Papers Relating to the Home Secretary
Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. There has been a real sense over many years now that the respect for standards in public life from the Government and the Conservative party has been deteriorating and has been undermining standards in our important institutions. The Prime Minister promised us that there would be something different. Instead, what we have is more of the same.
The Cabinet Office has already recognised that the Home Secretary broke sections 2.1 and 2.14 of the ministerial code. There are further serious concerns that she may have broken it a third time and also ignored legal advice that the Home Office was breaking the law. Yesterday morning, her successor and predecessor, now the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said that he had had clear advice—legal and policy advice—about dangerous overcrowding at Manston, about being in breach of the law, and about the need to take emergency measures, which he then took. We have deep concerns about how the Government could have allowed this situation to develop in the first place, why they badly failed to crack down on the criminal gangs that have proliferated in the channel and why they allowed Home Office decision making to collapse, so that only half the number of decisions are being taken each year compared with six years ago and only 4% of last year’s small boat arrivals had their claims determined, so that there is now a huge backlog of cases that has led to overcrowding and the last-minute use of costly hotels in inappropriate locations.
However, there is also a serious question whether the Home Secretary has just made things worse by ignoring legal advice and allowing dangerous overcrowding, leading to even more last-minute inappropriate procurement and running up substantial legal liabilities when she should have an alternative plan to cut the backlog and cut hotel use instead.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
Plaid Cymru supports this motion. The context here is the reappointment of the Home Secretary, and the appointment of a Minister without Portfolio despite bullying allegations against him—and all that after one Prime Minister was brought down by scandals and another due to ineptitude. Is it not the problem not just those specific individuals, but the fact that the very systems of accountability here in Westminster are fundamentally unfit for purpose, save for maintaining the thinnest pretence of competency from this Tory Government?
Yvette Cooper
The right hon. Lady makes an important point, because the standards in our public life and public institutions have depended on people respecting them and on people across public life believing in them and taking them immensely seriously. That is why it is so corrosive when, bit by bit, they are undermined, and why it is so damaging when a new Prime Minister who promised us he would be so different from his predecessors is simply reinforcing the same problems and the same damaging situation.
Tributes to Her Late Majesty The Queen
Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
On behalf of Plaid Cymru, I offer my sincerest sympathies and condolences to Her late Majesty the Queen’s children and her extended family as they come to terms with their grief. Queen Elizabeth II was a constant presence throughout all of our lives. She stood as a figure of stability in a world changing at a rapid and sometimes frightening pace. The loss of the continuity that Her late Majesty embodied is a source of sorrow and anxiety for people across the world.
Up to her final days she conducted her duties with an extraordinary dedication that has been an inspiration for so many of us. Her values of duty, service, reconciliation and forgiveness are held dear by the people of Wales. In Wales, we respect people who embody that sense of dedication to society and to public service; those who put their public duty first. Her late Majesty the Queen personified that duty for so many people for so many years.
Her late Majesty had a canny ability to put people at ease in the midst of Palace formality. Three years ago, I was fortunate to be appointed to the Privy Council. I remember being nervous and intimidated by the protocols and rules that govern interactions with the royal family. Your mind, as it would, tots up an infinite checklist of everything that could possibly go wrong. What struck me was something she said: “You may well be worrying that you’ll do something wrong, or in the wrong order. Don’t worry. Whatever could possibly go wrong, I’ve seen it all before. There’s nothing that you could do that would shock me now.” Even among all the pomp and ceremony, there was that characteristic warmth and courtesy to the Queen.
Her Majesty was a magnificent role model for older women across the world. Historically, of course, older women have disappeared from public life. The Queen was a constant visible figure throughout the 70 years of her reign. From historic buildings and charities to football, she always showed an interest in Wales. People of all walks of Welsh life have been touched by her keen interest in and constant support for Welsh organisations. She attended every official opening of the Senedd and showed due respect for Wales’s nationhood and our growing democracy.
The Queen was patron to organisations as diverse as the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society, the Football Association of Wales, the Cardiff Royal Infirmary and the Welsh Pony and Cob Society. Her love of horses, from thoroughbreds to native ponies, shone through. We can see it in those sparkling smiles. Everyone in public life knows that they have a public smile, but the photos with the horses show her real smile.
We now see one era drawing to a close and a new one at its very beginning. For now we will say, “Diolch yn fawr iawn.” “Thank you very much, your Majesty.” Cwsg mewn hedd. May she rest in peace. Bendith Duw ar y Brenin. God’s blessing on the King.
UK Energy Costs
Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
Diolch yn fawr, Ddirprwy Lefarydd. Hoffwn ddanfon dymuniadau gorau i’w Mawrhydu’r Frenhines. I, too, would like to send my best wishes to Her Majesty the Queen.
