago.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

But what is my right hon. Friend doing about the internal fraud within the Government, caused by low productivity and bloated and dysfunctional public services?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is a great one for holding the Government and the bureaucracy to account, and he is right to do so. That is why we are looking to significant productivity increases by reducing the size of the civil service back to where it was in 2016, to ensure that services are provided to the public efficiently and effectively. As we reduce the number, so there will be significant taxpayer spending on better technology, because the use of technology speeds up actions for citizens and reduces costs for the taxpayer.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Thursday 31st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

May I ask the Minister for Brexit Opportunities whether he believes that we can maximise our opportunities as long as article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol remains in place?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I thank my hon. Friend for his brilliant and inspired question. There are obviously difficulties with the Northern Ireland protocol, which was set out in the agreement to be amendable, changeable and alterable, and that must be done. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary is working on that and it is important to get it right, because nothing must undermine the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a single entity. That is the Government’s policy, that is the Government’s aim and that is what will happen.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Thursday 6th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady. I have enormous sympathy on the issue that she is raising. There is nothing more vexatious for our constituents than being fined by officious bodies for doing things that are perfectly normal to do, whether they are private road or private parking companies, who seem to specialise in this, or people chasing for tolls. She is quite right to stand up on behalf of her constituents on this. It would be most helpful if she would set out to me in writing precisely what byelaws need changing and then I can take that up with the relevant Department.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Can we have an early debate on the operation—or should I say the lack of operation?—of the vaccine damage payments scheme? In the year in which it has been operating, not a single payment has been made in respect of any victim of covid-19 vaccine. We know from recent inquests and from other detailed material from professors at Bristol University of the link between damage caused by vaccines and the need for compensation for those who are in the unfortunate minority of having so suffered. Is that not fundamental to improving vaccine confidence?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

There should be huge vaccine confidence. What has happened with the vaccine programme and the booster programme has meant that this country has been able to get back to normal faster than almost any other country in the world. My hon. Friend and I would particularly note that it is thanks to the fact that we are not in the European Union that we were able to move so quickly. I encourage him to indicate his own confidence in the vaccine and support the vaccine roll-out, because that really has been essential to our economic reopening, to the health of the nation, and to the ability of the NHS to cope with covid. Of course everything else will be looked at in due course, but the success of the programme is fundamental.

Committee on Standards

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I think the simple answer—[Interruption.] No, I think the heckle from the right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) is unfair and unkind. It was simply that the tragedy that afflicted Mr Paterson coloured and clouded our judgment, and my judgment, incorrectly. It is as simple and as sad as that.

The Back-Bench amendment that we supported was intended to facilitate the exploration, on a cross-party basis, of the standards system, with a time-limited, ad hoc Committee. However, I regret that the amendment conflated an individual case with more general concerns. That was a mistake. Crucially, the amendment did not carry cross-party support, which is why we have changed our approach.

The Government fully recognise the role of the Committee on Standards in ensuring that the code of conduct reflects and fosters the highest standards of public life. I would like to thank all the Committee members and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards for their service. We await the Committee’s report on the code of conduct with interest. The Committee performs an important role in identifying opportunities to improve the standards system, and I note that the Chairman, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), has made a recent, and helpful, commitment to commission a senior judicial figure to advise on possible changes to the process.

I assure all right hon. and hon. Members that I am always willing to discuss this matter further, and I hope to work with Opposition Members constructively on this issue. We all have the best interests of the House at heart and I hope that, setting aside the previous debate, we will work well together in the weeks ahead.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for facilitating this debate. [Laughter.] On 3 November, he said that the concerns expressed about the individual case in question included:

“the lack of examination of witnesses”—

of whom there were 17—

“the interpretation of the rules relating to whistleblowing…the application of aggravating factors; and the absence of the right of appeal.”—[Official Report, 3 November 2021; Vol. 702, c. 939.]

With regard to the first three of those, what is my right hon. Friend’s current view in relation to that particular case?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

First, the House will always have a debate when it wants to have a debate; that is how our procedures work. They are extremely straightforward and ensure that right hon. and hon. Members can come to this House and make objections, if they so wish, to have subjects debated on the Floor of the House—

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Thursday 23rd September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

It is important to recognise that some people had to go into work to do their job properly, for security reasons or to ensure the integrity of systems, and the DVLA was one of those organisations. We are now getting back to work and people are going back to their offices, which is a thoroughly good thing.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Can we have an early debate on the role of the Committee on Standards in delivering natural justice for those against whom complaints are made? Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that, in its second report, at paragraph 53, the Committee decided that my right hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) did not accept that he had breached the rules of the House and that this was treated as an aggravating factor? That is in complete contrast to the rules of the Sentencing Council, which say that pleading guilty can be a mitigating factor but that contesting a case cannot be regarded as an aggravating factor. Does that not show that natural justice seems to have been thrown to the wind by the Committee on Standards?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend raises an important point: people must be entitled, in all circumstances, to defend themselves, and it would be unfair to penalise somebody who believed they had acted in good faith for that belief. The assumption must very often be that Members do act in good faith. That is not to say that we do not make mistakes, but to defend oneself must be a natural right of Members of Parliament.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am not entirely sure who my right hon. Friend receives his emails from. It may be from certain conspiracy theorists who think all sorts of things are going to be discussed in this House. I remind him of what I said about Thursday: there will be a motion relating to the second report of the Session 2021-22 from the Committee on Standards, followed by the remaining stages of the Rating (Coronavirus) and Directors Disqualification (Dissolved Companies) Bill, and then a very important general debate on the legacy of Jo Cox. If my right hon. Friend wishes to be here earlier in the morning, he can, of course, hear my business statement, which will update him on any further business.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Will the Ways and Means resolution be amendable? In particular, would it be possible to amend the Ways and Means resolution to ensure that the cap on care costs comes into effect at the same time as the higher taxes, instead of 18 months later?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Ways and Means resolutions are amendable. My hon. Friend will have to have a discussion with the Table Office on what type of amendments it will accept, but, yes, the broad principle is that they are amendable.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Monday 12th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Can I ask my right hon. Friend whether it will be possible to amend the business of the House motion to facilitate the deferral of the debate on the draft Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2021?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Those matters are matters properly for the Speaker rather than for me, but it may be possible that we could have an interesting discussion on the meaning of the word “forthwith”. I seem to remember that that topic exercised the House to a considerable degree in a previous Parliament.

Amendments to the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that extremely sensible point. I would not want to trespass on the exclusive cognisance in their own fields of the various other Parliaments, but if it were thought useful I could certainly ensure that copies of what we propose were sent on an information basis. I am looking at both the SNP and the DUP in the hope that they would not think that that was an impertinence and an attempt to interfere. If those proposals were of use, however, I think that that would be a sensible thing to do.

The ICGS will be streamlined with the removal of the right to seek a review of the draft formal assessment, which is a current means for a complainant to request review when an investigation concludes that the case is not upheld. The factual accuracy check will now be the single point at which both parties, complainant and responder, can correct inaccuracies in the report. The system that we have had until now, which combines a factual accuracy check and a review, has resulted in substantial delay in some cases. We have debated the need for investigations to come to a conclusion more speedily on a number of occasions, and this straightforward measure will help to achieve that.

Another important recommendation concerns the introduction of a time limit for non-recent cases. That will apply only to bullying and harassment cases. The new timeframe will be brought in a year from now, applying to new complaints arising from 28 April 2022. From that date onwards, people can report an incident of bullying or harassment up to one full year after it occurs. That compares with the three-month deadline for claims to an employment tribunal, so the House is once again setting a standard higher than that expected in external workforces. Given the particular nature of sexual harassment cases and the understandable reality that people often need longer to feel able to bring forward such a case, there will be no time limit for those cases.

In addition to the changes recommended by the review, further technical changes are proposed to the policies and procedures, including making it clear that although bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct are defined in the same way across the parliamentary community, the Commissioners for Standards in both Houses are responsible for overseeing investigations, so there are some procedural differences. Other recommendations include aligning the language of the two policies and procedures more closely; amending the procedure documents to be clear that they provide an outline only of the procedure; making it clear that complaints can be made of any former member of the parliamentary community; including in the bullying and harassment policy that victimisation is an aggravating factor, as included in the sexual misconduct policy; and finally, including information on data protection.

I would like to provide some reassurance about whether the changes set out in the motion would have retrospective effect. For the majority of changes to the text of the policies and procedures, the question of retrospection does not arise. Some of the changes are purely linguistic—for example, the change in terminology from “case manager” to “independent investigator”, to ensure that the documents reflect the terminology used by those involved in the process, or the change from “reporter” to “complainant” in sexual misconduct complaints. In those cases, it would not be meaningful to talk about retrospection.

Other changes have been made to reflect existing practice. For example, the factual accuracy check, which was introduced as a procedural step some time ago as a matter of fairness to both parties, is now expressly referred to in the documents. Other changes have been made to clarify the language and to amend defects in the drafting to ensure that the documents clearly reflect the policy intention at the time they were made. It will be for the decision maker to decide how to apply the policy in cases already under way, considering both the language at the time and the intention. I will repeat that for the benefit of the House, because it is a fundamental point: it will be for the decision maker to decide how to apply the policy in cases already under way, considering both the language of the policy at the time and the intention. For Members or former Members, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards makes the initial decision, which can then be appealed to the independent expert panel in accordance with the IEP’s own procedures. For former staff, the house service is the decision maker, and for Members’ staff, the decision maker will be the Member.

There are also some minor changes where it is fair and reasonable to apply the changes—

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

The Leader of the House has addressed the issue that has been a concern to me and that led to me seeking support for an amendment—the issue of retrospection—but I am rather disappointed that he does not seem to be ruling out the fact that changes to paragraph 4.3 are retrospective. How can it be justified that we make retrospective changes to paragraph 4.3 which, subject to the decision maker, can be allowed to be lawful? Surely if we change the rules we should change them prospectively rather than retrospectively.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The issue is that it is not at this stage clear what decision the decision maker would make on the language that is currently used in the light of the policy that was adopted by the House. What we are passing today does not change the ability of the decision maker to make a decision on the language of the policy at the time. It is not an attempt to say that the decision maker must follow a new set of words or an old set of words. It is for them to look at what was there at the time both in policy and in terms of language and decide what the right decision is.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

But paragraph 16 of the Commission report states that the drafting of paragraph 4.3 has merely

“been updated so that it more clearly reflects the policy intention of the Commission and the House, when the resolution relating to non-recent cases was passed in July 2019”.

Without anticipating my own speech, all I can say is that there is no evidence at all that there was such a policy intention at that time, and I am very worried that those words in paragraph 16 could be used by a decision maker in order to justify what I would regard as retrospective change.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

It is not for me to say what decision the decision maker should come to, but the decision maker should base any decision on the language of the policy at the time. It would not be fair to make a decision on our clarification ex post facto. I hope that is helpful to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend makes a point that is sorted out by the fact that there is an appeals system and a senior body that can, on appeal, determine this, which I imagine other decision makers would then want to follow. It is not the same as a court, but it is not entirely dissimilar. Lower courts can make a decision, but ultimately there is an appeal body that will make a decision that we would then expect the lower-down decision makers to follow. I do not think that the problem he outlines would last, because there is a proper appeals system to the independent expert panel, which, very much at the request of Members across the House, contains very serious legal expertise, so that we can ensure that in all these cases, natural justice is done and it is fair to both complainants and respondents.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Will the independent panel be accessible by former Members, rather than just current Members? In paragraph 3 of the Commission’s report, there is a reference to the changes to which we are referring being

“recommended by staff for clarification and updating of the documents.”

Are those staff involved in any of this decision making? Can my right hon. Friend ensure that those recommendations from the staff are published, so that we can all see what they were and the basis on which they were put forward?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Alison Stanley carried out a very thorough review and spoke to a number of people across the parliamentary estate to get their views and to get a full understanding of how the overall system was working. She drew her conclusions from that and made recommendations to the Commission, the bulk of which will be implemented if the House decides to support tonight’s proposal. When discussions are held in confidence, it is unfair retrospectively to undermine that confidence, so I could not give the commitment that the views given to Alison Stanley should be made public, because the views were not solicited on that basis.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

It was a mistake to put two points in one intervention. My first point was about whether former Members of Parliament will have access to the independent panel for appeal.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The independent expert panel is available for appeals for people who get caught up in the ICGS system. If any conclusion is made, I believe people have the right to ask to appeal to the panel. Not all appeals are guaranteed, but there is a right to ask for one. As far as I am aware, that applies to anybody who comes up within the system.

Let me come to the other minor changes. The original documents were clear that confidentiality is central to the process, but they made reference to the possibility that either a complainant or a respondent might wish to discuss the matter with a small number of people to seek practical support. Those mentioned were managers and HR services or other relevant parties. The new version refers expressly to trade union representatives and party Whips, because concerns were very reasonably raised that the document should make it clear that a Member who discussed his or her case with a Whip would not be in breach of the requirement of confidentiality. That clarification is relevant in all cases, whether or not the complaints procedure has already begun.

Where there is a real change to the policies and procedures, I am happy to confirm that the changes are not being applied retrospectively. In particular, the new one-year time limit on complaints of bullying and harassment will not be applied to any complaints made before 28 April 2022, and that is clear from the text before the House. Alison Stanley also recommended the removal of the complainant’s right of review because of the degree of overlap with the factual accuracy check. Any complainant who has made a formal complaint before the House’s approval of the amended texts will continue to be able to request a review on the grounds set out in the existing documents, namely that the procedure was flawed or that substantial new evidence has become available.

The purpose of all the changes we are debating today is to ensure that the ICGS is an effective, efficient, clear and comprehensive system for complaints and support. These alterations will make a difference to the running of the scheme and will help us to make progress towards real and sustained culture change in Parliament—something I know Members across the House are keen to continue to champion and support. I commend the motion to the House.

