Risk-based Exclusion

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Monday 13th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Philip Davies]

I will not, because others want to speak and I do not want to take their time.

I will raise two other points. My hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) is absolutely right about the fact that when this motion was originally tabled, it was about arrest, and the Government have just changed the wording to “charged” but kept the rest of it in place, which is completely unsatisfactory. Personally, for the reason that I have given, I would get rid of the panel altogether, because I suspect that the outcome would be the same on every single thing, whether arrest or charge, to be perfectly honest. I am not entirely sure what the point of the panel is. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that when the matter relates to a charge, the panel is completely unnecessary, and we should get rid of it.

[Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Will my hon. Friend give way very briefly?

[Sir Philip Davies]

Go on then—as it is my right hon. Friend.

[Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I think the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) is more constitutional—although still far from perfect—because whether to exclude under certain circumstances is a decision for the House, rather than a decision for the House to delegate. His amendment to this rather bad motion is at least an improvement.

[Sir Philip Davies]

There is no better endorsement than that, as far as I am concerned, so that will do for me and, I am sure, for my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley.

The Order Paper indicates that amendment (c) is expected to be pressed to a Division, and I hope that it is. It was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), who cannot be here because of all the parliamentary business that he is engaged in today, but I have signed it, Madam Deputy Speaker, and would be prepared to move it. It comes back to the point—one that my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands made—about this motion being sort of cobbled together with a different original purpose.

Amendment (c) is about removing proxy voting from somebody who is subject to a charge. I do not think that there is any justification at all for somebody who has been charged with a serious sexual or violent offence to be given a proxy vote, when people with far better reasons for being absent from the House are not given that privilege. It would be an outrage, in my opinion, if they were treated more favourably than other Members who had just as good a reason for not being here. I very much hope that the Leader of the House will accept the amendment, which I think reflects the mood of the House. Proxy voting is a step too far, and it is a consequence of not amending the motion when the decision was made to change the wording from arrest to charge.

I would like to say a lot more—I said last week that this debate was not long enough, given the seriousness of the issue, and I maintain that view—but I want to allow others to speak. I completely agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset when he says that this is an unsatisfactory process, and if he were to vote against the whole motion, I would have a lot of sympathy with him, but I hope that colleagues accept that “charged” strikes the right balance by being fair to everybody—including our constituents, who are the most important people for this House to think about—and in terms of safeguarding the people who work here. I also hope that Members will accept amendment (c), tabled by hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and me, to scrap proxy voting in that situation. That would at least make the motion better than it would otherwise be.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Thursday 5th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Gentleman knows that the UK Internal Market Bill involves a great deal of powers—I think 70—that were with Europe now coming back to the United Kingdom and going to the devolved authorities. If we were to have a debate on standards in Scottish education, it would be about why the SNP has been running them into the ground in its period of running the Scottish Government, because the record of the SNP is absolutely appalling, as the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends know only too well. Scotland, as he rightly says, used to have one of the best records, and it is the SNP that has undermined that while it has been in government.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Back on Boxing day 2015, my constituency was terribly affected by flooding. Since that time, the same homes and streets have repeatedly suffered from flooding, which once again reared its ugly head earlier this week. It is bad enough that the same people are repeatedly flooded, but the trauma for those people is worse. Every time it rains heavily, fearing the worst is a torture that is hard to imagine. Will my right hon. Friend therefore ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to come to the House to make a statement to let my constituents know when he will implement the flood prevention measures for my constituency proposed by the Environment Agency?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The difficulties families face when they are flooded and the worry that they must have when the rain beats down again is something with which every Member of this House would have sympathy. A great deal of taxpayers’ money is being spent, and Yorkshire is receiving more than any other region—£496 million has been spent since 2015, protecting 66,000 properties. Across England as a whole, £2.6 billion is being spent on flood and coastal defences between 2015 and 2021. In March, there was a commitment of £5.2 billion to build 2,000 new flood and coastal defence schemes across England by 2027. I appreciate that that does not necessarily give my hon. Friend’s constituents the comfort that they desire, but he will have the opportunity to raise the matter with the Secretary of State on 26 November. I will also take it up on his behalf and try to get him a detailed answer on when the programme will actually start.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Thursday 1st October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Gentleman raises a very valid point: anything that we send out on paper is heavily regulated, and things that are done online are almost unregulated—not entirely, but broadly. There is a discrepancy between those two, and I know that the Government are considering this matter. A debate via the Backbench Business Committee would be a good starting place to get the ball rolling on this discussion.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

One of the many awful aspects of the coronavirus crisis has been the doubling of assaults on shop workers. These people are heroes who went into work every day while we were all locked down at home, and ensured that we had food and provisions; yet, the thanks that many get is to be abused and assaulted by customers. As somebody who worked for Asda for 12 years before entering the House, I feel very strongly that the despicable people who assault shop workers should face much tougher sentences from the courts. Can we have a debate to see whether the majority of the House agrees with that sentiment and so that we can show our deep gratitude for all shop workers?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend, as he so often does, puts his finger on the right issue. Shop workers have been fantastic, phenomenal and brave, because they all stayed at work at a point when we knew much less about the disease than we do now and thought that it might have been much more risky even than it has turned out to be; they were a real frontline emergency service. Without them, the crisis would have been infinitely worse, so I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the tribute he has paid to them. I can reassure him that there are already offences that cover assaults against any worker, including those in the retail sector, such as common assault, actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm. In July, the Government published the findings of a call for evidence on violence and abuse towards shop workers, and we will continue to work with the British Retail Consortium and other partners to stop these crimes. I pay tribute to the British Retail Consortium for the work that it has been doing to highlight this important issue, and encourage my hon. Friend and the BRC to continue raising it.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Thursday 6th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

There are Home Office questions on Monday. I think that would be the right time to raise that important question.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Can the Leader of the House arrange for the Secretary of State to come to the House to make a statement about flood defences? There has been a lot of focus, rightly, on places such as Fishlake, which suffered terribly from floods just before the general election, but my constituents are still waiting for improved flood defences from the Boxing Day floods in 2015. Perhaps the Secretary of State could come to the House to tell us when my constituents will get the flood defences they both deserve and need.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Thursday 24th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

As I have said before, we need to have a balance. People enjoy fireworks and we do not want to be po-faced enders of fun for one and all. We want to allow our constituents to do things that they enjoy, so I am not in favour of extending regulations at every opportunity.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Alopecia UK is based in my constituency. May we have a debate on wig provision in the NHS, which I have to say is completely and utterly inadequate and causes a great deal of distress to victims of hair loss?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Mr Speaker, I understand that some candidates to take over your role are concerned about wig provision, albeit I believe of a different kind.

My hon. Friend makes a serious point. Having raised it in the Chamber, I would encourage him to press for further debates, and particularly to ask a question of the Health Secretary when he is next at the Dispatch Box.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Tuesday 22nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Oh, we are wallowing in the realms of metaphysical abstraction, as Burke would have said, and almost certainly did, albeit not in relation to this Bill.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

May I urge my right hon. Friend to reconsider the point made by our right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith)? I think we all know that the people who voted against the programme motion tonight did not really want more time to consider the Bill; they wanted to frustrate Brexit. They wanted to block it. Nobody is fooled. Why do the Government not play them at their own game? The Father of the House, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), said that another three days would do it, so why do we not start the Committee stage tomorrow? The extra three days that seem to be required could be Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We could sit till any hour on all three days, and we could then see how much appetite there really is for extra scrutiny of the Bill. I suspect that if the Leader of the House were to do that, he would find that, actually, not much scrutiny would be required from Opposition Members.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for a characteristically good idea on how we might be able to proceed. The only difficulty is that the programme motion has been voted down, and to sit in the way my hon. Friend suggests would require another programme motion, and there is no indication that that would meet with greater satisfaction from the Opposition. The House of Lords also has to consider this Bill in due time, so I fear that his great solution is not going to be a way forward.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Thursday 3rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Indeed, yes—I welcome the fact that we have a Children’s Commissioner, and share the hon. Gentleman’s concern that 20% of children leave school with no qualification. That is the reason for so many of the education reforms that have been going through, and the extra expenditure that will be going to the Department of Health and Social Care should bring about an improvement. That is, of course, a subject that will be easy to raise during the Queen’s speech debates; one of the advantages of having a Queen’s speech is that many issues of importance like that can be raised, and Members can expect a ministerial response in the debate.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

The Government led by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) were very supportive of a Shipley eastern bypass, and paid for a feasibility study with a specific intention to complete the bypass when the study had ended. So will my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House arrange for the Secretary of State for Transport to come and make a statement to the House on that subject, so that he can, hopefully, restate this Government’s commitment to building a Shipley eastern bypass?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

What a great place Shipley is. I had the huge joy of visiting Shipley earlier this year to campaign for my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to become leader of the Conservative party, and it is brilliantly represented by my hon. Friend. I will pass on his message to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport, because I am sure we want to follow in the excellent footsteps of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who I notice is sitting behind me, watching proceedings closely.

Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 27th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The official figures and the recorded figures are likely to be the tip of an iceberg. Many instances will go unreported and unrecorded. Even though the figures are extremely high, they almost certainly understate the issue.

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

Are the five assaults a day generally carried out by five separate people or by the same people? If the Bill comes into law and the people committing the offences are imprisoned, will that be a relatively small number of frequent offenders or a large number of people who have done it once?

[Philip Davies]

As always, my hon. Friend raises a very good point. I hope later to deal with part of that issue, because there are persistent offenders who assault police officers time and time again. Even when they are found to have done it time and time again, the sentences that are imposed can be derisory. If there is more robust sentencing, it is blindingly obvious that the more criminals there are behind bars, the fewer criminals there are out on the streets committing crimes. That would certainly apply here. The more of these characters we can send to prison, the less chance there will be of police officers being assaulted. My hon. Friend makes a pertinent point.

New clause 1 mirrors the Bill with 12-month sentencing powers in magistrates courts and Crown courts. Of course, magistrates do not yet have 12-month sentencing powers for one offence. In reality, they would be left with just the six months they have now. I hope that one day that will change so that magistrates can sentence people to up to 12 months for all the offences we are talking about today.

I say to the Minister that we have promised magistrates for many years that we will increase their sentencing powers to 12 months. The law has been passed; it just has not been brought into effect. The Government have promised magistrates those extra powers for many years, and the Select Committee on Justice has reported on that and said that it should be done straight away. It would certainly help in relation to this Bill. I hope the Minister will reflect on the fact that we need to give magistrates those additional sentencing powers, not least because it is much cheaper to prosecute offences in the magistrates court than to take them to the Crown court.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Committee: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

But not for the United Kingdom as a whole—no, not yet. I will wait for the SNP to put up a candidate in North East Somerset, and we will see how well that goes down.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Would my hon. Friend concede that some of us are always in opposition whichever party is in government?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend puts the point beautifully. That is actually the historical and traditional job of Back-Bench Members of Parliament. We should be here to protect the interests of our constituents and the interests of the constitution, and to hold the Government—of whichever party—to account.

That is why I am in such agreement with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield about the undesirability of Henry VIII powers. However, I said I would diverge from him at some point. The point on which I diverge from him is the perhaps slightly academic one about where we have started from. I think it is inconsistent to say that Henry VIII powers exercised by the British Government, subject to the normal parliamentary procedures of this House and another place, are worrying, but that the Henry VIII powers used under the European Communities Act 1972 were not.

Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (Ratification of Convention) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 24th February 2017 Commons Chamber

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

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way with regard to his new clause 10, but I wonder whether he has thought through the constitutional implications of allowing a vote in this House to have any formal standing when it is neither a statutory instrument nor primary legislation. Would that not risk bringing the courts into the proceedings in Parliament?

[Philip Davies]

I always bow to my hon. Friend’s superior knowledge of constitutional issues. I would never enter into a competition with him on that, because I would certainly lose. However, I do not think there is anything to fear from new clause 10. All it asks for is a debate on the report in Parliament before the Government give a response. It would not even necessarily make the Government beholden to the outcome of that debate, but it would at least ensure the Government were aware of the views of MPs before they responded.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again. How would that be tested? If the Government decided not to have a debate in Parliament, it could not be taken to a judicial review, because the courts could not consider a proceeding in Parliament.

[Philip Davies]

There is plenty of evidence of Governments ignoring what Parliament has to say to them on a number of occasions, whether on appointments, Select Committees or whatever. I appreciate my hon. Friend’s concerns and I always take them seriously. I will reflect on what others have to say in the debate; they may be able to persuade me that new clause 10 is not worth pursuing. However, I do not envisage the problems my hon. Friend envisages. I suppose we ought just to leave it at that and perhaps move on from there. My hon. Friend may well have the opportunity to have his say and explain in greater detail why new clause 10 should be resisted. I am sure the House will listen carefully to what he says, as will I. It would be a sad—and rare—state of affairs if I found myself voting in a different Lobby from my hon. Friend. New clause 10 should find favour with campaigners in favour of the Bill and the convention, because it gives Parliament more say over what happens post-ratification.

New clause 11 relates to annual statistics. This is very important. I have heard many assertions from campaigners that we must pass the Istanbul convention to eliminate violence against women, and that if we do not ratify it we will not have any reduction in violence against women. Campaigners say that if we pass the convention there will miraculously be no violence against women. New clause 11 requires the Government to use their

“best endeavours to obtain statistics on the levels of violence against men, women and all domestic violence victims in each country who are ratified members of the Convention and to make them publicly available and published annually.”

The point of that is to allow us all to see for ourselves whether ratifying the Istanbul convention actually makes any difference at all to levels of violence against women and levels of domestic violence. At the moment, we do not really know too much about it.

In preparation for this debate, I tried to get figures on countries that have ratified the convention to ask them if they had seen a reduction in violence since ratification. We should want to test whether it will actually make any difference at all. Unfortunately, the House of Commons Library told me that it did not have any such figures and that these figures did not exist. So anybody who stands up today and says that passing the Istanbul convention will reduce levels of violence against women is doing so in the full knowledge that they have no evidence at all to support that claim—unless, of course, they have done what I did. In the absence of any House of Commons Library figures, I wrote to the ambassadors of all the countries who ratified the convention to ask whether they could supply me with any of the information.

I do not know whether anybody else in the House has actually bothered to find out whether ratifying the convention makes any difference to levels of violence against women. Perhaps anybody who has done so could intervene now and share that information with me. No, I did not think anybody would intervene. I did not think that anyone would actually have any idea of what they were talking about before they came here today, but of course someone coming in on a Friday and knowing what they were talking about before pontificating would be breaking a great tradition. I have done the work for them—again. I contacted the ambassadors of the countries that have ratified the convention and asked for their figures. I am sure everyone will be interested to know what has happened in those countries since ratification. I am sure the Minister will be delighted to know. Maybe the Minister does not know this either. It is quite extraordinary, really.

Sweden signed the convention in May 2011 and ratified it in July 2014. It came into force in November 2014, with reservations. I will come on to reservations later, because I know that is a subject my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch feels very strongly about. From the figures given to me by the Swedish ambassador, the total number of reported offences in 2013, before the convention was ratified in Sweden, was 39,580. When the convention came into force it was 42,217. In 2015, after ratification, it went up to 42,252. The preliminary figures for 2016 show another increase in violence, with reported offences at 43,179. The offences included in this category—I am very grateful to the Swedish ambassador for sending this very detailed information—are all forms of assault, murder and rape, including attempted rape, regardless of the victim’s age. In Sweden, therefore, ratification of the Istanbul convention has not made a blind bit of difference to levels of violence against women. In fact, all that has happened is that levels of violence have continued to increase. What do all those who claim that the convention is essential to reducing violence have to say about that? Absolutely nothing—that is what they have got to say about it.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I wonder whether there might be other factors involved. My hon. Friend will no doubt have heard the President of the United States expressing considerable concern about the dangers now arising in Sweden.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I do not intend to deviate too much from the matter in hand, but he raises an interesting point about what might be the driving force behind that. I think the point he is getting at is that he thinks the levels and nature of immigration into Sweden might have been a contributory factor—a point made by President Trump last week. There may well be truth in that. I do not know; I did not ask the ambassador for any assessment on that. All we do know is that ratifying the Istanbul convention has not led to a decrease in violence against women in Sweden, and so all the people claiming that that is what is going to happen might want to think again.

Merchant Shipping (Homosexual Conduct) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 20th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) led me astray, Mr Deputy Speaker, and you are quite rightly not allowing him to do that. I shall see him later to discuss Kempton Park’s closure.

My serious point is that this matter could have been dealt with many years ago if the 2010 Act had been scrutinised properly. The omission from that Act has meant that we have needed an entirely new Bill simply to correct a failure, and that is a great shame. The Equality Act 2010 (Work on Ships and Hovercraft) Regulations 2011 appear to be the final confirmation that this Bill is not going to change anything, because those regulations are the key piece of legislation relating to the 2010 Act that makes the original provisions redundant. Those regulations were made on 18 July 2011 and came into force on 1 August 2011.

I know that other Members wish to speak, so in the interests of time, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will not test your patience any further by reading out the part of the regulations that, in effect, makes the 1994 Act provisions redundant. They deal with the application of

“Part 5 of the Act to seafarers working wholly or partly in Great Britain and adjacent waters”

and make it clear that the 2010 Act does apply to seafarers and to ships working in this environment, so the position is clear. The regulations also come with an interpretation, which makes it clear that the 2010 Act is the Act that applies, goes through what is meant by a “United Kingdom ship” and a “United Kingdom water”, and sets out the legal relationship of a seafarer’s employment within the country.

The regulations therefore did make the position clear, but my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South made the pertinent point that somebody who reads the 1994 Act might not know about the 2011 regulations. How many people in here know about the Equality Act 2010 (Work on Ships and Hovercraft) Regulations 2011? It is our job to deal with these things, but how many of us know about those regulations? How on earth can we expect the general public, who might well have been made aware of the law that was in place, to have known that it was superseded by the 2011 regulations? For that reason—normally I might have been tempted to say that the Bill is a solution looking for a problem, and therefore not necessary—I think that the Bill serves a useful purpose.

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

Is it not further sensible to bring forward this Bill because the courts have watered down the understanding of implied repeal and built up a hierarchy of legislation? Therefore, as the principle of implied repeal has been weakened, it is more important that the legislation that we pass is clear.

[Philip Davies]

I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to give the House the benefit of more detail about his good point in a speech—he knows more about it than I do. I know full well that he will correct me if and when I am wrong, but my understanding is that constitutional legislation will always take precedence and, presumably, anything that is not constitutional that came earlier will be superseded by something that came later. He seems to be indicating that that is not necessarily the case, so perhaps he would like to have another bite of the cherry to inform us better.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The historical understanding was quite clear: any subsequent Act implicitly repealed a previous one. In recent years, however, the courts have developed, particularly in relation to the European Union, an understanding of a hierarchy of legislation. They have decided what are and what are not constitutional Acts. We do not list Acts as constitutional and non-constitutional—all Acts that we pass are of the same level—so this is just about creating certainty.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who makes a very good point. The Bill therefore does not just have the advantage of being symbolic and removing something from the statute book that I feel should not have been there in the first place, as he makes a good case for saying why it might well have a practical application in law, too. It certainly removes any doubt about the situation—we can all agree on that—which has to be a good thing.

Finally—I do not want to test the patience of the House too much—let me just raise the concern relating to historical cases. During the debates on the Armed Forces Bill, people raised the issue of historical cases in which individuals had been treated unfairly under the 1994 Act and asked whether something could be done. This touches on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley when he said that we cannot really do anything about what happened in the past, and what we can affect is what happens now and in the future. Although I wholeheartedly agree with the repeal of the 1994 provisions, I wish to raise a note of caution about the pardoning of historical cases. A private Member’s Bill has been introduced about the whole issue of pardons for those convicted for homosexuality in the past. I am not going to get sidetracked down that road—

National Minimum Wage (Workplace Internships) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 4th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall).

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke), my fellow west Yorkshire Member of Parliament, for bringing forward this Bill. As we all know, he is a very decent man. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North pointed out, he made a promise to his constituents and, as a decent, honourable man, he is honouring that promise. Nobody in this place should criticise him for doing that. It is what we have come to expect from him. Having said that, I do not think it was a particularly good promise to have made or to be fulfilling, although I admire him for following it through. I do not support the Bill but I do support—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am sorry to intervene on my hon. Friend’s speech at such an early stage, but last year we established a tradition of congratulating the Chairman of Ways and Means on the brilliant way in which he carried out the lottery to ensure that our hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) came third in the ballot and had this Bill to introduce. Perhaps my hon. Friend would like to say a few words on that subject.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I will come to that in a bit more detail, but just so that I do not look like I am dodging my hon. Friend’s question, let me say that it has varied wildly: some people come for a day, some come for a few days and some—I would imagine it is the majority—come for a week. However, some have come for months—five or six months in a couple of cases—and I will refer to them later, because part of their experience was part of what I see as the problem with the Bill.

The issue is what will be lost, and the definition in the Bill spells out what could be lost, not just in Parliament but when people are looking for jobs elsewhere. Clause 1(b) says the national minimum wage would apply where

“the purpose of the employment practice is…that the intern meets learning objectives or gains experience of working for the employer listed in section 1(a); and…to provide practical experience in an occupation or profession.”

That seems to be good old-fashioned, traditional work experience, but my hon. Friend seems to want to cover it through the minimum wage, and that would not be sensible. Learning and gaining practical experience are what is at stake. People doing work experience do it for the invaluable opportunity to gain that experience, and that is often something money cannot buy.

For many people thinking about going down a particular career route, spending even a small amount of time just seeing what happens and what the role actually means, rather than how it is portrayed in the media, is invaluable. They might actually think, “This job isn’t for me. I thought it was, because of what I thought about it, but after spending just a week here, I’ve seen what it’s really like, and it’s not for me.” The money someone can save by not pursuing a career that is no good for them is actually far more than they could ever earn by being paid the minimum wage for doing these things.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Do we not also have to have confidence in people and in the fact that they can make decisions for themselves? If they decide that they loathe the internship after a week, they are not paid and they are not contractually obligated, so they can leave and take on another internship or paid employment.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right—as he invariably is, I might add.

Under the heading “What is work experience?”, the Government’s own guidance on their website about the minimum wage, work experience and internships says:

“The term ‘work experience’ generally refers to a specified period of time that an individual spends with a business—during which they have an opportunity to learn directly about working life and the working environment.”

I should say at this point that work experience has actually proven quite an essential part of the Government’s welfare reforms—reforms that Conservative Members, including, I am sure, my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell, are very proud of. I am sure we all recall when the Government had to introduce emergency legislation because they lost the Cait Reilly case in the courts over the work experience she was asked to do as part of her benefits regime. The Government introduced emergency legislation, the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Act 2013, which made it clear in law that people on benefits should have to do work experience in certain circumstances. Labour Members agreed to help the Government rush through that legislation because they too saw the importance of those people having to do work experience. The right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), the shadow Minister at the time, gave Labour’s support to it. The legislation was about people doing unpaid work experience in the workplace because the Government believed, and everybody agreed, that that was one of the best ways to help them get into work. I think the Government said—I am happy for people to correct me if I am wrong—that about 50% of people on benefits who did the work experience got a job at the end of it. I would even be prepared to wager that my hon. Friend supported the Government in passing that legislation, because I am sure he appreciated how important that unpaid work experience was in people getting a job.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

Yes, I absolutely agree. However, my view is that the outcome of my hon. Friend’s Bill would be to take away opportunities from people and not to add extra opportunities for them. I will make a suggestion a bit later—if I ever get the opportunity to do so, Mr Deputy Speaker—to suggest how we might actually do what my hon. Friend says, which is not to take away opportunities that exist but to make sure that there are more opportunities for other people.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Will my hon. Friend examine the figures just given by our hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke)? He said that 40% of people do not take up internships because they cannot afford to, but 66% of internships are paid. That does not seem quite to work. It must mean that people are refusing to take up paid internships as well as unpaid internships, in which case simply paying people will not solve the problem.

[Philip Davies]

Of course my hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is a point that I, too, have considered during this debate, because my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell made a point about how expensive it is to live in London and to take accommodation in London, which is absolutely right. Many opportunities for internships and work experience are in London, so I have to say to him that paying under-18s £4 an hour—the current rate of the minimum wage for under-18s—will not give them the opportunity to come and take up a work experience place in London; they would still have to rely on parental support, other family support, or other means.

The Bill will not make a blind bit of difference to the people my hon. Friend is targeting. They still will not be able to afford to take up opportunities in London, which will still be the preserve of more affluent people. Again, that is why the Bill will not achieve what he sets out to achieve and why I think I have a better solution.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) was right: many people doing work experience are already entitled to the national minimum wage. We should make that point clear. I made it earlier in an intervention, but I see a difference between people who are—[Interruption.] I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) does not agree with me here; he is a bit more hard-core than I am.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for being prepared to be flexible with his Bill. We should commend him for that. I think there are areas where my hon. Friend can make the Bill better, but just making it better does not make it better than the status quo, so I cannot promise that if he were to amend it in that way it would all of a sudden command my support. I would say, however, that the Bill can be better than currently drafted, and my hon. Friend might want to explore that avenue. I am not entirely sure the Bill can be amended to make it into a good Bill, but it could be amended to make it a better Bill.

We should be clear about the rates of the minimum wage. It varies depending on people’s age. That is because we want to make sure that younger people get a fair crack of the whip; they would potentially be overlooked for someone older and more experienced if the minimum wage was the same across the board. So the Labour Government introduced a minimum wage, which has been maintained, which varies depending on age: it is £7.20 for those aged 25 and over, falling to £4 for those under 18, with different scales in between. In this context, I want my hon. Friend to bear in mind a further unintended consequence of introducing his Bill: there would clearly be an inbuilt advantage to take on younger people as interns if they have to be paid, because if they are being paid the minimum wage, they will be paid less than the cost of taking on somebody older. In this case, therefore, for the business concerned it would be a case of the younger the better. Schoolchildren would be exempt, as would students in full-time employment if it was part of their course. So this means anyone of that age could be taken on as an intern—schoolchildren could be taken on as interns for free—but for those aged 25 or over, the sum would be £7.20 an hour right away.