Today’s announcement shows beyond doubt whose side the new Prime Minister is on. She is prepared to force taxpayers to carry the burden of borrowing billions of pounds to subsidise the shareholders of energy companies that are profiting from Putin’s war. It is shocking that she cannot even tell us how much that burden will cost today. I urge her to think again. Make energy companies pay their fair share. The global energy norm of energy profit taxation is 70%. Norway stands at 78%. Why does the population of the UK have to suffer the combined yokes of higher taxes, worse public services and falling real wages while private profit is protected under her premiership?
We should use that money to return the energy price cap to the pre-April level of £1,277 a year and extend that cap to small businesses and charities. People are struggling now. Even at current prices, 180,000 households in Wales are forced to struggle even to afford items such as heating, food and toiletries. Bills of £2,500 are unaffordable for many, many people.
Anything short of £1,277 as a cap will fail to meet the scale of the crisis that we face. It will require the Prime Minister’s Government—this is important—to introduce additional packages of support for vulnerable households, including doubling the £650 cost of living payment and revising the eligibility criteria to include those on disability benefits who are currently excluded from support. That will cost us more in future if we do not deal with what is genuinely facing us. Instead of pursuing fantasy economics of rampant deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, the Prime Minister must also prioritise a reduction in energy demand and investment in low-carbon sources. That is the only way to bring down energy bills in the medium and long term.
Let me be clear and simple. It is time to unchain Wales’s renewable and low-carbon energy potential by vastly improving our grid capacity; bringing forward small modular reactors at Trawsfynydd in my constituency, Wylfa and other places; empowering the Welsh Government to deliver large-scale, transformative infrastructure projects, such as tidal lagoons; devolving management of the Crown Estate to Wales; and enabling community energy schemes to realise their full potential by selling their power directly to local customers. For us in Wales, it is clear that, in the long term, to fix this crisis for good, we must place our energy system and its huge potential in the hands of the people of Wales, for the benefit of the people of Wales.
Confidence in Her Majesty’s Government
Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
Diolch yn fawr, Madam Dirprwy Lefarydd.
The Prime Minister’s bluster and banter and his stock-in-trade mockery ended today, and they were little more than a pointy finger rhetorical raspberry, not just to us but to everyone who ever made the mistake of holding him to his word and believing what he told them. He is a law-breaking Prime Minister who cannot be permitted to remain in office, even as a caretaker. His dishonesty and abuse of power have together only served to erode trust in politics and our institutions. The House will not be surprised to hear that my party does not have confidence in this Prime Minister or his Government.
To come back to the question of eroding trust, this is why I introduced a private Member’s Bill that will make it an offence for politicians knowingly to lie. They will be given every opportunity to correct the record, but they will be held to account in law so that they use words—our stock in trade—genuinely and honestly to the best of their ability. I have also written to the Conservative leadership candidates inviting them to support the Bill, because they have made truth and honesty core tenets of their campaigns as they attempt to separate themselves from the outgoing Prime Minister, whom they all of course supported. The Bill seeks to ensure that those who deliberately lie are held to account, but also to send a signal that lying and dishonesty in a modern democracy are a blight that must be eradicated.
My party’s lack of confidence goes beyond this Government, besmirched as they are by Westminster scandal. It is driven by the wider deep-rooted problems of the Union. We distrust the Union and lack confidence in the Union. The UK is foundering in deep stagnation from years of Tory austerity and a hard Tory Brexit that is hobbling our economy. It is no wonder that Poland is set to become richer than Britain in 12 years’ time on current growth rates. It will not be ordinary working families who feel the benefit of the tiny growth that is predicted. The TUC estimates that the UK will see the worst wage squeeze of all the G7 economies, with real average wages falling by £1,750 between 2022 and 2023.
In Wales, we seek the macroeconomic tools but continue to be denied the bare necessities to fix Westminster’s chronic tolerance of geographical inequalities. When we look at the place of Wales within the UK, we can see that things are very bad. Since 1998, relative productivity in Wales has hovered between 80% and 85% of the UK level. Once London’s disproportionate weight is accounted for, the figure is still only 90%. Wales has been given the tools to juggle poverty, not to condemn poverty to history. How can we have confidence in a Government and system that perpetuate such gross inequalities? The current UK Government talk of levelling up, but instead of presenting a comprehensive plan for redistributing wealth, they have forced councils to fight over dwindling pots of money.
Today, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that this Government’s levelling up agenda does not work for Wales. It says that their ideological insistence on excluding the Welsh Government from decision making has led to worse outcomes for Wales. Despite this, the Conservative leader in Wales recently called for no further powers to be devolved and said that consequential funding for HS2 should—wait for it—be controlled by the UK rather than the Welsh Government. This is a staggering insult to our democracy. In conclusion, we have no confidence in the current Government and we have no confidence in any Westminster Government.
