The Growth Plan

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Friday 23rd September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

We are discussing support for off-grid properties where people rely on heating oil and other forms of energy. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy will be discussing it as well, and will set out the position in more detail very soon.

[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

I welcome the short-term support for energy costs that the Government are pursuing. I also welcome their focus on longer-term growth, but does my right hon. Friend agree that growth is dependent on the confidence not only of businesses, but of the households that spend on the products and services those businesses create? Does he also agree that that confidence will evaporate if people’s mortgage costs increase further than the benefits they gain from tax reductions? Will he do all he can to make sure that does not happen?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

My right hon. and learned Friend is right. The two interventions I announced today—the energy intervention and reducing the tax burden—will have a positive impact on inflation. He is quite right that there is a risk in respect of interest rates. I regularly speak to the Governor of the Bank of England to seek his views on that. We work closely together and are focused on alleviating the burden on our constituents.

Better Jobs and a Fair Deal at Work

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine), and unlike her, I find much to welcome in this Gracious Speech.

It will not surprise the House at all if I pick out the draft Online Safety Bill—a Bill that has had a long journey so far, some of which I have walked myself, and has further to go. Of course, I warmly welcome its publication, and although it is true that the fact that it is a draft Bill means that much of its impact will be delayed, I do appreciate the Government’s determination to get it right, especially if, as I believe to be the case, they are open to refining and improving the Bill as it makes its way through pre-legislative scrutiny. The detail of course needs to be scrutinised, but we can already say what this Bill is not. It is not a full-frontal assault on freedom of speech, as some would claim. It is a way to address the fact that restrictions on bad behaviour and protections for the vulnerable that exist in other environments do not exist at all online, and that is more and more unacceptable, the more of our lives we spend online. Also, the truth is that freedom of speech is not, and has never been, unlimited offline. We cannot say anything we want in print, in broadcast media or on the street. The criminal law confines us, and so do other standards, of decency or protection of children for example. The same should be true online.

We must of course ensure that we define carefully a duty of care on online platforms to keep their users as safe as they reasonably can, but these are highly capable companies, and systems or business models that permit or even promote harm can and must be changed. Although we should recognise and commend the progress that platforms are already making, we know, and they know, that self-regulation is no longer sufficient. We need an independent regulator with the capacity and the tools to do the job. That is what the Online Safety Bill can achieve, and we have an opportunity to lead the world in doing it.

Of course, in other areas of policy we already lead the world. I was pleased to hear in the Gracious Speech an ongoing commitment to overseas aid, but I noted, too, the absence of any proposed legislation to change the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015. I hope that means that any reduction in the percentage of our national wealth spent on aid is an aberration and a temporary failure to meet the current target in the exceptional circumstances envisaged by, and set out in, the 2015 Act, rather than a policy change. Urgent clarification of that, and of the circumstances in which we will return to 0.7%, would help those of us who could not support a deliberate, strategic and long-term reduction in aid and help to reassure the rest of the world that we will remain a global leader on this subject.

Finally, I come to social care. The problem is evident, but there is a reason why we have not for decades had a functioning social care policy solution. It is because any such solution will be very complicated, and elements of it are likely to be very unpopular. However, this is a collective failure of policy across the political spectrum, and resolving it must be a shared responsibility, because the implementation of any serious social care reform will outlast any single Government. It is also likely to require more of the taxpayer and more of individuals to save for their own care when they can afford to do so.

[Mr Perkins]

I agree entirely with what the right hon. and learned Member is saying about the complexity of the care issue and the need to work together on it. However, the Prime Minister stood on the steps of Downing Street and told us that he had a plan that he would bring before us if he was elected. If we are to start a debate, surely the starting point ought to be that plan. Why do we not all see the plan, if indeed it exists, and then we can discuss the bits we all agree on?

[Jeremy Wright]

I am tempted to agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. He is right that all of us, including the Government, have to be braver than we have been and more willing to recognise the urgency of the situation. He is right that this reform cannot wait.

