Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill

Debate between John McDonnell and Jim Shannon

2nd reading
Monday 3rd February 2025 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Ind)]

I do not want to repeat what has been said by others, but I will share my perspective on the Bill. It is in two parts, and there is almost unanimity about the first part, which deals with how we tackle fraud carried out through contracts and so on. I thank the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister) for pointing out some of the elements of real concern in that part of the Bill, which, to be frank, I missed. The Bill has been published for only a week, and it has been difficult to go through it. I have been somewhat distracted by the Government trying to concrete over a quarter of my constituency with a third runway at Heathrow, and elements of the Bill need further examination. To be frank, I think it will face legal challenge in some form.

I cannot welcome the first half of the Bill enough, which deals with tackling overall fraud. I was the first MP to raise with the then Chancellor the corruption that was taking place with covid bounce back loans. I raised it a number of times in the House, and I wrote to him twice. I received a standard letter that was almost identical to the response I got from the banks, which said they were going through their usual investigatory process, and then we eventually discovered that fraudulent claims for bounce back loans amounted to at least £5 billion. I welcome the first half of the Bill, because we need to be ruthless on the corruption and fraud that takes place.

However, the second part of the Bill, particularly clause 74 and schedule 3, is where we are straining, to be frank. Some hon. Members have mentioned the context already. There is real fear out there among people who claim welfare benefits, particularly disabled people. It is a result of their being targeted, and of careless language in this place and elsewhere. That is then exaggerated even further by the media, and benefit claimants become targets.

I echo what the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, because I have the same problem in my constituency. Sometimes it is about telling people to claim what they are entitled to, because they are terrified of the stigma around claiming benefits at the moment, particularly older people. The atmosphere that we now have is a climate of fear, and I am worried that this debate will add to that climate of fear.

The Secretary of State said that any proposal has to be proportionate, safe and fair, but there are real concerns about the proportionality of this Bill. As other Members have said, it is a mass surveillance exercise. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I fear that once we start down the path of surveillance in this way, others will come back with proposals for where we can go further. As Members have said time and again, there is an issue with safety. How many lessons do we have to learn about the way that computer systems and the use of algorithms have destroyed people’s lives? My hon. Friend the Member for Normanton and Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) said that the banks are gearing up, but they have expressed concern that the Bill is almost an exercise beyond their abilities. As a result, there will be errors, which will reinforce the climate of fear around benefits.

[Jim Shannon]

I apologise for omitting this issue from my speech. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the Government have decided to penalise those who have been charged with alleged fraud? Does he feel that there should be a system in place so that they can appeal?

[John McDonnell]

That is why the code of practice is going to be interesting. The code of practice needs to be published as rapidly as possible to see what mechanisms will be available for us to protect our constituents.

I have one area of experience with regard to the flagging up of sums of money that raise concerns: in the debates that we had on tax avoidance, we talked about suspicious activity reports. There is a record of real faults and a high number of errors in that process. As a result, people have been not just penalised, but penalised unfairly and exposed unfairly. It is not that I am in any way a defender of tax avoidance or anything like that, but if we are to introduce a system, we need to make sure that it is secure and effective, and does not penalise people unfairly.

The Bill is supposed to be proportionate, safe and fair. The reason why people will feel that it is unfair is that it specifically targets people who are often in desperate need. If there was a group of people whose accounts we would want to monitor because there has been a history of fraud, and who have had to pay money back—some have gone to prison—it would be MPs. I was here during the expenses scandal. Following that experience, are we really not monitoring our accounts for undue payments and so on? Why is it always the poor who we target in this way?

As I said, I am really worried about the climate of fear, particularly among people with disabilities, which the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling) mentioned. We know about 600 suicides that are related to DWP activity. We circulated John Pring’s book “The Department”, which looks at the DWP’s role in those deaths, to all MPs, and it was starkly obvious that it had made a significant contribution, if not caused them. I remember a case in Scotland in which a poet in Leith committed suicide but did not leave a suicide note; he just left a letter from the DWP beside him.

My view is that whatever steps we take in exercising the powers in the Bill, we have to be extremely careful. One of the things I want to raise—if I can crowbar it into this legislation through an amendment, I will—is that a number of us, on the basis of the work of Mo Stewart, who does research on poverty and welfare benefits, have said that we must give people assurances that they will be protected and that we will do everything we can to cause no harm, and certainly not cause any further suicides, but we must also learn the lessons of what has happened in the past.

One of Mo Stewart’s proposals is for an independent advisory panel for DWP-related deaths. We have exactly that system in place for deaths in custody. We have an advisory system at the moment for the DWP but, to be frank, it is not working. The minutes of the panel’s meetings are cursory, and it does not do detailed reports in the same way as the deaths in custody panel. If we are to reassure people out there that we really are looking after their interests, that is one small step that we could include in this legislation. I am not sure that we will be able to crowbar it into the title of the Bill, but I will do my best and would welcome other Members’ creative drafting to help me. Such a measure would send out the right message. The Secretary of State has tried to do that tonight with her assurances about the processes, but I am not sure whether that will be enough, given the climate of fear that we now have.

What are the next steps? I hope that there will be sufficient time in Committee for us all to get our head around the detail of the Bill. I hope that there will be more consultation; it would be better to delay Report to enable that. I also wish to raise the same issue as the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion (Siân Berry): we were given assurances that the proposals would be implemented by co-production rather than announced from above.