Oral Answers to Questions
Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts(2 years ago)
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The Prime Minister
It is possibly fair to say that I am responsible for building more river crossings and bridges than anybody else in this House, including the Suggitts Lane crossing, which I delivered for my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers). At this stage in my political career, I could not in all honesty promise that I will deliver this bridge, but my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) has eight people to whom she can direct that request right now, and she is in a strong bargaining position.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
The Prime Minister
Of course the Labour Government in Wales is responsible for schools, but what we have been doing is not only increasing the living wage by £1,000 and providing the £37 billion-worth of financial support that I mentioned, but helping councils with a £1.5 billion household support fund to get families such as those the right hon. Lady mentions through the tough times. We will come out very strongly the other side.
Functioning of Government
Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Michael Ellis
I am particularly conscious of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, to which I think the hon. Gentleman is referring. The Leader of the House will be doing the usual business questions session soon in this House.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
This latest Conservative party psychodrama only emphasises what many of us already know: the UK is a failed state. This Government have shown contempt for devolution. The Prime Minister’s successor will treat the electorate of Wales with the same disdain, and in this Palace the circus will roll on. Does the Paymaster General not recognise that surely now is the time for a new constitutional settlement for these islands?
Michael Ellis
The right hon. Lady frequently traduces this country. I disagree with her—I could not disagree with her more strongly. She has a separatist agenda, of course, and she wishes for the country to split, but in my view this country is the greatest country on earth.
Oral Answers to Questions
Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts(2 years ago)
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The Deputy Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is a doughty champion for his constituents, particularly on NHS services. The DHSC recently received the strategic outline case for the transformation of A&E services in Shrewsbury and Telford. It is still being processed, but I can tell him that the trust is aiming to present the full business case in 2023, with construction starting in the same year.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
The Deputy Prime Minister
The right hon. Lady was deft in getting that in. Across the Benches, we have all heard the case for reinforcing free speech, whether that is about judge-made privacy laws or how people are shouted down when they express legitimate opinions. The people of Wales—this is true across the country—will also want to join us in making sure that we can deport more foreign national offenders. That is the reality for the people in Wales and across the United Kingdom. The Bill of Rights will strengthen our tradition of freedom while curbing those abuses and making sure that we inject a bit more common sense into the system.
Bill of Rights
Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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The Deputy Prime Minister
My right hon. Friend is correct on all those points. This is a principled and pragmatic reform. It retains membership of the European convention. I have heard various arguments against that, but looking at what we would gain from leaving the ECHR, because of the UN convention against torture, which we are party to, and various other conventions, it would not solve all the problems. It is not the magic wand that some people suggest it is; I say that with great respect. We have made sure that within the bounds of the convention we can get the maximum leeway—the maximum marginal appreciation—in the way that my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) suggested.
On the permissions test, it is extraordinary that people have criticised doing something that the Strasbourg Court itself does. Making sure that whether they are trivial or frivolous claims, we have a filter early on to make sure that there is significant disadvantage, would, I think, just feel to many of our constituents like old-fashioned common sense.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
The UK Government’s scrapping of the Human Rights Act shows a callous disregard not only for the essential universality of human rights but for devolution in Wales too. The Human Rights Act is woven directly into Wales’s constitutional settlement. Changes to the Act will undermine our efforts to promote human rights and equality. When—when, not if—Wales refuses legislative consent to this erosion of human rights, will the Minister use legalistic bully-boy tactics to trample on our democracy too?
The Deputy Prime Minister
No, of course not. The right hon. Lady talks about “callous disregard”. Conservative Members, certainly, want to stand up for victims of crime who do not understand why, based on the most elastic interpretations, foreign national offenders who have committed some of the most abhorrent crimes cannot be deported.
On parole, I think of the victims I have met recently. I do not want to politicise this, but they expect us to stand up for them. As regards protecting not just those within the prison regime but the public from serious ideologues spreading their poison or those who commit terrorist offences, we should stand up for the public, not for the criminals.
Adviser on Ministerial Interests
Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Angela Rayner
This is about us trying to make sure that we do take back control, and also that we gain the respect of the public. Quite rightly, when they elect us and bring us into this place, they expect us to have the highest standards. Especially when we create the laws that they have to follow, they expect us to have the highest possible standards.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
Of course, the resignation of yet another ethics adviser will do little to quieten public concerns that there is something very rotten at the heart of this Government. Next week, I will be presenting a ten-minute rule Bill that would make lying in politics illegal and give our constituents confidence that we are serious about forcing a change of culture within our political system. Does the right hon. Member agree with me that the present culture is corroding trust in politics and democracy?