The truth is that our emergence from the covid-19 crisis demonstrates both the need for social care reform and also the political opportunity for it. Let us take the lesson from the election results we have just had. I think we can conclude from those that the different parties in office across the UK have all been rewarded by the electorate for addressing the crisis before them, even when doing so required difficult and unpopular measures. The challenge facing social care is also a crisis, just one unfolding at a slower speed. It is time, surely, to ask the electorate the support the right response to that crisis, too. Finally, I remind my colleagues on the Front Bench that they have considerable political authority to do this. This is a Government who have, as the hon. Gentleman has reminded us, promised to fix social care and who have a substantial parliamentary majority, there to be used, surely, to keep our promises. So let us get on with it.

The Economy

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to contribute to this debate about the economy. It is an economy that is changing, and I want to use my few minutes to speak about that change.

Technology has already transformed many of our businesses and much of our economic activity is now happening online, but of course some things have not changed. The Government still need businesses to create wealth to tax and spend on public services, and businesses still need the Government to provide the environment in which wealth can be created. But in the new digital economy, Government policy making needs to be quicker and more imaginative, and it needs to do several things at once.

Policy making needs to provide for necessary infra- structure, including broadband. It also needs to deliver the increased investment in science and research referred to in the Gracious Speech, and an immigration system designed to allow the brightest minds to contribute to our ongoing prosperity. But there is something else that policy has to do. It needs to create the ethical and regulatory frameworks within which technology advances. Now, some fear that innovation is stifled by ethical safeguards, but I think it is the opposite; I think that it can be the absence of ethical safeguards that holds innovation back.

Let us take artificial intelligence as a good example. The real potential for AI is in the intelligent utilisation of data, and lots of it. It cannot bring truly transformative improvement without that data, and much of the data it needs—some of it very sensitive—it is in the hands of individuals who understandably worry about what may be done with it. They will not make their data available if they are not persuaded that there are ethical safeguards in place to protect it. The Government need to design and implement those safeguards.

[Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Wright]

I will.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. May I suggest that if there are lots of interventions, people who wish to make speeches are going to end up with a reduced time limit?

[Stephen Metcalfe]

I just want to make a comment in the light of what my right hon. and learned Friend was saying about ethics in the use of data. Does he agree that the UK has historically led the field in the creation of ethical frameworks, and that we are well placed to do so again when it comes to AI?

[Jeremy Wright]

I agree with my hon. Friend. In the interest of saving time, he takes me directly to my next point, which is that we in the UK are well placed to do the work to which he refers. We are respected not just for our scientific expertise, but also for our regulatory expertise. I hope very much that the Government will engage fully in that task.

Finally, I urge the Government to maintain their commitment to internet safety and the reduction of online harms. I was very proud to bring forward the online harms White Paper in conjunction with a number of ministerial colleagues, including my right hon. Friend the Chancellor when he was Home Secretary. That White Paper sets out a response to online harms in social media and other user-generated content that seeks to balance freedom of speech with protection of the vulnerable in a fast-moving landscape where, frankly, hardly any rules have been applied so far. I believe that the approach it sets out strikes that balance well, but we certainly heard arguments that said, “Hold back. Let someone else regulate first, in case all the investment coming into the UK now from Google, Facebook and all the rest goes somewhere else instead.” Well, I rejected those arguments then and I reject them now—not least because, as these companies generally accept, if social media and other online spaces are not seen as safe spaces, people will increasingly choose not to be there, and if people are not there, they cannot be sold anything there, so it is good business as well as good policy to make them safer. I am therefore pleased to see in the Gracious Speech a commitment to continue to develop proposals to improve internet safety, but I am disappointed not yet to see a commitment to legislate to do so. I understand Ministers’ preference to pursue pre-legislative scrutiny first, and it is important to get this right, but I urge them not to lose momentum.

At this crucial moment in the development of the digital economy, we should not just act to protect the vulnerable in our own communities; with that well-deserved reputation for both innovating and regulating effectively, we should also be proud to lead the world in making the internet a safer place.

