Business of the House

Lee Scott Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I hope—I do not know—that the hon. Gentleman has had a chance to address those issues in the course of the debate on the Queen’s Speech. He will, of course, have an opportunity to do so today in the debate on the economy and living standards that the Opposition have initiated with their amendment. He is quite right: it is disappointing that the north-east is the only region of the United Kingdom where unemployment went up in the latest figures; everywhere else, it went down. One thing we need to keep looking at is how we can continue to rebalance the economy, as is successfully happening in many other places. We want to try to improve manufacturing. We have seen manufacturing growing in the latest data at 4.4% a year, which is faster than for a long time. As a manufacturing economy, the north-east should be participating more fully in that.

[Mr Lee Scott (Ilford North) (Con)]

Following on from the global summit on sexual violence in war, may we have a debate, on the conflict in Sri Lanka, which is still going on, against the Tamil community, where women are being raped daily?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. As I said, the Foreign Secretary will update the House on Monday, following what appears to have been an extremely successful global summit, not simply because we brought so many countries together for the purpose of ending sexual violence in conflict, but because of the vigour of the NGO community coming together in the same way. The message being sent out is that people need to understand the sheer scale and enormity of sexual violence in conflicts and that so very few people have been held responsible. That must not be true in future. It must be that the people responsible for such things will genuinely be held to account for the crimes they commit.