It would be an example of good governance if there were a process of proper consultation. After the Ellen Clifford case, in which the High Court ruled against the previous Government on their consultation, the spirit of the Government’s response was that there would then be proper consultation, hopefully on the principle of “Nothing about us without us”. Consultation on the detail of the Bill throughout its passage would be the best example that this Government could give of that process working productively so that we get it right and we do not endanger any more people, as unfortunately has happened in the past.

Detention of Alaa Abd el-Fattah

Debate between John McDonnell and Jim Shannon

Thursday 5th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

Alaa’s case is becoming a cause célèbre, not just in this country but across the globe, as demonstrated by the number of significant figures and also by the number of constituents who are now contacting us about the case.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the right hon. Gentleman for bringing this forward. I have spoken to him. In today’s debate, which I hope the right hon. Member watched on TV, he would have seen the Minister come forward with some ideas on how to take this matter forward. It has been mentioned that Alaa Abd el-Fattah is a British citizen. Carrying a British passport has to mean more than just being a British citizen; it gives us rights. Where are those rights? Does the right hon. Member agree that his continued detention should raise red flags with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office? Further, does he not believe that this deserves a greater push for Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s release? I hope that the Minister’s reply will outline some of the things that I believe the Government will do in a positive fashion.

[John McDonnell]

I will come on to some of those issues later in my speech, but this was a running theme in the debate that took place earlier as well.

To follow on from what my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) said with regard to Alaa’s case and the show of support, last year, more than 100 Parliaments echoed the call for his release in a letter to the then Foreign Secretary. In this new Parliament, Alaa has found support across the Benches. Today’s debate on the protection of British nationals arbitrarily detained abroad has demonstrated the breadth of that support. We also have a new all-party parliamentary group taking up the case.

Following the decision by the Egyptian authorities to effectively ignore the end of Alaa’s sentence, his mother, Laila Soueif, a professor of mathematics at Cairo university, whom a number of hon. Members have met, resorted to the only method that she thought she had left—a hunger strike. Today is the 67th day of that hunger strike. Since 30 September, she has consumed no calories, surviving solely on salts, black coffee and herbal tea. She has lost 22% of her body weight, and, as anyone who has experience of hunger strikes knows—unfortunately, in this country, we have known them in the past—she is now entering an extremely urgent and dangerous phase. Laila, who was born in London, felt compelled to take this extreme action because she believed that she was not being listened to by either of her Governments—both in Egypt and, unfortunately, in the UK.

Alaa has been repeatedly targeted by the Egyptian Government. He was first arrested in 2006 for protesting for the independence of the judiciary. In October 2011, he was arrested after writing a newspaper article detailing the Egyptian military’s killing of mostly Egyptian Christian protesters, known in Egypt as the Maspero massacre. The original demonstration was against the demolition of a church.

In 2013, Alaa was arrested again, falsely accused of organising a protest in violation of Egypt’s draconian protest law. He was released from prison in March 2019 after serving his five-year sentence. But the terms of his release were draconian. He was required to sleep inside a police station every night, so from 6pm until 6am he was effectively imprisoned again. During this period, Alaa continued to document the ways in which prisoners were treated in Egyptian prisons, publishing articles in the online newspaper, Mada Masr. While sleeping in the police station, he was visited in the middle of the night by security agents who threatened him and told him to stop writing. He courageously refused to do so. Among the many things that he wrote and shared was a story on Facebook about a man who had died in prison, allegedly after being tortured.

After six months, Alaa was re-arrested. In September 2019, he was arrested while inside the police station where he was required to sleep and taken to an undisclosed state security facility. His lawyer, Mohamed el-Baqer, found him and was himself arrested while representing Alaa. The lawyer is now serving four years in prison.

Alaa was held in inhumane conditions at Tora prison. In a cell with no sunlight, he was denied access to books, exercise, a radio, a mattress or bedding, or any time out of his cell. He was not even allowed a clock to be aware of the time of the day, so days would pass without him realising. Worst of all, he was placed under the custody of the very same officer who was accused of torturing a man to death. Alaa was held in this nightmare of a place for two years. At that time, he told his family that he was having suicidal thoughts, which was understandable.

Then, in December 2021, his application for his British passport—his right under the British Nationality Act 1981 —came through. A one-time use emergency passport was handed to his family who then went to the prison. They were not allowed to take even letters to Alaa, and the family insisted that a blank postcard of the Queen be delivered to him. The prison guards, perhaps confused, took the postcard and gave it to Alaa. For months thereafter, that postcard of the Queen was the only thing in his cell. This was how his family finally let him know that he had become a British citizen. Alaa and his family thought that things would now change, but weeks passed and no consular official arrived. Requests by the British embassy for consular access to their citizen were denied. Desperate, in April 2022 Alaa declared himself on hunger strike until the Egyptian authorities would allow the British consular services to access him. That failed. To this day, he has still never received a consular visit.

Many of us will remember the scenes in the run-up to and during COP27, which was held in Egypt. With still no movement after months on a Gandhi-style strike of 100 calories a day, Alaa escalated to a full water strike. There were scenes of global solidarity with Alaa from those in the climate movement, Nobel laureates and world leaders, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Emmanuel Macron. Our former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wrote to Alaa’s family before travelling to—