HMP Wellingborough

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Wednesday 5th September 2012 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

It is a pleasure, Ms Dorries, to see you in the Chair. This is my first opportunity to speak with my new responsibilities. It is an even greater pleasure to be able to respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone). I congratulate him on obtaining this debate, and on how he presented his case. I agree entirely with the assessment by my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) of how he serves his constituents.

I want to put on the record the Government’s appreciation of the continued efforts of all those who work at HMP Wellingborough. Like front-line staff in prisons throughout the country, they do a huge amount of excellent work that is hidden behind prison walls. I want to make it clear that any decision to close the prison is not a reflection of their work or performance.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough knows that any decision to close a prison is not taken lightly, and is never easy. As he would expect, it follows a comprehensive evaluation process led by senior operational managers in the Department and in the National Offender Management Service. Any such decision deserves an explanation not just to him, but to those he represents and to those who have campaigned to keep HMP Wellingborough open. The way in which he heard about the announcement of the closure is, as he said, profoundly unacceptable. It should not have happened, and I apologise to him for that.

I want to explain why the decision was made, and to set out the context for the decision-making process. As my hon. Friend knows, it is the duty of any Government to ensure that the prison system retains sufficient capacity and resilience to manage all those committed to custody by the courts. I assure him and the House that neither the Secretary of State nor I, as the prisons Minister, will announce any reductions in prison capacity unless we are confident that that duty can be discharged. It is equally clear that the Government have a duty to their citizens to ensure that we make best use of public funds. As a result, we must ensure that we do not maintain an over-provision of prison accommodation or operate prisons that are uneconomic. My hon. Friend should know that there has been the sort of comprehensive analysis that he says he wants across the system to determine which prisons those should be.

The prison system is necessarily complex, as my hon. Friend understands it must be to meet a variety of needs. They include being able to receive new prisoners direct from courts throughout England and Wales, providing health care and education, tackling deep-rooted, dangerous and harmful behaviour, and providing specialist intervention to particular groups of prisoners. Maintaining a wide geographical spread of prisons and a functional balance that meets the changing needs of the prison population is essential. By doing so, we remain able to carry out the punishments by the courts, to maintain strong security to protect the public, and to provide opportunities for different types of offenders to reduce the likelihood of them committing further crimes. Accordingly, individual prisons are robustly assessed to determine whether their closure is operationally viable before a recommendation is made.

My hon. Friend has reminded me that this is my first day in the job with all the constraints involved. A large proportion of my career at the Ministry of Justice so far has been spent on HMP Wellingborough, and I have, as he would expect, asked some questions about the decisions that have been made. I am satisfied that the process has been followed correctly, and that all the necessary criteria have been met. I know that that will discourage him from continuing his campaign, and I fully understand that. I and, I am sure, my right hon. Friend Secretary of State for Justice will be happy to discuss the matter with him further, but I want to be realistic.

[Mr Bone]

I am grateful to the Minister for reading out the notes from his officials, and he is doing exceptionally well. I thank him for offering to have a meeting with me and perhaps the Secretary of State. Can that meeting take place soon? Otherwise, there will be no point in having it.

[Jeremy Wright]

At this early stage in my career, I cannot speak for my diary, let alone for that of the Secretary of State. However, I have no doubt that if my hon. Friend, with all his persistence and eloquence, asks the Secretary of State for a meeting, he will get one as soon as it can be arranged.

[Mr Hollobone]

I very much respect the Minister, who is a good man, but this is day one of his job, and he has not even had time to sleep on the matter. As a human being, he cannot possibly be confident that the assessment of this prison closure is right. I know that that is what his officials are telling him, but he has simply not had time to digest it and to think about it. It would be perfectly reasonable for him to tell the House that as it is day one of the job and he has not had time to sit and think about the matter, he will postpone the decision for a set period. He could then be confident about whether it should close.

