Arts Council England Funding: Coalfield Communities

Debate between Jim Shannon and Helen Goodman

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

rose—

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

rose—

Medicines Regulation

Debate between Jim Shannon and Helen Goodman

Tuesday 21st November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman]

In one sentence, my hon. Friend gets to the nub of the issue; I will probably take 20 minutes to reach it. He is absolutely right. The problem is that the Government did not make a plan, and as yet have not resolved how they will regulate medicines from 1 April 2019. I have been asking about that for a year. We have had no clear explanation, no policy statement, and no impact assessment. The Government refused to debate the matter in the course of the legislation for triggering article 50. We have not been able to debate it properly as part of the scrutiny of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, which is in Committee today, in parallel with our debate.

We are therefore extremely interested to hear what the Minister will say, especially as two months ago there were leaks from the Department of Health that the Secretary of State was flirting with the idea that we should leave the EMA and join the American Food and Drug Administration. I was particularly surprised that that was being floated, because the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry has said consistently that it thinks that we should be aligned with EMA standards. Alignment with Europe on regulation of medicine does not simply mean having the same rules on exit day; it means having a mutual recognition agreement with the EMA, and continued alignment of future regulations as they change, which they inevitably will.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on what she is saying. Obviously, as a Brexiteer, I probably have a very different opinion about what will happen on 31 March, but that is by the bye. Does she agree that it is imperative that the phenomenal work done by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency and the EMA, which she referred to, can continue? Ensuring that we are able to supply safe and effective medication not simply to the UK but to all nations worldwide must be high on the priority list of the Brexit team. That is something that she and I very much agree on.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman truly is a gentleman, and I agree with him entirely. We want to see continued UK participation in EU regulatory and medicine safety processes as well. The ABPI has also said, reasonably enough, that it wants to maintain trading terms equivalent to being a full member of the customs union, and to have a common system for VAT.

In May, the EMA and the European Commission issued a statement saying that if the United Kingdom does not stay in the single market, stick with the EMA, or join the EEA—the European economic area—but goes for a clean break, drugs made in the United Kingdom will no longer be authorised for use in the European Union, and drugs made in the European Union will no longer be authorised for use in the UK. Tackling that would involve costly and time-consuming checks. It could even mean that the availability of drugs would diminish dramatically.

What response have the Government made to that statement? What practical steps have Ministers taken? All we have seen is a letter from the Secretary of State for Health and the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to a newspaper, which said that they want a “close working relationship” with the EU, and that patient safety matters, as does certainty, long-term stability, and innovation. The letter said that Ministers will set up a regulatory system with competitive fee pricing. This afternoon, we would like the Minister to explain that.

Currently, the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency—MHRA—contributes to the EMA’s work, and the UK pays approximately a fifth of the overall costs. It is universally acknowledged that the MHRA could not take on the task of licensing all drugs without astronomical costs for the industry and the taxpayer.

Vinovium House

Debate between Jim Shannon and Helen Goodman

Wednesday 8th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is a lot of anxiety, and I will read out an email from someone who works there to explain to the Minister why:

“On the day the closure was announced to us, we were told there would be an option between a job if we were prepared to travel, or an exit package if not—a small lifeline to me that may have cushioned the closure up to my pension age, but the next day the package offer was revoked with a statement that failure to accept a compulsory transfer could result in disciplinary action.”

Will the Minister please tell us exactly what is going on? What offers are being made to people?

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing this issue to the House for consideration. Surely, if someone has a contract of employment with a Department and that contract is changed, the rights of the individual must be retained. Therefore, should not the option of a package to leave still be on the table? Should not the Government endorse and deliver that earlier commitment?

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. I agree, which is why I want to know what is going on in the Department for Work and Pensions.

The underlying issues are travel times and costs, the lack of affordable childcare and the fact that most people who work at Vinovium House combine their job with some caring responsibilities. Many work part-time close to home, as they have caring responsibilities for children or elderly parents. The Tory party claims to be the party of the family. This change will adversely affect at least 85 families and will have a devastating impact.