Sittings in Westminster Hall (Suspension) (No. 2)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 13th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

As I understand it—though it may be better to seek wise clerkly advice on this point—if the Committee of Selection were to approve members for the Committee, the Committee could go ahead, and then my right hon. Friend’s Bill would be ready for the point at which we bring back Fridays, which, as I said, I look forward to doing at the earliest opportunity, when it is possible and practicable.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I thought I had almost finished, but I would never refuse to give way to my hon. Friend.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

I am very grateful. My right hon. Friend says that he is committed to coming back with proposals as soon as practicable. If we passed the amendments tonight, they would ensure that his will prevailed until after half-term, and then after half-term there would have to be a fresh look at these issues. Does he not agree with that?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I think my hon. Friend is saying, “Not my will but thy will be done”—essentially, that is his point—but I think the commitment is a sensible one. There is limited time, and therefore we should bring back something when we can actually do it rather than going through the motions again and again. That is why we have not reset dates for private Members’ Bills on Fridays, because we have reset dates now several times, and we have found that we have had to re-reset dates because, when we got to the new dates, it has turned out not be practical to sit. Therefore, I think this is the most sensible way of doing it, but I reiterate my reluctance. This place is here to scrutinise, to hold to account and to ensure that our constituents are represented. Anything that reduces scrutiny is something that no Leader of the House should ever wish to do.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 30th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am so sorry I was not clear; I thought that everybody knew that “da-da-da-dah, da-da-da-dah” was the fifth symphony. It was, of course, used as the signature tune of the BBC during the second world war to indicate that freedom was coming to Europe. As regards fishermen, the deal delivers for our fishermen. It recognises UK sovereignty over our fishing waters and puts us in a position to rebuild our fishing fleet and increase quotas in the next few years. There will be a rapid increase in quota—an uplift of up to 25%—by the end of five and a half years, beginning at 15%, before annual negotiations mean we can steadily increase beyond that point. In addition, £100 million will be spent in a programme to modernise the fishing fleet and the fish processing industry, so this is a great new opportunity for fishing. As the Prime Minister said in his speech earlier, it is putting right the wrongs of the common fisheries policy. May I finish by wishing my neighbour in Somerset a very happy new year? I am sorry that both Bath and North East Somerset are going into tier 3 from midnight tonight, or one minute past midnight tomorrow morning, but at least we will be able to have happy celebrations among ourselves.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his sterling personal contribution to securing the full Brexit of our dreams, but may I remind him that there is an organisation still frustrating our power to control our own borders and laws? I am referring to the European Court of Human Rights. Can we have a debate about that Court, particularly in light of its judgment, reported in The Times law reports yesterday, in the case of Unuane? That is a case where we deported a foreign national offender who had been sentenced to five and a half years’ imprisonment for very serious immigration offences—facilitating other people to break our immigration laws. The Court has said that deportation was unlawful. Can we have a debate to discuss judge-made law, which the Court itself referred to? It said that it was interpreting the law itself, although it is not spelt out in article 8.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The official Home Office line is that the Home Office is disappointed with the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, as it has a duty to protect the public by removing foreign criminals who violate our laws, and that is obviously right, but I would say to my hon. Friend that there is one fundamental difference between the ECJ and the European Court of Human Rights: ECJ judgments became our law automatically, but judgments of the European Court of Human Rights have to come through Parliament at some point to make our law compatible, but that ultimately is a choice. He will remember that was a choice we were very reluctant to make over voting rights for prisoners. The European Court of Human Rights has a different status—a lesser status—and the great protector of human rights in this nation is this House of Commons, not any court outside the country.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Thursday 3rd December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Never has parliamentary scrutiny of Government become more important than it is now. In the light of that, will my right hon. Friend agree to allow the House to sit until Christmas Eve so that we can discuss all these important issues, not least the tiering process, and to enable the House to have a chance to consider an issue dear to Mr Speaker and the Deputy Speakers—namely, whether or not we should introduce a change to the Standing Orders relating to the length of speeches?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

It is a matter of great concern that speeches are much too short. I know that Members of the House would like speeches to go on for many hours as they used to in the 19th century—particularly those of my hon. Friend, who has made some spectacularly long speeches in my period in this House and done so with great panache and verve. I agree with him that scrutiny is fundamental, but I can assure the House that we will not be sitting on Christmas Day.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Thursday 2nd July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

May I ask my right hon. Friend whether it is possible to have an early debate on the importance of regulatory impact assessments in public policy making? As he knows, social distancing rules have a different impact in different sectors of the economy and on different activities, and we would be able to get a lot more consistency in Government advice on this if we had regulatory impact assessments, which seem to have been ignored, not least in relation to social-distancing rules in this House.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The problem is that if we spend too long doing all this, by the time we have done it we have moved on to the next stage of the lockdown. We have to move at a pace to ensure that things happen in a timely manner, and I am a bit surprised that my hon. Friend is calling for bureaucratic folderol, rather than getting on with things—this is out of character for him. We need to do things properly and one sector or another will do it differently, but, as the opening up takes place, people must to some extent use their own wisdom to work out what they have to do.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s comments with regard to the digital voting, and for the tribute he paid to the House staff for doing that. I re-emphasise its temporary nature. We have proceeded with almost unanimous consent to achieve a hybrid Parliament. We would not have done so had people thought this was a sleight of hand—a prestidigitation—to try to change our procedures on a permanent basis. It has been important to maintain the good will of all parliamentarians.

As regards the statement on Sunday, I think the Prime Minister’s answer at Prime Minister’s questions was the right one. Although the week starts on a Sunday, the business week starts on a Monday, therefore the announcement is being made in preparation for the business week on a Monday. It is therefore the right time to do it, but I can confirm that there will be a statement on Monday. [Interruption.] I notice some giggles in the Chamber, although, Mr Speaker, I am not sure I am meant to notice the giggles emanating from the Chair. It slightly surprises me, because I do not think there are any plans for the House to meet on Sunday.

As regards the hybridity of this Chamber, this House must lead by example. The Government have set out in their guidelines that those who cannot work from home are entitled to and ought to carry on working, especially those in crucial roles. To pretend our democracy is not crucial undermines and undervalues the whole purpose of our democracy. What goes on here—the holding to account and the legislation—is essential, and when we are asking other people to work and to go to their places of work, we should not be ones who are exempt from that. I am glad, therefore, that we have made a hybrid system work.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con) [V]]

Can I thank my right hon. Friend for giving the assurance that there will be a statement on Monday, because that will enable Members to be able to ask questions on the statement, which they would not be able to do if it was just a mere introduction to a debate without the ability to intervene? May I also ask my right hon. Friend what he will do to ensure that the system of named day written questions works for the benefit of Back Benchers and their constituents? A host of named day questions are not being answered on time or at all, and I am sorry to say that the Department of Health and Social Care is the worst offender. One question that it has answered was from me, asking how many it had not answered. When that came in on Monday, it showed that figure to be more than 100, and I do not think any of those questions have been answered since, and a whole lot more are in the queue. Will my right hon. Friend do something to help us on that?

Private Members’ Bills: Money Resolutions

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Monday 21st May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Christopher Chope]

I thought that we did not need to change it, because I thought the convention was that if a Bill secured a Second Reading it would get a money resolution, and that is the disappointment that has come out of this debate.

My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House says that the Government are now going to look at this on a case-by-case basis, so we now have another layer, basically with the Government—the Executive—saying “We’re going to second-guess Members’ priorities.” It is difficult enough to secure Second Reading for a private Member’s Bill, but once these Bills have done so the order in which they go into Committee is now solely under the control of the Government, because the Government decide whether or not Bills are going to have their blessing on a case-by-case basis.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am fascinated that my hon. Friend has become such a champion of private Member’s Bills, as he has killed more of them than almost any other Member of this House, and to my mind has played a very useful role in doing so. However, is the Government’s practice not caprice, but constitutional correctness? It is the job of this House to seek redress of grievance while it is the job of the Government to ask for expenditure, and we are at risk of confusing the two?

Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 27th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

With the greatest of respect to the hon. Gentleman, I do not accept that, which is why I tabled the new clause. As he says, the Minister was addressing new clauses 1 and 2, and I would not at this stage anticipate her response to the debate we are now having on new clause 3. If a statutory duty is in place, minds will be concentrated. That means that the ombudsman would, for example, be able to explain to a complainant who it was who was not providing the information that was necessary in a timely fashion and say, “If we don’t get a move on, your complaint will be time-barred because we will dismiss it on the basis that we have a lack of evidence.”

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Following on from the point made by the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound), may I say that I am not entirely sure that corsets are normally metallic—I believe they are generally made of whalebone? Leaving that aside, I wonder whether my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) ought to be introducing a shorter time limit, because we all know that work expands to fill the time available. [Interruption.] Parkinson’s law, indeed. As soon as a 12-month time limit is introduced, that is the time that will be taken. If 95% of complaints are being dealt with within six months, six months would seem to be quite a good limit.

[Mr Chope]

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is a pity that he did not put down an amendment to my new clause to replace the limit of 12 months with one of six months. We know that the Bills that we debate on Fridays involve an iterative process. If the new clause were accepted today by my right hon. Friend, we would start off with a 12-month limit, which might in due course move to six months. That deadline, which will have the effect of concentrating minds, makes the measure legally meaningful, whereas, at the moment, everything in the Bill is legally meaningless. The Bill is, as someone has said in relation to the draft clauses of the Scotland Bill, “legally vacuous”.

[Mr Chope]

Unlike quite a lot of organisations, the ombudsman is accountable to this House. If the ombudsman were experiencing the difficulty to which my right hon. Friend refers, I would expect the ombudsman, the chief executive or chairman to contact my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) and say that they wished the Public Administration Committee to look into the matter and put pressure on the recalcitrant Department. In a sense, my right hon. Friend is saying that, because we may have customers—if that is the right expression—who are minded to delay things, we should facilitate enabling them to delay things beyond a year. We need to focus on who the real customer is. The customer is the person who has made a complaint, and whose complaint has been accepted for investigation by the ombudsman. In my view, they are entitled to have a decision on that complaint within 12 months, which is why I put in this statutory duty.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It occurs to me that, for once, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) is wrong. If a public body failed to respond to the ombudsman, it should be found against and that would be quite a penalty and an incentive not to procrastinate.

[Mr Chope]

Again, my hon. Friend makes a first-class point. I hope that, when the Minister responds to this short debate, she will support the line that is being taken. We need to ensure that there is no scope for statutory bodies to avoid their responsibilities to deliver and that we facilitate the ombudsman to reach a result within 12 months of a complaint being made.

At the moment, the ombudsman is dealing with about 4,000 complaints a year, some 3,000 of which are related to health. The cost of those complaints to the taxpayer is about £4,000 a time. As the taxpayer is investing that amount of money, a reasonable return on that would be to say that those complaints should be dealt with in a maximum period of one year. If we pass new clause 3 and include it in the Bill, we will have a useful piece of legislation, instead of an empty vessel—although even an empty vessel with the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden on it will be cherished by many people, especially his constituents.

Amendment 3 is more specific. It will require the commissioner, in fulfilling the obligations set out in clause 1, to explain the delay before the end of the 12-month period, rather than after it. At the moment, there is a lacuna here—perhaps it is a deliberate one—to ensure that the minimum pressure is applied, which will show that we are just engaged in gesture politics. I hope that that is not correct. As it stands, clause 1(2) says:

“Where the Commissioner has not concluded an investigation before the end of the 12-month period…the Commissioner must send a statement explaining the reason for the delay to the person who made the complaint.”

But it does not say when the commissioner should send that statement. Unless there is a requirement on the timing of that statement, the measure is completely meaningless. It may be that that statement will be sent at the same time as the ultimate decision is made. In an effort to make the Bill do what my right hon. Friend wants it to do, which is to put pressure on the health service commissioner to deal with complaints in a timely fashion, I am suggesting a modest amendment.

Amendment 4 is on the same theme. When that statement is sent, it would not just explain the reason for the delay, but contain an estimate of the target date for completion of the investigation. I accept that, in itself, that would not be much use, because if there is another target date—it could be in another year—there may still be no remedy for the complainant. At least, though, it would force the ombudsman service to apply its mind to how much longer it thought it was reasonable for the investigation of the complaint to take.

Amendment 5 brings us into a slightly different territory. I suspect that a main reason for the delay in dealing with these complaints is a lack of resource. The amendment would add to clause 1 the words:

“If the reason for the delay specified in Section 2HA is lack of financial resources it shall be the duty of the Commissioner to set out the action which is being taken to remedy that lack of financial resource.”

Again, if the delay is due to financial reasons, it is surely important that the world outside, and particularly the complainant, should know about that so that they can make the necessary complaints. It is also important that the ombudsman is able to say, “Well, because of a lack of financial resources, I am not able to deal with these cases as quickly as I would have wished. Therefore, I am asking Parliament for more money to help us meet our case load.”

There is a £15 million budget for this exercise. Each case currently costs some £4,000 on average. The average compensation payment that was paid out in 628 cases amounts to less than £1,000. I am not sure that anyone coming from another planet and looking at this system would say that it is financially well focused. The average cost of dealing with a complaint is over £4,000. The average amount paid to a successful complainant is just less than £1,000. That shows that there is a potential problem in relation to the funding of the ombudsman service. That may be exacerbated by the ombudsman’s decision to take on more complaints for investigation by “lowering the threshold” for investigating such complaints. As the annual report makes clear, the consequence of that is an increase in the number of complaints being investigated, only a reduced proportion of which is being concluded in favour of the complainant. Expectations among the complainants are being raised, but they are not being delivered on by the ombudsman because a lot more cases are being taken on which probably should not have been taken on in the first place. The report states that because the ombudsman is

“taking on many more investigations than before, the proportion of investigations…upheld or partly upheld has inevitably declined”.

I think that the expression “inevitably declined” is a bit of an underestimate, because it has declined from 86% to 42%, which is a dramatic reduction in one year.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 5th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

I certainly shall not do that, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wish to put it on record that there is a threat of us falling below the 2% threshold of defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP. That is a bad thing, and we should be legislating against that possibility.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

This Bill sets such a bad precedent that we should not follow it in other areas, and we should look to repeal it rather than extending the precedent right, left and centre.

[Mr Chope]

As always, there is logic in what my hon. Friend says, but, as Madam Deputy Speaker has said, I will not go down the route of making comparisons between this Bill and any other Bill that may or may not be discussed in due course. Over the coming weeks, I shall try to work out a convincing response to my hon. Friend’s intervention.

Cross-party consensus often results in rather woolly legislation. My concern, like that of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), is that this Bill is an exercise in tokenism; it is gesture politics. It is about raising expectations beyond what is actually going to be delivered by the Bill itself. Clause 1 sets down a statutory duty. Normally, a breach of statutory duty is something against which an individual or an organisation can litigate. They can sue in the courts against the Government for being in breach of a statutory duty. Clauses 2 and 3 negate that possibility. What they say is that notwithstanding the statutory duty set out in clause 1, there is no remedy in law; the only remedy is through a report to Parliament. There is not even a requirement for a debate. The promoters and supporters of the Bill see this as a fantastic breakthrough in law-making. They believe that they now have a new statutory duty to meet a target, but when one looks at the detail of it, one sees that it is a statutory duty without any right or ability to enforce it.

When I was a law student, I was told that there was no point in having a command in law without a sanction. It seems that this Bill fails to deliver an effective sanction against a failure to fulfil the duty set out in clause 1—whether or not one supports that duty. I fear that this Bill shows that we in this House are out of touch with the wishes of the British people, and it will, in the end, disappoint in practice.