[Jeremy Wright]

My hon. Friend makes a tempting offer. This may be day one for me in the job, but it is not day one of consideration of the issue. If he is patient, I will try to explain the work that has been done, and the reasoning that led us to the decision. I take him back to July when the then Secretary of State announced the closure of HMP Wellingborough. The gap between the prison population and our useable capacity then stood at 3,500 places, which represented the most headroom experienced in the prison estate since early 2011, with more empty prison places than there were before last year’s announcement of the closures of HMP Latchmere House and part of the Hewell cluster, formerly known as HMP Brockhill. It also represented more unused places than were available immediately before the serious public disorder in August 2011, and I remind the House that the prison system coped admirably with the unprecedented prison population growth experienced following those events.

The latest figures demonstrate that that degree of headroom has widened further, with a population of 86,708 on Friday 31 August against a useable capacity of 90,897, a gap of more than 4,100. Throughout this year, the capacity of the prison system will increase further as new accommodation at HMP Oakwood and HMP Thameside, with a total of more than 2,500 places, becomes fully operational. The provision of new accommodation is part of our wider strategy to improve prison conditions, to reduce operating costs, and to ensure that the prison system is able to provide opportunities for prisoners to work and to reduce their risks of further offending. That goes entirely to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough made about capacity within the system. Accordingly, it is clear that the loss of 588 places at HMP Wellingborough will not materially affect the Government’s ability to accommodate all those who are committed to custody by the courts in the foreseeable future.

My hon. Friend made the point that even if a prison closure is necessary, it need not be the prison in his constituency. Indeed, he has previously made similar arguments forcefully. The reason for closing HMP Wellingborough is, as he knows, linked to what happened when the running of that prison was put up for competition by the previous Government. He will recall that the reason for withdrawing HMP Wellingborough from that competition has been known to the House for some time. It was central to the decision on closure, and is summed up in the comments of the then Secretary of State:

“During the preparations for the bid it became apparent that competition could not produce improvements at HMP Wellingborough without significant capital investment to secure its long-term viability. In the current financial climate, this is clearly not a tenable proposition, so I took the decision to remove it from the competition process.” —[Official Report, 31 March 2011; Vol. 526, c. 526.]

It has taken longer than we would have hoped to determine the prison’s future, not least because of the significant pressure placed on the prison estate in the aftermath of last year’s public disorder. However, in the intervening period, the continued deterioration of the site has only served to make the need for a decision more pressing. They key point is that the cost of running the prison is not solely operational, as there are also costs for repairs and for bringing the prison up to an acceptable standard.

My hon. Friend mentioned that Wellingborough is the third most cost-effective prison in the country, but as ever, it depends on how that is calculated. That statistic relates to the prison’s running costs; it does not take account of the capital costs required to deal with the backlog of improvements that are needed on site. He is right that Wellingborough has an annual budget of £11.6 million for 588 places, which does not compare unfavourably with other prisons of the same type. However, as it was built in the 1960s, the physical fabric has deteriorated over the years.

[Mr Bone]

I hope that the Minister does not believe everything he is being told. More than half the prison was built in the last 10 years and it is exceptionally modern. The renovations that he mentions are about knocking down and completely rebuilding the old part of the prison. It is not quite as he is explaining it to this Chamber.

[Jeremy Wright]

In my understanding, it is true that almost half the current prisoner accommodation was built in the last 12 years, but sadly, that accounts for less than 25% of the prison’s overall infrastructure. It is not simply the accommodation that needs bringing up to standard; many other improvements are required and I shall come back to those, if my hon. Friend will forgive me.

My hon. Friend mentioned the figure of £50 million, which is the amount required in a major refurbishment programme. He is right that there is no such thing as an accurate, round number in these matters—if he wants the accurate figure, however, I understand that it is £49.7 million, and I hope he will forgive that being rounded up a little. The prison is increasingly unsafe, with poor services and infrastructure.

The proximity and size of the financial liability has presented prison management with a decision. We could either proceed with the outstanding and necessary refurbishments, which, as I have said, are estimated to cost up to £50 million. That would improve the wings that were not built in the past 12 years—wings A to E—and includes the services infrastructure. That would happen at a time when there is sufficient prisoner accommodation in the rest of the prison estate and many other pressures, as my hon. Friend knows, on the Department’s budget. Alternatively, we could close the prison and use the capital to better effect elsewhere.