Let me give one example. I talked to a woman who was very young—well, I think she was very young because she was in her 30s—and a widow with two children. Unfortunately, her partner died a year ago. At the moment, she drops her children off at school, gets to work by 9 o’clock and works until 6 o’clock, but she is given time to pick her children up at 3.30 pm. If she has to go to work in another town or another place, there is no possibility that this arrangement can continue. Her children are beyond three and four years old, when free childcare is available, but are too young to leave at home after school.

One thing Ministers need to bear in mind is the pay. The highest full-time pay is £18,000, and many of these people are on £12,000. They simply cannot afford to take home less, because they have to fork out on travel costs or childcare. There is also little other office work in the area, which is why the DWP is a valuable employer.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) suggested, a third of these people come from other villages round about. There is currently a bus connection into Bishop, but if the Bishop office closes, there is no guarantee people will be able to get transport onwards to other locations. The Department’s Darlington and Peterlee offices are already scheduled for closure. I strongly suggest that the Minister’s officials stop looking on Google Maps and that she send them up to the north to start looking at the geographical problems. Let them try to get a bus at 8 o’clock in the morning to Washington, near Sunderland, or to Newcastle, and get back in time to collect children from school at 3 o’clock. It is frankly impossible; it is a five-hour trip, including eight different buses. Of course, there is the massive devastation of public transport. What is being proposed is intolerable for these families.

There are many unanswered questions. The DWP guideline for staff travel times is one hour. How many sites are available for the staff to transfer to that are within an hour’s travel by public transport? What happens to people who received travel costs for three years if they go to work at another site? What happens after that? I suppose they will have to pay for themselves. Is there capacity in other offices nearby to take on these workers? Will they need to be retrained? What will that cost?

I am extremely grateful to the Public and Commercial Services Union for arranging for me to visit the office in February. I met a large number of staff, and they said things like this: “My husband is due to leave the armed forces later this year, so that could be two of us without a job,” “I moved here specifically to be close to my elderly parents,” “There is no childcare for children over 10-years-old,” “I have a child with disabilities, which results in lots of appointments. I couldn’t manage to meet them if I had to travel further afield,” “I’m dependent on my mum for childcare. If I had to leave earlier to travel further, she might not be able to manage, because she is dependent on getting to my children on the bus,” “I’m on maternity leave. I’ve worked here for nine years, and my future is up in the air. Will I have a job to come back to?” “I live in the Dales, where there is limited and often no public transport. How could I travel further afield? If I finished work in Newcastle at half-past seven, it would be physically impossible for me to get home at night,” and “I have a child starting university in September. How can I afford to support my child if I lose my job?”

The Minister must understand that these are significant problems for people. These people are not simply cogs in a machine or units of production; these are real people with real families. Many of the staff said that, in effect, they had to put their lives on hold, because they do not know what the upshot is going to be. They have had to cancel their holidays and things like that.

I want to propose a better way forward to the Minister. Historically, the jobcentre was in Vinovium House, and it would be much better in the long term if, instead of the medical assessment team moving to the jobcentre in the marketplace, the jobcentre people moved to Vinovium House and held on to the lease with the CSA people. There is already information and communications technology, telephones and security. That move would be much more cost-effective than what is being proposed at the moment.

There is, of course, another aspect: the impact on the rest of the town. I have had a letter from the Auckland Castle Trust. I do not know whether the Minister is aware that a philanthropist called Jonathan Ruffer has put at least £50 million into restoring and regenerating Auckland castle, with a view to building up the tourist industry. The Auckland Castle Trust says that it has moved into the upper five floors of Vinovium House, and it requires that office space until 2020. It has been told that if the DWP moves, it will also have to move, and that will cost it a great deal of money. If it has to spend money moving, it will have less money for the regeneration project that it is undertaking.