Somebody of 25 or over might, however, be in the greatest need of work experience, because they have clearly been finding it pretty difficult to get themselves a paid job, and they are having to do more to make themselves employable. It would be unfortunate if people in that position, who are striving to get a job and are prepared to do whatever it takes, are turned away because they have to be paid £7.20 an hour, which an employer either could not afford or was not prepared to pay. They might take on someone younger who does not have the same needs. One of the flaws of the Bill is that it is not needs-based; it does not look at who most needs these internships. Its strategy is too simple and is therefore flawed. Older people will lose out first even though they are most in need. That would need to be amended.

There is also no exemption in this Bill for participants in Government schemes or programmes to provide training, work experience or temporary work. I do not know whether that would conflict with other Government legislation. I imagine there would be another charter for making lawyers richer—as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North feared—in establishing which legislation had precedence. I am not a lawyer, and those with a legal background would be better placed than me to comment, but my understanding is that usually the latest legislation trumps previous legislation.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

I knew my hon. Friend would want to correct me, and I will of course allow him to do so.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I, too, am not a lawyer, but according to implied repeal, a later Act trumps a former Act—except, I am sorry to say, with the European Communities Act 1972, which has been deemed constitutional statute.

EU Membership (Audit of Costs and Benefits) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 26th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am not entirely sure what my hon. Friend is driving at. At the moment, if somebody comes to the UK from outside the EU, we do not have to let them in, whereas if they are an EU citizen, we pretty much do have to let them in. It does not matter how suspicious we are of their motives—that is irrelevant. I want the more robust immigration policy that we are allowed for non-EU nationals to apply to EU nationals too. Nobody is saying that we do not want anybody to come into the UK from the EU, but I would rather we had some choice as to who we allow in. It is a great privilege to come into the UK. We should make sure that it is indeed a great privilege and that we are not just letting any old person into the country, which is the situation at the moment.

On sovereignty, it cannot be right that people making so many of our laws are unelected and completely unaccountable to anybody. The remain campaigners say, “Well, of course we have a European Parliament to scrutinise all these laws.” First, Members of the European Parliament who represent the UK are a tiny proportion of the total, so even if every single UK MEP voted against something, there is no guarantee that it would make any difference whatsoever. Secondly, if, in this country, the Government were permanently in office and the only people elected were the MPs scrutinising the decisions they were making, that would be a bizarre situation and there would be uproar. Yet the justification for having the European Commission, unelected and unaccountable, initiating all the legislation, which is the role of Governments in most national Parliaments, is that MEPs are elected. It is unbelievable that anybody can justify that kind of democratic situation. When we sign treaties with other countries, that is the end of it—the position does not get changed every five minutes by qualified majority voting, with things being imposed on us against our wishes. That is not how treaties work, but it is how our relationship with the European Union works.

We are told that we have a lot of influence in the EU. That argument was completely demolished by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) in his contribution to the Prime Minister’s statement on Monday. He pointed out that a freedom of information request showed that over the past two decades there had been a definitive vote in the European Council 72 times and that we had been outvoted 72 times. So on Monday the idea that we are wielding this huge influence in the European Union was clearly demolished. It was shown to be a complete load of old codswallop. It is an illusion of influence. We do not have any influence; we are having discussions around a table and being outvoted at every single turn, as Ministers who attend these things know to their cost.

We are told that the US wants us to stay in the EU and that that is a reason why we should. I do not doubt that it is in the United States’ best interests that we stay in the European Union, because we add a bit of common sense to it and it does not want the French, who are very anti-American, having even more power. If it is so important for the Americans that we stay in the European Union, perhaps they will pay our £18 billion membership fee each year for us. I look forward to President Obama making that offer when he comes to campaign in the referendum. I am sure that amount would be a drop in the ocean for the United States.

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

Let me bring to my hon. Friend’s attention the fact that the person representing the United States Government who has called for us to stay is John Kerry, a former senator, who in the 1980s showed himself to be no friend of the United Kingdom but a sympathiser with the IRA when he held up a treaty allowing for the deportation of IRA activists from the United States to the United Kingdom, saying that the justice system in Northern Ireland did not work effectively. He is no friend of Britain and has been in the past a terrorist sympathiser.

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing that to the House’s attention. With friends like that in the United States, I suspect we do not need many enemies.

I am prepared to accept that it may be in the best interests of the United States that we stay in the European Union. I am not going to question that for one minute, and I am sure that if I was an American I would probably be arguing the same. However, we should be making decisions that are in the best interests of the United Kingdom, not of the United States, which is big enough and bad enough to look after its own interests.

I look forward to a truly independent cost-benefit analysis that takes into account the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has made and some of the points that I have made. Any cost-benefit analysis that ignores those points that have been raised today is not worth the paper it is written on. I say to the Minister that, if anybody in the Government is working on some bogus cost-benefit analysis that they think is going to work in hoodwinking the British public, I hope he will insist that it takes into account the points we have raised today.

Crucially, the membership of any committee that puts together a cost-benefit analysis must correspond to that insisted upon by this Bill, which calls for a balance of people who are in favour of and people who are against the UK’s membership, a neutral chairman, and for none of them to be a current or past Member of the European Parliament or the European Commission. Only if those criteria are met will we have a truly independent and worthwhile cost-benefit analysis. However, given the Government’s reluctance over many years to publish such a cost-benefit analysis, I am afraid that any decision to rush one through now will be treated with a great deal of cynicism and scepticism, not just by me, but by many people across the House and, more importantly, by the British public.

Compulsory Emergency First Aid Education (State-funded Secondary Schools) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 20th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), who knows I have a high regard for him, even though he did not give way to me during his speech. He said that the Bill has strong cross-party support and he talked about the will of the House, which presumably will mean that 100 MPs out of the 650 will be here—it is not a great total to reach—to vote for it today. I am sure that if those 100 MPs are here, it will go through. That is a matter of fact, so if 100 MPs troop through the Lobby, that will be the will of the House and that will be it. We will see just how much cross-party support the Bill actually has, rather than what he asserts.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

In looking for these 100 MPs, how many does my hon. Friend see on the Opposition Benches currently?

[Philip Davies]

I see four, but I am not going to get sidetracked on to the number of people on the Benches, as I am sure you want us to get into the meat of the debate, Mr Deputy Speaker. You know how anxious I always am to get cracking into the meat of the debate, and I am not going to disappoint you any longer.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) on introducing this Bill. It may have strong cross-party support, but it certainly does not have mine.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is congratulating the hon. Lady, but he has not yet congratulated the Chairman of Ways and Means, who conducts the draw. It has become something of a tradition to congratulate him on the way in which he does the draw.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am not capable of conducting this in Latin, Mr Deputy Speaker—some would say I am not able to conduct it in English. I am getting sidetracked again by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), and I hope you appreciate that it is certainly not of my doing.

The flavour of most private Members’ Bills that come before the House is that they are backed by a worthy sentiment, but are not really fit for purpose when given any great scrutiny. I fear that we are in that situation today. What we have been offered by a number of Members is what we normally get in this place on private Members’ Bills, which is a painless panacea. Politicians will always offer a painless panacea. With this Bill, I have heard that we can save lives, save money, save time and save absolutely anything. It has been said that there are no concerns and no downsides to this Bill, which will stipulate that it is compulsory for schools to provide first aid education. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), I have spoken to the schools in my constituency, and I wish to share some of the feedback that they have given to me.

If this Bill is so easy for schools to implement—it is said that it will save time, save money and save lives—then there is absolutely nothing to stop them introducing first aid courses now as part of the existing curriculum. We have heard that already today, and we have heard that many schools already do that. Why on earth would we need to make compulsory something that is so wonderful and that has no downsides? Surely we can just sit back and wait for every school to implement it themselves.

One thing I always say is that we should trust the people who are doing things every day. They tend to be the ones who know the best about what goes on and what works. When I worked for Asda, I found that it was the checkout operators who were the best people to ask about what was going wrong or right in the store, because they saw it every day with their own eyes. I certainly believe in trusting the professionals. My father was a teacher for that matter, so I am all for trusting teachers to get on and do their job. I do not really want the Government to be sticking their nose in at every single turn, trying to lecture them every five minutes about what they should be doing when they are perfectly capable of making those decisions for themselves.

If we think that we have recruited the right people to be teachers, then we have absolutely nothing to fear from leaving them to get on and do their job. If we feel that we have recruited the wrong teachers and that we need to lecture them every five minutes about what they should be doing, the problem is in the recruitment process. We should not need to look over their shoulder all the time, telling them what they should and should not be doing. I fear that we have made that particular mistake with this Bill.

I should make something very clear now, because, doubtless, Opposition Members will try to misconstrue my remarks. First aid, as everyone has acknowledged, is a very important life skill. I encourage as many people as possible to learn that skill. I am, and remain, a supporter of first aid, and certainly do not think that it is unimportant. I do not want to prevent anybody from learning first aid if they wish to learn it. I want people to have that opportunity.

Every year, there are 5.5 million attendees at A&E departments, 3 million of whom have the types of accident and injury that first aid treatment could have helped. For example, there are about 2,600 open wound injuries, 2,400 bone injuries, about 40 incidents of choking and more than 290 injuries from burns. Every year, about 66,000 die from heart attacks and seizures. They are all compelling statistics that endorse the increased use of first aid within society. Indeed, those statistics seem a valuable reason to encourage more members of society to learn first aid, but they do not in themselves justify the reason why first aid should become compulsory in the school curriculum, and that is what I wish to focus on today.

This Bill is not starting out from here. In the previous Parliament, Julie Hilling, the former Member for Bolton West, introduced a very similar Bill as a ten-minute rule Bill, which provided amendments to the Education Act 2002. She also brought in an amendment during the Committee stage of the Education Bill to make provision for teaching emergency life support skills in the national curriculum. The response of the then Minister for Schools, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), highlighted some of the same reservations that should be drawn to this debate today. He said:

“I agree that emergency life support skills can have an immensely positive impact on pupils’ families as well as schools and the wider community. It is encouraging to hear about the excellent work in schools…I am also aware of the invaluable support that organisations such as the British Heart Foundation and St John Ambulance offer individual schools or groups of schools to enrich curriculum work. I applaud them for their important work, but I do not agree that making emergency life support skills a statutory part of the curriculum is the right approach.”

I absolutely endorse what he said. He went on to say:

“We are clear that the national curriculum should set out the essential knowledge and understanding that all children should be expected to acquire in the course of their school lives. It is for teachers to design the wider curriculum in the way that meets the needs of their pupils, taking account of the views of parents, the wider community and local circumstances.”––[Official Report, Education Public Bill Committee, 5 April 2011; c. 990.]

That is the nub of my argument today. It should be a schools’ prerogative to incorporate extra-curricular activities, such as first aid education, into the school calendar, and they should not be forced to substitute other lessons to fit them in. That has been confirmed more recently—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is saying, and I agree with him, that it should be for schools to decide. Does he think that it should be a voluntary activity for the pupils, or is he suggesting that they should be compelled to participate?

[Philip Davies]

It absolutely should be a voluntary thing. I was struck by my hon. Friend’s earlier intervention when he said that people who volunteer for things tend to enter into them with much more gusto than if they are compelled to be there. That is self-evidently the case. I do not see why that should not be the case for the teaching of first aid as well.

I should say that when the Government were pressed on this matter by Bob Russell, the former Liberal Democrat MP for Colchester, the Secretary of State made it clear that her Department was prepared to help schools teach life-saving skills more generally if that was what schools wanted—again, that is very laudable. She also made it clear that the Government had negotiated a contract so that schools could obtain defibrillators at reasonable rates and train their pupils in the use of them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I do not know. Schools would presumably have to muddle through as best they can to meet the requirements of the Bill. I am sure teachers are very good at chopping and changing and muddling through.

As I made clear at the start of my speech, I have contacted all the schools in my constituency and got feedback from some of them. One of them had a “requires improvement” judgment in February 2014, and one reason was that the students’ achievement in both maths and English has not been good enough since 2012. The priority for the school and its leadership team is not to expand the curriculum to make us all feel better about ourselves because we are fulfilling a worthy sentiment; the teachers are working incredibly hard to ensure that their pupils leave as young adults who are equipped with the right level of maths and English to set them up for the future. That is the first priority of our schooling system in this country. We should not sit here and think everything is hunky-dory in all our schools; it is not. Those teachers want help do that difficult job, dealing with some difficult pupils, but the Bill does not give them that support.

The National Literacy Trust states:

“Around 16 per cent, or 5.2 million adults in England, can be described as ‘functionally illiterate’. They would not pass an English GCSE and have literacy levels at or below those expected of an 11-year-old.”

That is a serious problem, which schools should be addressing. The importance of that form of education, which is what parents expect when they send their children to school, cannot be overestimated.

As we have heard from various Members, many people learn their first aid skills with the guides or the scouts. The nub of one of my arguments is that children do not need to learn first aid at school, as there are many organisations and clubs which teach it, including St John Ambulance and the Red Cross. The first aid badge is one of the most important badges that people can get in those organisations. Individuals must show a thorough range of first aid knowledge before they are entitled to the badge. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) referred to the pride that people take in displaying their badge on their uniform when they have earned it through those sessions. The guides first aid badge is valid for only two years, at which point they are required to take the test again in order to keep the badge up to date.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is making such an important point. When things are done well by the voluntary sector, is it always necessary for the state to come in in a heavy-handed way, get rid of all the good work that is being done by others, and impose its own solution? Is it not better to encourage voluntary activity to flourish?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right.

It is clear from what happens at the guides that first aid skills need to be updated My hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall touched on this in an intervention. The guides do it every two years. For it to mean anything at all, schools will have to teach first aid every two or three years, which will mean even more time out of the curriculum. I remember doing a first aid course at school, but I have to admit that if I were faced with a medical emergency, I would struggle to remember all the training I received. In that sense it would be rendered completely useless. That would apply to many of those who would go through first aid training at school, particularly if they were not paying attention because they did not want to be there in the first place.

We in this place would be far better advised to encourage young people to go out and join the guides or the scouts, or to do the Duke of Edinburgh’s award—the bronze, the silver and the gold. That would be a very worthwhile thing for them to do, and as part of that they would get all the emergency first aid training they would ever need. That would be a much more worthwhile message for us to send out—

Hospital Parking Charges (Exemption for Carers) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 30th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. The Bill applies only to car parking charges, and many carers cannot afford a car, let alone car parking charges. They travel faithfully on a probably more tortuous journey to hospital by public transport. If the Bill were to be passed, people who could afford a car would get their parking charges reimbursed but those who cannot afford a car and have to travel by public transport would not get their public transport costs reimbursed. Clearly, there is something not quite right about that. My hon. Friend makes a good point. While we are on that subject—I may come back to this as well—I should have thought that we were trying to deter people from using a car. Some people have to use a car, as he said, and nobody argues with that, but it would be perverse to give people an incentive to use a car rather than using public transport if they could. My hon. Friend has made a good point as to why the Bill would give people a perverse incentive to use a car rather than public transport.

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

I am rather surprised by my hon. Friend’s burst of socialism and that he should be discouraging the use of the motor car, which should be encouraged in a free society.

[Philip Davies]

I have been accused of many things in my time. A burst of socialism is a first, even for me. I may try and put that out to my left-wing constituents to show them that there is hope for me yet. If I did come out with a burst of socialism, I apologise profusely, not least to my hon. Friend, who always keeps me on the straight and narrow. I apologise for a burst of socialism; it was not intended to be such. I feel chastised.

We should consider why hospital car parks are not already free. There is an argument, I guess, that instead of picking out parking for carers, all hospital car parking should be free. In its 2009 report, “Fair for all, not free-for-all—Principles for sustainable hospital car parking”, the NHS Confederation stated:

“Charging for car parking is often necessary, but needs to be fair – and to be seen to be fair.”

It is important for Opposition Members to recognise that the country and the NHS do not have millions of pounds to spend on covering the cost of parking for a certain section of the population. The Labour Government left this country in a huge financial black hole which we are still struggling to recover from. Policies such as this could severely affect local NHS hospitals and services and their budgets.

There is an analogy that I always give in such situations, which I first heard Lord Tebbit use. I hope that goes some way to restoring my hon. Friend’s faith in me after my earlier lapse. The analogy in this context, which is not necessarily the context in which Lord Tebbit used it, is this: if somebody asked, “Do you think we should have free hospital car parking?”, the chances are that virtually everybody who was asked would say yes. If they were asked, “Should we have free hospital car parking? By the way, that will mean having to get rid of lots of doctors, nurses and essential staff”, people may give a different answer. In the analogy that Lord Tebbit used, the question was, “Would you like a free Rolls-Royce?”, and he suspected that the vast majority of people would say yes. If they were asked, “Would you like a free Rolls-Royce? You’ll have to live in a tent for the rest of your life to pay for it”, people may come up with a different answer.

Of course, in principle, people would love to have free hospital car parking, but we have to think what the consequences would be and whether people would want to face those consequences. When it comes to the crunch, I suspect the answer may be different. If the Government had an additional £180 million to spend, which would be the cost of free hospital car parking, I am sure there would be many other pressures to spend that £180 million on in some part of the NHS. For example, it may pay for another 2,500 doctors or 8,000 nurses for the NHS. If we had a vote on what is the most important thing that we should do with that money, I suspect that the additional doctors and nurses would carry quite a weight of support, not just in this House, but across the country as a whole. It is not just a free-for-all. The harsh reality is that there are consequences of doing these things.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right. There will, as an inevitable consequence of the Bill, be issues about preserving the integrity of the spaces.

I am not sure, but perhaps the hon. Member for Burnley intends to ask hospitals to provide designated spaces for carers to use, in the same way that there are designated spaces in car parks for people with disabilities or for parents with toddlers. If so, how many spaces should the hospital provide? There are rules and guidance on how many spaces there should be for disabled customers. From my memory of working at Asda, I think the rule is that 4% of all the spaces in a car park plus four should be set aside for disabled customers. That was certainly the situation when I was at Asda. Does she envisage a similar system—a number of designated spaces for carers, but when they are full they are full?

Does the hon. Lady expect someone to police the car park at all times to ensure that carers use the right spaces and that no one is charged unfairly? I do not know what system she wants. Perhaps she envisages a system of reimbursement, with carers paying for parking normally, just like everybody else, and then going into the hospital to demonstrate that they are a carer and have their costs reimbursed. That may require 24-hour-a-day, constantly manned reimbursement desks to be open at the hospital. Does she envisage that?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am following my hon. Friend’s speech very closely. Is the heart of what he is saying that the scheme proposed in the Bill would prove so complex to administer that it would in effect be the end of all car parking charges, because to continue to have any charges would make the whole system collapse?

[Philip Davies]

Yes. That is absolutely my fear. Once we start down this route of having a centrally imposed system that has not been worked out locally, there will be all sorts of consequences. Ultimately, hospitals will be forced to turn a blind eye to this person or to that person, because their situation justifies having free parking just as much as a carer’s situation. It would be terrible for someone in the hospital car park to say, “Yes, you are a carer so you can have the free parking,” but, “You have a disability, so no, you can’t have free parking.” I do not see how we can allow hospitals to get into such a situation, because that would be grossly unfair.

From time to time, there will inevitably be disputes about whether somebody is a carer. If the system uses badges, somebody may forget to take their badge. As a carer, they would be entitled to free car parking, but if they had forgotten their badge, the hospital would not have to grant it. I am not entirely sure how such disputes would be policed. Would somebody be on site to adjudicate, or would the hospital do so? What training and qualifications would such people be given? Is this something for the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman to adjudicate on? Is the hon. Member for Burnley suggesting that a new adjudicating body should be created to settle hospital car parking disputes? Those are all practical matters that need to be considered. This is not an easy yes/no question. There will be disputes from time to time, so who will sort them out, how will it be paid for and who will organise it and set it up? Will the hospital be judge and jury on its system of parking charges, or will that be monitored by an independent board?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

To follow on from that, will the public or the private appeals system for parking offences be used? The two are completely different and have different statutory backings.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I do not know. The Bill covers not only NHS hospitals but private hospitals, which is another factor that needs to be considered. The hon. Member for Burnley did not say anything about how this would work in practice. In effect, we are being encouraged to vote for a pig in a poke.

The Bill will have unintended consequences. Hospitals may or may not be able to cope with the number of carers who use their car parks. The shadow Minister talked about the figures. According to the Department for Work and Pensions, just short of 721,000 people were claiming carer’s allowance in February, and a further 408,000 were estimated to be entitled to it. In England, 613,000 people actually claim it, and a further 331,000 are entitled to it. The number of people entitled to it varies quite widely from region to region.

I do not know whether this is why the hon. Member for Burnley has introduced the Bill, but she may be interested to know—this will certainly be of interest to my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) —that the north-west has a very high proportion of people entitled to carer’s allowance and a very high number who receive it compared with any other region in the country. I am not entirely sure of the reasons for that, but that is the fact of the matter, according to the figures from the Department for Work and Pensions. If, just under such a narrow definition, nearly 1 million people are suddenly automatically entitled to free parking in hospitals, how will hospitals cope with any potential increase in demand for car park places? Hospital car parks are bursting at the seams and unable to meet the current demand for car parking.

The principle of supply and demand is obvious in this regard. If the price of something is put up, the demand for it goes down, and vice versa. If we exempt people from car parking charges, an inevitable consequence will be a surge in demand. We all know that, much to the delight of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), car use is increasing in the UK. Presumably, the demand for hospital car parking places will get more acute as time goes on—something that he will no doubt welcome regally.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I do indeed. The more the motor car is used, the better. My hon. Friend is getting to the nub of the matter. One can ration either by price or by queue. There is no other way of determining how supply and demand meet.

[Philip Davies]

I am glad that we have got back to a situation where I am in agreement with my hon. Friend.

The Cumberland infirmary in Carlisle has outlined its concern over its four car parks on its website:

“We are currently experiencing unprecedented levels of cars requiring parking spaces at the Cumberland Infirmary.”

It is already having that problem. How on earth is it expected to find the additional car parking spaces for carers to park free of charge?

In the north-west alone, 102,000 people are receiving carer’s allowance and a further 60,000 people are entitled to it. That is 162,000 people just in the north-west who would be entitled to free car parking under this regime. Where on earth will they all go?

In the 2015 edition of the Department of Health’s health technical memorandum entitled “NHS car-parking management: environment and sustainability”—they always have catchy titles at the Department of Health—Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust was quoted as saying:

“The car-park occupancy levels often reach and surpass 100%.”

It is not as though there are lots of car parking spaces available to allocate to worthy groups of people who might need to use them.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am momentarily puzzled about how the usage of a car park can exceed 100%. Are the cars crashing into each other or parked on top of each other? Can my hon. Friend explain?

[Philip Davies]

I suspect it means that people are parking in places where they should not be parking within the car park because there are not enough spaces, so they park somewhere where there is not a space.

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[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I will turn to the example that the hon. Member for Burnley used in her remarks, which she encouraged me to reflect on. As she said, at the end of last year, Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust announced that it would offer free parking to registered carers at Torbay hospital. I should point out that that scheme, unlike the Bill, is offered specifically to unpaid carers, rather than people who receive carer’s allowance. That is not what the Bill proposes, despite the impression the hon. Lady wanted to give. The interim chief executive of Torbay hospital, Dr John Lowes, said in December 2014:

“Family members and friends who provide unpaid care to our patients at home are invaluable, so we wanted to do something to make their hospital visits a little less stressful, and to demonstrate that we really do value what they do.”

He explained that the system was being implemented with the involvement of the established local care providers and that

“if someone is registered with either Devon or Torbay Carers Services, they just need to display their Carers Card on the car dashboard whilst they are parked in the public pay and display areas, and they will not be charged for parking.”

There are two points to make about that. First, the hon. Lady argued that what happens in Torbay shows why we can happily roll out the scheme across the country, but my view is that it is a perfect illustration of why we do not need legislation. Torbay has managed to do it without any legislation in a way that suits its local requirements, which is what I want to see.

Secondly, I know from my own experience that there is a problem with having a card displayed on a dashboard in a pay and display area, which is effectively what happens with blue badges. Anybody who has been involved in that area knows that people hand their badge to someone else to use—a member of their family, or whoever. It is not right—it is a terrible thing—but it happens, and we cannot ignore the fact that it would happen under the system proposed in the Bill.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I just want to say that I am sure things like that do not happen in Somerset.

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[Philip Davies]

I very much agree, which is why I think the Bill is unnecessary. This can be done much better locally than by central Government diktat.

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has also set up a scheme for carers, aiming to support their needs when they visit hospitals. It asks that carers make hospital staff aware of their caring responsibilities, and it also mentions that they may be entitled to a carer’s badge that they can use during a hospital stay. That entitles the carer to exemption from parking fees, but also to reduced meal costs in the hospital restaurants, free drinks on the ward and the use of toilet and washing facilities in the ward area. When we allow local hospitals the freedom to do their own thing, they can give carers an enhanced service that is much better than what the hon. Member for Burnley proposes. I fear that if there were a central Government diktat that was bureaucratic and difficult to implement, areas such as Gloucestershire would scale back the other benefits that they gave carers and instead just meet the requirements of the law.

It is perfectly clear that the Torbay and Gloucestershire schemes have completely different ways of working and of identifying eligible carers. If it works at local level, all is well and good, but that would not be possible under the Bill.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Is my hon. Friend saying that carers who currently receive the benefit of free parking would have to be removed from the Torbay scheme if the Bill were brought into law, because they would not qualify and Torbay would have to change the scheme?

[Philip Davies]

That is my reading of the situation. Because the definition of carers in the Bill is different from that used by Torbay—

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

In which case we must look at the Bill itself, Mr Deputy Speaker, if that is what you are urging me to do.