As people realise the distorting effect that this measure will have on other spending plans, hostility towards it will increase. In its report on the autumn statement of 2013, the Treasury Committee said:

“Ring-fencing, by definition, requires that the balance of public expenditure restraint and cuts be borne in the rest of public expenditure. Each successive year of public expenditure restraint results in an increase in ring-fenced spending as a proportion of the total. The smaller non-ring-fenced areas in turn have to bear a higher proportion of any savings in subsequent years. The IFS has shown that non-ring-fenced expenditure may fall from 61.6% in 2010-11 to around 50% in 2018-19 of total Departmental Expenditure Limits.”

The Committee cites as a specific example the fact that overseas development expenditure as a percentage of departmental expenditure in 2010-11 was 2.2% but it is expected to have almost doubled to 4% by 2018-19, a far higher percentage increase than in any other area of public expenditure. I do not think that fits in with the priorities of the people and I do not think that has been spelt out clearly enough, if at all, by the promoters of the Bill or by my right hon. Friend the Minister in his all-too-brief remarks on Report.

There is another important point about ring-fencing. As the Treasury Committee has said, it reduces the discipline on spending in the areas subject to it. The rigour of negotiations between the Department and the Treasury on allocations will be weakened since it is known by both sides in advance that the spending is protected. When there is ring-fenced expenditure, a departmental Minister cannot go before a Cabinet Committee and say that they need more money to spend on a programme and, when the Chief Secretary to the Treasury asks where they are going to get the money from, point out where another Department is wasting a lot of money.

Benefit Entitlement (Restriction) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 17th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Indeed, he will see that clauses 2, 3 and 4 of the Bill state:

“Notwithstanding…the European Communities Act 1972”.

In other words, the Bill would ensure that we were able to decide these things for ourselves, as a sovereign legislature, and override European Union law. My hon. Friend’s point was, in a sense, echoed by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in an article in The Sunday Times to which I referred earlier. It states that he

“added that reforming benefits was part of a wider move towards no longer automatically accepting rulings from the European Commission and courts.”

He welcomed the comments by Lord Judge, the former lord chief justice, that ‘we shouldn’t always assume straight away that anything that comes legally out of Europe we have to impose’ and said he was optimistic that there was the ‘beginning of a twitch with the Supreme Court”.

My Bill is designed to go a bit further than a twitch; it is designed to ensure that we change our law. If we suffer infraction proceedings in the European Court of Justice, one thing is certain: they are unlikely to reach a conclusion until you and I are in our dotage, Madam Deputy Speaker. The ECJ involves a very long-winded process, and because it is so long-winded, the French Government, for example, will deliberately defy EU law in the knowledge that any sanctions arising from their defiance will not be apparent until many, many years later.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

What does my hon. Friend think would be the practicality of any sanction on a country that is a net contributor to the EU budget?

[Mr Chope]

I am not going to answer that question; as with so many of my hon. Friend’s interventions, he perhaps already knows the answer, in which case he will be able to adumbrate it if he contributes to the debate. The point he makes is that we are net contributors, and if the European Union thinks that we can be kicked around and we will do whatever Mrs Reding or anybody else wants us to do, it is about time they started concentrating their minds on the fact that British taxpayers pay a lot of their salaries.

Again, if fines or penalties are imposed, that creates distortions. I suppose we could set them off against our contributions to the European Union.

I became particularly interested in this subject early last year, because I thought that it was absolutely fundamental that our country can distinguish between our nationals and nationals of other European Union countries in dealing with benefit issues. A few parliamentary questions have been asked on the subject. In answer to a question asked on 14 January 2013, the then Minister of State at the Department for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban), said:

“The UK’s benefit payment systems do not currently record details of a claimant’s nationality. Looking forward, the Government is considering ways of recording nationality and immigration status of migrants who make a claim to universal credit”.—[Official Report, 14 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 466W.]

I hope that the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), who is on the Front Bench today, will tell us what has happened in the subsequent year regarding recording nationality and immigration status, because if we do not even have basic information about the nationality of migrants or people claiming benefit, and have no means of finding that out, how can we ever have the tight controls that the Government keep talking about to ensure that migrants from other EU countries do not abuse our benefit system in their first three months here, or ensure that they are genuinely seeking work?

The first provision in the Bill would ensure that national insurance numbers were issued only after the applicant had declared their nationality, and would not make it possible for anybody to claim benefit without declaring their nationality. In that way, we could at least gather some statistics about the use of our benefit system by nationals from other countries, which we certainly cannot do at the moment.

There is a big problem and I fear that it suits the Government not to give the people the full facts on this issue. They have statistics measuring net migration, for the purposes of meeting a commitment they made at the last general election to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. However, there are different ways in which net migration is calculated. The labour force survey estimates that the number of A2 nationals living in the UK has increased by 25,000 a year in the six years between 2007 and 2013. However, the Government’s figures, which are based on passenger surveys carried out at ports and airports, suggest that there were fewer than 10,000 new people from Bulgaria and Romania a year. As we do not have a way of measuring people’s nationality when it comes to national insurance numbers or benefit claimants, the Government have to rely on passenger surveys to find out how many people have come from Romania or Bulgaria. The Office for National Statistics has been critical of the cavalier way in which the UK collects those statistics.

Clause 1 of my Bill would make it much easier for us to have a proper public debate on these issues, based on the facts rather than on conjecture. I hope that the Minister agrees that is a good idea.

Clause 2 of my Bill says:

“Notwithstanding the provisions of the European Communities Act 1972, no non-UK citizen who is a national of a member country of the European Union or the European Economic Area shall be eligible for housing benefit or council tax benefit in England and Wales unless the benefit entitlement arises by reason of having the status of a spouse or dependant of a UK citizen.”

In other words, the clause would close down access to housing and council tax benefit for people who have come to this country to work or to play.

Business of the House (2 December)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Indeed, I tried to limit my remarks to those two issues: the length of the debate and its timing next Monday. I look forward to hearing an explanation from the Leader of the House.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I am puzzled by my hon. Friend’s view that after 10 pm on Monday is not a good time for debating these issues. What on earth else would anybody rather do than come to the House and debate these important matters?

[Mr Chope]

I would be happy, as I am sure my hon. Friend would be too, to debate these issues until 1, 2 or 3 o’clock on Tuesday morning, should the need arise. That is why, as I said, the more serious of my concerns is the time limit rather than the timing. Obviously, he and I will participate in the debate at whatever time is set down, but we need to think about how easily people outside can follow our proceedings.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

Madam Deputy Speaker, the sooner you are able to participate fully in our debates, the better. I invite you to come down and join the throng.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am simply concerned that, at that late hour, some Members might be tempted to go to nightclubs and things like that. It would be distressing if we were to have the debate at a time when that might happen.

[Mr Chope]

I hope that when the debate takes place, it will be allowed a longer period of time than the motion currently provides for, and that it will have a similar spirit of good humour to the one that is prevailing in this short debate. I see no reason for extending this debate; I am making only a short point. Why does the Leader of the House need to close down debate on these issues and limit the discussion to 45 minutes on each of the two subjects, one of which has been the subject of a Government amendment to the motion tabled by the Procedure Committee? If we are going to encourage Members to participate to the full in the work of the Select Committees, including the Procedure Committee, the least we can do is allow proper time for colleagues to debate and question the proposals of those Committees.

I do not think that 45 minutes for each subject is sufficient, and I would be interested to hear why the Leader of the House thinks that those time limits are sufficient and appropriate, particularly as we have quite a lot of surplus time available now. I was talking to a journalist earlier, and he suggested that the business for next week seemed extremely light. I put these questions to the Leader of the House in a spirit of friendship. I know that, even though he does not always succeed, he tries hard to accommodate the needs of Back Benchers.

House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 18th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend makes a helpful point. That is the nub of the matter: the courts can determine what is a proceeding in Parliament, and although proceedings in Parliament are exempt it is arguable that a certificate issued by the Lord Speaker is not a proceeding in Parliament and that it is, therefore, challengeable in spite of the wording of the Bill, which was questioned earlier, that the certificate

“shall not be questioned in a court of law.”

That has been tried before. I remember the then Home Secretary, now Lord Howard, introducing a Bill that said that a certain something could not be reviewed by the courts, but the courts did so and said that it was unconstitutional. We now have great difficulties in passing laws that deny the European Court of Human Rights and our own domestic courts access to determining things. Even if legislation says something, an appeal to a European court may overrule it. That is why it is important to try to keep as much as possible within the proceedings of the House, because those clearly and definitively cannot be challenged.

As I have said, the absence issue is ancient. Lots of people, when appointed or elected to Parliament, end up not wanting to come, and that has been true for centuries. They would rather stay in their constituencies. As has already been asked, where is everybody today? This House has procedures and mechanisms that we could use—they are ancient and, because of the whipping system, have tended to be allowed to lie waste in recent centuries—if we wanted to enforce attendance, which, in previous times, prior to the whipping system, we were much stricter about.

The House of Lords, of course, has a much weaker whipping system as well as Cross Benchers, who, inevitably, are particularly likely not to turn up on every occasion, because they are not payroll politicians. They are not there to provide a majority for either side or to try to disrupt business as Opposition peers; they are there to contribute what they know. Cross Benchers, modest Lords and Ladies that they are, realise that they do not know everything about everything, unlike Members of this House, who, I am glad to say, do know everything about everything, at least most of the time. Therefore, maintaining flexibility and trying to solve a long-standing historical problem that does not have much of a solution would be best left to their lordships.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend accept that another issue is that often Cross Benchers may attend but not actually vote and that, because the definition of voting is attendance, they might be caught out by the provision if they choose not to take sides in a particular debate?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend is right. Given the looser whipping system, Cross Benchers do not necessarily know when the votes will take place. I have heard from some Cross Benchers that they feel that the votes are often deliberately scheduled for the point at which most of them will have gone home, because the party Whips prefer to keep the votes mainly among themselves, rather than have too many pesky Cross Benchers interfering, but that is anecdotal and may not represent the situation fairly. Others may want to dispute it. I agree that the position of Cross Benchers is particular and that voting certainly does not mean attendance. It is a different requirement. Indeed, activity in the Lords can mean different things: it can take place in general discussion, in Committee or on the Floor. I think that that is a matter for the Lords to determine for themselves internally, not for legislation, because legislation is ultimately justiciable, and then the courts get involved.

On the retirement or resignation issue, I raised one of my concerns in an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire, namely the ping-ponging of people from this House to the House of Lords and back again. I can foresee a circumstance in which a body of entirely professional politicians—people who have never done any work outside the political arena—stand for Parliament in a marginal seat and win one election but lose the next, upon which the party bosses put them in the House of Lords and then the week before the next election they stand down in order to stand for election in their former constituency.

That would be disadvantageous for a number of reasons. First, it would increase the patronage of the party leaders because they would be able to provide a steady stream of income for loyalists. Members of this House who are in marginal seats would be under great pressure always to vote along party lines, because they would see that they were at risk of losing their seat, but that there was a nice billet on the red Benches if they behaved themselves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

I am not that naive; there are two Bills after this one before we get to any of mine. The Government have already indicated that, although the House of Lords (Maximum Membership) Bill has received the Queen’s consent, that does not mean that it has their support. I live in hope, but as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans), who is in charge of the next Bill to be discussed, nobody’s performance or career in this House should be judged on how many private Members’ Bills they have been able to get on the statute book.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Does my hon. Friend think that a contribution to the House should be judged on the number of Bills an hon. Member stops getting on to the statute book?

[Mr Chope]

I am not sure about that, in those blunt terms. It is often not clear how a Bill is stopped in its tracks. We know that the House of Lords Reform Bill was stopped in its tracks not by dealing with the issues of substance, but by a procedural device in relation to the programme motion. It may well be that when a vote is called shortly, I hope, on the proposal from my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset, we will see how many Members are here who wish to participate.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am sorry to disappoint my hon. Friend. If fewer than 35 Members participate in the Division on the committal to a Committee of the whole House, that does not have the same effect as if fewer than 35 had voted on Second Reading. It will have no effect, ultimately.

Business of the House (26 February)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Monday 25th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is, of course, absolutely right. If there are hon. Members present who would rather I was not speaking, I would point out to them that it was open to them to vote against the 10 o’clock motion. Indeed, I am rather surprised that they did not do so, if they wanted to get home promptly.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Does not my hon. Friend think that people voted in favour of the extension motion because it is always such a pleasure to sit late—to sit late tonight, and to sit late tomorrow night? Perhaps we could sit late on Wednesday as well.

[Mr Chope]

At a time when productivity in so many parts of our economy is in question, it is important that the House should set a good example by being very productive. I am sure that no one would wish to suggest concluding our proceedings unnecessarily early.

This issue should not be treated with levity. The whole purpose of Standing Orders is that we should maintain and stick to them. If, whenever we had private business, the Standing Orders were invariably set aside, they would be brought into disrepute. In the absence of a written constitution, the Standing Orders are our ultimate defence of liberty. That is why I take very seriously attempts by the Government to undermine the Standing Orders.

Let us look at what would happen tomorrow if the business of the House motion were not carried. The sitting would start with questions. Then there would be statements, though we do not yet know whether there will be any urgent questions or statements tomorrow. Then we would get on to the Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill. If discussion on that Bill had not finished at 4 o’clock, we could continue discussing it at 7 o’clock. What is so unreasonable about that? It seems a sensible way of proceeding.

Let us remember that in the past the Government would not normally have given half a day for Report and Third Reading of a major Bill; they would have allocated a whole day. Indeed, that is what they did originally in the programme motion that was carried by the House on 19 November last year, in which it was agreed that Report and Third Reading of the Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill would have a full day. As the Government want to curtail debate on the Bill, they have tabled a motion among the remaining orders to restrict the length of Report and Third Reading, and they are compounding that felony by saying that they wish to push private business to later on in the day, so that the Bill can be accommodated before private business.

Anyone would think that the Government were not in control of their business. Why are we having to debate this at 10 o’clock on a Monday night? It seems as though they run their business on a rather hand-to-mouth basis. Why did they not decide on this several weeks ago? I hope that the Leader of the House will address that issue when he responds.

I have tabled some new clauses and amendments to the Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill, and I see no harm in splitting consideration of the Bill, with our debating it until 4 o’clock, and starting again at 7 o’clock. [Interruption.] I see that the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) thinks that would be a good idea, and I hope that, in due course, that will be reflected in the way he votes in any Division that takes place.

