Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The buck absolutely stops with me; I am very clear about that. I think the NAO has produced a very good report on a difficult issue that we need to get right. We have deported 22,000 foreign national offenders since I became Prime Minister. The report is very clear that since 2013 for the first time we have got a proper cross-Government strategy to deal with this, but it also goes into quite a lot of detail about how there are still too many obstacles in terms of human rights legislation that we need to change. What we have seen from the Government this week is that we are now able to deport people first and they can appeal once they have gone back to their country of origin; and we are reducing the number of appeal routes from 17 routes, which were there under Labour, to just four. We are making progress. The buck stops with me, but I wouldn’t mind a bit of cross-party support for the actions we need to take.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

Q15. Will the Prime Minister join me in welcoming the fact that the £800 million contract for older people’s services in Cambridgeshire was awarded to the NHS bidder, in stark contrast to the billion-pound privatisation of Hinchingbrooke hospital tendered by the last Government, who did not even have an NHS bidder in the final five?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, which is that we want to see an expansion of NHS services. The Labour party claims there is some sort of secret agenda to privatise, but that was the case under the last Labour Government—they fattened up contracts and insisted on only private providers. Under this Government, the NHS is being properly run by those who are clinicians, and they make decisions about the future of our health service.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

What we have done in terms of vetting and barring is remove a huge number of people who are not a risk to children, but we do want to make sure that the system works well so that anyone who has criminal convictions is, as the hon. Lady said, barred.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

Does the Prime Minister believe that drugs policy has been failing for decades, as he said in 2005, and does he agree that the Government should initiate a discussion of alternative ways, including the possibility of legalisation and regulation, to tackle the global drugs dilemma, as he voted for in 2002?