Standards in Public Life
Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Angela Rayner
I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I vividly remember the contributions he made as part of that debate and the way in which he passionately put forward what the public have been through and how they felt about that. That is why I say that the public are not ready to move on. While the Prime Minister remains in office, I do not think the public will ever move on from what they have been through, because it was a very traumatic time. There is not a family in the UK that was not affected by the pandemic, and every time a Minister tells the public to move on, all it does is make them more upset and angry. I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman.
Coming back to the ministerial code, this is not just about the foreword. Far from adopting the recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life in a report that the Prime Minister did not even have the decency to respond to, the truth is that he cherry-picked the recommendations that suited him and discarded those he found inconvenient. Lord Evans, the chair of the committee, has said that the recommendations, which form the basis of this Opposition day debate today, were “designed as a package”. By casting aside cross-party proposals, the Prime Minister is trying to rig the rules and downgrade standards.
Let us take the introduction of tiered sanctions. That proposal is meaningful only if independence is granted to the adviser to open investigations. Without that, it is left to the whim of the Prime Minister. Lord Evans described these two changes as
“part of a mutually dependent package of reforms, designed to be taken together”.
As the Institute for Government says, the Prime Minister’s changes do not increase the adviser’s independence at all. In fact, the net effect of the changes is to weaken standards and concentrate power in his own hands. While the adviser on standards may have been granted a swanky new website and an office, he still fundamentally requires the Prime Minister’s permission to launch any investigation, making the Prime Minister the judge and jury in his very own personal courtroom. It is no wonder his own standards adviser has criticised him for his low ambition on standards.
The adviser was joined last week by Lord Evans, the chair of the committee, who outlined the dangers of cherry-picking changes to the ministerial code. While the Prime Minister maintains the power of veto over the independent adviser, there is an inherent risk that he will overrule his own adviser or tell him, “There’s nothing to see here. Now be a good chap and move on.” Well, we are not moving on when he is dragging our democracy into the gutter. Without having independence baked into the standards system, this new code flatters to deceive.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
It is extraordinary not only that the Prime Minister can refuse permission for an investigation to be undertaken but that there is no obligation on him to explain why. I am sure the right hon. Lady will agree that, in the circumstances, it is no surprise that more and more people are losing faith in the parliamentary system per se, and that we in Wales are therefore truly questioning whether we cannot do this better for ourselves.
Angela Rayner
The hon. Member makes her point, but I think we are better together. The actions of the Prime Minister do not represent the United Kingdom, which is why I am bringing this motion before the House today.
The new code is also utterly silent on the question of what amounts to a major breach of the rules, so what happens to a Minister who engages in bribery, who perpetuates sexual assault or who bullies their staff? It is the Prime Minister who continues to appoint himself as the judge and jury on ministerial misconduct, including his own. It is he who decides the degree of wrongdoing or rule breaking. You could not make it up, but that is exactly what he is proposing to do. This is the same Prime Minister who became the first in history to have broken the law in office. Now, what is to stop him saying that some sort of an apology is enough?
Michael Ellis
If I may say so, that is a rather poor example to cite, because what the Prime Minister is doing is emphasising the fact that unemployment in this country is lower now than it has been for generations. [Interruption.]
Until—[Interruption.] Can I carry on? Until now, the code has been silent on the specific consequences for breaches, apart from in some defined instances. The code sets out that knowingly misleading this House is a breach of the code for which resignation is expected. The code still says that—it is stated in paragraph 1.3.c, not one word of which has changed—but now it also includes more detail on other possible sanctions. In particular, it makes mention of a public apology, remedial action or the removal of ministerial salary for a period—again, something that this House can also sanction in certain circumstances. I do not know whether Members are arguing to the contrary.
Liz Saville Roberts
To what degree does the Minister agree that truth matters, regardless of the sanctions? We have been talking about a lot of the details, but Plaid Cymru and I have brought forward legislation to make lying in politics illegal, because that would fundamentally show to this place that the truth matters. Does the Minister agree with me in that respect?
Michael Ellis
Of course I agree that the truth is an important and paramount object in public life. That goes without saying. Sanctions are another matter. This is a question of fact and degree in each individual case. The right hon. Lady is pursuing this line that somehow truth has been removed from this iteration of the ministerial code. It has not—it is still there at paragraph 1.3.c—so she is pursuing an imaginary problem.
Let me turn to the letter on the application of the ministerial code to the Prime Minister. Before I talk about the detail of the letter, it is important that I touch on the recent communication between the Prime Minister and the independent adviser in relation to the fixed penalty notice received by the Prime Minister and the application of the ministerial code.