We do not need to make a great meal of this. It is important that we should stand up for the rights of the House. We should make it clear to the business managers that they cannot just push stuff though on the nod, and that there will always be some of us who will want to raise questions and not be pushed around, as we feel we are being pushed around now.

I hope very much that the House will support the proposition that under Standing Order 20 private business should be dealt with for three hours between 4 o’clock and 7 o’clock tomorrow and that any other Government business should be fitted in around the private business, rather than the private business being kicked into the long grass—relatively speaking—for consideration later in the day. That is my proposition, and that is why I tabled the amendment, which was not selected. That would have been a slightly academic amendment, as reflected in the Speaker’s decision not to call it, because I see no prospect whatever of the Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill being finished before 4 o’clock tomorrow afternoon. The issue before the House is a straight one: do we accept the motion on the Order Paper or do we not?

Canterbury City Council Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 6th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

I fear that, on too many occasions, parliamentary colleagues do not actually look at what they are voting on. I cannot think of any other explanation of why Members would wish to vote in a completely different way from how they voted earlier.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

The obvious reason why this House is so full is that hon. Members wish to listen to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), who is always illuminating.

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, as always, for his intervention, but on this occasion he is absolutely wrong.

This is the last group of amendments that we will debate on this Bill. In fact, the amendments relate not only to the Canterbury City Council Bill, but to all the Bills that we are discussing. It is right at this stage to pay tribute to everybody who has participated in these debates.

Business of the House (6 February)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Monday 4th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Briefly, I see no reason at all why we cannot have the normal arrangements, whereby three hours is allocated to private business between 4 o’clock and 7 o’clock on Wednesday. When such motions have been carried in the past, they have sometimes resulted in the private business continuing beyond 7 o’clock and the people promoting and speaking to that business being criticised by the Whips and colleagues for keeping the House late. The private business should be taken between 4 o’clock and 7 o’clock, and if the business managers so arrange things that they cannot deal with the other business before 4 o’clock and the private business has to continue after 7 o’clock, so be it. Obviously I am not going to divide the House on this matter this evening, but I put people on notice that if on Wednesday the private business continues beyond 7 o’clock and people start bellyaching about it, I hope they will not bellyache against those of us who take a keen interest in private business, but will criticise the Government and the business managers.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

As it is private business, it is not whipped business, so hon. Members will be completely free to go home whenever they feel like it as the private Bill is going through. No one will think otherwise.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend so often articulates the traditional view—indeed, the correct view—but unfortunately it is not consistent with the document outlining the Whip that I saw on the internet over the weekend.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The Vice-Chamberlain of the Household was nodding vigorously as I was making my intervention, so I think I had authoritative support from the Whips.

[Mr Chope]

That puts a slightly different complexion on it. It means that if we approve this motion, all my hon. Friends and Opposition Members will be free immediately after the Opposition day business and will not need to stay for the private business. Following my hon. Friend’s useful contribution, I hope that the Whip will be altered accordingly to reflect the fact that people on this side of the House will be free to leave at 4 o’clock at the latest on Wednesday and that we can then have the private business in our time and under our own rules, with those who are interested in participating present in the House and others who are not so interested absent. On that basis—that the Government are changing the whipping, so that private business is not whipped business—I shall not push this matter to a vote.

Canterbury City Council Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Thursday 31st January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

It may well be, and that is my concern. Let us look at what has happened in the past. Their lordships found a lot of evidence that councils were making assertions about the conduct of pedlars that they could not back up with evidence before their lordships’ Committee, so a council might consider something to be sufficient when it is not sufficient, because of that council or its officers having a particular prejudice or taking a cavalier approach.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the Bill would surely be clearer if it did not allow the council discretion. If the council were to err in its use of discretion, that could lead to judicial reviews and all sorts of expenses to the council, so the promoters of these Bills would benefit by accepting his amendments.

[Mr Chope]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that succinct and, I hope, persuasive—indeed, conclusive—argument in support of my amendments. I hope that our hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey has noted it—although sadly I do not see any messages being passed between him and the people sitting in the officials’ Box on behalf of the promoters of the Bills.

Let me turn to my amendment (e), which would add the following words at the end of subsection (2) of the proposed new clause inserted by Lords amendment C27:

“and shall also be displayed prominently in any designated area.”

It is obviously useful for a motorist visiting a town who is thinking of parking somewhere to know where the parking restrictions apply, and the way to find out is by looking at a notice close to where they intend to park. Similarly, it is quite useful for pedlars intending to peddle their goods in a city or town centre to be able to see on a notice whether a different regime operates there compared with the national regime. That is fundamental to ensuring fair play and justice for visitors to a designated area who are not quite sure whether it is indeed a designated area, and so on. What harm would there be in requiring signs on the circumference of a designated area to make it absolutely clear to any passer-by?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend has given any consideration to the design of such signs and how it might be made clear to people that they are in a peddling or non-peddling zone.

[Mr Chope]

It would be useful if there were distinct signs. Indeed, an enterprising local authority might want to invite local schools to enter a competition to see who could produce the best design for such a sign. I do not think there should necessarily be uniform signs across the country, because that sounds rather bureaucratic and top-down. The most important thing is that the signs should be prominent and clear and not contain a lot of detail—unlike the conditions on the back of one’s new credit card, for example. There need to be relatively few words, prominently displayed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

Colleagues elected in 2010 have discovered that when they are asked by promoters to sponsor a Bill in this House, it does not mean that they lose all their discretion over it. It is ultimately up to them as Members of Parliament to decide what to accept and what not to accept, and they do not need to be beholden to the officials.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, as I was getting very worried about this constitutional principle. It is surely up to this House and not up to individual promoters or local councils, to decide what passes into law.

[Mr Chope]

Absolutely, and I am sorry if I did not make that clear. There was an occasion—you may remember it, Mr Deputy Speaker—on a different private Bill earlier in this Parliament when one of my hon. Friends felt a certain reluctance to do anything other than what he had been told to do by the promoters. I explained to him that he would be doing the promoters, himself and the House a good service if he showed some flexibility. In fairness to him, he did show such flexibility. That is a good precedent, and I draw it to the attention of my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey in case he was not there at the time.

Disabled Persons’ Parking Badges Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 9th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It also occurs to me that a lot of people who have disabled badges are elderly and have memory lapses. Therefore, they may have forgotten who they are and may inadvertently be using a badge that had been stolen.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As I have the privilege of representing a constituency with, I think, the highest proportion of people aged over 85, I am familiar with one aspect of what he refers to: people sign postcards to which I respond by saying that I have sent their postcard to the Minister, but quite often I receive a letter back from the person denying that they have ever signed such a postcard. I then send a copy of the signed postcard to the constituent, who then writes back—people in the Christchurch constituency are ever so polite—full of apologies saying that, yes, they recognise that it is their signature and their handwriting and they must indeed have signed this postcard, but they could not recall having so done. My hon. Friend makes a perfectly valid point.

My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley has tried to encourage me to expand on my concerns about his amendments, but I do not think that I need to do so any more. I look forward to hearing from the Minister and from my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Simon Kirby), the promoter of the Bill, who will have the first opportunity to discuss, in the presence of the whole House, the virtues of the Bill, not having had that opportunity on Second Reading.

Business of the House (11 July)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Thursday 5th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I am sure that points like that—if not identical to it—will be made when we discuss the private business motions, because in essence they are motions on whether the House should agree with the other place that private Members’ Bills that, as he says, have been hanging around in the House for a long time should be revived, or whether the promoters should be held to account for the enormous delays.

Some of the Bills relate to peddlers. We know that since those Bills first began five or more years ago, the Government have announced that they will introduce separate provisions relating to peddlers. I will not go into the merits or otherwise of those particular Bills, because you would rule me out of order, Mr Deputy Speaker, but the question of whether they should be further considered or should lapse owing to how long they have been kicking around needs to be debated. I anticipate that the people saying they should no longer be heard might want to put the proposition to the vote, and I suggest that the voting take place at 7 o’clock on Wednesday rather than much later.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

It occurs to me that there is a certain incongruity in extending Wednesday when the House will just have voted on the sitting hours. We will have adopted hours and then immediately have suspended them for private business. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is rather peculiar?

[Mr Chope]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who, as so often, gets to the nub of the issue and the inconsistencies in the line taken by the business managers. Of course, we do not yet know what line officially they will take towards the sittings of the House, except that, judging by the motion, they think it desirable that we do not all have a say and that the debate be limited to two hours. I had not anticipated that we would have the chance to begin a debate on this important subject this evening.

Finance (No. 4) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Monday 16th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth). So far, this has been a low-key debate, but I suspect that when the people directly affected by the Bill receive their tax demands, they will write to us in large numbers.

I will concentrate my remarks on clause 8 and schedule 1, which relate to the higher rate child benefit charge. I raised this issue in an Adjournment debate. I am grateful to the Exchequer Secretary, whom I am pleased to see in his place, as the Government have given some ground and have responded to some of the concerns expressed in that debate and more widely, but I remain concerned that we will find ourselves with a lot of aggrieved constituents who will not be persuaded that the proposals in the Bill are fair and equitable.

For example, a single parent earning £60,000 a year will lose all their child benefit, whereas next door there may be two people each earning £40,000 and they will retain their child benefit. Constituents say to me—perhaps this happens to you, too, Madam Deputy Speaker—that they resent the fact that the house next door is almost identical to theirs and yet is in a different band for community charge or, as it is now called—[Interruption.] It is not the poll tax; it is the council tax. If they resent a difference of £100 or £200 in their council tax compared with that of their next-door neighbour, how resentful will they be when they find that they are losing child benefit, which could run into thousands of pounds per annum, as a result of being a single-income family earning more than £60,000, whereas the people next door, who are earning a lot more, are retaining their child benefit? Obviously, such people would not have the same costs associated with earning their income as a single parent family, who would normally have to rely on child care to enable them to make their income high enough to pay the full amount—more than £60,000. So I do not see how this new system will ever be fair or be seen to be fair by the people who will be affected by it.

Today the Government are launching their consultation paper on plain packaging for tobacco products. Some wags are saying that that is promoted by the Treasury, because it will give the Treasury more room on the back of the fag packet to write down its latest policy announcements. I do not know whether or not that is correct, but the proposals in clause 8 and schedule 1 smack of policies conceived if not on the back of a fag packet, certainly on the back of an envelope. We know now that the proposal to take child benefit away from higher-rate tax payers was made at the Conservative party conference in 2010, at very short notice. It was then decided by the Chancellor that it would not be possible to take child benefit away from those with children aged between 16 and 18.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, in principle, it is right that we should not tax people highly then to give them back universal benefits? Does he agree that we want to get away from a system where everyone gets benefits and then has to pay more tax just to get them?

[Mr Chope]

I agree with my hon. Friend that there is a lot to be said for simplification and stopping the churning effect. The late Lord Joseph was a great campaigner on these issues, and other Conservatives in the past have campaigned to simplify the tax system, which is the avowed intent of this Government. I also think it right to recognise in the tax system that when people have equivalent incomes, those with children have higher costs than those without children. If we are to recognise families in the tax system, one way is to have what used to be a child allowance, which is now incorporated into the child benefit.

If parents have higher costs, why should they start to pay tax at the same level of income as somebody who is not a parent and does not have those higher costs? That is where I disagree with the Government on this policy, which I do not think is fair or consistent. When it has been justified by the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Exchequer Secretary, they have argued that it is wrong that people who earn £20,000 or £30,000 a year pay for the child benefit of people like my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). The answer to that is that neither my hon. Friend nor other people are being subsidised in that way by other taxpayers, because, as the Exchequer Secretary confirmed in a written answer to me just before the recess, somebody would have to have 10 children and be on the threshold of higher-rate tax before they started to receive more child benefit than they were paying out in tax. The Government deploy a specious argument when they say that someone on £20,000 or £30,000 a year is paying for my hon. Friend’s child benefit.

London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Tuesday 21st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Some people might wonder why some of us speak for hours in these debates, but I must say that is exactly why. By banging on a little, we get steady improvement and amelioration of the penalties on the British people.

As I tried to explain in my opening remarks on this group of amendments, this is all about protecting the liberty of individuals from the constant encroachment of the state, bit by bit, day by day, not to meet some urgent or desperate cause, not because we are at war or because we face terrorists, but because it is more administratively convenient. One of the most important things that this Parliament can do is, by the proper scrutinising of legislation, ensure that the penalties on individuals are always minimised and that the greatest number of freedoms that can be preserved are preserved. I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green for notifying us of that fact, which is a considerable improvement in the Bill and helps us to get to where we want to go.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is introducing this group of amendments with such expertise. In fairness to our hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), he indicated some time ago that the promoter was prepared to accept the amendment. I was surprised, however, by the implication in his intervention just now that it was basically a drafting error that resulted in

“in the course of business”

being left out of clause 10 whereas it was included in clause 9. If it was just a drafting error, it is surprising that the Bill has gone through the other place and through detailed consideration in Committee in this House before that error emerged.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. It is, of course, human to err and divine to forgive, so we will be very forgiving of that error in this instance.

I do not like the clause at all. I have tabled my own amendment, which would get rid of it altogether, for much the same arguments as those I made about clause 9. In reality, we do not want high penalties for people who do things that cause modest inconvenience. A few people having a few cars on the road is not the end of the world.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for an extremely helpful and important intervention, which suggests that the Bill should be a public one covering the whole country. If there is a widespread problem in Castle Point, in North East Somerset and possibly in Scotland, Yorkshire and other parts—even in Wales, where my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) represents his constituency so nobly and so well—there should be a Bill that covers the whole of the United Kingdom. It may be a devolved power, so we may not be able to legislate for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, although their Assemblies may like to ask us to do so. However, if the problem is not so widespread and if it is not a matter for public law, is it really right that in certain areas a private Bill should institute the legal penalties with the full force of law behind them that we get in Westminster and some London boroughs but not in Castle Point? Thus residents in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris) will not have the benefit of the Bill, but if they happened to move to London and then decided to sell a car, they would risk being caught out because they were not aware of the law.

We are creating bad law from the start. One of the great principles of law is that it should be clear and simple to understand. It should not be arbitrary; it should apply uniformly to each equally. Bringing in the type of law that is in the Bill is to make arbitrary law with the full force of penalties behind it, including the possible confiscation of vehicles, if the person does not pay the fees and charges levied. Is that a reasonable way to proceed? If the matter is so urgent and essential—to return to my earlier point—it ought to be a public Bill and the Government ought to be driving it through. The problem should be dealt with in the country at large; simply dealing with it in some London boroughs, in particular the City of Westminster, is not satisfactory.

