Business of the House

Debate between Mark Harper and Anne Main

Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

I had not heard that specific piece of information, but even if it is not the case, if the Bill does go through the other place very rapidly, in effect a Bill with significant constitutional effects will have been passed without proper scrutiny in either House.

[Mrs Main]

Before the political point that was just made, my right hon. Friend was making the extremely valuable point that the House of Lords is a revising Chamber. We do the Lords a great disservice if we do not give them adequate time to advise and revise. This House will have very little time to take advantage of all the expertise in that House if its Members are not allowed to do their job in a proper fashion.

[Mr Harper]

I completely agree, but my major point was that I do not like the process whereby we do not consider Bills properly and then expect the Lords to do all the scrutiny. Certainly, when I was taking constitutional legislation through this House a number of years ago, as Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform, I tried to ensure that we had sufficient time to debate it properly, because for important constitutional matters, and particularly for this matter, which is effectively about enacting the result of a referendum of the people, it is important that it is elected Members who make the final decisions, not Members of the other place. My principal point on the substance of the business of the House motion is therefore that it provides insufficient time to allow proper scrutiny of the Bill.

The hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) all referred to precedent. I think that a dispute broke out on the SNP Front Bench, because the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire acknowledged that this process was indeed a precedent, and the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West then tried to differentiate it and say that it was not really a precedent, arguing that Brexit is such an unprecedented process that we cannot draw any lessons from the use of this procedure. I think that they are mistaken.

I think that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green made very reasonable points. As a former business manager, I think that future business managers will note that Members from a number of different parties have accepted this as a legitimate process. It is perfectly true, as the shadow Leader of the House said, that Clerks would not allow anything disorderly to take place. That is correct, but a majority in this House can override Standing Orders and ram things through, and it is convention and self-restraint that stop Governments using their majorities in inappropriate ways.

Members on both sides of the House ought to reflect on the fact that if in future a Government with a significant majority choose to use that majority to override the usual conventions and procedures of the House and ram through pieces of controversial legislation in a day, those Members cannot complain that the Government are behaving inappropriately. I would deprecate that behaviour and would not want any part in it, but the people will be watching these proceedings and following this precedent. I am pretty sure that someone will try to use this precedent again at some point, and Members may regret supporting it today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

No, I fundamentally disagree, for this reason. I will give the hon. Lady a couple of examples. First, I suspect that there are many people—I do not know this, but it is my assumption—who supported the Cabinet’s withdrawal agreement and political declaration who, if we attached a referendum to it, would no longer support it, because those of us on the Conservative Benches made a commitment to implement the result of the referendum. Indeed, when the hon. Lady stood for election on these Benches, she made the same commitment, I believe. The public made a decision—it was a once-in-a-generation decision—to leave the European Union. That is what I want to deliver, and I promised not to have another referendum. If we added on a referendum, people who have currently supported the proposition would no longer support it. I for one will not vote for another referendum.

There is also something that I have spotted. It is no surprise to me that those who want to remain in the European Union want to have a binary choice between the Cabinet’s deal and remain, because they have spotted that the proposition put forward by the Government is very unpopular in opinion polls. They have also noticed that many people who campaigned for leave do not believe that it is really leaving, and they think that if that is the binary choice presented to the public, it will be the best opportunity to get remain. They do not want a referendum with a range of choices. For my part, the only referendum that would be even vaguely justifiable is one that accepted that the public had asked to leave and simply gave them the choices of how to leave. That might be defensible, but nothing else.

[Mrs Main]

I am sure that my right hon. Friend is aware of this, but I want to put it on record that when the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) pressed her amendment on having a people’s vote, it got 85 votes. Revisiting the matter, as she did just now, does not make it more popular.

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I note from the indicative votes on Monday that, again, the motion on a confirmatory vote was supported by fewer people than the Cabinet’s withdrawal agreement and did not achieve a majority.

Universal Credit Roll-out

Debate between Mark Harper and Anne Main

Wednesday 18th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I will follow your strictures, Madam Deputy Speaker, and be relatively brief.

Let me take first the words on the Order Paper, which do not bear any relation to what the shadow Secretary of State said. She said she was asking the House to support a motion to pause and fix universal credit, but that is not what it says. It is what the title said yesterday, but between yesterday and today all the Opposition are now calling for is for us to pause universal credit and not bother doing any fixing at all.

[Mrs Main]

Perhaps my right hon. Friend needs to look at the Annunciator. We have moved on. We are now not pausing; we are just discussing. There is no mention of “pause”.

[Mr Harper]

I was grateful for my hon. Friend’s earlier intervention, which was taken up. It is a serious point. The former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), made the point that pausing the roll-out of universal credit does not help anybody, given the positive effects it is having on getting people into work and allowing them to progress in the workplace. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made the point that this is both an in-work and out-of-work benefit. That means that those who are out of work and are thinking about taking a job can have the confidence to do so, because it will not mean throwing up in the air all their existing arrangements for paying for their house and supporting their family. They will have the confidence to take on that work and to take extra hours, because they know they will be better off and that if it does not work out they will not have to go back to the drawing board.