The Bill is called the Hospital Parking Charges (Exemptions for Carers) Bill, but it would actually apply to all health service providers, both public and private, and not just hospitals. I do not think many people appreciate its true scope. Clause 1 states that bodies that provide healthcare must

“make arrangements to exempt qualifying carers”

from car parking charges. That applies to

“any National Health Service hospital, walk-in centre, GP practice or other health care facility to which patients are admitted, or which they attend, for diagnosis, testing, treatment or other appointment relating to their health”,

so we are not just talking about hospital car parking charges. It also extends to private hospitals, so not only are we dictating what should happen in the NHS, but we are telling private hospitals what they should do. Many people might argue that those who can afford private healthcare treatment can also pay for car parking. Whether that is a legitimate use of resources is a different matter.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I wonder whether the Bill’s proponents have considered the human rights implications of taking a revenue source away from a private company without compensation. The Bill makes no provision for compensation.

[Philip Davies]

That is a very good question, and I do not know about that. My understanding is that Bills have to be certified to say that they fulfil obligations under the Human Rights Act and all of that stuff, but I do not know whether that applies to private Members’ Bills. My hon. Friend raises an interesting point, and I am not sure what the answer is.

Clause 2 is an attempt to define who would qualify. It states:

“A qualifying carer under section 1(1) is a person who…receives the Carer’s Allowance, or…has an underlying entitlement to the Carer’s Allowance.”

I have no idea where to begin with that. To claim carer’s allowance, a person must provide at least 35 hours a week of care for a severely disabled person receiving one of the following benefits: the middle or highest rate of disability living allowance; attendance allowance; the daily living component of personal independence payment; constant attendance allowance at or above the normal maximum rate with an industrial injuries disablement benefit, or at the basic rate with a war disablement pension; or armed forces independence payment. The person applying must be at least 16 years old, meet residence and presence conditions, not be subject to immigration control and not be in full-time education or gainfully employed. Anyone entitled to carer’s allowance would automatically receive free parking at hospitals under the Bill, whether they frequently visited hospital or not.

The hon. Member for Burnley has specifically identified that the members of the caring community who should be entitled to free parking are not only those who receive carer’s allowance but those who have an underlying entitlement to that allowance. I do not understand how on earth a hospital is supposed to know whether somebody has an underlying entitlement. The benefits system in this country is incredibly complex, and I would prefer our NHS hospitals to concentrate on the complicated process of providing the appropriate treatment to the right patients rather than have to be bogged down in Department for Work and Pensions rules on who is eligible for a particular benefit. That is what the hon. Lady is asking them to do in clause 2—to understand who is eligible for the benefit, not just who receives it.

As the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South made clear in an intervention, many people in this country care for people but are neither recipients of carer’s allowance nor eligible for it, because of the restrictive entitlement definitions. Why would we want to exempt some carers from parking charges but not others? That seems very unfair. I tried to get some information about what defines a carer, and it is not necessarily the same as what qualifies somebody for carer’s allowance. We need some flexibility on that.

I want to move on, because other Members want to speak. Clause 3 sets out provision for the Secretary of State to issue guidance and regulations through statutory instruments about the implementation of the duty to exempt carers from car parking charges. It is an important part of the Bill. It is something that we often see in private Members’ Bills: whether the Bill has merit or not—I am trying to flag up some serious concerns about that—the Member in charge includes a provision that would allow Ministers to extend the Bill’s requirements with the stroke of a pen and with barely a breath being taken. Clause 3 is a dangerous part of the Bill, because a Secretary of State or Minister could come along and say, “Actually, I’ve decided that we’re going to extend this left, right and centre”, and the hospitals will just have to implement it. That is very worrying.

Clause 4 would introduce a

“Duty to establish a scheme for exempting eligible carers from hospital car park charges.”

I think I have sufficiently covered who that would apply to and why it is a dangerous path to go down. Clause 5 states that a person would be eligible for free hospital car parking if they are assessed by a local authority under section 10(5) of the Care Act 2014, and it would change the provisions of that Act. It therefore seems to me—perhaps the hon. Lady will correct me—that under clause 5 eligibility could be granted on an intention to provide care, rather than someone actually being a carer. I am not sure how well that has been thought through.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Can my hon. Friend explain whether under clauses 2 and 5 somebody can quality for this allowance but not be eligible, or be eligible but not qualify?

Use of the Chamber (Youth Parliament)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Tuesday 23rd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I do not want to test your patience by going off on a tangent about the merits of votes for 16 and 17-year-olds. I do not agree with giving them the vote; I make that clear. I do not want to dodge the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. I may be right in saying that Madam Deputy Speaker probably would not tolerate a lengthy debate on that. I think we are really debating whether the Youth Parliament should sit in the Chamber, so I do not want to incur Madam Deputy Speaker’s wrath so early in her career as Madam Deputy Speaker. There will be plenty of other occasions when that happens.

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

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way to allow me to curry favour with youth, which I am always aiming to do. I just wonder whether he might be a convert to votes for 16 and 17-year-olds, because on the argument we heard earlier, that would mean that they did not need to come here to have the Youth Parliament.

[Philip Davies]

As ever, my hon. Friend makes a telling point. However, the problem with his point is that that will indicate some kind of logic on the part of those people who so strongly advocate that the Youth Parliament should sit in this Chamber. He has probably missed out on its implication—that once 16 and 17-year-olds had the vote, and therefore that group of people did not need to sit in this Chamber for the Youth Parliament, a group of 14 and 15-year-olds would be exclusively invited to sit here because they did not have the vote, and they could sit here until enough weight built up behind their campaign to grant 14 and 15-year-olds the vote, and so on.

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for his earlier intervention. His argument is that members of the Youth Parliament should be able to sit here because they cannot vote. My children are 12 and 10, so they cannot vote either. I will happily go along to my children’s school and suggest, following my hon. Friend’s logic, that they should be able to have their annual debating competition here. They are not allowed to vote and we want to encourage them to get involved in politics, so presumably my hon. Friend would be all in favour of that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I may not agree with him, but I admire his consistency. If I follow his argument correctly, he is suggesting that any group should be able to use the Chamber if they think that would be worthwhile—for example, a parish council holding its annual meeting. He argues that they paid for it, so they should be able to use it. I do not agree with him, but I admire his consistency. What I cannot understand is the argument that nobody should be able to use the Chamber because it is absolutely sacrosanct and only Members of Parliament who have been elected should have the right to sit on these Benches—apart from members of the Youth Parliament. There is absolutely no logic to it. At least the hon. Gentleman’s position is logical.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I was intrigued by the idea that people should be able to come here and debate if they are not allowed to stand for Parliament. Were that argument to be taken further, I wonder whether we would allow criminals to come here, or Members of the House of Lords.

[Philip Davies]

I do not want to go into the history of the expenses scandal, but many people would argue that criminals did sit on these Benches for a while, so I am not sure that my hon. Friend should push that particular line too hard, because that has already happened. My hon. Friend’s point is that we could have an annual prisoners’ outing to Parliament so that they could sample democracy and be inspired to engage in the political process once they leave prison. It is the same argument. I suspect that the problem with that argument, however, is that whereas those Members who are such strong supporters of the Youth Parliament sitting here think that they can get a few grubby votes by supporting it, they would probably think, even though the logic is the same, that allowing prisoners to sit here would probably not go down so well with their constituents. This is not about high principle at all; it is about people who are prepared to say anything and do anything to get a few cheap votes back in their constituencies at the next election. They think that the best way of doing that is to say, “I am all for the youth. I think that young people should be able to sit in the House of Commons Chamber.”

But why just the Youth Parliament? That is what I want to know. What about all the other young people who would love to use these Benches to sample the atmosphere and further their political ambitions? Why are they excluded? Why are we being so exclusive? What is wrong with all the other young people out there whom we want to inspire?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Will my hon. Friend give way before he finishes?

[Philip Davies]

Because it is my hon. Friend, I will.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend. I thought I should assure him that he is not testing the patience of the House; the House is thoroughly enjoying his speech. He may not know that while he has been speaking the only people he has been inconveniencing are the Executive, because Back Benchers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries are now on a one-line Whip.

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for telling me about the whipping advice. I shall seek him out more often. It may well pay dividends for everybody to know that I know the whipping arrangements.

I do not think it is right to say that the only way we can inspire people to get involved in politics is to allow them to sit in here and have a debate. When I was first elected to Parliament in 2005, it was an absolute honour and privilege—[Interruption.] It absolutely still is a privilege, but to be able to sit on these Benches for the first time was an absolute privilege and an honour, and I thought it was very special.

Health and Social Care (Safety and Quality) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 9th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. It is possible that that is taken care of by other parts of the Bill. Clause 1 contains the fundamental commitment that unreasonable risks should not be taken, and language could be seen to be part of that. The reason I like the new clause is that it makes it absolutely clear that language is fundamental.

It is very hard to think of a circumstance where a lack of communication could possibly be safe. There may be cases where a patient cannot speak, or absolutely dire emergencies where there is no alternative form of treatment, but in the ordinary course of events language skills must be essential for somebody who looks to work in this country for any length of time.

I hope that the Government will think about this new clause very seriously, and perhaps consider whether a “notwithstanding” aspect is necessary, and that if they do not accept it today, they will look at the matter again in another place.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I apologise for not being here when my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) opened the batting on this new clause.

I very strongly support the sentiment behind the new clause. It should go without saying that people who are practising medicine should be able to communicate properly in English. It is a sad state of affairs when we have got to a point where we feel the need to introduce legislation in this regard. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, sufficient examples have been reported around the country to indicate that we do have a problem. It may not be widespread—it may only occur in pockets—but it is perfectly clear that in some areas there is a problem that needs to be addressed. If the Government do not intend to accept the new clause, I would like to know what they intend to do about this genuine problem that people have identified.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) made a reasonable point about the measures that were put in place, partly by the previous Government, relating to new doctors and people who are currently going through training. The problem with that, however, is that it does not deal with the people who are already practising.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I have just checked the territorial extent of the Bill, and parts of it apply to Wales as well, so we should not forget the need perhaps to be able to communicate in Welsh where appropriate.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. That enhances the complication that could arise as an unintended consequence. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of the new clause and the intention behind it, but I wonder whether its wording may lead to unintended consequences in relation to languages other than English that were not foreseen when it was tabled.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 5th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The situation is even worse than that. There will be pressure always to overspend above the target because in years when GDP turns out to be less good, there will be no means of clawing the money back, but where it has grown faster, there will be an expectation that more money will be paid or a statement laid. Therefore, there is a pressure in the Bill for there to be more than 0.7%.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right. Nobody could deny that if the recalculation means that we have underspent, everyone will be clamouring for the extra money to be found for a non-existent project somewhere in the world just to satisfy themselves, but if the GDP figure is downgraded, there will not be many in the House calling for some of the money to be clawed back. The Bill, in effect, sets a minimum target for spending, not an amount. That is not what most people have in mind. The public will be confused about why they have to spend an extra £550 million—I have no idea where the money would come from—to meet this arbitrary target because it did not happen to match the projection that was made. That is ridiculous.

My new clause 6 means that none of those adjustments would be made. If the calculation was wrong but the money was spent in good faith on a good-faith calculation, that should be that. There should be no end-of-year recalculation of the budget based on an upgrade or a downgrade—it could work either way and I cannot predict which way it would go. It strikes me as ridiculous that the Treasury should have to dig out money from nowhere just to hit a particular target. That is why the new clause is so important.

The way in which GNI is calculated is changing: 0.7% of the old GNI is quite different from 0.7% of the new GNI. For no reason other than statisticians deciding to calculate things differently, the taxpayer will have to find hundreds of millions of pounds extra in order to hit the 0.7% target.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I would be the first to say that when countries face some terrible humanitarian situation or natural disaster, the United Kingdom should always be at the forefront in helping them in their hour of need. However, if anybody thinks that our entire overseas aid budget goes on helping countries in their hour of need, they need to study much more closely what the budget is spent on.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

When other countries are in their greatest hour of need, it is often our armed forces who come to their rescue soonest. It would therefore be better to spend the money with them so that they can respond.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I do not want to go down that cul de sac either, but it is worth noting in passing that we made a promise to spend 2% of GDP on defence, and that promise does not appear to have been legislated for anywhere. In fact, the OBR has calculated that, on current projections, it will actually drop to 1.5% by 2020. My hon. Friend makes a very good point on what is the most worthwhile thing to spend our money if we are to help other countries around the world.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes his point well and I agree with it, but I will make no further comment, because we would be going off the rails if we started debating a different Bill.

Subsection (4) of new clause 7 would allow the Secretary of State to

“vary the target… by an order contained in a statutory instrument in response to the UK leaving or joining a multilateral organisation which itself disburses”

overseas aid. I think that we need more flexibility in the Bill. We might join an organisation that is giving aid to something we already give aid to, in which case it would be ridiculous to in effect doubt the money that is already being spent. We have no idea what our future international relationships will be and what these international organisations may or may not be doing. The Bill should therefore have some flexibility whereby if we join an organisation that is already doing what we are doing, we do not, in effect, end up doing it twice, and the Government can adjust the target to take account of that.

The final part of new clause 7 is a sunset clause whereby the Act would cease to exist in the fifth year of its being in force. I am a big fan of sunset clauses generally; they should be used more widely. Often when we pass legislation in this House, we guess or second-guess its implications, and then find that it has no end of unintended consequences, yet it stays there on the statute book causing problems because nobody can be bothered to get rid of it or find the parliamentary time to do so. It would be much more sensible if, as a matter of routine, we introduced sunset clauses so that we were forced as a House to assess how legislation was working and whether it needed to be tweaked. That would force people to come back either with the same proposal or a revised proposal taking into account what we had learned.

If overseas aid is doing what it should be doing, then it should not be there in perpetuity. This goes to the heart of why this Bill is completely ridiculous. We should be saying to countries around the world: “You’ve got some issues that you need help with. It’s your responsibility to sort out your own issues, but we’ll give you a helping hand. We expect you to sort out your own arrangements on the rule of law and governance and so on to enable inward investment to be encouraged. Once you’ve sorted yourself out with our helping hand, we can then walk away and leave you to stand on your own two feet.” Surely the purpose of overseas aid, if it has any purpose whatsoever, is to help countries to stand on their own two feet; it should not be there in perpetuity. Why, therefore, does this Bill enshrine this level of spending in perpetuity? Are we accepting that overseas aid does not make any difference to these countries—that they do not get any long-term benefit from it and it is just a short-term sticking plaster to make us feel better? If it is achieving anything on a longer-term basis, then surely we should not need to keep spending all this money but should instead be tapering it off.

A sunset clause is a sensible provision to allow us to assess five years hence what is an appropriate figure for us to spend in order to deal with the world as it then is. It is complete lunacy to say that we are going to spend 0.7% in future years when we have no idea of what the world’s circumstances will be—what countries will need help, and how much.

There is no doubt about why Labour Members agree to these things. They believe that people should be judged simply on how much money they spend on something—that it is all about input. That is what the Labour party is all about. I remember, years ago, asking the then Government why truancy had got worse under their stewardship. They told me that they had spent £1 billion on tackling truancy, as if that made it all right; they wanted to be judged simply on their input. I thought that the fact that they had spent £1 billion on something that had got worse was terrible, but that is because I am a Conservative. I do not doubt that Labour Members think they should be judged on how much they spend and that it is all about input. What astonishes me is that people who like to describe themselves as Conservatives think we should be judged only on how much we spend and on our input, and have no judgment made on our output whatsoever. A sunset clause would help by making us look at the output of what we had done and whether it was worth persevering with.

I have previously outlined the difficulty of basing how much money we spend on an ongoing calculation throughout a year. Under amendment 16 the 0.7% figure that we spent would be based on the final adjusted figure for gross national income in the preceding year. No guesswork would be involved—it would be the final adjusted figure that everybody accepted as such. The figure that would be spent the following year would be 0.7% of the previous year’s GNI.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I accept the thrust of the amendment and what my hon. Friend is trying to achieve. However, the Office for National Statistics keeps on revising things over such an extended period that I would like to know when the final figure is deemed to be the final figure. He will be aware that the apparent double-dip recession that the socialists accused us of having turned out not to have existed once the figures were revised. This has become an increasing problem as the ONS has made more and more revisions to historical figures.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. My amendment does not give any particular date for a final figure; it refers to just one. By definition, it would be the final, final figure, whenever that was reached. It may well be that as a consequence of my amendment we would be dealing with figures from two or three years previously; I am not entirely sure.

My amendment would mean that we were not guessing the figure, so the Department could work in a certain year knowing what its budget was going to be for that year and not having to guess what it might be. That has to be a much more sensible way of managing its budget than having to second-guess things. It would also avoid what might be described as local authority syndrome. Once local authorities get to the end of the year in March—in this case, it would be December because we have this ridiculous new regime for DFID—they use up the rest of their budget because they have more money than they had anticipated. Let us not have any illusions that that would not happen if we stuck to this Bill in its current form.

Amendment 16 would allow the Department to know with certainty how much money it had for the year so that it could make plans for its spending based on that certain figure. Wherever one stands on overseas aid, that has to be a much more sensible way of dealing with things. I am sure that the Minister would appreciate knowing with certainty what his budget was going to be for the year rather than having to second-guess it.

Amendment 20 would mean that we would not have to have achieved the target but only to have “progressed toward” it. That would give the Bill more flexibility so that we do not need to have huge spikes in spending to meet an arbitrary figure, but the progression would be in the same direction.

Amendment 18 refers to replacing the calendar year with the financial year. I have spoken before about why it is so important that we should do that. Nobody else reports on the basis of a calendar year. The OBR does not, and the GNI figures are not worked out on that basis. The Minister could have helped us with this. I have no idea of who is going to calculate the 0.7% figure for the calendar year. We rely on the OBR for these figures, but it does not calculate them in that way, so how will we know whether we have hit the 0.7% figure?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Is it not obviously absurd to have one Government Department accounting on a different basis from all the other Government Departments? We cannot have one Department working to a calendar year when the whole Government budgetary process is based on a financial year. That is the fundamental flaw in the Bill.

[Philip Davies]

I have made that point, but I agree with my hon. Friend.

Who will calculate the calendar year figure? As far as I understand it, it will not even be domestically set, because the OBR works to a financial year and so it will not be doing it. I suspect that the decision on whether we have hit this figure will be determined solely by the international body that calculates these things on the basis of a calendar year. In effect, we are setting up Government spending without any of our own controls over it—not even with our independent body determining it for us, but rather with it being done by an international body in whose calculations and figures we may or may not have any confidence. Having our Government spending determined not by ourselves—not even in this country—but by an international body is a very dangerous precedent to set.

Amendments 21 to 26 are consequential amendments that flow from one another. They would remove several references to 0.7% and replace them with 0.35%. I believe that I may have been overly generous with the target of 0.35%, but I am a generous kind of chap. I set out earlier the fact that we give lots of overseas aid—whether to the European Union or in welfare payments—that is not covered by the Bill. When all those things were added on, even if we were to accept my amendments and make the target 0.35%, we would be spending way over 0.7%. My amendments are, therefore, rather modest.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

Thank you for graciousness in accepting my apology, Madam Deputy Speaker, which is, I might add, typical of you.

After that brief interlude, amendment 37 would remove clause 6(2), which states that the Act will come into effect in June 2015. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has tabled a sensible amendment, and I cannot see why anybody should object to it, to the effect that the legislation should come into effect the following January. It is the will of those who promoted and sponsored the Bill, and of those on both Front Benches, that it should be a calendar year operation. I think I have made it clear that it should operate on a financial year basis. Given that they have proposed that the Bill should operate on a calendar year basis, it is quite extraordinary that they have included the provision that it should come into effect in June 2015.

How on earth do we square that circle? How on earth will we determine, at the end of 2015, whether the Government have hit their half-yearly target? If they have overspent in the first bit of 2015 but underspent in the second bit of 2015, will the evaluation state that they have missed their target, even if they have spent 0.7% over the whole year? I am happy to be corrected by anybody who claims to know any better, but it seems to me that if the Bill comes into effect in June 2015, the Government will be required to have spent 0.35% on overseas aid between June and the end of the year, otherwise they will have broken the rules. If the Government had spent, for argument’s sake, 0.4% between January and June, and at the end of the year the international body that is set up to scrutinise how much every country has spent says that we have spent 0.72%, are we going to chastise ourselves because in the second half of the year we did not meet the legal requirement? I genuinely do not understand that. Perhaps the Minister could explain what his obligations will be under the Bill as drafted.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend raises a very serious and important point, because it is not the usual practice of this House to pass retrospective legislation. Indeed, as a constitutional principle it is very bad to pass retrospective legislation.

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[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This sort of thing brings this place into contempt with the public. We have to guard against that.

I agree wholeheartedly with amendments 5 and 6, which were tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset, who will be able to offer a much better explanation of their merits. He also tabled amendments 7 and 8. Amendment 7 is very good. At present, the only sanction is that the Government will have to make a statement on why they have not achieved their target

“as soon as reasonably practicable”.

When will that be? What does that mean? Will we have to wait for a report to come out a year hence? It is completely meaningless and I cannot believe that anyone has fallen for it. My hon. Friend’s amendment, which is very sensible indeed and should be welcomed by the whole House, says that the statement should be made after

“no more than 10 days during which both Houses of Parliament are sitting”.

That would genuinely hold the Government’s feet to the fire, but, of course, in their haste to get anything on the statute book, it appears that, as usually happens on a Friday, hon. Members on both sides of the House are happy to accept it, even though it is completely meaningless.

I have to say to my hon. Friend that I do not agree with amendment 8. He wants to leave out the subsections in clause 2 that give reasons for why the Government have not hit the target. I will conclude shortly, so I hope my hon. Friend will be able to offer an explanation. Perhaps I have read it wrongly, but it seems to me that there are some reasons in the Bill as drafted for why the Government may not have hit their target of 0.7%. I would like to see as many of those reasons as possible in the Bill, but my hon. Friend wants to take them out.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I simply do not think it is right for a statement, which is a proceeding in Parliament, to be the subject of legislation. I think it is a direct interference in our proceedings through the legislative process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I applaud my hon. Friend for his ingenuity. Everybody is in favour of sustainability, but nobody knows what it means. It is a bit like social justice—everybody is in favour of it, but nobody really knows how to define it. Sustainability is definitely in that camp. I agree that it is hard to see how anybody can disagree with it, particularly the proponents of the Bill, as he says.

I have had a quick canter around an awful lot of amendments. I think that there are 30-odd amendments in the group. I apologise to the House for going through them so rapidly, but everybody wants to make progress. I look forward to hearing the proponents of the other amendments make a more cogent case than I have been able to make. As I made clear, I do not fully understand some of them. It is a great shame that the Minister and the shadow Minister have treated the House with such contempt and not even bothered to engage with the amendments that have been tabled or explain their position. One day, I hope that they will come to regret that. Some of my hon. Friends and I will keep arguing for common sense. I would love to hear why everyone in the House, other than a few of us, is against the Bill being put to a referendum.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I have tabled a number of amendments to the Bill, which I will speak to before turning to some of the amendments that have been tabled by my hon. Friends. I have tabled amendments in a number of categories. Some are intended to make the Bill achieve what it is intended to achieve, and some are offered up in a less friendly spirit towards the Bill, of which I fundamentally disapprove.

I will start with the most important proposal—the one that is intended to make the Bill serious. It seems to me that a lot of fine words are being spoken in passing a Bill that can do nothing at all: it has no sanction, but is merely an intention, an expression of good will. That is not the sort of reason for which legislation is passed. It does not have that majesty and authority that the statute book ought to have; it is a wish, a hope, a desire, but it is not something of fundamental strength and importance. Hence my new clause 2.

We hear from all parts of the House lots of pious talk and fine words about how important it is that we spend this money, but when it is suggested that there should be some enforcement of how the money is spent—that there should be some penalty if it is not spent—we hear that it is not possible, it is too difficult, it is unfair on the Ministers concerned. Surely it is simply a matter of making our legislative desire effective. If Ministers and shadow Ministers do not support new clause 2, one has to think that the Bill is merely a matter of fine words and pieties, and not a serious legislative desire.

That is why I challenge Front Benchers on both sides to accept new clause 2. I challenge them to do so on a bipartisan basis, because it is deliberately phrased so that the penalty comes into effect in the following financial year, so that if there is a change of Government, it will affect the incoming Ministers. Why? Because they all buy into this proposal. They are all in favour of frittering away public money overseas—of spending 0.7% of our wealth there, even though the statistical evidence is not available until some time after the money is supposed to have been spent. There are in-year revisions that inevitably lead to money being spent without the proper rigour being applied. Let them show that they really mean it, that they really are in this together, and that they really do subscribe to the pieties that they propose—to the fine words and grandiloquent sentiments that they express up and down the country—by saying that if they do not achieve it, they will accept a fine of £1,000 on their Cabinet colleagues in the following year.

One thousand pounds is the amount that has traditionally been used in this House to indicate the disapproval of the performance of a particular Minister in his or her duties, and it makes for a sensible extension to the Bill. I do not believe that anyone who supports the Bill can oppose new clause 2, because if they oppose it, they do not really mean what they say. Without this new clause, there is no effective mechanism of enforcement.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) said that there would be no teeth to the Bill without the new clause. Without the new clause, there are not even dentures, there are not even gums, to gnaw away at the failures that there may be in implementing the details of the Bill. Let us put in some mild teeth—some teeth that will have a little bit of a bite, but not a huge one. One thousand pounds will not devastate the financial circumstances of a Cabinet Minister over the course of the ensuing year, but it will make them put their money where their mouth is.

That is important, because this House is very good at spending taxpayers’ money and very happy to send it around the world, but what happens if we say instead, “No, it won’t be taxpayers, but the Ministers themselves who find that their money is reduced if they don’t do what they say.”? They run away, they are scared, they are frit, they do not like it, but they are quite happy to spend taxpayers’ money all around the world on projects that may or may not succeed, with almost no accountability to this House or anywhere else.