[Mr Chope]

If the Bill goes through in its current state, the problem described by our hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris) could become worse. Residents involved in the motor trade in London will move their vehicles from the streets of London to the streets of Castle Point and other areas outside London. I hope that in due course she will vote with us to remove the clauses from the Bill.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that wise intervention. It is like squeezing a balloon. I doubt, Mr Deputy Speaker, that you have ever squeezed a balloon, which is rather a childish habit, but if people do, they find that it goes in at the middle and a bit goes up and down and out of the way—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire says it is like a water bed; I have never had the disadvantage—or advantage or pleasure—of sleeping on a water bed, so I really cannot comment.

To develop the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), if people shift from the centre towards the suburbs and then further out, it would not be too bad because at least business would be carried on. We rail against the European Union for introducing more and more regulation against business. In speech after speech, particularly from the Government Benches, we say we want more business and we want to deregulate so that business can get on with what it is trying to do. But then what do we do? We have this musty, hangover Bill that has been mouldering around in Parliament for several years, and because nobody is willing to stand up and say that it ought to be a dead duck, it keeps on going. I am sorry for the mixed metaphors; the dead ducks would have had to be stuffed to be in that musty and mouldering condition.

The Bill is an improper and bad way of legislating, and it is fundamentally against Conservative principles. I am glad that there are Lib Dems in the Chamber, because I do not think the Bill upholds Lib Dem principles either. One of the great virtues of the historic Liberal party, and one of the things that I have always thought made it so attractive and why I quite like the coalition, is that Liberals are genuinely liberal in parts; they believe that people should be relatively free and regulated only when it is essential, rather than for the convenience of the bureaucrat. In the order of priority, the bureaucrat comes pretty low down. The measure may be convenient for a few people who are strolling along, but we have to weigh up the inconvenience caused when parking spaces are taken, with the weight of the law coming down on people and the risk of putting them out of business and conceivably out of work.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I have the greatest sympathy with my hon. Friend’s view. It can often be a mistake to give an excessive amount of power in one particular area to relatively junior people. The authorised officer who is entitled to seize a vehicle is likely to be a relatively low-paid official who suddenly has the power to go round and confiscate a car. It might be quite a nice car—possibly that Aston Martin DB5 that I was talking about a few moments ago, which somebody was trying to sell on the internet for a good price. Then some teenaged council officer comes round and says, “I rather like that.” Bang. He says, “I’ve seen that on the internet. I’m going to issue a seizure notice and seize it.”

That does not build in the proper protections that we ought to have as British subjects. I know this is a long-winded speech and that many aspects of it are not entirely serious, but this is serious. The protection of our individual liberties ought to be the daily concern—the hourly concern—of Members of Parliament, because we are the people who can do something about that. It is in the nature of Government to erode people’s liberties because liberties are inconvenient. Liberties make people object to things that Governments are doing. They stop the great steamroller of Government coming down the tarmac. We as Members of Parliament are here to constrain that great urge of Government—to bind them down so that their infringements of liberty can occur only when they are essential.

I find it hard to believe that it is essential for the good of this great nation that my teenage authorised officer should be able to seize a motor car because somebody wanted to sell it on the internet, just because he has reasonable suspicion and not with any proof or any order of a court. I said that I disliked the whole clause altogether, but if we are to have this rotten clause, let us make it a little less rotten so that we can at least have protections for the individual.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point. Does he agree that the concern of many is that that could lead to disputes between neighbours? Someone could maliciously advertise on the internet a car belonging not to him, but to the neighbour with whom he has fallen out? The low-grade officer to whom my hon. Friend refers could then use the powers under the Bill to seize that vehicle, thereby causing great embarrassment and injustice.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend’s imagination is so wonderful and glorious that it allows us to consider the possibility that a malevolent neighbour—you could not possibly have a malevolent neighbour, Mr Deputy Speaker, being so good-natured yourself, but others may—could take a little photograph of the car. Do you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that you can take photographs with your telephone nowadays? This is one of the great delights of modern technology.

People take photographs even of MPs going about their daily business and put them on websites. They have not yet said that any MP is for sale, but they could take a photograph with their mobile telephone of a motor car, put it on the internet, say it is for sale, and then ring up the council and say, “Look what my neighbour is doing,” and how outrageous that is. Around comes the authorised officer and practically drives off in a brand-new Bentley. That would be very tiresome for the person who had bought a brand-new Bentley, if anybody could afford such things in these days of austerity.

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. He identifies a concern that we should all have. We in the House are all in favour of brotherly love—I look at my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) as I say that, and I know how much he values brotherly love among all peoples and all nations—but I am sorry to say that that is not how people live sometimes in the real world. They sometimes have disputes. They sometimes go to law courts over a hedge that is 2 or 3 inches above where it should be. They sometimes go to law courts over a perch of land, if that is still a unit that is allowed in these European days, and they argue through the courts for years and years, decades and decades, and cost themselves hundreds of thousands of pounds for a piece of land that was worth £20 or £1,000 to start with.

We could in this way, as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said, have neighbourly disputes made worse. The injunction that we get from the Bible, “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” would fall on sandy ground, as we found that all those cars were being purloined, in effect, by those authorised officers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Some people may have been thinking from my speech that, despite not being in a uniform, I have an undue level of self-importance, so my hon. Friend’s point is probably one that Members, as much as others, should bear in mind.

If we develop the uniform theme and decide that it gives such officials too much power, we might decide that they should just have the badge of Westminster on their ordinary clothes, so that at least one would knew who they were. I thought that you, Mr Deputy Speaker, would be dying to know what the badge is:

“A Portcullis chained and ensigned of a Mural Crown between on the dexter side a united Rose and on the sinister side a Lily”—

once again stalked, but—

“both stalked and leaved all Or,”

which is exactly the ticket for issuing tickets, so to speak.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend accept that one beneficial side effect of his suggestion is that replicas of such badges, uniforms or pieces of insignia could be made available for tourists and sold by street traders to tourists?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

That is an idea of the most sumptuous gloriousness. It would be a fine way of raising money and reducing the council tax for residents if we could get Westminster city council into a bit of unlicensed street trading on the side, and of course its officers would not penalise it because it would be effectively above the law.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

I see that the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) are the only two representatives on the Opposition Benches. I interpret the lack of attendance from London Members differently. Is it not extraordinary that a Bill which, we are told, is so essential to the well-being of the people of London has received no support from large numbers of London Members? I would expect them to be here in droves, intervening and saying how antisocial I am.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Could one put an alternative gloss on the lack of attendance of London Members—that they are embarrassed by this nasty little Bill, and have therefore stayed away, preferring to keep quiet?

[Mr Chope]

That is the more proper interpretation of the fact that there are no London Members in the Chamber with the exception of my hon. Friends the Members for Finchley and Golders Green and for Harrow East (Bob Blackman). I congratulate the latter on his assiduous attendance in such debates and on receiving the accolade of sponsoring subsequent private Bills on behalf of London local authorities. I understand he will take over from my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green the onerous responsibility of sponsoring London local authority private Bills because the latter has decided that one is enough. With the exception of my two enthusiastic hon. Friends there is a conspicuous absence of London Members in the debate.

Clause 9 is seriously flawed and ill-conceived. In the end, it will result in people who are innocently trying to sell their motor vehicles to get the maximum benefit will find themselves on the wrong side of some officious council officer. They will then find that their vehicle is seized or suffer another penalty. If clause 9 is passed and gets on to the statute book, the real villains of whom we have heard—those who park large numbers of cars on the highway, perhaps with labels in them saying that they are for sale on the internet—will escape scot-free. The innocent bystanders, so to speak, will find themselves suffering penalties as a result.

In practice, if the local authority wants to restrict parking on the highway, it can introduce parking controls—it has the power to do so. Why should not licensed vehicles, as they must be, be parked in a lawful place on the high street or the public highway? Does the fact that they have a label inside saying that they are for sale cause any offence? I suspect it does not—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

I am sorry that there is any confusion, but I am happy to try to clear it up. I am speaking to the proposals in this Bill that local authorities should have the powers, because I am against cluttering up the statute book with unnecessary legislation, particularly that which purports to be necessary to address a particular mischief, when that mischief can be addressed in another way, without using public or private legislation. In answer to my hon. Friend’s point, my objection is to this particular Bill and the way it is being used to try to deal with a mischief that, if there be that mischief, could be dealt with another way, without the use of these draconian powers.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I think my hon. Friend’s point is one of absolute clarity, justness and truth. It seems to me that clause 10, which applies to Westminster city council, stops people doing something that they cannot do anyway, because as far as I am aware, there is not a yard of parking space in Westminster city council area that is not regulated by the council, either through residents’ parking, a meter, or a single or even double yellow line. Therefore, this is just a ridiculous piece of legislation to introduce a nasty set of penalties, quite unnecessarily, when councils can ensure that there is no problem through their existing powers.

[Mr Chope]

That is probably one of the most compelling points made in this evening’s debate. My hon. Friend, with his knowledge of the city of Westminster, says that people are not able to do the mischief that clause 10 seeks to address, so what is the point of it? I hope that our hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green will be able to get some advice as to why it is necessary at all. Perhaps the problem arises because some residents are a bit snooty and worry that, when visitors come for dinner, they might see a car parked in the street with a sign in it saying that it is for sale and that more information is available on the internet. Perhaps they think that that would lower the tone of the neighbourhood. Even in circumstances in which residents were limited to one parking permit, they could still display such a label inside their vehicle, which could, in the eyes of some people, lower the tone of the neighbourhood. I do not know whether that is the justification for the proposal. We could debate whether it was a sensible reason for introducing this kind of legislation, and for introducing clause 10 in particular, but I do not think that it is sufficient justification.

Amendments have been made to the Bill, and some clauses have been completely cut out of it. That shows that, in its original conception, it was put forward without proper forethought by a lot of rather ambitious officials. No doubt the ratepayers of those local authorities have paid dearly for the services of the parliamentary agents and other advisers involved. As with so many private Bills, however, it would have been better if those people had spent more time thinking about what they really wanted to put into it and about whether it was really necessary, before launching it for our consideration in the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the latter part of his intervention. I like to think that, when I was the leader of Wandsworth council, we did not waste a lot of money on promoting private Bills to try to oppress our residents. Our policy was very much the reverse of that. If Westminster can deal with this problem, I do not see why other councils cannot do so. My hon. Friend talks about there being a problem after hours, but what would happen to the cars during the day? Would they suddenly appear after hours?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) has conjured up a marvellous picture of some incredibly efficient businesses that race along and park their cars on the single yellow lines at 6.30 every evening and race them off again at 8.30 every morning. Whither they would go, heaven only knows. That would hardly be practical, and it would not represent a real risk to residents.

[Mr Chope]

That is absolutely right.

It is sometimes difficult to give personal examples, but I shall give the House an example involving my daughter. Last autumn, she was in the market for her first car, and she saw one advertised on the internet, on Auto Trader. I went with her—apparently, my cheque book was needed—to view this vehicle and we went to what appeared to be a private house, although I suspect it was being used for a business.

The vehicle was parked on the street outside. It was a car advertised on the internet, parked on a residential road and, as far as I could make out, it was not causing any problems. If this had taken place inside the London area, the person trying to sell that car would have been found guilty of street trading under the terms of the provisions. For the life of me, I cannot see what was wrong with advertising that car on the Auto Trader site or with a potential purchaser looking at it, doing a test drive and visiting the residential premises where the person selling it was based. I simply do not see the problem, and by going on that sort of website, one can arguably get much better value for money. I shall not spoil my own story—or perhaps I will—by saying that we did not purchase this particular car because I found out that it had been clocked by 100,000 miles—but that is a separate story, and this Bill does not go into dealing with that. Perhaps it is a cautionary tale for people who try to buy cars in such circumstances.

I think I have exhausted my concerns about clause 9. It is an over-the-top reaction, and clause 10 has the same problems in relation to the city of Westminster. I know that other hon. Friends want to contribute to the debate, so I shall not repeat further points made by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset. However, his arguments for removing clauses 18 and 19, which are of general application and are wholly inimical to the principles of liberty, are very strong, so I heartily endorse them.

If it is not already clear, let me say that I have grave concerns about most of the clauses we are debating this evening, and particularly about clause 9. I hope that in due course we will have the opportunity to test the will of the House on that clause.

[Mike Freer]

I shall deal with a couple of points before talking about the amendments. Let me try to lay to rest this issue about the variance of laws across the UK and how people visiting London are suddenly going to be terribly confused—as if people living outside London lack the competence to understand that laws change.

I am disappointed that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) is not in his place this evening, as I took the opportunity to look at some of the vagaries of local laws in his local authority of Bradford. If I were minded to take a petrol-fuelled model plane into a local park there, I would be prohibited from doing so, and I am sure that the people of London who also wished to do so would be confused if they took their plane up the M1. If I chose to fly my kite dangerously, although it is not made clear what is dangerous and what is safe kite flying, that would also be prohibited. If I were innocently to strum a guitar in a public park, I would be intercepted by what my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) would no doubt call a peak-capped local government official who would immediately throw me out of the park.

Daylight Saving Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 20th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

I will not be drawn into having a discussion about the United States, because the Bill is fairly and squarely about the United Kingdom, a far superior country to the United States. I am not unfamiliar with the fact that there are countries with more than one time zone. Last weekend I was in Kazakhstan, which has two time zones and, as my hon. Friend will know, is the ninth largest country in the world.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

It is worth pointing out that the coming power of the next century, China, has only the one time zone, and as we know from Noel Coward, China’s very big.

[Mr Chope]

I hope that we will have many similar witty interventions from my hon. Friend during the day.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

It is basically the luck of the draw. If an hon. Member’s amendment is selected as the lead amendment in a group, it is obviously that hon. Member’s responsibility to speak to that amendment and conduct a debate around it. [Interruption.] I think this is developing into a rather puerile discussion.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

There are 28 amendments in this group. If my hon. Friend were to devote just five minutes to discussing each one, it would take two hours and 20 minutes. Surely that is what we want—a proper discussion of all the issues, amendment by amendment.

[Mr Chope]

I shall come on to the other amendments seriatim, but I doubt whether I shall speak at such length as my hon. Friend suggests.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

In that case, my hon. Friend will obviously be very supportive of amendment 12. It would ensure that the facts to which he has just referred would have to be examined by the independent panel. I am sure that our hon. Friend—if we can call him that as a member of the coalition—the Member for Argyll and Bute would be very supportive of the view taken by my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). I hope that amendment 12 will find favour with the Government and with the promoter of the Bill.

That brings me to amendment 23, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, which would require the independent oversight group to have at least one member from each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That seems eminently sensible, because what can the Bill’s promoter or the Government have against having somebody from each of the four nations of the United Kingdom represented on the group?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Will my hon. Friend assure me that if that amendment were passed, the representative from England would come from Somerset?