Prison closures are only part of the Department’s wider strategy, and we will discuss them at length on another occasion. I hope that my hon. Friend will accept—if not today, at subsequent meetings—that we have looked at this very carefully. I am sorry that I cannot offer him better news this afternoon. I can assure him, however, from what I have been able to determine, that careful consideration has been given to the matter.

[Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)]

Order. We move on to the next debate.

Summer Adjournment

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury (Jeremy Wright)]

I am delighted to have the opportunity to respond to this short but varied debate. I should apologise to all Members who have taken part, however, as I will not be able to give them the detailed answers their contributions deserve in the time available, but I do want to respond to some of the points they raised.

My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) expressed concerns about the drug khat. The Government share his concerns. He rightly pointed out that we do not have a great deal of information about the extent of the use of khat. What we know at present is based on a 2010 estimate that about 0.2% of the population reported using it. My hon. Friend asked about acquiring more information. I can tell him that there are now—since, I think, October 2009—questions in the British crime survey about the use of khat, and I hope that will lead to the Government having more information in making appropriate decisions.

In 2006, the previous Government decided to accept the advice of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs not to ban khat at that point. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary wrote to the ACMD in February of this year asking it to review the available evidence now, and to reconsider the question of controlling khat under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. I can tell my hon. Friend that that work will begin in the autumn, and that we therefore expect in the fullness of time to have a good deal of information available from the ACMD and conclusions the Government can consider in deciding what to do next.

My hon. Friend would not expect me to prejudge the outcome of that ACMD review, and I will not do so. However, I can tell him that it will be thorough, and I am also sure that the ACMD will be interested in any evidence he and others can bring forward for its consideration. As I say, the decision that it takes and the decision that the Government then take will be based on evidence.

That brings me neatly to the remarks made by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). She made two proposals to the Government, the first of which was that drugs policy should be evidence-based and the second that we should move away from the criminalisation of drug use towards a more health-based model. I shall deal with both of those in turn.

The first point to make is that we already have a balanced drugs policy. It is right that drugs policy should be based on evidence and that it should be balanced, not just on criminalisation but on other issues. The title of last December’s drugs strategy, to which the hon. Lady referred, starts with the words “Reducing Demand, Restricting Supply, Building Recovery”. All those elements are important, and we will continue to evaluate the strategy to make sure that it is delivering what it should. The strategy set out, for example, that the commissioning of drug and alcohol treatment services will be a core responsibility of local directors of public health, so there will continue to be a health-related element to the Government’s drugs strategy, and that is as it should be. There will also be an education element to the strategy. It is right to say also that young people need to understand exactly what they are dealing with when faced with a variety of illegal drugs and they need to be discouraged from taking them.

That brings me on to the second area. I understand that the hon. Lady had a very limited time in which to make her case on this important issue. I have an even more limited time in which to reply, so I understand that we are restricted in what we say. However, I disagree with her view that the right answer is to decriminalise the drugs that we are discussing. The simple reason for that is that legalising something that was previously illegal sends out a very clear message, and that message is that society no longer disapproves of this item in the way that it previously did. That would be acceptable only if the effect of these drugs was not as damaging as it is. The hon. Lady says that she is interested in evidence when it comes to drugs policy, so she must accept that the evidence clearly shows that illegal drugs of the type we are discussing are extremely damaging. They are damaging to the individual who takes them and to their family, and to the wider community. Therefore society should not take a neutral view on whether these drugs are a good or bad thing; society should take a strong view that they are a bad thing. The Government’s view is therefore that those drugs should remain illegal.

I will certainly pass to the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone), the invitation from the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) to visit the Fortalice refuge, and I am sure that my hon. Friend will consider it. The hon. Lady was right to say that the people who work there do a remarkably good job and offer a service that many people find extremely valuable. However, I do not think it is right to conclude that the funding difficulties with which the Government certainly have to contend on a range of fronts mean that these types of services cannot be provided.