I am surprised that the shadow Minister, who is a sensible and wise fellow, has not decided to take up my new clause and put it forward as an Opposition proposal. I thought that I could reasonably have expected the Opposition to add their names to it as an indication of their passion for overseas aid—not a passion that I share, but one that is honourable, as long as it is taken to its logical conclusion. Hence, new clause 2 tries to pave the way for people to support what they believe in and what they want to do, by ensuring that it has meaning and meat, rather than being a simple expression of will.

Why do I dislike mere expressions of will in legislation? I do not believe that mere expressions of will are what Acts of Parliament are for. Acts of Parliament are not there to say that we believe in motherhood and apple pie, even though I happen to approve of both. I think that motherhood is a wonderful thing and I like apple pie, particularly if the apples are from Somerset and cream and sugar are provided, but that is not a matter for legislation. To put wish lists into legislation is a poor way of legislating. All legislation needs to have a consequence if it is ignored. It must not be free of any form of consequence and, therefore, open to being ignored by any future Government.

The only penalty provided for in the Bill is that a statement must be laid before the House. Statements are laid before the House every day. If Members look at the back of today’s Hansard, they will find a very interesting statement by my hon. Friend the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy on a meeting that took place in Brussels on 27 November 2014. It is an important statement and an important part of European scrutiny, but the Government are not going to stand or fall on a written statement. Whether he made it today, yesterday or in a week’s time is not fundamental to how this nation is governed, and so, as a sanction, it is entirely worthless. Not even an oral statement is required. One wonders why the promoter and sponsors of the Bill have not come up with a suitable sanction. They may have thought of one that was better than the one I could—

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 12th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

If I may, I would like to start by paying my tribute to Ian Paisley. It was a great privilege that when I made my maiden speech in Parliament, it came after a speech by the great man himself. I have always thought that that was a great honour. I was also very honoured to be invited to Speaker’s House for his 80th birthday celebration. I will always be grateful to him for inviting me. One of my favourite moments was going to his church in Ulster to listen to him giving a sermon. The verve with which he gave a sermon was even greater than that with which he made speeches in this House, if that is possible. I am extremely sorry to hear the news. In the short time that we were both in Parliament, he became a very good friend, along with many of his party colleagues. I send my sympathies to people in Northern Ireland and, in particular, to the current hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) and his family. When we say that people will be very deeply missed, it is sometimes an exaggeration, but it certainly is not when we talk about Ian Paisley. As far as I am concerned, he was one of the finest parliamentarians this House has ever seen.

To return to the Bill—thank you for indulging me, Madam Deputy Speaker—this debate has been going for roughly three hours and there has been what might be called one-way traffic, with speeches on the merits of the Bill and the merits of aid more generally. It is only right, given that we are supposed to debate things in this House, that we spend some time listening to the other side of the argument. I hope that those who claim to believe in Parliament and parliamentary debate will not rush to vote for a closure motion to stop the other side of the argument being heard. That would rather demean them and their view of democracy and debate. I just say that in passing.

The Bill raises a number of questions. Does aid actually work? That is a legitimate area for debate. Should we spend 0.7% of gross national income on aid? That is another area of debate. Finally, should that spending be put into law? This Bill is gesture politics of the worst kind. Everybody here is saying why it is so important to spend 0.7% of GNI on aid, although they do not seem to care which definition of GNI is used. We are spending 0.7% of GNI on overseas aid. In fact, we are spending 0.72% of GNI on it. We therefore do not need to put it into law. Even the people who are saying that it is such a wonderful thing must recognise, by the fact that it is already happening, that we do not need a law in order to do it. If Parliament wants to do it, it can quite easily do so, as we have proved in this Parliament.

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

Does my hon. Friend share my concern about the constitutional propriety of trying to bind our successors?

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[Philip Davies]

What I will make clear is that unlike the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, who started the debate and then cleared off, I have been sitting here for the whole debate, so I am not sure how on earth you, Madam Deputy Speaker, or the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke), would expect me to have given him notice.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker, I understand that the purpose of that rule is to deal with a premeditated intention to embarrass a Member, not if the point under consideration is something that has arisen in the course of the debate.

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[Philip Davies]

I am not giving way to the hon. Lady.

We are not even spending taxpayers’ money. We keep on talking about how important it is to spend taxpayers’ money wisely, but we are not spending that money. We do not have any money. When will people understand that even now we are borrowing? Even after the Chancellor’s welcome measures, we are still borrowing £100 billion a year. We are not in a position to spend 0.7% of our GNI on overseas aid, because it is actually much more than that. What we are doing is borrowing money from other countries, paying interest on it to then hand it over to other countries. At the start of this Parliament, we were in the ludicrous situation of borrowing huge sums of money from China in order to give China overseas aid to help that country to get along. It could hardly be made up. No wonder most of my constituents think that the people here are round the bend.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

We are, in effect, spending the money of taxpayers as yet unborn.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right.

Are we going to take into account the debt interest that we will have to incur on the money we are spending on overseas aid? Is that going to be taken into account as part of the 0.7%, or is that on top of the 0.7% that we are actually handing over? As I made clear in my intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), the idea that we even know what we are spending is a complete nonsense as well, because the goalposts are always moving. It was first supposed to be 0.7% of GDP; now we are told it is 0.7% of GNI; and in the autumn of this year, apparently, how GNI is calculated is going to be changed, which will mean an upward revision to GNI, making our aid as a proportion of GNI lower so that we will have to spend even more on overseas aid to hit our 0.7% target.

Private Landlords and Letting and Managing Agents (Regulation) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 25th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has highlighted another area where we have worked together: raising money for the part of North Yorkshire where that sad event took place. The point I was making was not a matter of opinion, however; it was a matter of fact. The vast majority of complaints I get in my constituency about landlords are about social housing providers, not private sector providers. I was offering that up not as an opinion but as a fact. We should perhaps focus on what social housing providers are doing incorrectly.

There is one respect in which I have a lot of sympathy with the hon. Member for Mansfield, and that is on his point about antisocial behaviour; he is on to something there. Again, this is from personal experience—from speaking to people in my constituency, including those who come to see me at my surgery. Getting antisocial behaviour dealt with by a social housing provider may well be a far-too-long—incredibly long—and tortuous process, but I have evidence to suggest that social housing providers take the issue seriously, as do the local police. In my constituency, there has been some terrible antisocial behaviour by tenants in the private rented sector, but the problem is that as long as a tenant pays the rent and keeps the house in a decent manner, the landlord, who may live in another part of the country, or a different country, is not really that bothered about the tenant’s antisocial behaviour in the local community. There is an issue about landlords’ responsibility for dealing with their tenants’ antisocial behaviour, and for helping the local community by being inclined to help have tenants evicted, if there is evidence to suggest that they are causing a menace.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

(North East Somerset): I am grateful to my honourable and almost dirigiste Friend for giving way. I wonder whether it occurs to him that it is easier for private landlords to remove antisocial tenants, because under assured shorthold tenancies it is relatively easy to remove people. It is therefore swifter in the private than in the public sector.

[Philip Davies]

I absolutely agree, as ever, with my hon. Friend. If private sector landlords are minded to evict a tenant, it is easier for them to do so; he is right. Perhaps he has put his finger on what would help social housing providers to evict problem tenants quicker: less regulation, rather than more regulation. The situation that I am referring to—I do not know whether the hon. Member for Mansfield has this in mind—is one where the private landlord has no interest in evicting the person causing the problem, because that person is paying the rent on time and is not causing havoc in the house. The landlord is quite happy; why would they go through the hassle of trying to find a new tenant to replace someone from whom they are getting a steady income?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The vision is of an antisocial tenant who causes a nightmare for his neighbours, but the one thing he does properly is pay his rent and look after the house. That is not likely to be true in most cases. People who are antisocial in their behaviour are antisocial generally, not just to their neighbours, so in most cases the landlord is likely to have a strong incentive to act. To legislate for the exception is a mistake that my hon. Friend normally guards against.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right; I do not disagree with anything that he said. The point I was making is that the hon. Member for Mansfield is on to something, and there is a potential issue here. I say that only because the issue has arisen, and been raised with me, in my constituency; that is why I am aware that this can be a problem.

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[Philip Davies]

The hon. Gentleman has shown the true face of the Labour party. He cannot understand that a requirement on somebody is more legislation and more regulation. He seems to think that requiring someone to do something that they are not currently required to do does not mean more regulation and legislation. Of course it does. I am not aware that anybody has said they think that written agreements are a bad thing. The hon. Gentleman falls into the typical socialist trap of thinking that just because he believes that something is a good idea, we must impose it on everybody, regardless of whether they think that it a good idea and want it. In effect, he thinks that he knows best what everybody should do, and that he should impose his view of the world on absolutely everybody. He is clearly a socialist, so of course he believes that. I am not a socialist, so I do not.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Is it not the case that if we enforce written agreements, we give more jobs to lawyers—we have enough lawyers in this country already—and increase the expense for the people participating in an agreement, who may be great friends and may feel that they do not need reams of legal protection?

[Philip Davies]

I have great sympathy for my hon. Friend’s view. I agree. I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) wishes at this point to declare his profession in the legal world or otherwise. He is welcome to do so.

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[Philip Davies]

You are right, Mr Speaker. I certainly would not have mentioned early-day motions if they were not relevant to the Bill, as I hope you appreciate. The hon. Member for Mansfield misunderstood my point. I was commending him for signing so many early-day motions. It is a sign of how active he is as a Member of Parliament and I am grateful for the support that he has given me in the past.

The point that I was coming on to, which I hope Mr Speaker will agree is relevant, is that one early-day motion that appeared to escape the hon. Gentleman’s notice was No. 233, which was entitled “Regulation of the private rented sector”. It was tabled by the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr Love) and had a great deal of support from the usual suspects, like the hon. Member for Islington North. It stated that the House

“notes with concern the Government’s decision to abandon plans for a national register of landlords and further regulation of the private rented sector; recognises that the private rented sector plays a significant role in supporting the housing market in the UK; believes that rogue landlords and letting agents continue to pose a threat to consumers in the private rented sector; further notes the statistic from the Office of Fair Trading that the number of complaints against rogue landlords and letting agents is on the rise; and calls on the Government to bring forward proposals immediately to create a national register of landlords and to propose further regulation of landlords and letting agents in the private rented sector.”

In relation to the views of the hon. Member for Mansfield, it seems to me that that early-day motion was very much on the money, but it was not among those that he signed. Perhaps he can tell us whether he just did not notice that one—so many are tabled that we cannot notice all of them, and I certainly miss them from time to time, as I am sure we all do—or whether his interest in the subject has been sparked more recently, whereas early-day motion 233 was tabled earlier in this Parliament. It was interesting to note that he had not signed it, given that it seems highly relevant to what he is trying to impose on us today.

Clause 1 would establish a mandatory national register of private landlords. That raises a number of questions about the purpose of such a register. What would it be used for? Who would use it? What would be achieved by such a register? Who would administer it? In subsection (2), a duty is

“placed on all private sector residential landlords to sign up to the Register, and to pay an annual registration fee and provide all the information prescribed in regulations by the Secretary of State as required in the Register.”

I have many concerns about that. The payment of an annual registration fee, which appears to be dictated by whoever is appointed or by the Secretary of State himself, seems to open up landlords to an unlimited cost.

What control will there be over the registration fee? The hon. Gentleman made it clear in his speech that he did not see such a fee resulting in any cost to the taxpayer, which must mean that he expects the whole cost to be covered by the landlord, presumably through their registration fee. However, as we all know, with any kind of bureaucracy we always end up with a narrow focus. I think the hon. Gentleman himself referred to envisaging a light touch, but such measures seldom end up as light touch. They always end up with some empire building and more and more costs being added. At the end of the day, the landlord will pick up the tab. If the Bill were to be enacted, not only would they be picking up a tab, they would be picking up an unlimited tab, because the fees will be out of their control.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way once again. He has been prodigiously generous. Does it occur to him, as it does to me, that this is another socialist tax?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right. He pre-empts what I was going to say; I was going to make that very point. This is absolutely a tax on private landlords. The hon. Gentleman said that there would be no cost to the taxpayer, but that will not necessarily be the case. If a landlord is expected to pay a fee—in many cases, my cynicism leads me to suspect, perhaps an ever-increasing fee—the likely scenario is that that fee would be passed on to the tenant through higher rents. That will be how the landlord recoups the money to pay for it.

Obviously, many rents are paid by the taxpayer through housing benefit. I have no doubt that the hon. Gentleman intends that there will be no cost to the taxpayer as a result of this Bill, but he cannot guarantee that, and I would argue the exact opposite. The likely scenario is that this will lead to an increase in costs to the taxpayer through higher housing benefit payments.

[Philip Davies]

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but I am simply not persuaded. There will be a cost to somebody, and it seems inevitable that some of that will be passed on to the tenant—and the taxpayer pays for an awful lot of tenancies. I have no doubt that were the hon. Gentleman the relevant Housing Minister at the time, the fee would be small, but heaven knows what the fee might end up being if the hon. Member for Islington North got his hands on the levers of power. I have every faith in the hon. Member for Mansfield as an individual, but he cannot guarantee who will be holding the post in the future and what the consequence of that may be.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It occurs to me that the fee must mean a reduction in the tax take, even if it is not added to the rent, because the fee, in the normal course of events, would be tax deductable. Assuming that the landlord is making a profit on his letting, that would come out of the tax payable to HMRC.

[Philip Davies]

As ever on these occasions my hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Therefore, we can determine quite clearly that whatever is envisaged there will be a cost one way or the other to the Exchequer.

Who will monitor the register? How will it be monitored? How will it be determined when someone becomes a new private landlord and who will ensure that that particular landlord signs up? I am not entirely sure that I can envisage how that will happen in practice. How will existing landlords be made aware that they have to sign up? How will the process of registration of all these private landlords be carried out? What about private landlords who are foreign nationals, and who own a property in the UK but do not live here? How will we go about getting them on the register? How will they be made aware that they have got to be registered? How will they be made to sign up and pay their registration fee? I simply do not understand how having a register will help the landlord. I do not understand how it will help the private sector tenant either. What incentive will there be for landlords to sign up? If we have a mass refusal of landlords to sign up, what will be done to get them to sign up? We can argue whether the concept is desirable, but it seems filled with practical issues.

If we are to go down this route, surely the hon. Gentleman would accept that there has to some kind of incentive for the landlord to sign up. There has to be some benefit for them in signing up, and the best way to ensure that is to make signing up a free choice, not to mandate people to do it. The only effect it will have on landlords is to ensure that they have the additional task of renewing their registration every year and that they pay for it out of their own pockets. As my hon. Friend so wisely suggested, this is no more than a tax. It is a tax for letting out one’s house for others to live in. I am not sure whether that qualifies it to be called a bedroom tax, but given that most people who live in these houses will be occupying a bedroom, and given that the cost is likely to be passed on to them, we can safely say that this is the Labour party’s attempt to impose a bedroom tax on the public. It introduced the spare room subsidy when it was in government, and it now seems to be trying to introduce a new tax on people.

The Bill will drive up not only rents but property prices, which are extortionate everywhere, but particularly in London. As rents go up to compensate for the cost of the register, property prices will be driven up even further.

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[Philip Davies]

Of course. The shadow Minister states the blindingly obvious. Who is to say, however, whether that person would have any ill will towards the people renting the property? Presumably, they would just carry on with the arrangements already in place, but without registering on a national register of landlords.

This is the difference between Government Members and the Opposition: they think that not registering on a state-sponsored register makes someone a bad landlord, but I do not accept that premise. I think that what makes someone a good landlord is whether they are treating their tenant well, irrespective of whether they are on a register. It is how they look after their tenant that determines whether they are a good landlord. Someone who is not on a register might be a very good landlord, but, equally, someone who is on the register might be a very bad landlord. The hon. Gentleman seems to be under the impression that being on the register would determine whether someone is a good landlord, but I am afraid I do not share that view. The hon. Gentleman seems to support a Bill that would criminalise people who had no idea about the obligation being thrust on them by the socialists opposite. We have to be careful about introducing legislation left, right and centre—in this case, left—and we must remind ourselves that laws have consequences. A criminal sanction is serious. We do not want decent people falling foul of the law by accident and receiving a criminal conviction. As I mentioned earlier, four-fifths of private landlords are part-time landlords, with just one or a small number of properties from which they earn less than a quarter of their income. We should tread carefully.

The Minister will outline the Government’s position, but my understanding, which he will either make clear or refute, is that they have concerns about the Bill. I am therefore delighted to find myself agreeing wholeheartedly —this is a red letter day for me—with the Government. I state with confidence that the Government are opposed to the Bill, because their website is clear about why they have chosen not to introduce further legislation:

“The private rented sector is already governed by a well-established legal framework and we will not introduce any further regulations. This will ensure the sector is free to grow in response to market conditions.”

The website goes on to state:

“In the past over-regulation drove landlords out of the rental market. We don't want to introduce any measures which would form a barrier to potential landlords considering renting out their properties. Over regulation would reduce the number of properties to rent and wouldn't help tenants or landlords.”

I could not have put it better myself. I find myself in total agreement with the Government website.

I am conscious that I am in danger of taking up more than my fair share of time. It would be unfair of me to dominate proceedings and I hope that Members do not think that I am doing so.

A report by Professor Michael Ball for the Property Ombudsman, entitled “Regulating Residential Letting Agents: the issues and the options” and published in October 2012, looked at the issue of the number of letting agents and the number that belong to a professional body. This is relevant to the Bill. The report states:

“The extent to which agents belong to the various professional bodies is unknown because there are no reliable figures on the size of the lettings industry. A government report in 2009 estimated that there were roughly 8,000 lettings agents…In the same year, the Office of Fair Trading offered a larger estimate of at least 15,000 letting agency businesses in the UK as a whole...In terms of the individual offices of member firms, The Property Ombudsman reported 9,523 registered lettings offices in September, 2012; as compared to 11,853 for sales…A recent survey found that 85% of agents belong to a professional body, which may indicate that the number of agents outside of the current voluntary schemes though significant is not overwhelmingly large compared to those participating.”

That information can only lead us to two conclusions.

First, the Government and their related authorities have absolutely no idea how many letting agency businesses there are. If we are to have a regulatory and registration system, a starting point might be to know how many there are. The gap between the Office of Fair Trading’s estimate, 15,000, and the Government’s estimate, 8,000, is a big one. How on earth are we going to enforce this great regime if we do not even know how many there are or where they are? At a stroke, the information presented by Professor Michael Ball makes the Bill unworkable.

Secondly, the survey found that 85% of agents—the ones that are known about—belonged to a professional body, indicating that there is not an issue in this sector that needs to be dealt with. They are already aligned to a professional body that insists on many of the standards that the hon. Member for Mansfield wants them to follow.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Does my hon. Friend agree that a voluntary association is much better than a compulsory one, because it acts as a kitemark? If everybody has to do it we cannot distinguish between those who are good and have volunteered to register, and those who simply have do it as a matter of compulsion.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. I suspect that both of us would have no issue with people having their own standards of excellence that they could advertise, and the Government and the hon. Member for Mansfield saying, “If you want to be with a good landlord, you should look for those who advertise with this particular crest, kitemark or standard.” By definition, that would encourage more and more landlords—they would lose out on tenants if they did not join—to reach that standard. I agree that that is a far better way of driving up standards than forcing people to sign up to something that they might not follow.

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[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. That just goes to show that an awful lot of good work is being done in this sector. Perhaps a good starting point for us would be to encourage more of that good work and to make people more aware of the schemes that are in place. I confess that before I looked at the Bill, I was not aware of some of the schemes that are in place to help my constituents, should they have a problem. If nothing else, I am extremely grateful to the hon. Member for Mansfield for forcing me to look at this area to see what is in place. I hope that as a result I will be able to offer my constituents a better service and make them aware of the situation. On that basis alone, we should be grateful to him for drawing our attention to what is already happening, sometimes without any fanfare or advertisement.

As I said earlier, if I am wrong I hope the hon. Gentleman will correct me, but it seems that the Bill would not apply to landlords who sub-let a room in their property. That poses the question why they would be exempt when nobody else would be. What do he and the Labour party think about such landlords? Do they believe they tend to be good or bad landlords? Is there any evidence either way?

I will come to a conclusion, because I am anxious that I may be taking up time that other Members wish to use, and I am sure others have better points to make than me. As with so much proposed legislation, the Bill is full of more bureaucracy and more interference by politicians, and it provides more evidence of the need to be seen to be doing something, which is the prevailing culture in politics at the moment. I always say that if a politician is faced with a problem, their solution will always incorporate two ingredients, the first of which is being seen to be doing something. I long for the day when a Minister will stand up and say, “That’s got nothing to do with us, it’s for people to sort out for themselves”, but so far I have been disappointed.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Has my hon. Friend noticed that at his suggestion that a Minister might conceivably say that something was not his business, the Minister fled, so frightening was that thought to those who sit on the Treasury Bench?

[Philip Davies]

Maybe the Minister has taken my advice and decided that it has nothing to do with him, so he will not stay for the remainder of the debate. Maybe it is another red letter day for me, but I doubt it.

The second part of a politician’s solution when faced with a problem is to do something that does not seem to cause offence to anybody. The Bill falls in that category—it would make it look as though we were doing something, and it would not really offend any of our constituents. It is a naked attempt to please people. At Prayers, I am always struck by the fact that we pray that we will not do things through a desire for power or a desire to please, which tend to be the two traps that politicians most often fall into. I fear that the Bill shows a desire to please. It is full of good intentions but would not be very good in practice.

If we carry on at this rate, none of us will be able to breathe without breaking some regulation or law in the near future. Many points in the Bill could be dealt with by the free market and a voluntary scheme, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset suggested. Where people rent is a consumer choice issue, after all, and it is best left in that sphere.

As I said at the beginning, by force of accident I am both a landlord and a tenant, and I use a managing agent. As a customer I am quite capable of going to a reputable one, and I think I can be trusted to do that. There is plenty of evidence that there is already an abundance of remedies and laws to protect tenants from rogue landlords and landlords from rogue managing agents. I do not doubt that rogue landlords and managing agents exist—they clearly do, and that is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the Bill will help or hinder people, and I think it will do the latter.

Many practical issues could affect the workings of the Bill’s provisions. Some I have mentioned relate to what happens when a landlord changes their name or dies, when a landlord resides in the property that is being rented out, when a couple get divorced or when a property is bought as part of a self-invested personal pension. What about the fact that some properties and landlords are already part of a licensing scheme? Would we, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North suggested, force them out of a scheme that is working well to make them part of the one in the Bill, or would we allow them to stay part of their voluntary scheme? There are all sorts of practical problems with the Bill, which would make people criminals who should not be. As we know, ignorance of the law is no defence, so that is the inevitable consequence.

As a friend of mine who is a property litigation partner at Seddons law firm in London and dealt with landlords and tenants daily said to me, there is so much legislation in this area of law that creating more runs the serious risk of putting people off becoming landlords or even carrying on as landlords. The most likely consequence is the unintended one that with fewer landlords, there would probably be fewer properties for tenants to rent, which would end up helping nobody, least of all those looking for somewhere to live. It seems to me that there is too much legislation in this area, not too little, and that the Bill would unnecessarily add to that legislative mountain.

Deep Sea Mining Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 6th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful to you for highlighting my pitch for me, in a far more eloquent way than I was, Mr Speaker, so that nobody could be in any doubt that I would, obviously, be delighted to serve on the Committee.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am concerned that my hon. Friend might have been tempted down a dangerously internationalist path by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall). It is always important in these matters to preserve British sovereignty.

[Philip Davies]

I certainly agree with that. I am not sure that what my two hon. Friends are saying is necessarily incompatible, but I am sure they will be able to discuss that in the Tea Room at a later date. I am certainly one for upholding British sovereignty, however, as most people will appreciate.

Let me now deal with some of the points that I would like the Minister to cover. I am interested in the licences that the UK Government offer and give to people who apply for them. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North referred to the resources that the Government provide to ensure that the licences are dealt with properly and in a timely manner. I am not entirely sure what the fees are for these licences and how our fees compare with those in other countries. As he said, we want the UK to be an international leader in this field. If companies can, in effect, apply to any signatory country for a licence, in order to take that to the International Seabed Authority, we want a commitment from our Government that the fees they charge for these licences will be competitive—more competitive than those charged by other countries. I would be interested to hear whether or not they are.

This is not just about the fee; it is also about the timeliness of how a licence application is determined and a licence issued. I hope that the Government also make a commitment to ensure that licences are processed more quickly here than in competitor countries, because, again, that might be a factor in which country a company chooses to go through. I would be interested to know how many licences have been applied for and how many applications have been rejected. That would allow me to see whether the process was strenuous or whether licences were just given out on the nod.

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

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friends the Members for Shipley (Philip Davies) and for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), who have been, for a Friday, most amazingly reticent and brief in their remarks. I am worried that this Bill may not therefore get the scrutiny that it deserves, given that people who normally go into every detail have skated over some of the more important points—perhaps that will come at a later stage, however.

The great thing that we should bear in mind as a nation is that our companies and our businesses should never be disadvantaged against foreign businesses and foreign companies. Any regime we have of licensing and of regulation should be as light-touch as possible, particularly when this enormous and exciting resource is available for us. We have heard of the metals that there may be—of molybdenum, of rare earth metals. It occurs to me that at the depths of the ocean there may even be gold, and it might be possible for us, through the ingenuity of British companies, to go down fathom after fathom to explore and find the gold that could be used to replace that which was sold by a former Chancellor of the Exchequer at an extraordinarily low price and against the advice of the Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Sir Peter Tapsell), who thought it was very unwise to sell that gold at a rock-bottom price. That is what it is really about: exploring these resources that could add to the wealth not only of the nation but of the globe at large. As we have seen the emergence of the new economies—of China, India, Brazil and Russia—so we have seen demand for resources grow extraordinarily. The demand has been for steel, obviously, and all that goes into manufacturing it: the components and the other metals that make steel of a particular strength to ensure that the skyscrapers that have gone up across Asia can be built safely.