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

As always, my hon. Friend makes a wise and pertinent intervention.

There has been one occasion in history on which daylight was extended. Those hon. Members who are up on their Bible will remember their studies from their student days. They will recall the book of Joshua, chapter 10, verse 13:

“And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day.”

That is really what amendment 59 is all about. It is about accepting what verse 14 goes on to say, which is that that happened only once; it was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. God allowed the sun to stand still in the heavens on that day only, and never again.

There is absolutely nothing that we can do about that. No great Act of Parliament or—dare I say it—regulation from the European Union can create more daylight. We are therefore faced with a simple choice in the winter. Do we get up in the dark and have teatime when it is a bit brighter, or do we have murky, dank, dark mornings—I am sorry, I meant that the other way round. Do we instead get up with a spring in our step and go to work with enthusiasm, full of beans and ready to face the world, and sacrifice a little bit of daylight at teatime?

In seeking to leave us on summer time, my hon. Friend’s amendment would allow all the supposed advantages to be investigated, including having an extra hour of daylight in the evenings so that people could have their barbecues and all that sort of thing, but it would not upset the mornings. That is particularly important for our friends in Scotland, which is why I want to mention amendment 23.

[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his support for my amendment 59. Did he notice that, when the Minister made his very brief response to my amendment, he completely misrepresented the effect that it would have? He suggested that it would alter the date on which summer time came to an end, and thereby cause problems with the European Union. He was wrong about that.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

There is another amendment, tabled by other hon. Members, that would have that effect. I take my hon. Friend’s very valid point, however. He was not proposing to change the dates on which summer time comes into force.

London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Is it really the case that the Bill as drafted means that these officers could go around willy-nilly serving charges on people who had nothing to do with the penalty committed? Is my hon. Friend not absolutely right to say that this shows the shoddy drafting of the legislation?

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that that would be the consequence and that it indicates the shoddy drafting. One has to ask why the provision is so broad brush. That is why I tabled amendment 5. It is only a small amendment; it does not address all that I think is wrong with clause 3, but it would at least remove part of the wide ambit and prevent people who have not been the subject of penalty charges from being served with penalty charge notices. One might ask whether it really matters if penalty notices are served on people who should not be served with them. It does if we also look at clause 4. If the person being served with a penalty charge notice to which he should not be subject, as he has been wrongly accused of having liability for it, is asked to give his name and address and refuses to do so, he then becomes under clause 4 a criminal and is liable to a summary fine on strict liability of up to £1,000.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again. Perhaps he could answer two questions. First, will the accredited people have to wear a uniform of any kind? I wondered whether they might wear bowler hats, for instance, so that it would be clear that they were from the council—proper, thoroughgoing bureaucrats. Secondly, would an accredited person who used his bowler hat to detain someone whose name he wanted be potentially guilty of false arrest?

[Mr Chope]

The answer to my hon. Friend’s second question is yes. As for what uniform would be appropriate, I think that there is much to be said for requiring the accredited people to wear bowler hats, because they could be easily identified. People would know when an accredited person was approaching, and would be able to scarper. There is a lot of common sense in that suggestion from my hon. Friend. A better solution, however, would be not allowing the Bill to extend the power to accredited persons in the first place.

Amendment 8 mirrors amendment 5, again proposing the insertion after the word “payable” the words

“by the person being served”.

I do not think that I need go into it further.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a good point that the sponsor of the Bill may wish to address later.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am sorry to keep on interrupting my hon. Friend, but his speech is so compelling and raises so many fascinating aspects of each clause. If councils can find out people’s names and addresses, would they need a gigantic and expensive national database of names and addresses? If so, who would pay for it—Westminster city council or Her Majesty’s Government?

[Mr Chope]

I hope neither, but my hon. Friend is right that as sure as night follows day, what follows from this sort of power is the establishment of databases. That is very sinister.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend almost answered his own point in his preamble, when he said that this was a civil liberties issue. I think that he and I agree. If there is a civil liberties issue, on the whole our instinct is to come down on the side of maintaining the civil liberty rather than giving an arbitrary power to an official to intervene—a power that might be subject to abuse or result in oppression, and which would certainly undermine the long-standing principle in this country that people are not required to give their name and address to any Tom, Dick and Harry whom they happen to meet in the street.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Following on from the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field), will my hon. Friend explain how somebody of no fixed abode could give a false address? If someone does not have an address, they cannot give either a right one or a wrong one. Would they be penalised simply for being of no fixed abode?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

Again, I do not purport to be an expert on this Bill, and my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green may wish to respond on that matter when winding up this debate. The explanatory notes are totally silent on this issue and to obtain the right answer one would need to have a greater knowledge than I have of the enforcement powers in relation to unlicensed sex establishments in the City of Westminster.

I have almost got to the end of this group, but I shall now deal with amendments 35 to 39 to clauses 18 and 20. I find clause 18 to be particularly offensive, because it creates a new criminal offence, stating:

“Any person who intentionally obstructs any authorised officer acting in the exercise of his powers under this Act shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale.”

In other words, they would be subject to a fine of up to £1,000. There used to be an offence on the statute book of obstructing a police officer in the execution of his duty, and there probably still is. In the days when I used to practise a bit in the criminal courts as a barrister, what one might describe as an “over-enthusiastic” or “over-zealous” police officer might often throw in a couple of charges of obstruction in the execution of duty to press a point home against a hapless defendant. If that was happening with the police, how much more dangerous is it for civil liberties for the authorised officer to be able to say, “You’ve obstructed me, so I will make sure you get a £1,000 fine”? The decision about what the obstruction would be and so on would be left to the officer, and I think that goes far too far.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Adding up all these fines, there seems to be £1,000 under clause 18 and another £1,000 under clause 4. Does my hon. Friend think that these councils are very hard up?

[Mr Chope]

That might be the situation. They seem just to have gone for level 3 fines, which are a maximum of £1,000, but there is no explanation for choosing that penalty, so I cannot answer my hon. Friend’s point, I am afraid.

The provision on the obstruction of authorised officers goes far too far, giving rise to the creation of an inappropriate criminal penalty.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

That is extremely helpful. Indeed, it is both encouraging and worrying: it is encouraging in one sense, because it shows the generosity—the parliamentary spirit—of my hon. Friend, and that is extraordinarily welcome, but it is slightly worrying, given the inconsistency of the Bill. Should we really be negotiating with a group of councils—after we have been debating some of the amendments for little more than an hour—what they will and will not accept? I am not sure that the dignity of Parliament—the House of Commons, this honourable House—is properly and justly reflected by bandying about amendments in that way, so I had better, just in case clause 18 changes again, which would concern me, say a few words about it and the obstruction of an authorised officer.

[Mr Chope]

I am not in any way churlish about the generosity of my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) in accepting so many of my amendments. It is right for us to put on the record that he is in charge of the Bill and of taking it through this place; it is nothing to do with officials. He makes the decisions, and the decision that he has made is an excellent one.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Quite right. How could I fail to agree? I hope that, when my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green comes to the decision of withdrawing the whole Bill, we will welcome that decision even more. But just—just—in case it comes back at some later stage, let us look at it briefly and in passing, because we come back to the same problem of the authorised officer not being a constable.

Who is this authorised officer? What is an obstruction? What is an intentional obstruction? What if you, Mr Deputy Speaker, fall over in front of him and he trips over you? Is that an obstruction, or do you have to be more aggressive? What happens if you see him coming but he is not in his uniform—you may not know it is him—and you scarper? Is that an obstruction of him in his duties because you are not there and, therefore, he cannot catch you, whereas if you were there he could catch you? That seems to me, arguably, an obstruction, even an intentional one, because you had to run away to be away from the person who was trying to catch you—because if you had not decided to run away, you would still be there, and then he would have caught you. So if you follow the logic of what I am saying, Mr Deputy Speaker—and if you do follow it, you are doing jolly well—you will see that the clause really ought to be removed and should never have been in the Bill in the first place.

Again, the fines really do seem excessive, and I go back to the point that I was making about the traffic wardens in the city of Westminster, who were put in uniforms that any civilised fellow would have been ashamed to be seen dead in. They were the most scruffy things that really did make the wardens look as if they were vagrants, and I should have thought that most people would scarper if they saw somebody like that coming after them, particularly if they were bringing out a book of fines. One would think, “I’m getting out of his way pretty sharpish, because I don’t know really who he is and I don’t know why he’s got his fines book out, because I don’t think I have done anything wrong.” If we are going to authorise those sorts of people, many of us might obstruct them and say, “Who the Dickens do you think you are?” or words to that effect.

That gives me the opportunity to answer the valid point, made by my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green, that if one is innocent one has nothing to fear. If only it worked like that. Those of us who have contested parking tickets over the years—when we have done absolutely nothing wrong but the machine has broken or the person coming round has misread his own figures and all that stuff—have found that when we appeal we get off. It happens to those of us who are innocent again and again. I was even stopped under one of those ludicrous terrorist Acts that the previous Government passed—going about my lawful business.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Gentleman suggests that I look like one. If I look like one, there is not a lot of hope for the rest of you, I have to say.

Therefore, this idea that those of us who are innocent have absolutely nothing to fear at all and can go about our business safely, because it will not be us, is the wrong line to take. It is crucial to defend the liberties of those we dislike and disapprove of, as well as of those we like and approve of, and that is the essence of my objection to much of the Bill but, in particular, to clause 18.

[Mr Chope]

What my hon. Friend says is reinforced by the fact that almost everybody who goes to a parking tribunal and appeals is successful, but very many people do not realise that they have such a right of appeal and, therefore, pay reluctantly and, probably, when they should not.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is, as always, absolutely spot on, and I should advise anybody in the Chamber today or listening outside to appeal if they get a parking ticket, because it is often wrong and unfair and being issued just as a money-grabbing exercise. Westminster city council is now conducting such an exercise by extending parking charges to midnight, and that is a pretty awful thing to be doing—[Interruption]—but not, Mr Deputy Speaker, as I see you, panther-like, waiting to pounce on an irrelevant comment, part of the amendments under discussion.

So I turn to clause 20, the last measure related to the amendments under consideration, and agree again with my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch that it is drawn far too widely. It has to be the people at the top who are responsible, but the clause refers to

“a manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate”,

so I am a little worried that the cleaning lady is going to be nicked by some bod coming round in unrecognisable garb, whom we do not really know, saying, “We’ll have a few quid off you.” The measure is going to be a swindler’s charter if it goes through, because people will pretend that they are these authorised officers and sneak up on us and try to get money out of us for doing something that we should not, saying, “Well, it does catch you because you are an ‘other similar officer’. I am an ‘authorised officer’, you’re an ‘other similar officer’ and, therefore, we’ll take a fine off you.”

To conclude my relatively brief remarks—though it would be possible to go on and on about this Bill, so many are its flaws and faults, so good are the amendments proposed by my hon. Friend and so wise was he to bring them forward to try, as I said at the very beginning, to make a silk purse out a sow’s ear—I am afraid to say, after all is said and done, that it is still the meat of pigs.

Employment Opportunities Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 17th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the black economy, and indeed I will refer to it in due course. The Low Pay Commission itself accepts that there are more than 1 million operating in the black economy at below the national minimum wage. That demonstrates that the minimum wage legislation is not working anyway and is widely ignored.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

It occurs to me that one advantage of what my hon. Friend proposes is that the mood towards asylum seekers in this country would improve dramatically. Many people feel that if asylum seekers are coming here and claiming benefits, claiming benefits was their reason for coming here. If asylum seekers were working and contributing, the British people would regard them more sympathetically

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a really good point. This month we are celebrating 60 years of the UN refugee convention. One of the problems of public perception is that although everybody supports refugees—I think almost everybody would say that we are happy to look after refugees—they do not regard all asylum seekers as genuine refugees. They now think of asylum seekers as what are called illegal or irregular migrants. If we were able to give the genuine asylum seeker enhanced status, as he says, that would raise the esteem in which they are held in this country and their own self-esteem.

I turn now to clause 2. You will know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the minimum wage is currently £5.93 an hour for an adult over 21, but this October it will rise to £6.08 an hour for such an adult, to £4.98 for those aged 18 to 20 and to £3.68 for those aged 16 or 17. In addition, for apprentices who are within a particular age range there will be a minimum wage of £2.60 from this October. To illustrate the consequences of my Bill, I will use the October figures rather than the current ones.

Defenders of the minimum wage argue that it represents the minimum living wage, but if so, why do hundreds of thousands of self-employed people work for far less, and why does the state tax the minimum living wage? I am enthusiastic about the coalition Government’s tax policy, which recognises that the minimum wage is so basic that it should not be taxed, but we are a long way from that at the moment. From October, the minimum wage for a 40-hour week will amount to £12,646 a year, whereas even the enhanced tax-free allowance for a single person will be £7,475. That means that even somebody on the minimum wage is paying tax on more than £5,000 of their income. In consequence, far from actually receiving a minimum wage of £6.08, the amount that people who are working full-time can take home is more like £5.

[Mr Chope]

My own view is that the Government got it wrong—I will be blunt about it. There is no point in beating about the bush. I know that I am supported in that opinion by a lot of other commentators. I will discuss later one comment on the increase of 2.5% for adults and an even smaller percentage for young people, which is that it will be disastrous for young people. If that modest increase in the minimum wage is going to make an enormous difference to young people, what would be the consequences of introducing the flexibility in my Bill? It would be nirvana for young people who do not currently have work and are seeking it. We need to consider the matter in context, and I think there is a much bigger issue than whether the minimum wage should be raised by 2.5%, as it has been this year.

Raising the personal allowance will do a lot more to help people on the minimum wage than the 2.5% increase. The effect of the interaction between the minimum wage and income tax is that about 8% of the income of somebody working on the minimum wage will be taken in tax, plus what is taken in national insurance contributions.

If a single adult is out of work, he is entitled to an out-of-work benefit payment of between £60 and £70 a week—well below £2 an hour, even for a 35-hour week. However, the minimum that he can be paid if he works for 35 hours is more than £200 a week. That is a big gap. If he is offered, and willing to take, 35 hours’ work for, say, £140 a week, which is twice what he can get on the dole, the state does not allow him to take it despite the fact that it would save the state a significant amount of money. I put this to the House and to the Government: how ludicrous, mad and silly is that situation? Why can we not allow somebody who would otherwise try to exist on benefits of between £60 and £70 a week to go out and obtain gainful employment and double his remuneration? Currently, we do not allow that.