Badger Cull

Debate between Mark Harper and Anne Main

Thursday 13th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that the pilot badger culls in Gloucestershire and Somerset have decisively failed against the criteria set out by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in guidance to Natural England for licensing of the culls, which stipulated that 70 per cent of the badger population should be culled within a six-week period; notes that the costs of policing, additional implementation and monitoring, and the resort to more expensive cage-and-trap methods over an extended period have substantially increased the cost of the culls, and strengthened the financial case for vaccination; regrets that the decision to extend the original culls has not been subject to any debate or vote in Parliament; further regrets that the Independent Expert Panel will only assess the humaneness, safety and effectiveness of the original six-week period and not the extended cull period; and urges the Government to halt the existing culls and granting of any further licences, pending development of alternative strategies to eradicate bovine TB and promote a healthy badger population.

I thank you for your gracious comments, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am sure that the debate will be very well attended and, bearing that in mind, I hope that colleagues will accept that I will not be taking any interventions during my opening remarks. I know that the many right hon. and hon. Members here today will make this a lively and impassioned debate.

This is a timely debate, coming before any further roll-out of the culls, and particularly in the light of concerns being raised from many quarters about the culls. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting a full day’s debate and vote on the Floor of the House. I have received a large amount of cross-party support for this debate. It is important to note that this is not a matter of one side of the House versus the other. The House wants a chance to vote on this issue and I have made repeated calls for it to be brought back before the House. I tabled my first early-day motion on 25 June last year calling for the matter to return, and 149 Members from both sides of the House supported it. I then tabled another on 31 October asking for a return, which attracted 107 Members. In a well-attended Westminster Hall debate on 11 Dec, I pleaded with the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), to bring the matter back before the House. Well, I have brought it back, with the support of many colleagues of all political parties. I hope that colleagues today will examine their consciences and try to do the right thing. I know that this is not an easy subject, and that feelings are running high on both sides, but we must not be seen just to be doing something, if we are now convinced that the facts and evidence indicate that we might have taken the wrong approach.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mrs Main]

I am sorry, but I have indicated that I will not be taking interventions.

The public might be surprised to learn that the Minister can instigate a cull without having to get the consent of the House. Consequently, there has been no substantive vote in Parliament proactively to adopt a culling strategy. Instead, we have merely had two votes not to adopt one. The two votes on the subject took place in Opposition day debates on 25 October 2012 and 5 June 2013. The most recent vote in the House of Commons, on 5 June, was 299 to 250 against the motion:

“That this House believes the badger cull should not go ahead.”

As the House can see, even in an Opposition day debate, the vote was a close one—and that was before we had gleaned all the information about the underperformance of the culls.

We all accept that the House has had an uneasy relationship with this topic, but we should not be here today to score political points or to try to rehash history. We should be here to examine our current position in a cross-party fashion and to give a strong steer to the Minister as to the next steps we believe he should take. I believe, as I am sure many other hon. Members do, that we should halt the culls and not issue any more licences until a full examination of the failings has been taken into account. That is what the debate is for; it is not a blame game. It is a recognition that hon. Members might wish to change their minds based on the change in facts.

There is great sympathy with farmers who have experienced heartache and hardship over losing cattle and precious stock to bovine TB. There is also regard for how we as a society treat all animals, but in particular a protected species. This tension has divided the House. I believe that many lent their support to the concept of tackling bovine TB with this strategy, but they did not give their Government permission to carry on regardless—regardless of humaneness, effectiveness or cost.

Performance criteria for the pilot culls were set by the Government, and they were not arbitrary, but intended to reassure hon. Members and the public that what was being done was an effective way of tackling bovine TB infections and was, crucially, humane. The reason for the 70% kill target within a six-week period was specifically drawn so that sufficient badgers would be killed to ensure that they did not simply go elsewhere, thus spreading the TB more widely.

This approach reflected extensive research carried out by Professor Woodroffe in trials in the 1990s, which showed that a failure to kill this percentage in a narrow window of time could worsen matters as disturbed diseased animals took TB to new areas. Analysis commissioned by the Government found that the number of badgers killed according to the criteria fell well short of the target deemed necessary, despite the cull being extended and cage shooting being used. We must face up to the fact that this House, if we persist and simply roll out more free-shooting culls, may be contributing to an increase in TB in cattle.

The humaneness test set by Ministers was to ensure that no animal suffered needlessly a protracted, agonising death. Badgers were supposed to be free-shot quickly, efficiently and, importantly, cost-effectively. It is now understood, however, that between 6.4% and 18% of shot animals took more than five minutes to die, and sometimes even as long as 10 minutes or longer. In order to avoid suffering, the standard to be met was that no more than 5% of shot badgers should take more than five minutes to die. An independent expert panel was appointed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to help Ministers to evaluate, against the Government’s own criteria, the effectiveness, humaneness and safety of pilots, and its conclusions are damning.

[Mr Harper]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker—[Interruption.] Will Opposition Members listen to my point of order? I have been listening carefully to my hon. Friend quoting figures from an independent report. Are you aware, Madam Deputy Speaker, whether that independent report has been placed in the Library of the House or on the Table, so that hon. Members taking part in the debate may reference it? I was not aware that the report had been published.