As demand increases we will find that the traditional sources of metals and minerals can be exhausted. We will then find that economic growth across the globe slows down because the prices of commodities will rise. As you know, Mr Speaker, the laws of supply and demand would come into effect and if the supply is limited in relation to the demand, the price rises. If the price rises, the burden of higher prices will ultimately fall on the consumer and standards of living in the country at large and, indeed, in the world at large would be reduced. There could be an exciting resource in the depths of the ocean in an area where mankind has hardly dared go before—there have been limited efforts, and cables have been laid, but we have otherwise been able to do very little in terms of exploration. If we find on the base of the ocean little things the size of golf balls, or possibly even cricket balls, that could add to our wealth, that would be exciting, but we want British companies to be at the forefront. We do not want to allow the Americans, who are not following this regulatory path, to get ahead of us as they have on other occasions.

I hope that the Minister will focus on international law. I am always very suspicious of internationalism. I think that the nation state is the right way of dealing with problems. It is the right way of legislating, of representing a democratic mandate and of ensuring a fair and better economic outlook for the country. If there are international agreements to which major countries are not signed up, in what position are those countries and their companies left? International law is only enforceable by the acceptance of the people on whom it is enforced. There is no equivalent to this Parliament that can pass a law for the whole world nor is there a court that can lead a judgment against a country that refuses to accept what international law proposes.

Indeed, we discussed how, by the 17th century, the oceans were viewed as owned by everybody and as free, but we did not go on to develop how that freedom was protected. It was protected by the might of one great nation and one great navy, the Royal Navy, which went across the world ensuring the freedom of the seas. Although the argument was that the seas were global, they were global by the fiat of the British empire, which enforced internationalism and the security and safety of those travelling on the high seas. Indeed, it was a deliberate change of British policy. In the reign of Elizabeth I, letters of marque were issued to allow piracy on the high seas as a means of getting at the Spanish wealth. We changed our policy to internationalise and that is the situation that we are now in, but sadly our Navy is not what it was.

Do we have the hundreds of capital ships that we used to have? Do we have the dreadnoughts that we used to have ready to save the high seas from dangers? No, we do not. So, we must think about who will enforce the freedom of the seas. Which great navy is left today that can patrol those open spaces? The US navy, of course. Which state is not a party to the agreements that will regulate mining at the depth of the ocean? The United States, of course. So we must consider who will act against an American company that has not come along dutifully to get a licence from the Secretary of State and applied to an international body for confirmation of that licence. What if an American company goes out? Who will say no? Perhaps the Russian navy might go out, but I doubt it. The British Navy would certainly be unwise to take on the United States in such circumstances. We must consider what we are imposing on our companies and our fellow subjects that is not necessarily being applied internationally.

[Philip Davies]

Is my hon. Friend saying that, given the lack of support for internationalism, so to speak, we should not have the International Seabed Authority, and that we should have a free-for-all whereby, if our companies want to go out there and explore or exploit somewhere, they should just get on with it irrespective of what any international body might say?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

That is an exciting way of looking at it—to adopt a real free-market approach, which allows companies to go out to prospect, as they did in California in the 19th century, and as Cecil Rhodes did when he went to South Africa. He found great acres of space and he made a claim and he dug and he dug and he dug, and he found gold, diamonds and platinum, and he put them into a great company, and he made millions—in modern money, billions—of pounds by doing that. That was not through state regulation, not through international bodies, not through the United Nations reaching an agreement to say, “You may do this,” or “You may do that,” but by enterprise, hard work and energy—by all those great British virtues of which we should be so proud. Why not say that of the oceans? Why not mount expeditions? We could launch one together, Mr Speaker, to try and find the lost city of Atlantis, which we would expect to have all sorts of valuables—metals, gold, excitements—in it.

We could have other companies, perhaps, doing more careful geological surveys to locate those metals—the rare earth metals. An interesting fact about rare earth metals is that they are not particularly rare. The Chinese sold them very cheaply to start with, but they became a monopolist and then they raised the price. In doing so, they showed absolutely classic monopolistic behaviour. Those metals are not particularly rare, although they are quite expensive to gather together. People could go off as a free-enterprise endeavour, without having to pay for licences and regulations.

Every pound that is spent on a licence is a pound that cannot be spent on exploration, or on exploitation of the asset once it is found. How relieved I was to hear from Mining Weekly about the speed with which the sea bed—the mighty sea bed—restores itself to pristine condition after someone has been down and done a little digging. That conjures up wonderful images. I was delighted to hear my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray) say that there is always a Cornish miner involved, and that they go down and dig, even at the depths of the ocean, to find valuable assets that we may be able to exploit for the benefit of the British people. That is a free-enterprise endeavour.

Interestingly, those who spoke in the debates in the early ’80s thought there would be a great expansion of activity at the depths of the ocean. Why did that not happen? Is it not obvious, Mr Speaker? The dead hand of legislation and bureaucracy came crushing down on those who wanted to be enterprising in their prospecting activities. So there was no equivalent of the Californian gold rush. There was no shout of, “There’s gold in them there hills,” or anything of that kind, of the undersea hills.

As we are talking about geology, it is worth mentioning that the great father of geology, a Mr Smith, started all his work in North East Somerset, in the village of High Littleton. Going down in a mineshaft, he saw the different layers of the earth and worked out—

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Because so many other Members are keen to speak in the debate, I shall keep my remarks short. I know the Benches are not currently filled, but people are waiting in their offices to come racing down into the Chamber the minute the Minister has said a few words, such is their excitement to talk about the details of the Bill.

The details of the Bill are of course crucial. Its worst aspect is that it removes the Secretary of State’s ability to repeal legislation. If there is one thing that I take particular exception to, it is the idea that legislation that was temporary and could be removed is now to become a permanent burden on our statute book. When we look, in the No Lobby, at the statutes of this great nation, we see one volume covering the first few hundred years of the existence of Parliament, and now we see a volume barely doing a Session of Parliament. How glorious it would be if more Bills gave Secretaries of State power to take them off the statute book—to deregulate. I would urge that the Bill should have a more deregulatory ambition, and therefore in the early stages of its consideration we should delete the conversion of the 1981 Act from temporary to permanent, because the temporary nature of legislation is one of the pious hopes that all legislators should have. We should wish our legislation to deal with a temporary problem and then restore the liberties of the British subject as soon as possible. That would be my first concern over the Bill and the regulations within it.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend knows that I agree with him about this, and in my time I have unsuccessfully tried to introduce sunset clauses or expiry dates into Bills. But will he concede that, in essence, every Bill is temporary in the sense that it can be repealed at any time?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

If only that were true. I would hope that Bills would be repealed at any time, but sadly the House is much keener to pass new Bills than it is to repeal old and defunct ones. Every so often a Session will pass 20 repeals of ancient Bills. I think we had one earlier in this Session or at the end of the last Session, which repealed some Bill relating to the purchase of the Isle of Man from whoever previously owned it to make it part of the Crown territory. That does happen, but not often enough.

A sunset clause in this Bill would be particularly attractive, especially if the Americans are not part of this. I rather like the American approach to internationalism; that is to treat it with the deepest caution, and not to sign up to every international body that comes along. My hon. Friend mentioned what Sir Teddy Taylor said about the Foreign Office. It is interesting that in the United States the State Department almost always wants to sign up to any bit of internationalism that is going. But the sensible people in the Senate who have to ratify treaties almost never do, because they do not think it is in the interests of the American people. Because of our system, we seem to be rather too keen to sign up to international agreements, when, as I was saying earlier, we should do things by free enterprise, which will often ensure more success, riches and wealth for the nation at large.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker. Mr. Speaker has done a long stint and we are glad to have you standing in for him.

United Kingdom Corporate and Individual Tax and Financial Transparency Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 6th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The Government had a fiscal tightening and a plan for increasing taxation—which has come through—that forecast taxation going up to over 38% of GDP. Taxation at 38% of GDP is about the highest level that Governments ever achieve. If we go back to Harold Wilson’s prime ministership, we still find that it is almost impossible to get taxation at much more than 38% of GDP. The issue was that spending was so high, not that taxation was too low. The ability to squeeze imaginary rich people to get a lot of money coming in was simply not there. Such fiscal tightening on the taxation side as was possible was undertaken by the Government, but had they gone as far as the right hon. Gentleman proposes, any prospect of economic recovery would have been postponed. The tightening would have been too great, which would have harmed the economy. It would have taken money out of the economy simply to put it into the Government’s coffers. That would have led to a shrinkage of the economy, not least because people would have changed their affairs so as not to pay that extra burden of taxation.

[Philip Davies]

Did not that intervention from the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher) go to the heart of the difference between his views and ours? His view was that the Government would create all those jobs, whereas it is our view that the private sector companies that he so hates will create those jobs for the economy.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is certainly my view—I accept that it is not the view of the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton—that it is the private sector that creates employment. Every job in the public sector has to be paid for by the taxes of the private sector. The public sector has no ability to create jobs without imposing a burden of taxation either now or in the future. I shall not go into the details of Ricardian equivalence, but the electorate understand that extra spending that is borrowed is merely taxation postponed.

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[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am very glad that my hon. Friend has put it in that way. Sometimes, the Government claim that they have created 1.3 million private sector jobs, and that is a turn of phrase that I particularly dislike. It is not the Government who have done it; it is the private sector.

I am particularly enjoying discussing the right hon. Gentleman’s Bill. It is sometimes alleged that politics has all become too similar and that all the parties agree. That might be true of those on our Front Benches, but there are still some of us on the Back Benches who are willing to put forward in a more forthright way the views that we hold according to our respective political traditions. That certainly makes the debate in the Chamber more interesting.

Having set out my broad-brush objection in principle to what the right hon. Gentleman has proposed, I want to move on to the details of the Bill. And here it gets worse. The Bill is an astonishing, fundamental attack on some of the basic principles that we ought to enjoy. As a taxpayer—I am sad to say that I am not in the top 250, although I would not mind if I were—I have a right to privacy. The Government do not have a right to publish my financial information; that is my private, confidential affair. I am not advocating tax evasion, which is a criminal activity. It is quite right that it should be criminal, and the Government should enforce those laws. However, the prevention of that crime does not require the Government to deny people their fundamental right to privacy.

People’s most personal and intimate financial details, as set out in their tax return, should not be made available to all and sundry, and it is quite right that the tax authorities should maintain vigorous rules of confidentiality, even when appearing before Select Committees of the House of Commons. It is a right that we all enjoy as British subjects that our financial affairs are a private matter. Yes, we have to pay a degree of taxation and, yes, we have to make declarations to the Revenue, but we do so on the understanding that they will be kept confidential. Once this begins with the top 250, the next stage will be the top 1,000 and it will develop further so that nobody has the right to maintain privacy of their own financial affairs. I thus oppose this provision very strongly.

I oppose less strongly the requirements for disclosure by public companies because they have exchanged a right to privacy in return for limited liability, so they are expected to make disclosure and are obliged to do so to their shareholders. Clause 1 deals with “Disclosure of financial information by large companies” and from the perspective of a shareholder as an investor, I believe that I am entitled to such information anyway; and with large public companies, the shareholder list is so extensive that, once that information is given to shareholders, it is effectively in the public domain.

I add at this point that my background and career have been in investment management, so I know that the more information we get from listed companies, the easier it is to do the job of an investment manager and the better the investments it is possible to make. Perhaps inadvertently, then, the right hon. Gentleman will help the investment community in that, if clause 1 were introduced, financial analysts in the City of London would practically be dancing with joy at their ability to find out every single financial statement of large private companies. It might be quite helpful in stopping them from hiding unwelcome, loss-making subsidiaries somewhere at the bottom of the balance sheet, tucking them away under a contingent liability. Because this is essentially dealing with already public companies, I would make no objection to the clause, but I would maintain the privacy of individuals—and of trusts.

I do not think that trusts should be attacked in this way. Trusts are, in fact, one of the glories of the British legal system. They are much less understood on the continent, but they allow many protections to be built into ownership. Trusts allow the protection of minors in how they are structured and they allow continuity in the holding of assets, including allowing some of this country’s great historic treasures to be kept within the country through the trust structure of ownership. Putting unduly onerous charges on them and requirements to report would, I think, be unreasonable.

Looking at the detail, the idea is that, if trusts do not meet the requirements, their income should go to the Crown. That is what happened in the Court of Wards in the 17th century. It was one of the things that caused such trouble between Parliament and the King because the Crown was able to take the estates of minors and effectively ruin them during the minority of the beneficiary. We moved away from that type of arbitrary rule of giving power to the Crown—in this context, it is not a personal Crown; the Crown is the Executive—to do things such as take funds from private property, not in the form of tax, but in a regulatory way, squeezing income for a certain period until onerous requirements are met.

I think that would be an extraordinarily unsatisfactory way of proceeding. It would undermine the right of property—again a fundamental right that we ought to enjoy. Going back to the Magna Carta, the Crown cannot take property away from people unless there is a judgment—a judgment in a court—against them; it cannot be done on the basis of some failure to meet some bureaucratic standard. This seems to me to illustrate where the Conservative, a believer in the rights of property and a believer in the individual, stands up against the socialist, a believer in the collective and the rights of the collective to override the rights of property. I stand four-square in favour of the rights of property and four-square, too, in favour of the rights of the Crown dependencies, by and large, to regulate their own affairs.

The Bill is again onerous in what it requires to be done, by Order in Council, for territories that, by and large, are no longer treated as mere colonies. The Crown dependencies are allowed to develop and run their own affairs and have their own elective councils to take charge of those affairs. The Bill is a throwback to how this country behaved in the 19th century when we felt we had a greater right to order about the non-dominions—with dominions starting, first with Canada, in the latter part of the 19th century. We seem to be taking the Crown dependencies back to a period before dominion status started to be granted. I consider that to be undemocratic, and unfair on them. It attacks their fundamental livelihoods, namely, their ability to provide financial services and a degree of confidentiality at the same time.

There is a fundamental disagreement—and I am not entirely of the Government’s view either—about the attempt to elide tax avoidance and tax evasion. It is very important to be clear about the difference between the two. Tax evasion is criminal, illegal deliberate breaking of the tax law; tax avoidance is following the law as it is written. It seems to me that, when people are being accused of avoiding tax, it is the job of Parliament to pass good laws that make that avoidance difficult, and to make the tax collectible by Act of Parliament, rather than turning the position the other way round and saying “We are not very good at writing tax law, and therefore we will make you disclose absolutely everything so that, ex post facto, we can determine how much tax we think you ought to have paid.” That strikes me as fundamentally unjust.

It has been a solid principle of British law for decades formally, but for centuries effectively, that the individual taxpayer does not have to arrange his affairs so as to increase the amount of tax that the Revenue is entitled to take. It is an important part of justice that the law should be clear, and should be enforced fairly.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. It seems bizarre that people should be criticised for following the law of the land.

The Government have introduced a new concept, that of “aggressive tax avoidance”. Given my hon. Friend’s expertise, I wonder whether he can explain to us the difference between tax avoidance and aggressive tax avoidance.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My understanding of aggressive tax avoidance is that it is, in fact, tax evasion when the Revenue has not yet got around to taking action. One of the schemes reported in the newspapers involved some comedian whose name escapes me: he is modern, and apparently very funny if you like that sort of thing. What he was doing struck me as evasion, not avoidance, although that was not directly his fault. It seemed to me that the scheme was so far removed from any sensible understanding of the tax law that “aggressive tax avoidance” was essentially a euphemism for “We will try to scrape things back rather than charging people.” I should prefer to see Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs using the law as it is, and testing the law in the courts to establish whether such activity really is evasion. If it proves to be evasion, people should be punished accordingly, and if it proves to be avoidance, it should be considered legitimate.

I do not think it is possible to say that there is the law, there is the non-law, and somewhere in between there is something that the Government would quite like us to do. There are an awful lot of things that the Government would quite like us to do. At one point, they wanted us all to eat five vegetables a day. Indeed, they probably still want us to eat five vegetables a day, but that cannot be law. It is wrong to try to say that good behaviour, generosity and charity should be a matter of law. That is a different concept. The law, with all the might and power and sanction behind it, is a more absolute thing than that.

High Cost Credit Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 12th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, but knowing your client is not knowing a group of clients or a class of clients; it is knowing your client as an individual—as a person. That has been in the rule book of the FSA before and of the FCA now, and of the Investment Management Regulatory Organisation before them. It is a fundamental rule of financial services that we should know the counter-party with whom we are dealing and we should not deal with that counter-party if we do not, because we have a regulatory obligation to ensure the product we are offering is suitable to them. This seems to me to be a matter not of legislation, therefore, but merely of the FCA covering the bodies that are making the payday loans through its existing regulations, which would need very little change. That is a very straightforward means of putting this anomaly right.

[Philip Davies]

I am, as ever, very interested in what my hon. Friend is saying, but to what extent should payday loan companies get to know their clients? Is he simply asking that they get evidence of people’s bank statements or pay slips, or does he envisaging something more onerous?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I suggest that the know your client obligation should be as strong on payday lenders as on somebody who was receiving an investment of a similar amount—that they should have an obligation upon them to know who their client is and to understand whether what they are offering is suitable. It would be as if someone went to Hargreaves Lansdown to get investment advice; they should know the customer as well as Hargreaves Lansdown would.

The second count is to do with an absolutely standard part of all financial service regulation: money laundering. It is drummed into anybody who works in the City that money laundering is one of the most dangerous things they can be involved with, and that anything to do with money laundering—any passive participation in money laundering—is a very serious offence subject to high penalties. The basic rule for an investment firm is, “If you hear about money laundering or have the vaguest suspicion of money laundering, you must inform the senior person—the money laundering officer—in your business, who will then decide whether to report that to the police.” The payday lenders clearly have no obligation to follow the money laundering laws that are already on the statute book, however. We do not need more laws; we need existing laws to be used.

Why do I think that? Let me go back to the example of my constituent and the £300. If the lender were paying it into a bank account of which they had no real evidence—no proper knowledge—that was a golden opportunity for money laundering. If someone can just ring up and say, “I would like to borrow a few hundred pounds,” and it is instantly put into an account in the name of someone who is not necessarily the person who has rung up, and is then paid back with a cash deposit, that is the most fantastic way of money laundering. Not only that, but the price paid of a month’s interest is a modest amount to pay to wash the money through the system. So this aspect of payday lenders’ operations would allow money laundering to take place—I have no evidence on whether or not it is taking place—in a very easy and straightforward way.

[Philip Davies]

Again, I bow to my hon. Friend’s expertise in this sector that I do not have. Do the money laundering regulations relate to moneys above a certain amount? Is that why payday lenders, which are generally lending very small amounts, do not appear, as he says, to be covered by that legislation and regulation?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is right; there are aspects of the money laundering regulations that set thresholds. For example, someone can bring only £10,000 into the country in cash—such a rule applies to many countries around the world in their equivalent currencies—and certain sums have to be reported, if they are cash transactions, by banks and so on. One part of the rules also deals with aggregations. Using a succession of small transactions is one way in which money launderers try to launder money, because the rules on higher sums have become relatively effective. Before legislating we should always want to look carefully at whether regulations that are already available could improve the system. The use of the two I have mentioned, relating to knowing one’s client and money laundering, would put a strong burden on the payday loan companies to ensure that they were lending to people they at least knew really existed and about whose financial circumstances they knew something. They would, thus, be able to lend to people who had a better chance of paying back.

The issue of people having a better chance of paying a loan back is important, because payday lenders have a cavalier approach to how they lend and so they build into their interest rate a high level of default, which means that people who can pay back, even though they may not be the greatest debtors, pay a much higher interest rate than would otherwise be necessary for them. If the business of the payday lenders was more tightly regulated so that they knew their underlying client and if the level of bad debt was brought down, the rate of interest would come down and the problem would be reduced in that natural and evolutionary way, rather than by trying to set caps and controls.

I have great difficulties with caps on interest rates, for the straightforward reason that no business is going to make a small loan if the interest rate is capped, because the administration of that loan will simply be too expensive to make it worth while. A £100 loan is likely to involve £5 to £10 of administration, whether that loan lasts for a day, a week or a month. So the rate for a week is extraordinarily high because it is being compounded over the course of a year. Setting caps is therefore not the right way to proceed, because it takes away the ability to borrow from the people who are most in need of these smaller sums at the bottom end of the scale.

The truth is that the bigger the borrower someone is, the better the interest rate they are likely to get. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) talked about the Conservative party borrowing at 3.5%—of course it borrows at that rate. People who are borrowing millions of pounds pay low rates of interest, because usually there is some collateral against the loan, they are more likely to have a track record on lending and the interest rate covers the administrative cost. Where someone is paying 3.5% on a £5 million loan, the administrative costs are comparatively negligible. On a £100 loan repayable within a week, the 3.5% is so negligible that it would not begin to cover the administrative costs, and so what does the holder of capital do? They do not make the loan to the individual who needs it to get through that weekend. We must be careful about what we seek to regulate. If we seek to regulate one aspect of the system, we may well find that the unintended consequence is that the people who are most in need of this source of borrowing are cut out of the market altogether. In that case, they have no alternative but to go to the loan shark.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend that it is an anomaly, but not all anomalies are corrected by adding people in to the anomaly. It is much simpler to abolish the anomaly and say that the right to levy taxation is a fundamental right of Parliament. I quoted specifically from Magna Carta, which refers to a court, and we are the High Court of Parliament. It is important to remember that fines should only come through a proper judicial process or through the will of Parliament extracting fees. As soon as we delegate that to other bodies, over which there is no democratic control, we give up something that is fundamental to this House and what it is for. The consent to taxation is what this House has done since 1265. Perhaps the last Labour Government passed it over in a fit of absent-mindedness; they were not known for their love of the history of the constitution and their strictest adherence to it.

[Philip Davies]

Would a solution to this rare disagreement between my two hon. Friends be for payday loan companies to volunteer a certain amount of money to help with this issue, in the same way as bookmakers voluntarily give money to charities to help with problem gambling?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful for that suggestion; I think it is a very useful one. I would be very happy to see a levy brought in under the Finance Bill. I have no objection to a levy being placed on these people; it is just who places it. It needs to be placed by Parliament because that is a hard, constitutional right and power, not by an independent regulator.

European Union (Approvals) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Monday 11th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I do not intend to detain the House for long, but I wanted to support my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), who, yet again, has done a great service to this House. I rather fancy that the Government hoped to sneak this Bill through without any real scrutiny; they hoped it would be nodded through without anybody looking at the detail. Of course, my eagle-eyed hon. Friend has spotted some of the nasty parts of this Bill that the Government were hoping to sneak through, and he has done us a great service by highlighting them.

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

I am shocked at my hon. Friend’s suggestion that such an important Bill could have crept through this House without being carefully scrutinised. Many of us spoke on Second Reading and have considered the Bill carefully, as it is a sensible advancement of the European Union Act 2011.

[Philip Davies]

While my hon. Friends the Members for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) and for Christchurch are in the House, I can be confident that legislation will be properly scrutinised. Without their services, I cannot always be so confident, and we owe them a great debt of gratitude for the work they do.

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is absolutely right about the Fundamental Rights Agency, and I hope that the Minister will make it clear where the Government stand on this issue. Bizarrely, we face enacting something and, in doing so, supporting a wholly unnecessary agency. It is unnecessary because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said, it does the work that the Council of Europe already does. We are already signed up to the European convention on human rights, which is bad enough—if I had my way, we would not be signed up to that—but now it appears that the Government want us to have an EU version of exactly the same thing.

Canterbury City Council Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Wednesday 6th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I will just say in passing that I very much agreed with his earlier intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch when he said that these matters are best dealt with at a national level. We are either in favour of ticket touting or we are not, and the same rules should apply across the country. Like my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), I think that many people will believe that touting relates mainly to sporting events, or perhaps even big music events, which is maybe one of the reasons why it is in, for example, the Reading Bill in the first place, as it has a big music festival.

My hon. Friend will be interested to know that clause 11(2) talks about affecting

“Any person who, in a place designated under this section”—

I mentioned briefly about the areas that apply—

“importunes any person by touting for a hotel, lodging house, restaurant or other place of refreshment, for a shop, for a theatre or nightclub or other place of amusement or recreation, or for a boat or other conveyance shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale.”

Straight away, my hon. Friend will appreciate that this goes far beyond what he and many other people might think of it.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am troubled about this definition of “touting”, because it includes all forms of entertainment. If one were to give out a leaflet asking people to join the local Conservative party, which is always a source of the greatest entertainment, would that potentially count as touting and be illegal in Reading but legal in Canterbury?

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful for your protection, Mr Deputy Speaker, because I fear I am being troubled by questions that I am unable to answer.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

In the interests of impartiality, may I inquire about the Liberal Democrats?

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I guess that the hon. Gentleman is merely highlighting the point I am making and which the Select Committee started out with, which is that the term “touting” has different meanings to different people. I am grateful to him for accepting that point.

In considering whether to support the Lords amendments, it is important that Members decide whether they think that touting is a perfectly acceptable practice or an unsavoury practice. Of course, there are some unsavoury parts of touting—they are not specific to touting itself, but go along with it. For instance, people associate the selling of counterfeit tickets with touting. As it happens, however, that is already a criminal offence. It is not a good excuse for banning touting anywhere, given that legislation is already in place to deal with it. It might well be that people feel it clutters up a town or city and that it would look better without such people making a nuisance of themselves. It might well be that people think the nuisance is worth stopping. Perhaps they are being pestered by people handing out leaflets or trying to drag them into their restaurant against their wishes with a lasso or whatever mechanisms it is they use.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I have a feeling that my hon. Friend is talking about false imprisonment—people being dragged into restaurants against their will—and surely that is against the law anyway.