The DWP decision is doubly bad; it threatens unemployment for the 80 people employed by the DWP, and at exactly the moment when the trust is bending every sinew to regenerate the town, the DWP is pulling the rug from under it. The staff are 100% committed to the local area. They have done a lot of work for local charities, and they have counted up how much they spend every week, which is about £2,000. We know from that that local shops will be extremely badly affected and there will be job losses there, too.

I think the Government should take a more holistic approach. The problem is that Whitehall lives in departmental silos, but people do not. I understand the pressure to save money, but I do not understand why Bishop Auckland is always at the sharp end. We have lost our magistrates court. We have lost our driving test centre. We have lost an HMRC officer. For once, if there is going to be centralisation, could it be into Bishop Auckland instead? I simply do not believe that the Minister can find a place where rents are cheaper than they are in Bishop; that is not credible. People in Bishop Auckland feel very strongly about this, and thousands are currently collecting signatures for a petition. As a hard-working, long-serving staff member said to me,

“It’s become about the building not the service and the staff”.

I am sure the Minister will agree that that is not the right approach.

New Media and Personal Data

Debate between Jim Shannon and Helen Goodman

Monday 15th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have secured this debate. I am, of course, delighted to see the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport at the Dispatch Box, although I am a little surprised that a Ministry of Justice Minister is not here instead. The hon. Gentleman will understand why as I develop my argument.

There are many problems relating to the use of personal data by new media companies. We could be discussing the BBC report this morning: after a journalist went on to just four websites, 40 companies put cookies on to his computer to track what he was doing. We could be discussing the fact that Google has just three months to change its privacy policy or pay a £500,000 fine or the fact that Prism, used by the United States National Security Agency, has been collecting data from Microsoft and many other large companies.

However, the specific issue that I want to talk about is the use of personal data by mobile phone companies and the special sensitivity that arises because of the fact that the mobile phone companies know the location of the user. On 12 May, The Sunday Times reported that EE had sold to Ipsos MORI the personal data of 27 million mobile phone users, including their gender, age and postcode, the websites they visited, the time of day texts were sent, and, linked to that, their location when the texts were sent. Customers were clearly not aware that their data were being handed on and used in this way. Ipsos MORI then had a meeting with the Metropolitan police to discuss selling the data on for a second time. These data go beyond anything the police can get without an application under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. The scale of this is demonstrated by the fact that in 2011 only 2,911 such orders were given. Furthermore, a proposal to allow the police to hold such data was dropped by the Home Secretary last year.

The day after reading that article, I wrote to the Minister and requested various assurances from him. I have not had an answer so far, but perhaps this evening he will respond to the points I made. I asked him whether he had discussed the matter with industry, what steps the Government had taken to ensure that such data do not fall into undesirable hands, whether he had had a report from the Metropolitan police, whether the Government believe that it is right that a larger range of data are being used and sold than is allowed under RIPA, and what action the Government are taking to protect our citizens.

Because I did not receive an answer, I wrote to the mobile phone companies and the Information Commissioner’s Office, most of which provided full responses. I also had meetings with EE, the Open Rights Group and Big Brother Watch. Three companies told me that they do not sell on personal data at all, Ipsos MORI explained that the data were aggregated into groups of at least 50 people, and Telefonica pointed out, reasonably enough, that the location data are needed for “find my nearest” services. When I asked EE if the public might judge themselves whether they were satisfied with the arrangements it had made with Ipsos MORI and suggested that the way to achieve that would be for it to publish its contract with Ipsos MORI regarding the sale, it said that it could not do so because it was “confidential”.

All the companies said they believed that their practices fell within the Data Protection Act 1998 and that the data had been anonymised as defined in that Act. The ICO said that having datasets with names or addresses stripped out and aggregated into groups of 50

“does not enable particular individuals to be identified”.

Unfortunately that is not the case. By combining these data with other datasets—for example, those of the Land Registry—individual people can be identified. In March this year, Nature published a science report by academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, Louvain and Valparaiso universities which concluded that

“in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly…four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals…These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.”