The freedom to work for less than the minimum wage would not be attractive to everyone, which is why the Bill does not seek to abolish the minimum wage but to facilitate an opt-out by mutual consent. That freedom would not be attractive to everybody. Some might choose to invest some of their time looking for much better paid work rather than undertaking work below the minimum wage.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It just occurred to me that somebody who refused a job who had not opted out of the minimum wage could exclude themselves from receiving jobseeker’s allowance. Would that be the case, or could the Bill make provision for that?

[Mr Chope]

The Bill could make provision for that—I certainly intended to make provision for that, but it is not expressed in the current wording. My hon. Friend makes a good point, because we do not want to introduce more disincentives to opting out of the minimum wage, such as putting people in a position in which they are not entitled to any benefits should their circumstances change.

Another reason why people may not want to opt out of the minimum wage is that unemployment benefit or jobseeker’s allowance provide access to passported benefits—meaning that they bring with them money for dependents and help towards housing costs and so on—so people could be worse off working for less than the minimum wage than if they were on benefits. My question is why should these people not have the freedom to decide for themselves whether or not they wish to work for the minimum wage?

Many self-employed people earn far less than the annualised minimum wage for full-time work, thereby avoiding the constraints of the national minimum wage legislation and fixed penalties. There are fixed penalties, which can run into thousands of pounds, for employers who take people on at below the minimum wage, even if that person wants to work for less than the minimum wage.

Of course, not everybody wants to become self-employed. Another argument that I expressed when the minimum wage legislation was originally before the House in the late 1990s was that it discriminates unfairly and disproportionately against people who are not classified as fully disabled—for the purposes of this argument, I shall describe such people as conscientious plodders. It might take such people a bit longer to do a given bit of work than it would take the average person, but by having a national minimum wage we are putting them at a significant disadvantage, because they might otherwise be able to work longer hours for less money per hour to achieve the same objective. If they did that, they would take pride in being able to work and contribute to our society. I do not have the figures with me, but I believe that the proportion of disabled people who are unable to get a job is rising rapidly. That might well be linked with the advent of the national minimum wage.

What would be the consequences of enabling people to opt out? There are many examples of people who offer work to others, such as window cleaning, gardening and car washing, that is not worth as much as the minimum wage. I am not talking only about what we used to know as boy scouts’ bob-a-job week jobs—it is probably more than a bob a job these days. Many people would be willing to offer something less than the minimum wage for a job, but they are currently not allowed to do so. If the price is right, a potential employer will be willing to provide work. I am sure that there is a lot of opportunity out there in the marketplace. People would offer work to people if the wage demanded were not as high as it is currently under the minimum wage. That is particularly true in the more remote regions of the country.

Drugs (Roadside Testing) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 10th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. When presented with such evidence, one has to question the motives. Why has the Home Office been so slow in coming forward with a specification against which it might be able to give type approval for these devices? It may be because it knows that were there to be such roadside testing, there would be a lot more work for the police to do, because many drivers have drugs in their system and if they were detected by such screening devices at the roadside following an accident, the whole process of law would come into play and many of them would end up with a conviction. We know that there is a cost associated with that, and I suspect that behind all this delay is a reluctance by the Home Office to open up a Pandora’s box of increased detection of offences and increased burden on the court system, and ultimately, perhaps, increased numbers of people in prison.

What could be happening? Funnily enough, on Wednesday of this week there was a short post from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from the Limestone Coast police in South Australia, which said:

“Statistics released by Limestone Coast police have shown significantly more people are being caught driving under the influence of drugs, than under the influence of alcohol. Superintendent Trevor Twilley says 6 per cent of people tested for drug driving are coming back with positive results, while less than half a per cent are returning positive results for alcohol.”

That is a direct consequence of the state of South Australia equipping its police with the technology and the means to do roadside drug tests. It is relatively new in South Australia but it is already having a major impact. If it can be done in South Australia, why can we not do it here, and now?

My Bill, like previous Bills along the same lines, says that a type approval for this drug-testing device must be in place within 12 months. My original Bill, introduced under the ten-minute procedure in April 2007, had the exclusive support of those who were at that time Opposition Members. Among those who supported that and subsequent Bills are a number of distinguished Members of the House. The Bill that I introduced in December 2007, which was identical to my ten-minute rule Bill, was supported by none other than my right hon. Friend the Leader of House, who I am delighted to see in his place today, and also by four colleagues who are now Select Committee Chairmen, and one colleague who is now a Deputy Speaker of this House, as well as, of course, what might be described as the more usual suspects, my hon. Friends the Members for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) and for Shipley (Philip Davies). The legislation thus had a wide range of support, and that was back in 2007. The Bill then said that the type approval should be produced within one year. My right hon. Friend was obviously keen that that should happen. He is now in a very powerful position in the Government—arguably even more powerful than the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), who will reply to the debate.

Why cannot the Government, with the support of the Leader of House and that of the Minister with responsibility for roads, who was also a signatory to one of my Bills in identical terms on this subject, deliver on this reasonable proposition that we should have type approval for a roadside drug-testing piece of equipment? I am sure that it would result in far fewer people driving on our roads under the influence of drugs or with drugs in their system. Far too few people are being brought to justice at the moment, so people think they can drive with drugs in their system with impunity. It is relatively rare that the courts are asked to deal with people who are guilty of drug-driving, because it is quite hard to detect at the moment.

One of the most famous recent cases was reported on 14 September 2010 when somebody called George Michael was jailed for eight weeks for drug-driving. He crashed his car while under the influence of cannabis and was given a five-year driving ban. He had also been guilty of driving under the influence of drugs on a previous occasion. I am not sure what Members of the House will think about the sentence that was imposed, but it shows that this illegal activity of drug-driving is taking place in this country, and the police themselves suggest that it is much more widespread than has so far been recognised by the Government.

We have had any number of Government initiatives promising to clamp down on drug-driving and have a publicity campaign about it. Even this week, in the Mail Online, there is an article similar to that in The Sunday Times to which I have already referred, saying that the Minister is determined to do something about it. All he has to do, if he really has the will, is to go to Concateno and ask what type approval would be needed to ensure that we can have a roadside testing device. Concateno would be able to give him that information relatively easily and the specification could be drawn up and the testing device given type approval sooner rather than later.

In the Government’s most recent road safety programme, they refer to this issue but only in the most general terms. Even the target that was set as recently as March, that the type approval for the device that would be used in police stations would be completed, has not yet been met. It was said that it would done by the end of April, but we are now in June and it still has not been completed. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be candid in explaining the reasons. For one reason or another, we have still not got the type approval that we need for both the roadside testing device and the testing device to be used in police stations. Until we get that we will not have an effective regime for dealing with the scourge of drug-driving.

The principle that Ministers should apply is this: where there is a will, there is a way. If the ministerial team has the will to do something about this and is prepared to override the block in the Home Office, particularly in its scientific branch, they will be able to deal with this. I think that it is an indictment of the Home Office’s scientific branch that, despite all its expertise, it is still unable to come up with the type approval specification.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Is the Home Office not right to be cautious about approving a device that could lead to someone getting a criminal sentence, and possibly going to jail if the accident is serious enough? On this occasion, delay may be wise and prudential, rather than the folly of bureaucracy.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is certainly right that it is absolutely vital that the devices used in police stations to provide conclusive evidence that a person has drugs in their system are 100% accurate. We are on the threshold of having type approval for such devices. I am dealing with screening devices that could be used at the roadside and that are comparable to the devices used to identify those suspected of drink-driving. Those screening devices, which people have to blow into through a tube, indicate prima facie whether there is excess alcohol in the system. It might turn out that those people, even if they have a positive breath test, are found not to test positive when they get down to the police station and a blood sample is taken. The device is a screening device. It enables the police, following road traffic accidents or offences, to screen people they suspect of having alcohol in their system. I am suggesting that we urgently need a similar system for people who are suspected of having drugs in their system.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again. Press reports are saying that the screening devices used for drug-driving will be made evidential in and of themselves, without a second test back at the police station. Would it not be rather peculiar to have two different standards for roadside testing, one that had to be checked at the police station and one that had become evidential in itself?

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is right, but he has read reports that these roadside devices will be used to provide evidence of guilt in themselves. As a lawyer, not to mention as a politician, I would be rather concerned about that, because I think that trying to streamline the processes in such a way could lead to an enormous amount of injustice. On the most recent sitting Friday we heard that quite a lot of criminal records are inaccurate. If the criminal records are inaccurate, how can we be sure that a roadside device for indentifying whether someone has excess alcohol in their system will be 100% accurate?

In response to my hon. Friend’s reasonable concerns, I would argue that we should keep the existing system for detecting alcohol, which has proved successful and resulted in a significant reduction in the number of people driving with excess alcohol in their system. We should keep the system of a roadside test and apply the same screening principle to people suspected of having taken drugs or whose driving is impaired as a result. We should then ensure that there is a cast-iron, rigorous system at the police station for ensuring the accuracy of those tests.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend refers to the fifth amendment, but he will be aware that there is statute law in the United States stating that there is implied consent on the part of every driver of a motor vehicle. By taking out a driving licence, they are not covered by the fifth amendment, because by implied consent in law they agree to be subject to a test if the police suspect that they have an illegal substance in their body while driving. I am not sure that he is comparing like with like, because a similar statutory regime exists in the United States notwithstanding the fifth amendment.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend’s intervention is extremely helpful, but we can see how clear America is about understanding the process that is followed, and about what it is doing in relation to people’s constitutional rights. That is what I am highlighting.

If we do what is suggested in the Bill, we have to be aware of the very important principle that is, to some extent, being undermined. It is not necessarily disproportionate to do it, and it may be absolutely essential—I would not begin to say that we should not have the breathalyser and the assumption that if someone refuses a test, they have probably committed an offence anyway. I do not think that is disproportionate, but it is important to be aware of the risk that we are taking with our constitution, and we must ensure that we are very careful if we ever take the idea further. The next time an hon. Member introduces a private Member’s Bill that would do something that looks very good and would improve society, we must consider whether we are doing anything to the constitution that we should be very careful about.

That is another reason for supporting Her Majesty’s Government in this particular area. They are right to be slow and deliberative. The worst thing to do would be to get some fancy bit of kit introduced—made by Philips, as I think was suggested earlier, or perhaps by Samsung Electronics—that comes in, absolutely whizzo, and tests for all drugs but one, or takes just one reading. This “nanogram” thing really makes me suspicious, because it must be easy to find a nanogram from somewhere if that is what one wants to do, or for a nanogram to be stuck in the machine from the last person, who might have come from Gloucestershire. The police might cross over into Somerset, and then some good Somerset fellow would spit on this thing and find himself caught out by a Gloucestershire nanogram. I am very concerned about Gloucestershire nanograms.

I urge Her Majesty’s Government to be very careful about the testing of the machines, and to ensure that they really do what they are said to do. That is the other great point of complexity. When a Labour Transport Minister, one Barbara Castle, introduced the breathalyser in the late 1960s, it was simply a few crystals that changed colour if somebody was over the limit, and they then went for a test. The machines have obviously become much more sophisticated, but they are testing for one thing and one thing only. They are not about finding out whether someone has had five cups of coffee, or whether they have been in one of those dance clubs that we were hearing about earlier, where 76% of people have taken drugs. I must say, I was shocked by that. We have tea dances in Somerset, where I do not think such things take place. The machine that we have is accurate and accepted, but the machines that are yet to come in may be given increasing evidential value despite testing for so many things and being at greater risk of getting things wrong. The Government really need to be, and clearly are being, very cautious.

We have heard a lot of comparisons with Australia. It is not always the model for the United Kingdom to follow, although it sometimes is. In its drink-driving laws, it has accepted random testing for a very long time, because it felt that it had a very serious problem. We have never accepted that. Australia may feel, in its circumstances, that having something relatively untested is necessary in the light of the problems that it has faced.

I am sorry to say that I will not go on with such eloquence and at such length as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North. I am full of admiration for him, and I wish that I could do so. I wish to conclude with some key points that we have to remember. First, I hope that the Minister will ensure that we put the cart behind the horse—we have to get things the right way around—by establishing the levels that make a substance legal or illegal. Secondly, we must look at the question of somebody using a prescribed drug that in other circumstances is illegal. Will we simply ban them from driving whenever they go through that course of treatment? If we take the zero-reading approach that an hon. Friend suggested, we would do so. Thirdly, we must always bear in mind the deep constitutional principle of non-self-incrimination. We may accept that it can be overridden, but at least we would know what we were doing. Fourthly, we must consider the quality of the machine, and ask whether it will really work. Finally, we must keep the process in the hands of Parliament and not delegate these nanograms to judges. Noble, lordly and wise as they are, we need to make the law, so that they can enforce it.

Further and Higher Education (Access) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 4th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

Well, we will have to see what happens. If one looks at the detailed guidance—I do not have the paragraph to which my hon. Friend is referring to hand—one can see that it is full of contradictions. The director of fair access said that, based on the guidance, he would issue advice to universities before the end of February to meet their tight time scales. The fact that he has not yet done so perhaps indicates that he is finding it a bit problematic.

This issue even appears in today’s newspapers. In The Times, there is a letter from John Foster, a former chairman of the council at the university of Leicester, expressing strong concern about the Government

“digging itself into an ever-deeper hole”

over universities and student fees. In particular, he states that the Government

“now proposes to penalise some universities that wish to charge the maximum level by cutting their student numbers and diverting thus-frustrated applicants to lesser institutions.”

He states:

“Many will regard this as confirmation that the Government is viscerally opposed to students in general and to higher education in particular. Others will interpret it as a deliberate discouragement to excellence and a reward to mediocrity. I have no doubt that it will weaken the international standing and competitiveness of some of our finest universities.”

Such comments are coming thick and fast from people on the front line in higher education, and they reflect the concerns of, for example, the Russell group of leading universities. It issued a press release on 10 February commenting on the Government’s guidance to OFFA, which made a number of good points and emphasised that

“admission to university is and should be based on merit, and any decisions about admissions must also respect the autonomy of institutions and maintain high academic standards.”

That is four-square with my Bill, because clause 1, which is headed “Duty to allocate places on merit”, states:

“It shall be the duty of all institutions within the further or higher education sectors in receipt of public funds to consider applicants domiciled in England for any course of study below post-graduate level on the basis of merit alone unless the circumstances in section 3 apply.”

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend explain why that applies to people domiciled in England, but the Bill would have effect in England and Wales?

[Mr Chope]

Yes, I will explain that to my hon. Friend. It is because under our conventions, it is not possible to have an Act that applies exclusively to England. Acts have to extend either to England and Wales, to England, Wales and Scotland or to Northern Ireland as well. Although my Bill has to extend to England and Wales, it would actually apply only in England, because the issues that are the subject of it are reserved matters for the Welsh Assembly. I did not think it would be right for the House to interfere with the Welsh Assembly’s discretion on them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

But does that mean that a Welshman who applied to Oxford could be admitted not on merit, but an Englishman who applied would have to be admitted exclusively on merit?