[Philip Davies]

As ever, my hon. Friend makes a good point. He is renowned in the House for defending individual freedom. Of course, if people wish to be encouraged into a place, that is a matter for their free choice, but if people go too far, they would be breaking the law. Those practices may well lead people to want to stop touting altogether.

Some people think that touting acts against the interests of the general public. This brings us to the crux of the argument about whether in principle we should find touting acceptable or unacceptable, as well as back to the point my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds made about the touting of tickets for sporting events. Touts mop up tickets for extremely popular events at a low price or at face value and sell them on at an inflated price to the general public who could not get their hands on them because the touts were buying up all the stock. In effect, the general public—the fan or the person who genuinely wants to go—end up having to pay above the odds for their tickets, which people find unsavoury. The Select Committee took a great deal of evidence on that. Indeed, there has been a great deal of concern about this issue and interest in it.

As it happens, it was not just the Select Committee that looked into the issue. The Office of Fair Trading has also investigated whether ticket touting should be stopped because it acts against the interests of the consumer. After many months of inquiry, the Office of Fair Trading found—this was consistent with the evidence it gave us during our inquiry—that, on the whole, touting acts in the best interests of the consumer, and it does so on a number of levels. In many cases, someone who has bought a ticket for an event that they genuinely hope to go to, but who finds that for some reason they cannot go, will be refused a refund by those who sold them the ticket because it is non-returnable. That person is left with a ticket—it could be an expensive ticket—that they cannot do anything with. What are they expected to do? Their only hope is what is known as the secondary market, which is what is known colloquially as touting. Indeed, I am rather surprised that clause 11 is entitled “Touting”. I think that “Secondary market” would probably be a fairer name.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Clause 11 stands out like a sore thumb from the rest of the Bill, whish is pretty consistent in being about pedlars and street traders, as he rightly says. I pay tribute to the scrutiny he has given the Bill during its passage through this House. Clause 11 stands alone in that it can apply to anybody. It should be an acceptable part of life—it would be acceptable to me, as well as the Office of Fair Trading and the Select Committee, which looked at this—for someone in Canterbury who happened to have purchased a ticket for an event they could no longer attend to sell their ticket on to somebody else. Once people have bought their ticket, it is their ticket. If they want to sell it on to someone else, that should be a matter for them.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Surely this should be a matter of contract. If the ticket prohibits the purchaser from selling it on, they should be prohibited from so doing, and if it allows the use of the secondary market, that should be allowed. Purchasing a ticket is a contractual activity; the ticket is not an item of property.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point but, interestingly, it is not made clear in the provision that that would be the case. Many tickets state that they are not to be resold, or that they are non-transferable. The promoter of an event could take the matter to court to test the contract, and the court could find against the person who had sold the ticket on, whether for a profit or not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I have not forgotten the hon. Gentleman—

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

He is unforgettable.

[Philip Davies]

Indeed he is.

Notwithstanding the question of an individual’s freedom to do what they want with a ticket that they have bought, it seems unacceptable to include the clause in the Bill, as it would provide for imposing a further penalty. Let us imagine that someone had bought a ticket to an event but could no longer attend it. They would lose their money because they could not get a refund, but if they tried to resell their ticket, they would also face being fined for so doing. They would lose out financially.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I shall try not to be sidetracked by people trying to lead me astray. The hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) is always trying to do that, but I shall resist the temptation.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I want to ask my hon. Friend a question on the specifics of the amendment that we are considering. As I understand it, someone with a ticket in Reading would need to go to Canterbury to do their touting, because it would be illegal in Reading but not in Canterbury thanks to their lordships wise amendment. Is that correct?

[Philip Davies]

rose—

Canterbury City Council Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Thursday 31st January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I absolutely agree. I hope that, in many respects, what their lordships have done will set a precedent and that we will not have to worry so much about some of the worst consequences of such legislation.

A notable omission from my hon. Friend’s speech was the issue of touting, although I appreciate that he was trying to be as brief as possible. If he did mention that and I missed it, I apologise to him. One amendment before us today deals with touting. He did not mention it—[Interruption.] I think it comes later on in our proceedings. It is in the third group, so I will save up my expertise on touting until that time; I apologise for mentioning it now.

The amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch were focused mainly on training. My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) is my parliamentary neighbour and an excellent Member of Parliament. The only bad thing about having him as my neighbour is that he puts me to shame. He has already successfully steered a private Member’s Bill through Parliament in his short time in the House. He did so with an awful lot of panache and charm, and by being practical and reasonable about what it was sensible to do in order to get that legislation through. I very much hope he will adopt the same strategy now, because he saw how well it worked with his Bill; I hope he will use that experience when considering this legislation, too.

Let us consider the debate we have had so far from a layman’s perspective—from the point of view of people who have no vested interest in the legislation and who have not been going through battles which started six years ago, as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said. People who do not have that baggage and who listened to the argument that my hon. Friend made for his amendments to Lords amendment C27 could not fail to have been persuaded by his case. We started from the position that these Bills were designed to give local authorities far too much power—that was the whole point for us when we started out. As a result of my hon. Friend’s work and what happened in their lordships’ House, gradually, bit by bit, the excessive powers have been whittled down. We hope to end up with legislation that, although perhaps not ideal—it may not be something we particularly agree with—will certainly be an awful lot better than it was when we started out. We have an opportunity to carry on the theme that my hon. Friend started, and that their lordships continued, by removing some of the remaining parts that put far too much power in the hands of local authorities and give far too little protection, literally, to the man on the street.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Is it not very reassuring that the upper House has carried out its traditional role of defending the liberty of the subject from the seizure of goods? Such seizure has been unknown and unwelcome in this country since Magna Carta.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. It is why some of us felt so strongly about these Bills and, in particular, about the issues relating to seizure. It is to be commended that their lordships have done what they have historically done—defend people’s freedoms—but we should not have to rely on their lordships for that; we should be doing that in this place, too. We have a great opportunity to demonstrate how important that is to us through my hon. Friend’s amendments.

The promoters of the Canterbury City Council Bill chose well when they selected my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey as the person to steer it through the House. I am sure that it would be in everybody’s interests if the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch were accepted. I am a signatory to them, so I would say that, but their genesis lies with my hon. Friend and I do not want to take the credit away from him.

I am not so bothered about amendment (a) to Lords amendment C27. Lords amendment C27 seeks to provide that:

“The council shall publish on its internet website information”.

My hon. Friend wishes to remove the words “on its internet website” from that provision. I am not so bothered about that one, not because I disagree with it, but because I am not sure it would achieve what he intends. It would not preclude the council from simply putting the information on its website; the council would still be able to do exactly the same thing, so we would be no further forward. I think my hon. Friend intended that the council should not simply be allowed to leave it at that and that other forms of communications should be used, particularly for people who do not have access to the internet and the relevant website. I agree with his approach, but the amendment would not achieve its purpose and we could end up with a bizarre situation where the unintended consequence was that the local authority published even less information than was available for pedlars. Amendment (a) certainly does not require the local authority to publish more information, so I think we can leave it to one side—I hope my hon. Friend will agree.

There is far more merit in my hon. Friend’s other amendments to Lords amendment C27, and I very much hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey will give them serious thought. None of us wishes unnecessarily to delay further the proceedings on this legislation, and I am sure that the Bill’s promoters do not wish it to be delayed further, so my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey has a great opportunity here. I cannot speak for my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch but I think that if my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey were to give way on these amendments, the progress of this legislation could be much speedier. That would be a small price for the Bill’s promoters to pay, because not only are these amendments designed to make things better for the pedlar, but, as far as I can see, they are better for the local authority.

Amendments (b) and (c) would mean that the council would make things abundantly clear by publishing details of the streets covered by the legislation. That is not catered for in the Bill at the moment. If that is such a big issue for these local authorities and something that needs all this time and expense to deal with it, surely it is in the best interests of these councils that everybody knows which streets are affected and which are not, and the boundaries of these rules. With the best will in the world, I am sure that even my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey would not suggest—I hope he will not—that council officials will be on every corner of every street waiting for pedlars to appear in order to turn them around at the first opportunity and issue them with a fixed penalty notice. I would like to think that council resources do not stretch that far. On those days when there is no council official waiting to move a pedlar on or to issue them with a fixed penalty notice, surely it is in the interests of the local residents and the local area that people are following the rules because things are clear and that they are not mistakenly in a place where they should not be. Through his amendments my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is striking a blow not only for freedom but for the efficiency of the local authority in carrying out its wishes.

Disabled Persons’ Parking Badges Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 9th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My proposal would not end all discretion because, as I made clear, a court may send somebody to prison for up to six months. If my hon. Friend represented somebody as a barrister, and did so with great distinction, as he always used to in his previous life, I am sure that his client would be pleased to escape with just a three-month sentence. The point is that we must have lines in the sand to show that the offence is unacceptable.

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

rose—

[Philip Davies]

I see my hon. Friend cranking into action, so I give way to him.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am interested by my hon. Friend’s new clause, which refers to people “knowingly using” a permit but does not say for what purpose. Would there be a three-month sentence for knowingly using a fraudulent permit as a Christmas decoration, or something like that, or would it have to be knowingly used for the purpose for which it was issued?

[Philip Davies]

As ever, my hon. Friend comes up with an entertaining point, and no doubt a rather good one. He may well be criticising the wording of my new clause in his customary charming way, but I think it is safe to say that using a fraudulent badge as a Christmas decoration would not land somebody in prison for three months. The offence would be using it fraudulently for the purpose for which parking badges are designed.

New clause 2 is along similar lines and states:

“Anyone found guilty of knowingly allowing another to use their disabled parking badge shall be liable on summary conviction to fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale.”

For the avoidance of doubt, I believe that means a fine of up to £5,000. One thing that particularly frustrates people with disabilities is when people who have a genuine blue badge hand it on to a family member, friend or whoever so that they can park in a convenient location where they would otherwise not be able to park. That undermines the rigour and fitness for purpose of the system, and it is a serious matter. It denies a space to someone who needs it and gives it to someone who does not. Again, I believe it deserves a more serious penalty.

I believe that the offence is currently covered by section 115 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984. My hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown or the Minister will correct me if I am wrong. The new clause would make the offence specific to the Bill, and it would attract a higher fine than it currently does. We should punish not just people who steal blue badges or own them fraudulently but those who abuse badges that are handed out genuinely. I hope my hon. Friend will see that those are serious matters that need more serious penalties.

New clause 3 states:

“Anyone found guilty of using a stolen disabled parking badge will receive a minimum custodial sentence of six months.”

I suspect that, again, my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch will be concerned about the lack of discretion that the new clause would give the courts, and some people may well be concerned that it sets out an even longer sentence than new clause 1 does for the use of a fraudulent disabled parking badge. The reason why I believe the offence of using a stolen badge needs a more serious sentence is the double whammy effect that it has. If somebody uses a fraudulent blue badge that they have cooked up and designed to look like the real thing, they effectively take away a space from somebody who needs it. If somebody steals a blue badge, however, the double whammy effect is that not only are they using a space that they do not need and denying it to somebody else, but they have taken the blue badge away from the person who genuinely needs it. That person is therefore also unable to find a space. The reason for the length of the sentences suggested in the new clause is that a stolen blue badge is twice as serious as a fraudulent one—the offender not only benefits but deprives somebody else.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend is not being a little bit harsh in his new clauses. Could he give us some guidance about what other offences attract such minimum sentences? After all, misusing a parking badge is only a parking offence.

[Philip Davies]

I will not get distracted by going off piste and talking about other offences that should have minimum sentences, but they are not an unusual idea. In fact, earlier this year we passed the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, which included minimum sentences for threatening someone with a knife. The concept is not unusual, and the Government have been quite happy to use it.

My hon. Friend says that misusing a blue badge is only a parking offence, and he is clearly right, but I suggest to him that it causes a great deal of distress to many people. It not only causes inconvenience but can deprive people of the ability to go out and live their lives. I have spoken to many people who use blue badges, and sometimes they cannot go out because they know there will not be a parking space available to them, as they will all be clogged up by people who do not need them.

Planning regulations now set out a certain number of disabled parking spaces that should be available, so there should be an ample number, but we still find that people are abusing the system. I understand where my hon. Friend is coming from, but I do not see these offences as being just road traffic offences like not wearing a seat belt, which largely has an impact only on the person who does it. I see them as much more serious, because they deprive people of their freedom to go about their daily lives. It seems to me that when someone is found guilty of knowingly and recklessly denying others their freedoms, it is a reasonable punishment that their freedoms are taken away as well.

Antarctic Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 2nd November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is, as always, a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash). I cannot guarantee Members that I shall talk about anything as interesting as his wife’s family history, and I am sure we are all sorry that he cut his long story short, but perhaps we will hear the rest of it another time.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) on being successful in the private Member’s Bill ballot and making progress with his Bill, and I am sure he will be heartened by the widespread support that it has received. I certainly do not intend to do anything to prevent it from making further progress today. Therefore, as is customary on these occasions, I shall try to keep my remarks relatively brief.

This Bill makes

“provision consequential on Annex VI to the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty”

and amends the Antarctic Act 1994. That Act implements most of the Antarctic treaty requirements in domestic law, and this Bill seeks to implement further treaty measures.

The Bill has two parts. The first addresses liability and the annex, and deals with environmental emergency liability and the concept that the polluter pays. The second part amends the 1994 Act to allow the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to permit foreign nationals on British-led expeditions and to give additional protection for the Antarctic environment, including its marine life and other living creatures.

Antarctica is a fascinating and important continent. I think my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud had a Westminster Hall debate on the Antarctic.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am sorry for interrupting my hon. Friend so early in what I hope will be a fine and Gladstonian-length speech, but I was wondering whether the requirement to allow foreign nationals on British expeditions is a requirement of EU law, and whether, once again, the European Union is getting its grubby mitts on our legislative process.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point and, as he knows, I share his horror of the European Union sticking its nose into our affairs. His question might be best answered by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud, as this is his Bill, but I think that provision is intended to allay the concerns of universities who might have foreign nationals on teams wanting to carry out research in the Antarctic. At present, the required process is quite difficult, and involves having to get foreign nationals’ own countries to sort things out. The idea is that it would be a lot easier for research institutions in this country if the British Government could sort everything out. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) is, however, always wise to be on the look-out for encroachment by the European Union, the consequences of which are hardly ever in our favour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that; he is as vigilant as ever on these matters. I understand why the mention of the Soviet Union drew his immediate thoughts to the European Union, as there is very little to choose between the two.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Is my hon. Friend aware that the European Union has just issued a new logo with the hammer and sickle at the very top of it, which makes the connection explicit?

[Philip Davies]

I am sure that we are all grateful to my hon. Friend for that update, and that we are all alarmed, if not surprised, by that development.

In addition to the treaty signatories, we now have “other consultative parties”, such as Brazil, China, India, Germany, Italy, Holland, Finland, Sweden, Spain, and even Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru, Bulgaria, Poland and South Korea. There are also other “non-consultative parties”, including Austria, Belarus, Canada, Colombia, Cuba and the Czech Republic. I will not read them all out, Mr Deputy Speaker, but suffice it to say that plenty of other countries are also involved on a non-consultative basis.

The treaty parties meet each year at the Antarctic treaty consultative meeting, for the purpose of consulting and exchanging information on matters of common interest pertaining to Antarctica. The reasons for the treaty were competing territorial ambitions—my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) made much mention of those—and claims by various countries, including the UK, that sometimes overlapped each other. At the same time, Antarctic scientific research was becoming more important, which encouraged the need for the negotiation of a peaceful agreement establishing spheres of interest and the permanent presence of national teams conducting scientific research. The UK made its first territorial claim in 1908 and has had a permanent presence since 1943. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud said, our zone of presence is called the British Antarctic Territory, which was established to provide survey and meteorological information in the south Atlantic ocean—this is known as the British Antarctic Survey. The BAT is administered by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and, as I am sure we all know, it is located in the coldest and windiest part of the Antarctic and it has no indigenous population.

The main objectives of the treaty can be defined as follows: to demilitarise Antarctica; to establish it as a zone free of nuclear tests and the disposal of radioactive waste; and to ensure that it is used for peaceful purposes only. That is set out in the introduction to the Antarctic treaty 1959, which states:

“Recognizing that it is in the interest of all mankind that Antarctica shall continue for ever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord”.

Nuclear explosions and the disposal of radioactive material are prohibited under article V(1). However, article V(2) states:

“In the event of the conclusion of international agreements concerning the use of nuclear energy, including nuclear explosions and the disposal of radioactive waste material”—

by—

“all of the Contracting Parties...the rules established under such agreements shall apply in Antarctica.”

Although, hypothetically, this might be allowed and executable, it is rather unlikely that all the parties to the treaty would agree on such actions at the same time.

The second objective is to promote international scientific co-operation in Antarctica, which we have heard quite a lot about today, so I will not dwell on that. The third objective is to set aside disputes over territorial sovereignty. The treaty preserves the incompatible views regarding territory that my hon. Friend the Member for Romford spoke about earlier, but prevents any action from being taken to create, extend, support or deny claims to territorial sovereignty. All these factors make the governance of Antarctica slightly more complex than anywhere else in the world. It is important to say that the treaty is already in force indefinitely.

As with other international treaties and agreements that have been adopted by a large number of states, more than 300 recommendations have been adopted by the Antarctic treaty parties which negotiated separate international agreements, of which three are still in use. These three treaties are collectively known as the Antarctic treaty system—ATS. The three international agreements are the convention for the conservation of Antarctic seals 1972, the convention on the conservation of Antarctic marine living resources 1980, and the protocol on environmental protection to the Antarctic treaty 1991. I will come to each of these separately.

What is important to all these agreements is the geography of Antarctica, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud referred at the beginning of his remarks. He pointed out that the Antarctic was about one and a half times the size of the USA. It is also one and a third times the size of Europe. It is a huge area, bigger than China and India combined. The Antarctic icecap contains 90% of the ice on earth. It is almost impossible to live there, but Antarctica is well known for its biodiversity, which is one of the reasons why my hon. Friend is so keen on the Bill—whales, seals, mammals, emperor penguins, albatross, vertebrates and microscopic organisms are well adapted to the cold climate. In contrast with the Arctic tundra, the Antarctic tundra lacks large mammal fauna.

According to the convention on the conservation of Antarctic marine living resources, the first Antarctic marine living resources to be exploited were fur seals and elephant seals early in the 19th century. Subsequently great whales were hunted in Antarctic waters. Most, if not all, Southern ocean whales are migratory. They head into warmer waters during the Antarctic winter and the calves are born in these more hospitable seas, as they would struggle to survive in polar waters during their first few months. No native bird or mammal may be killed or captured without a licence from the competent authority. Thanks to the British Antarctic Survey, I know a great deal more about seals than I did before, but given that time is pressing, I will not indulge the House by passing on some of the facts that I learned about seals, but I commend my hon. Friends to read them.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am sure the subject of seals will be of great interest to the House. Will my hon. Friend make a copy of his research available in the Library?

[Philip Davies]

I am not sure the demand would justify making the research available in the Library, but I am happy to send it to my hon. Friend. He can do with it what he wishes. I would not want to trouble the House of Commons Library with it, although it is interesting.

The extremely cold and dry climate does not allow rich vegetation, but some flora exists on the continent, which creates the Antarctic tundra in some parts of the continent, particularly the Antarctic peninsula, which has areas of rocky soil that support plant life.

The protocol on environmental protection to the Antarctic treaty is of great importance to the Bill. A ban on mining was imposed in 1998. The protocol, which was introduced in 1998, will be reviewed in 2048.

Part 1 of the Bill introduces a number of new statutory duties on those operating in Antarctica, relating to appropriate response action, preventive measures and contingency planning and information. It will come into force when it is officially approved by all the consultative parties which signed up to annex VI in 2005. I would imagine that this would be quite a difficult and lengthy process as there are 28 separate signatories and it is hard to envisage that they would all be content with every single part of the Bill. Perhaps the Minister will tell us what progress has been made in getting agreement with all the consultative parties that signed up, because that could be one of the most difficult parts of bringing this into operation. In 2009, the previous Government launched a consultation on a draft Antarctic Bill, and the version that we see today deals with issues raised by that consultation and includes some of the subsequent recommendations.

Clause 1 says that

“the person who organised the activities must take reasonable, prompt and effective response action.”

I am not sure whether my hon. Friend has something precisely in mind on what would constitute such action—whether that would be left for the courts to decide, or whether the Government have formulated any definitions. At the moment, it is not particularly clear. The clause also says that the costs that would have to be incurred

“are the costs that the person would have incurred had the person taken reasonable, prompt and effective response action.”

That seems to be rather difficult to determine, and it would be helpful to know exactly how it would be done. How would we know exactly what the costs would have been if people had taken such action in the event that they are before the courts because they have not done so? I do not know whether my hon. Friend wants to deal with those matters now or in Committee.

Prisons (Property) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 14th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

If my hon. Friend is going to be so kind in all her interventions, I will encourage her to make even lengthier ones in future. It seems from the figures—I am only glancing at them—that at Hollesley Bay just one seizure of drugs was made.

We need to bear in mind two separate things. In the case of prisons with very high levels of seizure, one might argue that it is because they have a bigger problem than other prisons, but it is possibly because the authorities are much better at finding these things and more assiduous in dealing with the problem. The fact that my hon. Friend’s prison had only one seizure may indicate that they have got a grip of the problem there and it is not as big as elsewhere; equally, it could be because they are not as assiduous in finding these things. From my experience, which she was kind enough to mention, I would be surprised if that prison had only one example of drugs being in somebody’s cell that should not be there, but that is just a hunch and I am probably completely wrong.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Might my hon. Friend, without reading out the whole list, give us some of the highlights? Does he have any idea of which prisons have a particularly bad problem, with the very highest number of seizures, or which ones have figures that are suspiciously low because they are known to be high-security prisons with particularly difficult prisoners inside them? Are there any lessons that we can draw from across the prison estate as a whole?

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Thankfully, he made a long enough intervention for me to quickly brush through the figures to see whether I could find any particular highlights or lowlights. The figures that instantly spring to mind as regards mobile phone seizures are 265 at Altcourse prison, which I cannot say I am familiar with, and 231 at Pentonville, which I am much more familiar with. Those seem to be the two highest figures. Altcourse also had a rather high number of drugs seizures. Several prisons have single figures for mobile phones. The lowest that I can see is Blantyre House, which has just one, as do Low Newton, Morton Hall and Send, while some have two. There is a big discrepancy between 230-odd and just one or two. I can only reiterate that it is difficult to tell which prisons we should be commending and which we should not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Perhaps the Prison Service could also offer an answering service, so that when the mobiles ring, messages can be taken and passed on to the inmates.

[Philip Davies]

That may already be happening. Something that I have learned in my short time in Parliament is that all the things that one thinks could not possibly be happening are almost certainly happening somewhere. It would not be the greatest of surprises if that were happening. Even if it is not, perhaps on the back of my hon. Friend’s suggestion, it will start happening across the country. Any prison that refuses to take such messages will probably be taken to the European Court of Human Rights.

The search teams targeted 14 prisons across the north-west of England, so only 14 prisons generated that amount of contraband, including Liverpool, Preston, Garth, Kirkham, Risley, Haverigg and Styal women’s prison. The article goes on to say:

“The haul of hooch, made from fruit, bread, sugar and water, included 371 pints found before Christmas.”

Given that we know that there is a problem of that scale, we ought be doing more to tackle it. The Bill would be a useful tool because it would ensure that people know that if something is confiscated, it will not be returned to them.

I would like to emphasise what these things are used for. People usually use mobile phones to carry on criminal activity while they are in prison. The trade in drugs and other illegal activities continue in prison. We are, in effect, saying to people, “It is absolutely fine for you to carry on your illegal, criminal activity in prison. If we find your phone, don’t worry too much, because we will hand it back to you in the end with all the phone numbers still stored on it. You can have back the details of all your contacts and all the clients that you have been supplying to over recent years. We will give all that back to you, saved on the SIM card. That’s no problem.” How on earth are we to tackle drug crime if we are handing back to drug dealers their full contact lists on their mobile phones as soon as they leave prison? It honestly could not be made up, but that is what is happening.

My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey did not touch a great deal on how contraband is found, whether prisons need to get better at searching cells or whether the current system works well. My hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) kindly said that I visit a lot of prisons, and indeed I have visited prisons not just in the UK, although I have visited plenty of those, but abroad. To be fair, the problem of contraband exists in prisons around the world. It is not just a UK problem. It exists even in some of the most rigorous prison regimes in the world. I commend to my hon. Friend the Minister a visit to the Florida state prison to see what a prison system is really like, but even Florida, with its much more robust approach—and much cheaper, but I will not get sidetracked down that line—has the same problem.

I do not know whether this is useful, but I visited a prison in Denmark, a notoriously liberal regime that hands condoms out to people who visit prisoners, locks them in a room for an hour and lets them do what they want. I do not commend that approach to the Minister. Visitors do not go through any search mechanism at all, but the prisoner is strip-searched both before and after they meet a visitor to ensure that no material is passed from one to another. That may be a suggestion for him to explore, as Denmark thinks it helps to prevent contraband material from getting into prisons in the first place.

I absolutely support my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey in his Bill, which makes sense to me and, I believe, to most people. It cannot be right that prisoners’ ill-gotten gains are returned to them when they should not have had them in the first place. We have had far too much focus in this country on the interests and rights of prisoners, and the Bill is just one way, albeit a small way, of redressing the balance. It will probably affect a small number of people, the vast majority of whom have committed crimes so serious that they have been sent to prison. That is no mean feat in itself in this country, because it takes a pretty good effort for someone to get themselves into prison these days. They have to be either an incredibly serious offender or a very persistent one. On top of that, the people in question will be those found to be in possession of illegal items while in prison, so they are the worst of the worst in the criminal fraternity. If their spoils can be sold for the greater good to raise money for good causes or victims of crime, as my hon. Friend suggested, or can be destroyed in the interests of safety and security, I am all for it.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Does my hon. Friend agree that if those things were sold, the best cause would be to cut taxes for the hard-pressed British people?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Government certainly should be cutting taxes, but I fear that if we were to get into a ramble about the rate of taxation in this country you might rule me out of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. As you know, I certainly do not want to stray from the narrow subject of the Bill.