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Lady for bringing this vital issue to the House. A week does not pass in my constituency without the police warning people to be aware of a scam. Data seem to become available to many organisations, especially the mobile phone groups. Does the hon. Lady agree—I hope the Minister will also respond to this—that, rather than addressing the issue regionally, it would be best to do so with a strategy across the whole United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Indeed, the European Union will make proposals, which will obviously cover the United Kingdom. That is essential, because we are dealing with international companies, so we need international agreements to tackle the problems.

The current law is inadequate to protect people’s privacy, partly because there has been significant technological change since 1998. The advent of cloud computing and the increasing sharing of personal information on online social networks mean that fewer and fewer data are needed to identify people. Furthermore, the current consent rules are completely inadequate. For consent to be meaningful, it needs to be explicit, informed and freely given. Usually, that is not the case —the consent is buried somewhere in paragraph 157 of the terms and conditions—and people have no option to refuse if they want the service at all.

Data are not used for the purposes requested or desired by their owner. In other words, the legal definition of legitimate use is too weak. The data that mobile phone companies hold are extremely sensitive and neither those that they sell nor their changed use have been agreed with the customers. The sanctions are weak, as is evident from the fact that the ICO will fine Google only £500,000 if it does not change its policies.

There are two relevant laws: the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. Do the Government think there is a proper legal basis for processing customers’ location data for the benefit of the marketing purposes of third parties? Does the Minister believe that the ICO is taking enough action to require mobile phone companies to keep consumers informed?

If the Government think that the public are not bothered, they are surely mistaken. Last year Demos carried out some public opinion surveys as part of a report on data sharing and protection. The surveys found that losing control of personal information is the public’s most significant concern with regard to using new technology. They also found that people are sharing more, but that they have a “crisis of confidence” in relation to it. On sharing personal data, 52% of the public were non-sharers or sceptics, compared with only 27% who were described as value hunters or enthusiastic sharers.

Against that background, Neelie Kroes, the EU commissioner for the digital agenda, has made proposals to give people effective control over their personal data, which is a fundamental right for all EU citizens. Under her proposals, an individual’s consent would have to be given explicitly and there would also be a new right to be forgotten whereby, if requested, a data holder would have to delete all the data they hold on a particular person. She also proposes that people should have easier access to their personal data; that there should be a right to transfer those data from one data holder to another; that people should receive speedy information of personal data security breaches; and that there should be stronger protection for children.

The Justice Select Committee has described the draft regulation as necessary and agrees that a shared approach across the EU is necessary for dealing with these large multinational companies, yet the Lord Chancellor has described the proposals as “mad”. The Government have complained about the costs and the potential loss of £15 million of income in fees to the ICO.

Of course no one wants to impose unnecessary burdens on business, and especially not on small and medium-sized enterprises, but if the Government got their act together and started taxing those large new media companies properly, they would easily acquire the necessary resources to enable the institutions to provide proper protection for our citizens. That is evident from the fact that Google paid only £3 million in tax on a £2 billion turnover.

Furthermore, the Government seem to be supporting attempts to weaken people’s rights. The Ministry of Justice’s summary of responses document, which it published in June 2012, said that the Government would

“resist the proposal that subject access rights be exercisable free of charge”,

and that they would resist the right to be forgotten. Although they accepted that people should receive notifications of data breaches, they resisted the introduction of a speedy timetable for them. They also felt that the imposition of a fine of 2% of turnover would be “disproportionately high”.

To summarise my argument, 70% of Europeans are concerned that companies use data for purposes other than that for which they were collected, and 94% of the British public worry about their online privacy. British people’s data have been used and sold without their knowledge, and the rapid pace of technological change means that the law is in urgent need of updating. Privacy is a fundamental human right and the EU is now bringing forward sensible proposals to tackle this, which the Lord Chancellor has described as “mad”. Is this because the Tory-led Government are so in hock to big business that they refuse to protect citizens’ privacy, or because the Lord Chancellor is so Europhobic that he cannot recognise a good idea when it comes along?