The hon. Lady will know that a substantial part of the local funding to refuges such as the one in her constituency comes from the Supporting People programme. In relation to that programme, £6.5 billion-worth of funding has been secured for the current spending review period. Admittedly, that represents a reduction, but the average annual reduction over the four-year period is less than 1% in cash terms. Central funding is also available and the Government are making available £28 million of stable Home Office funding over that period for specialist services, including independent domestic violence advisers, independent sexual violence advisers and co-ordinators for multi-agency risk assessment conferences. Those are all important services that she will recognise, and they co-ordinate with the types of services at the refuge in her constituency that she is describing.

I was discussing the Government’s commitment to preventing violence and abuse against women and girls, not just in the UK but more broadly so I shall move on to deal with the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison). As she said, she has spoken in this House before—and powerfully—on female genital mutilation. She has done so again today and she is right to say that this practice constitutes horrific abuse of often very young children. It remains a crime, as she says, and it has been a crime since 1985. More specifically, under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 the maximum sentence for this offence has been increased to 14 years’ imprisonment. Crucially, as she said, this Act allows the behaviour of British citizens abroad to be punished, whereas previously it could not be. That is an important point for the reason she gave, which is that occasionally such activity was transferred abroad to avoid the effect of the criminal law.

My hon. Friend would probably also agree that there are a number of things we can do. We should look not only to punish those who are responsible for committing these offences but to improve the guidance available to prosecutors so that they can prosecute more often. She is right that there have been no prosecutions, but it is worth noting that there have been some 58 investigations into this offence. If there are difficulties with prosecuting, they might be to do with the types of information and understanding that Crown prosecutors need to have, and later this summer the CPS will therefore be issued with new guidelines to assist, we hope, in taking forward prosecutions where appropriate.

I am sure that my hon. Friend will agree that we can do more. We can raise awareness of the issue, which remains in many ways a hidden crime, and we will therefore attempt to get more Government guidelines to teachers, general practitioners and nurses, who need to understand the signs of such offences so that they can identify them. We also need to broaden awareness more generally and we have sent out some 40,000 leaflets and 40,000 posters to schools, health services, charities and community groups, because wider society needs to understand what is happening. We also need to assist victims, which we are doing with 15 specialist NHS clinics offering a range of services, including so-called reversal surgery. Women can go to those centres direct and do not need to be referred. Finally, this is a cross-government issue. It is not simply the Home Office that must act but the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for Education and the Department of Health.

Let me turn finally to my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who spoke, as he has before, about the tragic and worrying events in his constituency. He is right, of course, that the Government should be very clear about the consequences of knife crime not just for the victim but for the offender. Let me make it very clear that so far as this Government are concerned, those who commit a criminal offence using a knife can expect to go to prison. As my hon. Friend knows, a prison sentence is available not just for adult offenders but for young offenders, and in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which is making its way through the House, the Government propose a new offence of having an offensive weapon in a public place and threatening someone with it. That offence will receive a mandatory six-month prison sentence, unless that would be unjust in all the circumstances.

My hon. Friend is also right to point out that we need to ensure that resources find their way to the problem. On that front, he might know that the Home Office has committed £18 million over the next two years, up to 2013, to support police, local agencies and the voluntary sector in tackling crime involving weapons and youth crime more generally. That includes £3.75 million for the three police forces where most knife crime occurs, and, as he would expect, that includes London.

It is also important, as my hon. Friend said, that we support those community projects that help to deter young people from involvement in knife crime. On that front, he will be interested to know that the Government have committed £400,000 to an organisation known as Kids Taskforce, which helps to educate school pupils about knife crime. He may have come across the organisation, because its materials are used by schools in Harrow.

My final point—I know my hon. Friend would support this—is that we must make those who are tempted to carry a knife understand that doing so does not, as they might believe, make them safer but makes them less safe. That is part of our education task when we deal with knife crime. I know that he would wish us to pursue that and that he would hope that it would be pursued in his constituency.

My speech has not covered all the contributions that have been made in the detail that would be justified, but I am grateful to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to respond to the extent that I have. I wish you and all those who work in this building a very prosperous and happy recess.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—