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey for introducing the Bill, which is important and long overdue. Most of my constituents would think that these measures were already in place. I hope that it makes swift progress through this House and the other place, and I am delighted to support it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

When it comes to issues of this kind, I am the ultimate Treasury stooge. I am very much against hypothecation of any kind, ever. It is a fundamentally bad principle for a Government to have. All spending should come out of the Consolidated Fund, and all money should go into the Consolidated Fund. That is why it is consolidated, after all. If things are put into specific pots, people sometimes find that they have more money in a pot than is actually necessary. If items are confiscated and then sold, the money should go to the Treasury.

There is another reason, which is always important. You may be aware, Mr Deputy Speaker, that some local authorities have been accused of ramping up parking fines just so that they have more money to spend on other things. A process that falls hard on the subject is used to raise revenue in a way that was never intended. If the money went to the prison, or to certain areas within the prison, or to a cause that the governor particularly liked, it might give governors a false incentive to be particularly harsh in deciding what to confiscate. Such an incentive would be removed altogether if it were ensured that the money went into the Consolidated Fund. As I have said, in this respect I am very much the Treasury stooge.

[Philip Davies]

Has it occurred to my hon. Friend that it may be difficult to identify what is contraband in a prison cell and what is not? For example, a member of the public may well go into a prison cell, observe the prisoner enjoying Sky TV and assume that it must be contraband—that the prisoner must have smuggled Sky TV in—only to find that the prison authorities have actually allowed 4,070 prisoners to have Sky TV in their cells.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

As always, my hon. Friend comes up with a shocking statistic, but the situation he described was, perhaps, even more worrying: members of the public being able to wander into prisons and look into prisoners’ cells. If prisons are really like that, we face a more fundamental problem. Prisons should be good at keeping people in, but they also ought to keep some people out, and I would have thought that members of the general public should not be waltzing in and out of prisons. Having said that, I agree with my hon. Friend’s general point.

The nub of my concern, however, is that there needs to be clarity, because we do not want to have circumstances in which, for instance, a new governor is appointed and he decides to have a new rule on what is, and what is not, allowed. That would lead to prisoners being uncertain about the rules. The new governor may think Sky TV ought to be banned. He may be left-wing and not like Mr Murdoch and therefore think anything to do with him should be banned, so he may decide to remove Sky TV and only allow people to watch the BBC. If that were the case, that would be a very fair uncertainty for the prisoner, however.

My hon. Friend and I hold many similar views, but although I, too, believe prison ought to be a reasonably robust experience, I do not go all the way with him and say prisoners should be denied all rights. They ought to have a basic understanding of the general rule of law that allows them to live by a code that is set and certain, so they know from day to day what the situation will be and what they will be allowed to do.

I am keen to follow on from a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland). I should say first, however, that North East Somerset is looking forward to hearing from him this evening, and I hope he will speak for a little longer in North East Somerset because people have paid for their supper and they shall want a good after-dinner speech—and I am sure they will get one. He talked about remand, and the remand issue is fundamental to my understanding of how our criminal justice system works. People are innocent until proved guilty. The state has decided to remand them because it is nervous that they may escape or it deems them to be dangerous. The state is often wrong about their guilt, however, and people on remand frequently turn out to be innocent of any offence, and are sometimes able to leave court without a stain on their character. It is important to remember that, and to treat people on remand differently. I am not sure that the Bill does that at present. I hope it will be amended in Committee to ensure that there is no injustice to those on remand.

It is a fundamental principle of our justice system that people are innocent until proven guilty. That is often forgotten in respect of people on remand. Because they are in prison, the establishment deems they must have done something wrong. That is deeply unsatisfactory. They are as innocent as any other citizen in the land until the court has ruled and found them guilty. Therefore, to deny them things, or to destroy things that they could legitimately hold if they had not been remanded, is unreasonable. If they are not guilty—and many of them will not be guilty—they should not in normal circumstances be denied the right to use, or to have, a mobile telephone. Just because they have had the misfortune to be charged with an offence does not mean they should be punished for breaching a regulation that in ordinary life would never fall upon them.

I have great confidence in the police, but we know from events earlier this week that the police are not invariably impartial in the way they charge people or in the information they put forward. We cannot put so much trust in the state that we allow unreasonable punishments to fall on those on remand beyond that which they have already suffered—their loss of liberty. They are innocent until they have been through a proper court process.

I want to associate myself with some comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). He discussed at modest length—indeed, extreme brevity by his standards—the question of how things get into prison in the first place. He kept on talking about nets being put up. I thought the prisoners might be practising cricket, but it turns out that is not the case; the nets are there to catch contraband being thrown over. We must surely have a Prison Service that is more effective in stopping items getting into prison in the first place, whether they are mobile phones, drugs or other items that are not allowed.

How would that be done? I listened carefully to the shadow Secretary of State, who said quite rightly that some of the items might cost money. However—this is an argument one must treat with care—this might be one of those occasions when we could spend to save, because stopping such items getting in could reduce the drug problem in prisons and the ability to run a criminal enterprise, which one hears about. There is the image from “The Italian Job” in which a Mr Big character, played rather resplendently by Noël Coward, is still running his criminal enterprise from prison, and standing regularly for the national anthem, as all true-born UK subjects ought always to do. The idea that a criminal gang can still be run from prison by a Mr Big is one that I thought had passed out, but we find it is happening because illicit mobile phones have been smuggled in. Therefore, if we spent some money trying to stop these items getting into prisons in the first place, we might reduce the overall level of crime and so bring savings to the whole country. We would be cutting off some of the top people organising it.

I cannot finish my brief comments without talking about some of the items that might be taken into prison and can now sensibly be confiscated, rather than stored. One always expects that the first thing smuggled into prison is a cake, because a file can always be hidden in it so that the prisoner can eat the cake and use the file to saw through the bars. It would be a great relief to the cake makers of Britain that their efforts will no longer go to waste, because the prison officers who confiscate a cake because it has a file in it will now be able to eat it, rather than having to store it until the end of the sentence, by which time one has a nasty feeling the cake may have become rather stale, and therefore there would have been no point in preserving it and the file would not have been put to use to aid escape.

There is a serious point in that. Innocent items can be used for illicit activities. Things could be smuggled into prison that look completely innocuous by themselves but could be used as drugs paraphernalia or for the production of alcohol. We do not want to have a system in which those things are returned so that they can be used again, either inside or outside prison. We want to ensure that items that can be used illicitly, even if they look innocent, can be taken away and destroyed by the prison authorities.

When we look at the proposals overall, I think that we can be comfortable that there is the reasonable balance between the rights of property and the punishment of the individuals. I think that it is reasonable to say that the individuals have sacrificed sufficient of their liberty that goods that they should not possess can be taken away and destroyed. We have to be confident that this will be a fair, rational and non-arbitrary process. I note that the Bill provides for the Ministry to give guidance that prison governors would have to follow, which is very important, because this is not an area for localism. It would be very unfair on prisoners who might move prison or have a change of governor to find that the regime had suddenly ended and become more arbitrary.

The Bill does not tackle the concern about things getting into prison in the first place and, in that context, this House and the Ministry should not think that, by passing an Act of Parliament, we have solved the problem, because the truth will be something like the reverse. This is merely an indication of a deeper, underlying malaise that is being tackled; it does not deal with the fundamental problem that a little netting will not solve. I will not talk about body searches. I can think only that people might take in little pieces of gold in their false teeth to be used as currency, but other things can be done, and one does not wish to dwell on them in this House, or indeed anywhere else for that matter.

It is important for us to recognise that the Bill is a palliative rather than a cure; it tries to deal with a problem that needs a separate answer. However, on balance it is a decent, sensible and prudent piece of legislation, which will go well with the legislation that we will be considering to enable the blocking of mobile telephone signals in prisons.

That combination of legislation may enable us to sleep a little more securely in our beds, knowing that malefactors are safely locked up, incarcerated and put away and that they cannot come out easily, or get their minions to threaten us, because they do not have the necessary communications. We will know that the drugs problem will be reduced because not only the drugs themselves but the associated paraphernalia will be taken away. Furthermore, prisoners will not have their cakes, either.

London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend might want to advance that argument, but I am not entirely clear whether the Bill is simply about cost-cutting. I know that that is what the hon. Member for Derby North would have us believe, but I think that it is slightly more sinister and that it is about the amount of powers to be given to local authorities and their officers.

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

Might the provision be not only cost-cutting, but cost-increasing? Some of the buildings that will be included are public buildings, so the charge will simply be taken from a local council to another public authority, but the local authority already has the means of street cleaning, whereas the public authority in a building may not.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Given that local authorities are playing not with their own money but with other people’s, they may not be so bothered if they were caught up in the regulations. It may be businesses that were more concerned and therefore dealing with the problem better themselves. My hon. Friend touches on a good point because no business will attract customers if the area around its shop is in a terrible state, full of litter. I suspect that this is a solution looking for a problem, because most businesses will want to ensure that the streets close by are free of litter. They are probably doing that already, so my hon. Friend may well be right. The measure may well end up applying only to other public buildings, and the local authority may find itself in some accounting exercise where it is passing invoices from one department to another, which makes everyone unhappy apart from the person who is supplying invoices for the local authority, and it will not benefit the council tax payer, but give them an extra cost. My hon. Friend may well be on to something there.

I was slightly sidetracked, particularly by the hon. Member for Derby North. I made the point that the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005 already took the law beyond the Environmental Protection Act, and I gave an example of that. But it does not stop there, because section 21 of the 2005 Act extended street litter notices to any vehicles that act as commercial or retail premises, which was another giant step of mission creep down this particular route. On street litter control notices, which is precisely what this clause deals with, the 2005 Act says:

“In section 93 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990…(street litter control notices), after subsection (3) insert—

‘(3A) A vehicle or stall or other moveable structure which is used for one or more commercial or retail activities while parked or set at a particular place on or verging a street is to be treated for the purpose of this section and section 94 below as if it were premises situated at that place having a frontage on that street in the place where it is parked or set.”

So we have already had an extension of the provisions that the hon. Gentleman seeks to extend further. The Act continues:

“(3B) In subsection (3A) above, ‘vehicle’ means any vehicle intended or adapted for use on roads.”

That may well be burger vans or ice cream vans. That has already been covered in that legislation. The Act continues:

“(3) in that section, for subsections (8) and (9) substitute—

‘(8) A person commits an offence if, without reasonable excuse, he fails to comply with a requirement imposed on him by a notice.

(9) A person guilty of an offence under subsection (8) above is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale.’”

Those are already the laws of the land. This is the law that applies throughout the country. Why on earth it should be extended just for London is beyond me.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. That sounds like a good initiative. In fact, I think that there are business improvement districts in London. I am not entirely sure if they work in exactly the same way as it does on Merseyside, but they are certainly there. It seems to me that my hon. Friend proposes a far better solution, if there is a problem, which could not only get the support of the local authority, because it would then not have to deal with the problem that it does not think is its responsibility, but local businesses, which I might add probably do a far better job clearing it up than the local authority, because they would feel that they are improving their local area and making a contribution, but are not, in effect, paying twice. My concern is that the Bill is trying to get them to pay twice, once for their rates and once for sorting the problem out.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I wonder whether that establishes a general principle that it is much better to get a free market solution whereby companies come together to make things better, rather than draconian sanctions being imposed from on high.

[Philip Davies]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey) will welcome his support for her argument, because he is absolutely right.

We know what needs to be done, because we have plenty of recommendations and evidence that would eliminate the need for clause 5. In June 2006 Environmental Campaigns—ENCAMS—produced the report “What is the Situation with Cigarette-Related Litter in England?”, which set out some recommendations. We know from the sponsor of the Bill and the explanatory notes that clause 5 is intended to tackle above all else, but not exclusively, the new phenomenon of smoking outside, because of the ban on smoking in public places. On research and monitoring, ENCAMS recommended:

“An accessible, repeatable monitoring methodology could be developed to measure the quantity of cigarette butts in the environment, and therefore better understand the impact of interventions.”

One of the problems is that we appear to be going down the route of putting forward legislation without fully appreciating the nature and scale of the problem. On education and communication, ENCAMS recommends:

“The successful ENCAMS cigarette-related litter campaign could be repeated in the future, to build on the momentum it has generated. The learnings from the 2006 campaign should be built into the 2007 campaign”

and campaigns in future years, and:

“Additional communications campaigns could be developed to target specific stakeholder groups in areas where cigarette litter tends to accumulate.”

This is a far better solution and it would target where there is a problem—and cigarette litter tends to accumulate— rather than having a blanket policy that applies everywhere, whether or not there is problem.

On ashtrays and infrastructure, ENCAMS recommends

“ENCAMS existing list of ashtray suppliers could be further expanded and developed to include a description of the characteristics and price of ashtrays. This could be complemented by a set of best practice guidelines to provide advice on the type of ashtrays that are suitable in different contexts.”

On enforcement, it recommends

“Ways to increase enforcement levels could be investigated, such as further training programmes for enforcement officers and street wardens.”

It seems to me that the report was not blaming the non-dwellings. ENCAMS seems to be saying that it is the councils that need to raise their game.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I wonder whether it is not rather an unsatisfactory principle that something that was perfectly legal should be made illegal but then increasingly unpleasant, and draconian penalties are introduced for people who are doing something that used to be legal, having been forced to do it less comfortably. I simply do not think that is the right way to legislate.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is a tyranny over people who were once able to enjoy a particular way of life indoors who have been forced outside, through no fault of their own and no fault of the premises from which they have been kicked out. Most premises used to offer some kind of smoking room or a place where smokers could go. The legislation has forced them to put those people out on to the streets. It would be a rather perverse kick in the teeth for them, having been once inconvenienced, now to have to pick up the tab—excuse the pun—for a piece of Government legislation. My hon. Friend is right that it would be perverse to go down that, route based on the history of how this situation has come about.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I absolutely agree.

The ENCAMS report went on to discuss cleaning and stated:

“Efficient, cost effective cleaning equipment that targets cigarette butts would complement preventative measures, especially at the start of an education campaign. Furthermore, the fundamentals of streetscape design could be considered to discourage and prevent the impacts of littering, especially in those areas where cigarette litter accumulates.”

Most importantly, it concluded:

“Ultimately, the reduction in cigarette litter is likely to be more significant in England if the identified solutions are implemented in a targeted, coordinated fashion, with strong partnerships between stakeholders.”

ENCAMS’ conclusion seems to be compatible with the approach that my hon. Friends the Members for Wirral West and for North East Somerset advocate, and surely that is a far better route to go down than clause 5, which is officious and, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset said, might not even help with the problem but make it worse.

We have also had a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report, after the ENCAMS report, on how local authorities can prevent cigarette litter, and DEFRA proposed seven similar guidelines, with

“advice about how to prevent and reduce cigarette litter based on international and local experience. They are:

“1) Ashtrays—choose the right ashtray to suit your context and needs; 2) Signage—provide clear, consistent anti-littering signage; 3) Cleansing—clean up littered cigarette ends; 4) Partnerships—work with local organisations; 5) Leadership—walk the talk and be a leader in your community; 6) Educate—change the cigarette littering behaviour of smokers; and 7) Enforcement—use the legislation and powers available where appropriate.”

Those points are similar to the ones that ENCAMS made, and, given that outside this place there seems to be a consensus developing on what should happen, I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will not go against that report by another Department, which proposed a solution very different from the line taken in clause 5.

Interestingly, in the DEFRA report, “Enforcement” was listed as the last thing to do. It was the last resort: once everything else has failed, enforcement should be the final path; it should not be leapt to as the first solution. Furthermore, the report says:

“Enforcement—use the legislation and powers available where appropriate.”

It suggested not that new powers of enforcement were needed, but that what should be used were the powers already available to local authorities, so I see little evidence from anywhere to suggest that clause 5 is required. That is why it should be deleted.

We do not need to look too far to find out how we can solve, without clause 5, the problems that the Bill’s promoters have—perhaps rightly—identified, because Braintree district council reduced cigarette litter by encouraging smokers to use portable ashtrays. A campaign was launched to raise awareness, and the council purchased 1,000 portable ashtrays. Media coverage was so successful that it had to order a further 400 ashtrays, and in addition the company supplying them found five local newsagents that agreed to sell the product. One shop in Braintree sold more than 200, and follow-up interviews with ashtray users showed that smokers continued to use them and welcomed a means of disposing of their cigarette butts responsibly. More importantly, cleansing staff noticed a general reduction in the number of cigarette butts on the streets.

My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset advocates a free market solution to the problem, so I hope he agrees that what happened in Braintree was a far better, and truly free market, solution to the problem that the Bill’s promoters have identified.

It is not just Braintree that has found ways of dealing with the problem, however. An interesting idea worked successfully in Australia, so my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green might wish to run it past all his local London authorities. In 2004 Toowoomba city council wanted to reduce smoking-related litter throughout the city, so it ran a small-scale campaign within the council to change the cigarette-littering behaviour of staff before trying to change the behaviour of the public, which in itself makes the interesting point that perhaps London Councils should start closer to home with its solutions to the problem, rather than by interfering with everybody else.

A clean-up was carried out around Toowoomba council buildings, and official and unofficial smoking areas were identified. The number of stubs was counted during the clean-up so that any reduction could be monitored as each measure was introduced. First, all employees were exposed to educational material—a process that continued throughout the campaign—and just that one measure alone reduced the number of littered stubs from 1,849 to 1,164. After one month, all employees who smoked were offered pocket ashtrays—similar to what happened in Braintree—and 150 were given out, producing a further reduction to 966 littered stubs. The following month wall-mounted ashtrays were installed in the smoking areas, and that saw the amount of littered stubs fall to 753—a 41% reduction in cigarette litter in total.

Following the success of the campaign, and with the knowledge that the council was leading the way, a city-wide public campaign to reduce cigarette litter in Toowoomba was carried out.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend would describe that initiative as “nudge” theory. That means getting people to do things by gently pushing them in the right direction, rather than through what we have been discussing—the heavy hand of the state crashing down.

[Philip Davies]

Absolutely. That is very much the case.

The point of these examples, and the lesson that we should learn from them, is that people can be helped to produce a solution themselves. It would be far better if the Bill were proposing measures that helped people to sort out the problem themselves, rather than introducing a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who displays her expertise once again. As regards not knowing how much people are prepared to spend to go to the toilet, I always thought we knew they were prepared to spend a penny, but perhaps that is somewhat out of date.

The right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) mentions the Disability Discrimination Act, which has been used as cover by my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green. Under that Act, the service provider is obliged to make reasonable adjustments, not to make everything wholly accessible to everybody. A local authority that is denying access to a person with a disability because their disability does not fit in with the equipment that is on display may well argue that it would be unreasonable for it to change its entry system because it would be disproportionately expensive in relation to the one person it helped—in other words, that it would be an unreasonable adjustment. My hon. Friend would be misguided if he put all his faith in the Disability Discrimination Act, because it does not do what he seems to think it does.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

If the Act allowed for turnstiles that everybody could get through, why should that not apply to the whole country? Why are we using a private Bill to repeal a public Act? Surely this is a rather dubious constitutional procedure.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right. We all know how important toilet facilities are. When we go to a restaurant, we probably judge it as much on the provision, cleanliness and accessibility of the toilets as on the service or the quality of the food. I am as sure as my hon. Friend that Thomas Crapper would be turning in his grave if he thought that we were even contemplating the clause.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I must disagree with my hon. Friend —for the first time in his excellent speech—on the way he judges restaurants.

[Philip Davies]

I suspect that my hon. Friend visits far better quality restaurants than me. If I had his means, I am sure that I would, too. However, I have to go to establishments where sometimes you take a bit of a risk when going to the toilet.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I do not want to go on further about public toilets, suffice it to say that I hope my comments have shown that such things should be the responsibility of local authorities.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

To go back to an amendment to which my hon. Friend spoke earlier, that could be a matter of free enterprise. Groups of concerned citizens could come together to improve the trade in their area and ensure that there are convenient public conveniences.

[Philip Davies]

That is right. My hon. Friend proposes a good solution, but however they are paid for, local businesses pay rates and expect services in return. Such facilities are important in attracting people to a location. The local authority will benefit from those just as much as local businesses.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am sure that my hon. Friend is right; indeed, I recall attempts, whether successful or not, to try and develop a café culture in this country. It appears to me that clause 7 is designed to try and thwart such a café-style culture, and I do not really understand why we would want to do that.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I think that it is much worse than that; this is a fundamental attack on the rights of property. The explanatory notes state:

“Subsection (2) of section 115F provides that except where the council are the owners of the sub-soil beneath the part of the highway in relation to which the permission is granted, the charges may not exceed the standard amount”.

That is, the council may charge only reasonable costs. That means that a council would be able to charge someone for doing something on that person’s own land, which must be wrong.

[Philip Davies]

I commend my hon. Friend for being so eagle-eyed; I agree with him wholeheartedly on that point.

One of my problems with the Bill, and with this clause, is that they appear to intend to damage small businesses. We are in a terrible economic situation at the moment, and we know that small businesses are the engine of economic growth, so why on earth would the House want to pass measures that appear to have been designed to clobber small businesses? That is completely beyond me. These kinds of extra costs and bureaucracy are meat and drink to big businesses. I used to work for a large multinational company, and although these extra requirements were sometimes an irritation, we could afford to employ legions of people to deal with them. Many small businesses are struggling in the current climate, however, and they do not have the financial capability to deal with all the extra regulation and costs that the Bill seeks to impose on them. There seems to be a mindset that owning a small business is a licence to print money, that everyone who owns one has millions of pounds in the bank doing absolutely nothing, and that it is the job of a local authority to extract as much of that money as possible from them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, I have tabled a number of amendments and have also put my name to a number of others. I would like, if I may, to start by outlining why they have been proposed. The simple reason is that the Bill as drafted is extraordinarily illiberal and seeks to extend the powers of the state into the nooks and crannies of people’s lives as they carry out otherwise lawful activities that would be banned by the Bill, unless the amendments are passed.

I remind hon. Members of what was said in the Conservative party manifesto about protecting civil liberties. We said:

“Labour have subjected Britain’s historic freedoms to unprecedented attack. They have trampled on liberties…giving public bodies extraordinary powers to intervene in the way we live our lives.

The impact of this has been profound and far-reaching. Trust has been replaced by suspicion.”

The amendments I have tabled with many of my hon. Friends aim to restore that trust and to ensure that what is done is proportionate and that civil liberties are maintained. You will not be surprised to know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that some of those civil liberties go as far back as the Magna Carta and they are being undermined by the clauses that we are discussing.

Under the clauses, unidentified officers of councils who might or might not show identification may confiscate things from people, directly contrary to the Magna Carta, which states:

“No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed, or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed…except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.”

This is not the law of the land, it is the law of some minor council official—some minor bod—going around and confiscating people’s goods without having the proper authority to do so, a proper process by which to do it or a legitimacy that would give people confidence in the laws we are passing in this Parliament.

[Philip Davies]

I agree with my hon. Friend wholeheartedly. During a previous discussion on this Bill, he proposed that those council officials should wear bowler hats. If they identified themselves with a bowler hat, would he be happy for them to take on these powers?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point, because I specify in amendment 60, which has been selected, that these officers of the council should be in uniform when they carry out their duties. I have left it to the discretion of the council to determine what those uniforms should be.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful for that intervention. The Mayor of London is a man whom I admire enormously and whose writ I should think runs across the whole of London and probably should run across the world. However, he stood down from this Parliament and it therefore is not fitting that his views should be authoritative. In this instance, I do not happen to know what they are.

[Philip Davies]

rose—

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Perhaps my hon. Friend does.

[Philip Davies]

I certainly do not know what they are, but perhaps my hon. Friend ought to listen to the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) because no doubt he has just come from a meeting with the Mayor of London. He certainly was not here when we debated the first group of amendments, but he seems to think that this is very important.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I completely agree.

Daylight Saving Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 20th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am very interested by what the hon. Gentleman says, but if it were simply a case of looking for the evidence, the Government could do that anyway. The Government produce Green Papers, White Papers and discussion documents, and set up inquiries that publish reports. If every one of those required a private Member’s Bill to be passed by the House, we would be saved a large number of inquiries.

[Philip Davies]

If the Bill is not anti-Scottish and if people are happy with it, there will be no problem with ensuring that the oversight group contains members from all four parts of the United Kingdom. Does my hon. Friend agree that if the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Mr Harris) is right, the amendment should be accepted by all Members, regardless of whether they support the Bill?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

That is an excellent point. I hope that it was heard by my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris), because she is one of the wisest Members in the House, and has handled the Bill with so much charm that she almost persuaded me to support it. Perhaps she and the Bill’s sponsors will accept amendment 23.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Philip Davies]

I will give way one last time, but then I want to make progress.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I just wondered whether my hon. Friend had noticed the time on the clock, because had the Bill already come into force, the debate would by now have ended.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that observation.

My amendment 35 deals with the length of the trial period, which the Bill proposes should be three years. I return to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) made earlier about a city in Kazakhstan that had been built in 15 years; we seem to need three years to conduct this trial but I do not see why it needs to last that long. His amendment 85, in this group, recommends reducing the period to two years, which I would welcome. However, my amendment 35 urges the promoter of the Bill to reduce the trial period to just one year, because we can get a perfectly good flavour of what is going to happen in that time. Of course there would then be the opportunity, if everyone so wished, to carry out another trial beyond that period. I do not see why we should be boxed into having a three-year trial, as that is totally unnecessary.