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is very good at interpreting the words in the Bill, and that is obviously a factual situation. He will know from his constituents who apply to universities outside England that they are sometimes concerned whether they will be accepted purely on merit or whether, for example, a different set of criteria applies to students from Scotland compared with those from England applying to Scottish universities. I recognise that that is a potentially contentious matter, and I thought it would be better to limit the scope of the Bill in the way that I have.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It is very depressing when we get to a state at which there is a bit of legislation that we do not like, about which we have doubts and that we think ought to be changed, and yet instead of arguing to get rid of that legislation we say that the clever thing to do is to have yet more legislation. We go on and on legislating so that the British people are weighed down with a mass of rules, regulations and complications that mean that they do not know where they stand. If the intention of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is that we should scrap the controls in place, he should argue for that and his Bill should be a repeal Bill, which might then be supported by other hon. Members.

[Mr Chope]

If the Bill was amended in Committee to clarify that it was effectively a repeal Bill, would it then command my hon. Friend’s support?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I think the Bill should have said that in the first place. I am even more suspicious of the new Labour approach of a Bill that says one thing initially and then does something completely different.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his helpful intervention. That is absolutely right. Transparency is, in a sense, everything. As long as people know where they stand, they will be able to see what they ought to do. It is a tremendously beneficial reform for the Russell group to have said which subjects it views as being proper subjects, because now pupils from across the country can say, “If I do history, classics and double maths, I have a really good chance of getting in, if I do well; but if I do knitting and photography, I won’t have a very good chance of getting into the top-rate universities. My chances and opportunities will be limited.” It is absolutely right to let people know at an early stage the way that they ought to be going. Understanding the interview process when one applies to a university is also extremely helpful. If one is going from a public school to Oxford, one will be very well trained in what to expect in the interview, and that should be made as widely available as possible to people from other schools and backgrounds. I agree with the hon. Gentleman on his point on transparency.

We have, I think, established that in terms of merit, the Bill has a lot of waffle in it. What it says is fundamentally subjective, cannot work in practice, and, if taken to the courts, would be impossible to adjudicate on. It is hard to see where the Bill is going, in that respect. The exemptions are glorious, because they are so splendidly old-fashioned. By and large, I rather like things being old-fashioned, and I do not normally use it as a term of disapprobation, but in this case it means that one could reintroduce the closed scholarships. At New college, Oxford, which has a close connection with Winchester, places could be reserved for Wykehamists. People may think that that is all fine and dandy, but as an Etonian, I would feel that I was being prejudiced against, and that it was wrong to give places to Wykehamists rather than Etonians—or, more seriously, to deny them to people from all over the country. Allowing the reintroduction of a system of closed scholarships cannot be what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is really trying to do. That cannot be an advance for universities, and it does not make this a sensible Bill to pass.

[Mr Chope]

The Bill applies only to places that are funded by the taxpayer. Does my hon. Friend not accept that if a university wishes to give closed scholarships, at its discretion, to students who will not be funded by the taxpayer, it should have the freedom so to do?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

We should always deal in the realms of reality, and not assume that people would be so barkingly eccentric as to run off down that route. Universities want to be places of great academic excellence, and they want to be able to have a system that admits people fairly and freely. We are sometimes too suspicious of people’s motives. I accept that the Bill applies to publicly funded universities, but most universities receive public funding of one kind or another, if only via their charitable status.

That helpfully moves me on to another point—the key point of money. Money is always relevant to our discussions, but it is one of the most dangerous things with which Governments have to deal. We give money to an independent institution—great universities—and say, “Now we’ve given you some money, we must decide how you spend it,” and then, “Now we’ve decided how you should spend it, we must take a little more control”—and it becomes more and more control, until independent bodies become agents of the state. The Bill continues that process. Instead of our saying that the money will now come from students, and universities will become more independent of the state, the Bill is an effort to claw back state control. We see in the charitable and university sectors that when Governments spend money, they always want their pound of flesh, and the pound of flesh is interfering in the day-to-day running of organisations, denying them their freedoms. In some cases, that does not really matter, but it is crucial that academic freedom, as a fundamental good, be maintained as an absolute priority.

Let me carry on dealing with the details of the Bill. I raised this matter in an intervention: I am very much against passing Bills that are slightly absurd—I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch for being so harsh as to use that term. To have a Bill that applies to England and Wales only, and also only to people domiciled in England, does not seem to work. Surely, the universities in England should admit on the same basis anyone who comes along. To say that they will admit English people on merit but that they can admit the Scots, Irish and Welsh and people from the Commonwealth or European Union not according to merit does not make any sense. If we are to pass laws of this kind, there must be the same principle of application and entry for everyone who is eligible to enter subject to public funding. One might say that it is a good idea to take some overseas students because they can pay a vast fee that will subsidise some of the rest of the university’s operations, although after the Gaddafi affair one might not think that quite such a clever idea, but one really does not want to say that people from Scotland can be taken in on a completely different basis from the people of England.

I am also concerned about the term “domiciled in England”, because I am not quite sure, legally, where it comes from. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch will explain it. I understand that with tax laws for which domicile is relevant, it is United Kingdom domicile that matters, although that may change with the Scotland Bill. I am not convinced that there is an agreed English domicile classification.

I want to elaborate a little more on academic freedoms. What is it that allows thought to develop? What allows us not just to produce people who can go into the workplace, fill jobs and earn a living, but allows that great development of thought that we have had in this country for hundreds of years? Whom should we go back to as our earliest notable philosopher? One could argue for Shakespeare or go back even further and argue for Chaucer, although one might think of them more as literary figures. One could start with Hobbs and Locke and the development of thought in which this country has been so powerfully involved. When talking about science, one could mention Boyle and Newton, both of whom had strong associations with our great universities. How did they achieve that? Yes, they sometimes got Government money: Chaucer was sponsored by the King and so was Shakespeare. Newton was the Master of the Mint and got an income from his service that allowed him to afford his academic studies. So, there is a connection between the state and academic excellence, but it is not a control: it is not the state saying, “You may do only these things or you must educate only these people.”

We must be very wary of putting constraints on our institutions. I hope that the Minister will consider this point in relation to the current state of legislation rather than just in regard to this Bill. Our institutions need to be free to take in the people whom they think best even though we might not agree that they are the best—indeed, they might seem to us not quite up to the mark. Our institutions might decide to take a bet on someone who has no academic qualifications, because they have been failed by their secondary school—such failure has been a problem—but who appears absolutely genius in quality. They might decide to take people who have that spark of intelligence and thoughtfulness that makes them interesting and exciting and means they can push on the great development of thought.

Many areas of university life are not covered by the academic subjects that are done up until A-level. There are developments that people need to take with a philosophy, politics and economics qualification.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and I am sorry that we appear to be confusing two things. I am not for a moment suggesting that we ought to go back to the standard of living of the middle ages, or the level of literacy. That is not what we should aim for. It would be bonkers. What I was saying, and I thought I was agreeing with the Minister, is that I would like the status of education to be as high as it was in the middle ages, and to be something that people love and rejoice in. Of course, we want it to be open to everybody rather than only to the narrow, broadly clerical, class that it was open to in the past.

To think of education as a great and exciting thing is tremendously important, and we do that best by allowing the universities their freedom. The less control the Government have, the better. One of the great things about tuition fees is that they will follow the student. Although the Government will provide the money initially, eventually it will be paid back. The Government are beginning to retreat from the financing of the universities, so universities will have greater freedom because they will not be so subject to the Government’s interference.

[Mr Chope]

I am concerned that my hon. Friend accepts too much at face value what the Government say. In paragraph 5.4 of the “Guidance to the Director of Fair Access”, the Government make the point:

“The subsidised loans that Government offers students represent a significant cost to the public purse.”

That is then used as justification for interference. Surely, that is inconsistent with my hon. Friend’s vision, which I share, that universities should be free to charge whatever fees they wish.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

We have to evolve. We have to move to a position where freedom is re-established. We are going from a position where most university funding is state-controlled to one where a large proportion of it will come from individuals. The Government would be in a ludicrous position if they were getting students to pay what was the Government’s money. That would not make sense. We have a wise, good and forthright Government, made up of some of the best brains ever born in this country. We are lucky. We know where we are going in terms of tuition fees; we have a well-thought through plan that will aid the independence of universities, particularly once we move through it and we find that the money is being paid back, the loan book can be run profitably and a major cost can be taken off the Government’s balance sheet. I am all in favour of student loans, which will help to achieve the Bill’s aims—the admission of people whom universities want because they have the ability to attend them.

Let me draw broadly to a conclusion.

Legislation (Territorial Extent) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 11th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

I am generous by nature but I would be even more generous if my hon. Friend had explained why it has turned out to be impossible for the Government to appoint the commission before Christmas, as they originally intended.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

May I come to the support of the Minister, and on a constitutional issue, which may surprise him? Our consideration of the earlier legislation on the alternative vote, parliamentary boundaries and fixed-term Parliaments was desperately rushed, and therefore its measures were not necessarily very well thought through, which is a great shame. In contrast, the progress we are making towards considering the West Lothian question in a deliberative and thorough way is in the best traditions of high Toryism.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I think that these deliberations should be conducted by the commission itself, however, rather than by the Government, and I do not want the Government to be agonising over whether there should be a commission and, if so, who will serve on it. I do not think my hon. Friend and I are very far apart, as I believe the commission must be given the maximum amount of time to go into the details of this topic. However, if we are going to get this sorted out before the end of this fixed-term Parliament, why have we not got on with it already? What is the reason for the delay? It seems to me that the justifications for delay put forward thus far are specious in the extreme, and we have learned from experience that if a Government have not got a proper explanation for delay, the reason is usually that they intended to delay matters, as is the case now.

Public Services (Social Enterprise and Social Value) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 19th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

As my hon. Friend says, that is ridiculous. The previous Government were too obsessed with the fact that this organisation was based in the north-east of England and had grown significantly as a result of all the money that it had received from the public purse. I hope that the new coalition Government will introduce a bit more sanity and proportion into the way in which that money is spent so that we can ensure that relatively small local contractors can participate.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that what he suggests is a good way of moving towards the localism agenda? If something is local, it can be smaller and involve smaller, more community-sized businesses much more easily than it can if it takes a central, Big Brother, top-down approach.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Given time, I am sure that he would develop his argument in relation to north Somerset, as he has so ably on previous Fridays.

Localism is of great importance. When we talk about its importance, we should not be too fussed about whether we are talking about a local small business, a local social enterprise or a local charity. We must not create artificial distinctions.

Sustainable Livestock Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Christopher Chope

Friday 12th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

I hope that that is right. Certainly, that is a much more commonsensical approach than adopting the idea of replacing imported soy with home-grown alternatives.

I drew the Minister’s attention to the statistics contained in “Pastures New”, a Friends of the Earth briefing on a sustainable future for meat and dairy farming. At page 10 of that document, which I obtained last night at the gathering of people interested in the Bill, under the heading “Strength in Numbers: How much soy could be replaced?” it says:

“The RAC’s research for Friends of the Earth estimates the proportion of soy bean meal that could be replaced by UK protein crops…show that: Field beans could substitute 14 per cent of soy bean, requiring 221,000 hectares…Peas could substitute 17 per cent, requiring 323,000 hectares…Lupins could substitute 15 per cent, requiring 263,000 hectares…Oilseed rape could replace 14 per cent, requiring 214,000 hectares…Sunflower could replace 17 per cent, requiring 512,000 hectares…Linseed could replace 14 per cent, requiring 425,000 hectares. In addition, lucerne silage from some 438,000 hectares of pasture or leys could replace 42 per cent of soy bean for ruminants.”

As my hon. Friend pointed out, if such a replacement occurred, over half of our agricultural land would be taken over with soy replacement, and that would squeeze out the production of wheat, barley and other agricultural products, and we would no doubt have to import those as a substitute.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I know that one of the most important aspects of agriculture policy is to ensure food security, and I wonder whether my hon. Friend is in fact saying that this Bill would fundamentally undermine food security in this country because so much of our land would be going to soya production, rather than to providing the food that we actually need.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend, as so often, puts his finger on a really good point, and it highlights the Bill’s inherent contradictions. On the one hand, the Minister will be asked to have regard to food security through compliance with clause 1; on the other, one of the main measures that the promoter intends to introduce would undermine and damage food security. I do not think that that is intentional on the part of the promoter, but when one looks at the Bill in detail one finds that it, like many good intentions that are brought before the House and converted into draft legislation, will achieve quite the reverse of what its promoter thought.

Replacing all that soya with those alternative crops is the wrong thing to do. Lupins, sunflowers and, arguably, linseed can look quite attractive in the countryside at particular times of year, but I am not sure whether many people would say that field upon field and hectare upon hectare of such crops, which are not native to the United Kingdom, would enhance our landscape.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

I am most encouraged by my hon. Friend’s response. I am glad that he recognises that it would be a mistake to impose on local government and other parts of the public sector.

My hon. Friend went on to talk about labelling. I agree wholeheartedly that we should try to get better labelling, but I fear that unless we can renegotiate our position in relation to the European Union, we will not be able to do that as easily or quickly as my hon. Friend would like.

I still do not understand why we are not able to feed food waste to pigs, as we always used to. There was an unnecessary health scare about all that, and it would surely be much better if we fed our food waste to pigs, rather than putting it into landfill or disposing of it in some other way. I hope that in due course the Government will readdress that issue.

Pigs will eat almost anything. As you may recall, Mr Deputy Speaker, it was not that long ago that a citizen was murdered in Wimbledon and it was discovered that his body had been fed to pigs. I am sure that you will be advised that that point is far outside the remit of the Bill, and, funnily enough, dealing with such issues will not be one of the burdens put on the Minister if the Bill passes into law. That is fair enough. I am illustrating the point that pigs are omnivores. It is a pity that we do not allow pigs to devour food waste and thereby the reduce the amount of soya that they consume.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The point about food waste needs to be looked into very thoroughly. I seem to remember that the last outbreak of foot and mouth was caused by diseased waste. Before putting food waste into the food chain, it has to be treated enormously carefully. The Bill may not be doing that in the right way.

[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend rightly brings a cautionary tale to bear on this. My parents used to keep two pigs—one was called Humpty, and the other Dumpty. We used to feed them all the food waste, and there was never an outbreak of foot and mouth disease as a result. Those pigs were very healthy, and, because it was a time of rationing, when they were slaughtered we did not keep all the meat ourselves, but shared it among the people in a sort of collectivist action.