My amendment 38 deals with the monitoring of the effect of the order. Clause 6, to which my amendment relates, provides for a situation in which the Secretary of State monitors the effect of the order “throughout the period” and then lectures all the parts of the United Kingdom—the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly—on his conclusions and, therefore, what he thinks should happen. My amendment merely asks that reports are also sought from the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly, so that they can equally make it clear what their report on the trial is. Rather than just having the Secretary of State laying down the law, it is only fair that we let those parts of the United Kingdom not only have their say but be seen to have their say, which is not the case at the moment.

Amendment 40 would delete clause 8, which relates to the power to increase the length of the trial period. I think that a trial period of three years is on the excessive side, so I obviously find it nonsensical to have a clause that then gives a power to extend the trial period. The period is already too long, so we should delete any clause that gives a power to increase it; we really should be able to make a decision after three years.

I repeat that I am most concerned about amendment 30, but I am aware that amendment 40 may not be accepted—I do not know whether it will be or not. If it is not accepted by my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point and the Minister, two further amendments I have tabled—amendments 42 and 43—would provide the House with an alternative. Basically, before an order is made to extend the trial we should either gain agreement from the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly—along the lines of the amendment promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute—or we should obtain agreement from the First Minister in Scotland, the First Minister in Wales and the First Minister in Northern Ireland, whichever option the House prefers. It seems to me that if we want to obtain the agreement of the Scottish Government or Ministers or the Welsh Government or Ministers before we start a trial, and if we want a clause that gives the power to increase the length of the trial, we must go through the same process to ensure that we are not railroading something through against the wishes of those people.

I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute was satisfied by the Minister’s response on amendment 13.

London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Philip Davies]

It is always a trial to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), because, as I am sure we all agree, we could happily sit here all afternoon and listen to him, so wise is his counsel and so entertaining is his delivery. I am afraid that I cannot match it, but I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) on tabling the amendments, and because today appears to have been a red letter day for him. Such was the speed at which our hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) rattled through the amendments which have now been accepted, that I struggled to keep up with them all, so my comments will be based on my understanding of the current situation, and I am sure that my hon. Friend will correct me if I am wrong at any point.

I certainly support the thrust of what my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset said about the amendments, and particularly about the position of accredited persons. My hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green made the point that such council officials and officers are reasonable people who will use the powers only when necessary and sparingly, that they would not be used willy-nilly, and that that was his experience of council officials.

My hon. Friend talked to me about my experience of my local police when investigating what might be considered petty or minor crime, and my experience of the police in Shipley is, as it happens, very good—but he must not only have had good experiences of council officials and officers, but also have come across the rather petty council officer who is a stickler for something and does not use any discretion or common sense.

I am sure that we have all come across those people. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset referred to traffic wardens who wait for the clock to tick down before they put their £70 ticket on a vehicle, and there are also those who measure up to see whether one inch of a car is parked on a double yellow line, even though the vast bulk of the car is well within the parking space. I am sure that we have all had experiences of these things.

It is completely unacceptable to give that kind of person additional powers to go about and terrorise what we would largely call law-abiding members of the public. In my hon. Friend’s part of the world there may well be very reasonable people who use their powers very sparingly. However, the rules would apply not only to the council officials whom he has in mind, and not only to the council officials in place at the moment, all of whom may be very reasonable people, but to council officials in future—and who knows what kind of people we may have running some of our local authorities in future? We should not be giving people all these powers just because the people we know at the moment seem to be okay. We have to bear in mind how they may be used, or abused, in future.

Employment Opportunities Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 17th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I have given way enough to the hon. Gentleman. I want to crack on because other Members want to speak. I put Labour Members’ attitude down to their being misguided. I know that the hon. Gentleman was a university lecturer. I am not sure that I class that in the wealth-creating sector. Perhaps we will debate that in the Tea Room afterwards.

Labour Members have the attitude that basically the only way for businesses to make a profit is to screw the customers and the employees into the ground as much as possible; that that is the secret for businesses in making as much money as possible; and that, if it were not for the Labour party intervening at every possible opportunity, across the country the customer and the employee would be squeezed and fat cat businesses would make massive profits. I genuinely think that that is their view of the world. That may be the view in the Victorian age that the hon. Gentleman lives in, but in the modern world that is not how business works. That is not how to make money as a business.

In the real world today, the hallmark of successful companies—the thing that they have in common—is that they look after their customers and their employees. The thing that failed businesses have in common is that they do not look after their customers and their employees. That tends to be what differentiates successful and failed businesses. I am sorry that, still in this day and age, the Labour party has not woken up to the fact that, to be successful in business, people have to look after their staff and customers and that, if they do not, they will go out of business.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I was concerned about my hon. Friend’s attack on the Victorian age, which was one of the finest ages in British history, when most employers were benevolent, kindly, good and not out of a Dickens novel: they were more Trollope than Dickens by and large.

[Philip Davies]

I can always rely on my hon. Friend to speak up for the Victorian age. In fact, he usually speaks up for an age before the Victorian age, so I commend him for being so modern, but he is right. In passing, I should say that I know that better than most, because in my constituency, I have Saltaire, which is a world heritage site made famous by Sir Titus Salt, who had his mill in Saltaire, built houses all around the factory for his employees and was the epitome of a benign Victorian mill owner, so I thank my hon. Friend for allowing me to give a plug to Saltaire in case people are looking for a great place to visit.

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch made a point about tax. It is perverse that hon. Members can be so wedded to the idea that it is outrageous for anyone to be paid below £5.93 an hour, yet in the next breath be perfectly happy for those people to be taxed. If we are going to have a national minimum wage, if it is a minimum that people can be expected to earn and live on as an employment wage, surely those people should not be taxed on whatever happens to be the minimum wage.

I cannot make a logical case for why the minimum wage should be taxed. It is not that people are taxed by just a bit. People in full-time employment on the minimum wage are taxed, if income tax and national insurance contributions are combined, at about £1,500 a year. If people want to argue for a minimum wage, that is a perfectly respectable position to hold, but surely those same people should be arguing that people on that wage should not pay any income tax. If Labour Members want to confirm now that they agree that people earning the minimum wage should not be taxed, I will happily give way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I have heard that argument. I do not want to be sidetracked, but I do not agree with my hon. Friend. The fewer people at the lower end who pay tax the better. I do not see why we should expect the lowest paid in the country to contribute to taxes. They should be allowed to take home and keep what they earn. It is very rare that I say this to my hon. Friend, but I simply do not agree.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

People on the minimum wage, regardless of their income tax position, will also pay VAT, council tax, tax on cigarettes particularly, tax on alcoholic beverages and often tax by playing the lottery. They will be contributing, even on the minimum wage.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; many of those people already pay an excessive amount of tax through their spending, as he says. The best thing that we could do is give them some relief in the income tax that they pay. There is an easy way of ensuring that we can help to stimulate the economy without penalising anybody in the amount that they take home. If the only purpose of the minimum wage is to ensure that people take home a certain amount of money each week, I do not see what objection there could be to people taking home exactly the same amount of money.

I could talk about the provisions in the Bill on asylum seekers. I am not entirely persuaded of the case made by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, because I wonder whether the Bill might unintentionally encourage even more people to come here falsely claiming asylum. He did go some way to persuading me of the merits of his case, so I would not allow that to be an objection to my supporting the Bill. I would be happy to support the Bill because of the minimum wage provision that allows people to choose whether they wish to be subject to it or not, and I would perhaps try to delete the part on asylum seekers in Committee. If hon. Members support the provision to allow asylum seekers to work and to be paid, they could equally support the Bill on Second Reading and attempt in Committee or on Report to delete the part on the minimum wage that they do not like. Given that that opportunity is there for them, I hope that we will not hear any weasel words from people who will be seen to have voted against allowing asylum seekers to work and to be paid. They are voting against that just as much as they are voting against anything else in the Bill. I hope that the hon. Member for Manchester Central will not try to weasel his way out of the fact the he is in danger of voting against something that he claims that he enthusiastically supports. He could try to delete the part he does not like at a later stage.

[Philip Davies]

For the avoidance of any doubt, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I will withdraw the word “weasel”. I certainly did not mean it in any pejorative sense.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I encourage my hon. Friend to elaborate a little on his views on clause 1, as it is tremendously important. I know that the people of Shipley will be interested, and I am pretty sure that the people of North East Somerset would like to know what he thinks.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend tempts me. I have no problem in principle with what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said in terms of people being allowed to work, particularly when they have been here for so long. There is a massive issue—the hon. Member for Manchester Central also made this point—where people have been waiting years and years for their cases to be heard and in some cases have set up a family and are still deprived from being able to work. I would prefer to tackle that by speeding up the process, rather than by accepting that the process will take ages and allowing them to work. That is my preferred solution. That is why I am not so enthusiastic about this part of the Bill. However, I will not allow that to prevent me from supporting the Bill if my hon. Friend puts it to a vote.

I appreciate that the national minimum wage is popular, I understand perfectly that it is politically expedient not to oppose it in any shape or form, and I absolutely accept that many people in this country have benefited from the national minimum wage and have seen their pay rise as a result. I do not want to undermine that point. Many people in my constituency and others have benefited from it. But in politics it is crucial that we do the right thing, even if it is sometimes unpopular to do it or to say it. It is essential that we have a proper, sensible debate about these issues to ensure that we get them right. Instead of engaging in a sensible debate where we all agree that everyone has the best interests of the public and low-paid people at heart, those who disagree with us on these matters tend to engage in some rather childish name calling and abuse, often through a lack of reason in their debates.

We want the best for everybody, and although Government Members might have different ways of going about it and a different perspective on it, nobody should be under any illusion, because we want the best for low-paid workers and people who are out of work just as much as Labour Members. I do not decry their different perspective, and I hope that they will not decry ours but instead be grown-up enough to accept that the national minimum wage has made it harder for some people to access the jobs market. If Labour Members are not prepared to accept even that, we are not going to get anywhere with trying to tackle the scourge of unemployment.

The hon. Member for Manchester Central either would not answer my question or did not know the answer to it, but the fact is that unemployment has gone up since the national minimum wage was introduced. When it was introduced, unemployment was at 1.7 million and youth unemployment was 1.1 million, and now unemployment is at 2.43 million and youth unemployment is at 1.5 million. That has happened since we have had the national minimum wage. Whether people like it or not, and whether it is convenient to point out those facts or not, they are the facts of the matter.

I am sure that all Members want everybody to have the opportunity to get a job, to develop their career and for it to flourish in every possible way, but for some people the national minimum wage may be more of a hindrance than a help, and if those people—in my view, some of the most vulnerable people in our society—consider it a hindrance and feel that for a short period taking lower pay to get on the first rung of the jobs ladder is a good thing, I do not see why we should stand in their way.

I hope that we can have that sensible debate, so that we can help everybody in society—not just people in work, but those people who are really struggling to secure their first opportunity on the jobs ladder.

Further and Higher Education (Access) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 4th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The Minister makes an absolutely brilliant point. The prestige of universities ought to be great. In fact, it should be very difficult to get into the best universities because they provide such opportunities and a career path for the ablest in our society.

Let me move on to more modern times and come to the great lady—perhaps the greatest peacetime leader of this country in the past 100 years or more—Margaret Thatcher. She was not the daughter of a butcher—unlike Cardinal Wolsey, the son of a butcher—but the daughter of a shopkeeper who was born and who lived over a shop. She got a scholarship to Oxford and transformed this country. It was not only in the 15th and 18th centuries that university admissions policies allowed great people to get to university, to be enormously successful and to transform their nation’s success as a result. That is a thoroughly good and worthwhile thing, and it was all done without the Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I have agreed with everything that my hon. Friend has said thus far, but does he not agree that all that happened without the Bill because the Governments at those times did not try to stop universities from recruiting people on merit?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I stand corrected, but I am not quite sure that I can go along with that monstrous slur on our coalition partners.

We must have Bills that do what they say, not ones that set off in one direction, hare off in another in Committee, and then say something that was never intended or given a Second Reading by the House.

Let us consider the question of merit. My right hon. Friend for a Yorkshire constituency—I forget precisely which—talked about how clauses 1 and 3 operate.

[Philip Davies]

It was my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight).

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I thank my hon. Friend. Yorkshire is a big county. It is almost as good a county as Somerset, but Somerset is particularly favoured by God.

If we are considering the basis of merit alone, how do we define merit? The Bill defines it as

“academic ability, potential and aptitude”,

but that is desperately woolly. Ability can be measured, but do we think that all exams correctly measure a student’s further success? I knew, as I completed my physics O-level, that I knew no more physics than that and that that was the limit of my ability in physics. I actually got an A grade in my physics O-level, of which I am rather proud, but if I had gone on to do physics at A-level, I would have sunk like a stone. I am sure that that is true of people doing other examinations. They might apply to university, but the university has to determine whether he or she has taken the subject to the limit of their ability and whether they would therefore find that they could go no further.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As he knows, I share his robust opinion on the merits of being in the European Union—that is, that there are no merits of being in the European Union. One problem with allowing more and more people to go to university and increasing tuition fees is that the people who go there on merit end up paying over the odds to subsidise those who do not go there on merit and who will not end up paying back their loan. That is, in effect, the system that the Government have introduced. I think that that puts a penalty on merit. I do not see why people who go to university on merit should subsidise those who are not going on merit.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

I sense that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset is cranking into action.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I thank my hon. Friend. I do not accept his description of the Government’s loan programme, because one would not be able to get the interest rate that will be paid by students in the market for an unsecured loan. Therefore, there is no penalty for those who get to university on merit.

[Philip Davies]

I take my hon. Friend’s point, but my point is that people who go to university on merit would not be expected to pay £6,000 or £9,000 if it were not for the fact that the Government want to get more people to go to university. They are being penalised in that sense. If the Government restricted the proportion of people going to university to 30% or 40%, there would be no move to increase tuition fees. It is in that sense that people are paying over the odds, or more than they would if the Government were not pursuing this strategy.

Sale of Tickets (Sporting and Cultural Events) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 21st January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I heard the hon. Lady’s argument the first time around; I was not persuaded by it then and I am not persuaded by it now.

Before anybody suggests that I am going to talk out this Bill, I should say that it is absolutely my intention—in fact, it is a guarantee—to speak for less time than the hon. Lady did when proposing it. So I hope there will be no arguments about that.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend will have to do that, because this particular business ends at 2.30 pm so the time available is obviously less.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend spotted that, too, but the situation is beyond my control. If you, Madam Deputy Speaker, tell me—not for the first time—that I have to conclude my remarks, I shall accept your ruling with the good grace that I always show.

Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Friday 22nd October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

You are very kind, Madam Deputy Speaker. It really is a red-letter day now. I shall put that in the literature I will distribute at the next election. However, what surprised me was not just that you were listening to my speech, but that anyone was listening to it. I am afraid that my experience is usually otherwise.

I hope that the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington will accept at least some of my suggestions of alternative ways in which to promote his side of the argument.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I too have been listening to my hon. Friend’s speech with great interest. Does he believe that the Bill could be amended in Committee, or does he think that we should vote it down and kill it off as early as possible?

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I hope that I shall have the pleasure of listening to his own speech today, because I enjoy his speeches immensely.

I intend to develop this point further, but my direct answer to my hon. Friend’s question is that I believe we should vote against the Bill. I do not think that any of my suggested alternatives could be incorporated into an amendment, because the Bill goes off at a tangent to them.

At the beginning of his speech, the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington said that, although others might perceive flaws in the Bill, it should proceed straight to Committee, where any such flaws could be ironed out. That strikes me as an argument for never giving a Bill a Second Reading. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North helpfully pointed out, the Bill has two clauses, and given that both appear to contain flaws, I do not think that amending them in Committee is an option. We should try to vote them down and start again from scratch. The fact that I have given advice to the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington does not mean that I would agree with any of the amendments that I have suggested should he introduce them; I merely think that they would help him to deliver what he wants to achieve.

In deciding whether to approve the Bill, we must also decide whether it is necessary. It was, I think, my hon. Friend the Member for Dover who suggested that it was a solution looking for a problem. I hope that when he sums up his argument, the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington—with his court verdicts in the bag—will tell us what problems the Bill solves, because all the evidence that he gave earlier involved problems that have now been cleared up by the Court of Appeal. It would be helpful if he told us about any current problems of which he is aware, because it seems to me that the Bill is wholly unnecessary.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

That is a fair point, and one might legitimately ask the RMT how close it is to its members when it balloted a signal box that burnt down years ago. It does not give one much confidence that the union has a close working relationship with its members.

People may forgive the RMT for not knowing that the signal box at Pelham in Lincolnshire was demolished in 2008 or that the signal box at Ascot in Berkshire was closed in October 2009. People might ask how the union could be expected to know these things—although I would presume that it should know. However, it is surely difficult for it not to be aware that the signal box at Chalford in Gloucestershire closed down in 1966. One would have thought that the union would have been aware of that. Nor should it have overlooked the fact that the signal box at Northallerton in North Yorkshire closed in 1980. I personally think that those are rather serious errors, not the minor errors that the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington suggests when he uses the case as a reason why the law should be changed.

The problems were not confined to signal boxes that were closed down 44 years ago. In 67 locations, the number of RMT members balloted exceeded the total number of employees. I do not know what the rate of union membership is among the staff of Network Rail, but I would be astonished if it were more than 100%. But that is what the RMT seems to think. A further 26 places, with up to 100 employees, were missed out completely, including the key signal box at Rugby. As we have heard, the difference in the vote between those who voted for strike action and those who voted against was 224. It is therefore difficult to argue that the examples that I have given—of the balloting of signal boxes that had burnt down or been closed, of ballot returns of more than 100% and of the failure to ballot some locations—were not material factors that should have been taken into consideration. Those are substantial errors that could have made a material difference to the result.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It occurs to me that if the Bill were enacted and then used too widely, it would allow malevolent people to use it to push through something against the will of their members and then claim that only minor errors had been made. That would be a slippery slope.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right, and we should guard against that. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman wants to exempt minor errors, which are already protected. He wants to exempt major errors from the scrutiny of the courts and we should be very wary of doing that.

In 12 locations, there were no operations staff and workers were clearly ineligible to vote—

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Gentleman is trying to lead me astray. Mr Deputy Speaker asked me not to carry on talking about history, but I disagree entirely with the hon. Gentleman’s point.

On the specifics of the proposals, we have to look at the Bill in its context. We need not go back to the great strikes of early history. I was thinking initially of Achilles sitting in his tent and about whether that was a first example of industrial action and the withdrawal of labour, and about whether we should get on to Patroclus and so on, but I thought that would be too abstruse at this time in the afternoon. However, the Bill is important because it would take us back to the industrial relations of the 1970s and 1980s, so the immediate historical context is of tremendous importance. I remember growing up—I was a child once, although I never normally admit to it. We had a wonderful debate the other day with all sorts of people saying they had once been 16. I sat here wondering whether I had ever been 16 and hoping that it had passed by quite quickly. However, when I was a child, I saw the streets, including Leicester square, used as a dumping ground for rubbish because of strikes. They were strikes that had been called not with any democratic oversight, but because unions had the ability to bully their members.

The great lady, Margaret Thatcher—Baroness Thatcher, Lady of the Garter—came in and pulled this country up by the scruff of its neck. She introduced legislation, which was opposed every time by the socialists—they opposed everything she did—to democratise the trade unions and bring them under the control of their members and to allow this country to be run by its democratically elected Government, rather than by the grand, godfather-like bosses of the trade union movement. Anything that takes us back to those days would be desperately unfortunate and risk our seeing the same number of strikes that we saw in the 1970s and 1980s and the destruction of British industry.

Our car manufacturing was destroyed by strike after strike called from mass meetings. Do hon. Members remember those mass meetings? Do they remember watching them on the television? Do they remember the voice votes controlled by a few bullies? A hand or two would go up, but they would never be counted. That was the type of behaviour we had in this country before the laws that Margaret Thatcher introduced. That put us back on to a proper footing, where prosperity could arise, commerce could take place and business could flourish. We saw the launch pad built for an amazing economic performance that was no longer being destroyed by the trade unions.

[Philip Davies]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is further to go down this route, and that if we are trying to make potential strike action fairer, which seems to be the purpose of the Bill, we should instead be providing that more than 50% of those balloted, rather than just of those who voted, have to have voted for strike action before a strike is called?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend knows that I have an affinity for thresholds in other circumstances. Obviously, I am not going to talk about that, because it is not germane to the Bill, but I think it right that a sufficient number should express their will for a ballot to be valid, and that while we are debating Second Reading, we ought to think about what else it could have said, had it been a better Bill—a Bill that the House might have liked and approved on Second Reading. It could have contained further reforms to give power back to the members. I actually believe in the slogan used by Baldwin for his election: “Trust the People”. The people are the masters of their politicians, and they know what is best for them, and the greater the democracy in trade unions, the better it is for their members.

I was struck by the Minister’s comments that the Bill would make 15 sections of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 subject to accidental mistakes and a broad interpretation. Does that not make the hairs on the backs of hon. Members’ necks stand up, when they think of what has gone before, and when they think of the possibilities for manipulation and for people to stand over others as they fill out their ballot papers? Perhaps it would be done in the canteen. Perhaps one person would gather everyone together, and if only 20% of the vote went astray, nobody would mind. It would not be substantial; it would be a minor error, a small failing, a little bit on the side.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If a union cannot run a ballot properly, that is a disastrous state for that union to be in, but people use the mechanisms to hand. We should always be suspicious—always cautious, always careful—about allowing exemptions, because as soon as we do, people work out how to use them for a purpose other than that which was initially intended. That is why legislation in this place needs to be so properly considered—and considered in due and appropriate detail—because when it is not, people might actually believe the title of the Bill, which I come back to.

As the Minister so rightly said, the title refers to “Minor Errors”. Clause 2 deals with the short title, and although I doubt whether the short title of a Bill should very often be a contentious matter, on this occasion I think that it is. I do not think that the Bill ought to be called the Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill. If passed, it should be called the Lawful Industrial Action (Coach and Horses) Act 2010, because that, as I said in an intervention on the Minister, is what it would do to the law as it stands. The Bill would get rid of so many safeguards, and this House is here to safeguard the British people—our electors—not just from over-mighty government, but from over-mighty private organisations that may wish to use and abuse their power.

[Philip Davies]

On that theme, does my hon. Friend agree that one thing that the Bill does not address is the damages that have to be paid by unions that call for action that is later found to be unprotected? Damages are capped at £250,000 in those cases, whereas the strikes at BA, for example, cost BA £40 million.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend makes an extraordinarily good and wise point. This would have been a better Bill if it had sought to raise that cap and made unions responsible for their unlawful errors.

Use of the Chamber (United Kingdom Youth Parliament)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Philip Davies

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Gentleman seems to think that members of the UK Youth Parliament are unique in not being able to vote or stand for Parliament at a general election. That, I am afraid, is not the case. They are not unique. No young people have the opportunity to participate in general elections, not just members of the UK Youth Parliament. As I made clear earlier, the royal family do not have the opportunity to vote in elections. [Hon. Members: “Sit down!] Well, this is a repetition of an intervention. Does the hon. Gentleman not accept my point? Prisoners do not have the opportunity to vote or stand for Parliament. People who are bankrupt do not have the opportunity to stand for Parliament. Again he has failed to say why the UK Youth Parliament is unique. Yet again, he has spectacularly failed to answer that point.

Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con): I am shocked that my hon. Friend is making a socialist point and saying that just because everyone cannot do it, nobody should be doing it. That is the antithesis of Conservatism. May I also correct him when he says that members of the royal family cannot vote? Our sovereign lady cannot vote, but members of the royal family who are not peers in their own right can vote.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who certainly is not the antithesis of Conservatism. I am checking whether the Whips are still writing notes, because it would be helpful if they have noted that I am not the antithesis of Conservatism: that would be helpful for my career prospects. I am grateful that he made the point that I am the antithesis of Conservatism. Thank you for that, Madam Deputy Speaker.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) made the most salient point: younger people do not vote at general elections, not because we do not allow them to use the Chamber or because we do allow them to use it, but because we do not inspire them to vote. The onus is on us. [Interruption.] I note the laughter from the Liberal Democrat Benches, but the point I am making is that what inspires people to vote in elections is people who stand up and have clear views and beliefs and are prepared to stand on matters of principle. That is what inspires people to vote. Perhaps Liberal Democrats might wish to consider that.

It is delusional to pretend that we can carry on as we always have done and trot out the same meaningless stuff that will not offend anybody, or that we can go around saying nothing worth while or meaningful and hope that nobody notices, while claiming that allowing the Youth Parliament to sit in the Chamber will inspire young people to vote. Young people do not want to vote because they never hear arguments and ideas; they never hear a battle about ideas. I was lucky enough to be brought up to be interested in politics in the 1980s, when there was a clear difference between the main political parties. Whichever side of that divide one happened to be on, it was perfectly clear where we were. I was a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. She was the person who inspired me to enter politics. No doubt lots of Opposition Members felt exactly the opposite. They knew exactly which side of the fence they were on.

The problem that we now have with inspiring young people to vote is that when they listen to debates, they are not entirely sure which side they agree with, or even which side sticks up for their principles. Indeed, when Tony Blair was the leader of the Labour party and my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) was the Leader of the Opposition, it was sometimes difficult for young people who were just getting interested in politics to know which side of the political divide they were on, or which way they should vote in an election. My point is that if we want to inspire young people to go out and vote in elections, the onus is on us to start having a battle of ideas and stand up for what we believe in, rather than just saying what we think might be popular or politically expedient.

To all those people who have been grandstanding in here about how important it is for the Youth Parliament to sit in this Chamber, let me say this. I hope that they will go away from this debate and think about what else they can do. Part of that battle might be about standing up and saying something controversial or unpopular every now and then—standing on a point of principle, arguing their point of view and trying to change public opinion, rather than just trying to follow it and saying “motherhood and apple pie” things, in order to get a nice little press release in their local papers. That is not what inspires young people to get involved in politics, and if people think that they can cover all that with an annual debate in this Chamber, they are sadly mistaken.

Other people may want to have debates in this Chamber—other people whose issues do not—