National Health Service

Debate between Mark Harper and Lord Mackinlay of Richborough

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a fantastic argument, as he always does in this place. I have interweaved these new regulations into where they would fit in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and the 2014 regulated activities regulations, and have found that we are asking care homes to be the policemen of delivery people, plumbers and window cleaners with a possible £4,000 fixed penalty fine. I do not know whether my right hon. Friend was aware of the extent of the fine that backs up these regulations.

[Mr Harper]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing that information to the attention of the House.

I will bring my remarks to a conclusion, because Mr Deputy Speaker wants to make sure that we get everybody in. My final point is that, coming back to the consultation that took place, it is very clear that most of the people responding did not support these proposals. They were very concerned about them; certainly, the care homes and those involved in the sector who I have heard from are very concerned about them. The proposals do not command wide support, so I say to the Minister that I would listen to the concerns that are being expressed, take these proposals away, and come back with some well-thought-through proposals to secure the support of the House. If she presses them to a vote today, I regret to say that I will be forced to vote against them.

Public Health

Debate between Mark Harper and Lord Mackinlay of Richborough

Monday 15th June 2020 Commons Chamber

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

It is a genuine pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), because my area, like his, has a number of tourism and hospitality businesses. I have met a number of those businesses virtually, and they too will be waiting to see the guidance on how they are able to open their businesses in a way that is profitable and sustainable. They no doubt look forward to seeing that guidance.

I want to cover two things. The first is the process of how the Government make these regulations and the House debates them. The second is the amendment to regulation 7, on gatherings, and pertains specifically to an event proposed in my constituency.

My first point relates to one that I touched on in my interventions on the Minister and in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker). I note that on social media, one of our colleagues has clipped my remarks and used them as an explainer for the rather complicated set of amendments that we are debating. I have not yet had a chance to look at it, because that would have been inappropriate and difficult in the Chamber, but I will see whether my explanation has clarified things.

It is worth reminding ourselves that this set of regulations are the biggest restrictions on the liberties of British people since the second world war, and potentially even including some of the wartime restrictions. The first set of regulations were made on 26 March and came into force immediately. They were clearly very significant, and they were made under the emergency provisions. Although the regulations were made under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, the substance of them had been debated quite fully as part of the debate on the Coronavirus Bill, which got Royal Assent that week. To be fair, although the original regulations themselves had not been debated, the substance of them had been debated at length by the House as part of the passage of the Coronavirus Act 2020, so they were properly debated in the House. Since then, though, they have been amended by the different sets of amendment regulations—I shall not trouble the House by reading out all the titles.

I note that although the amendment No. 2 regulations were debated in a Delegated Legislation Committee, as the Minister said, they are going to be approved by the House only today—they are on the Order Paper—and we are now debating the coronavirus No. 3 regulations which, as set out in the exchanges, have in some cases already been superseded by the No. 4 regulations, which were laid before the House on Friday and in some cases came into force almost immediately afterwards, with some regulations coming into force on Saturday.

My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne put his finger on it when he noted that the regulations are actually quite complicated and not everybody will understand them in great detail, but because they are the law a breach of them is actually an offence. We are creating criminal offences here, and when we do that it is important that we let people know what the offence is and how they can make sure that they remain within the law. I suspect that if we were to do a survey among Members of Parliament, even they probably would not get all the regulations correct. They are quite difficult to follow, given that they start off with a set of regulations that is then amended over and over again. It is quite a challenge to work out what the current legal position is. Given that sanctions are involved, that is difficult.

If I were to explain to the public—who are, after all, the people we represent and the reason why we are here—why they should care about what might seem like a piece of esoteric processology, I would say that it is because we are debating laws that they have to live under and that place enormous restrictions on their liberty and how they live their lives and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne said, have really quite significant impacts on their livelihoods, as was clearly illustrated by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale when he recounted the impact on his local tourism sector, as there has been an impact on mine. The regulations include detailed provisions about what businesses can trade, how they can trade and how they can make money or not make money, so it is important that we debate them seriously.

It is worth my briefly going through how we have ended up with these regulations. As I said, the first set of regulations were in effect debated as part of the debate on the Coronavirus Bill. There were then some amendments that were largely minor and technical, so people could probably live with the fact that they were not debated in detail. The second set of amendments—those that are not being debated by the House today, because they were debated in Committee, but will, I suspect, be approved by the House today—contained some important changes and significantly increased the maximum penalty from £960 to £3,200. Admittedly, that is the maximum after a number of offences, but it is a significant penalty increase, and they have not yet—until this evening—been approved by the House. So far, that criminal offence or sanction has been imposed only by the stroke of a Minister’s pen, not by the approval of the House.

The amendment No. 3 regulations, which we are debating, contain some significant changes. They changed fundamentally the structure of the regulations from restrictions as to whether we could leave our homes and the reasons why we could do so towards in effect saying that we could leave our homes whenever we liked but just could not stay away overnight. That is a significant change in the way the regulations are structured and, again, that has not been properly debated by the House until today.

The other significant change in the regulations was that they altered the rules about gatherings. Originally, more than two people were not allowed to meet in a public place. These regulations change the rules on gatherings to cover both public and private places and put a restriction on gatherings to be of no more than six. I will come onto that a little later in my remarks, because it is relevant to my particular constituency case.

The final thing that these regulations do that I want to focus on—the Minister touched on this in her remarks—is to extend the review period from 21 days to 28 days. I am not sure I quite follow the logic that the Minister set out, because I was happy with the shorter period on the basis that the regulations are very significant restrictions on liberty, and therefore I think reviewing them more frequently is better. On the Minister’s point that the length of time for the review has been extended to allow changes to come into force and an assessment to be made of the impact of those changes on, presumably, the R number and the level of infections before we make another set of changes, I understand the logic behind that, but that does not really seem to be exactly what we are doing. The review period as set out in the regulations is 25 June, which is nine days before the point in the Government’s plan at which we will potentially open up the leisure, tourism and hospitality sectors. That nine-day gap will not leave people a lot of time to prepare, because 25 June is only 10 days after the very significant and welcome changes to open up the non-essential retail sector, which have only taken place today.

If those changes today were to have an adverse impact on the spread of the virus— I do not think they will, because businesses are operating in a covid-secure way—we probably would not know about that in 10 days’ time because of the period that the virus takes to show up and feed through into the data. So we would not be in a position on 25 June to know whether the changes that have taken place today have had any impact. We would not know, therefore, when we were potentially going to announce the opening up of the hospitality, leisure and tourism sectors, whether the changes today have had any impact or not, and whether we need to make a course correction. I am not sure that the extension of 21 days to 28 days for the review period makes a lot of sense, because we are not debating the regulations at the time when they come into force or ahead of that, so the timetables are completely out of kilter.

My final point before I come to the specifics of the regulations is on the amendment (No. 4) regulations, which deal with linked households. I will touch on them only briefly, because they are not the regulations we are debating today. I have read those regulations, and they are quite complicated. There is such a level of detail about family structures and the rules on which households can link to other households means, and I am not really sure that trying to put that level of detail into the law makes a lot of sense. That is both because it is complicated—I am not sure how anybody makes head or tail of it—and because realistically I cannot see how anyone can practically enforce the regulations. I do not see how a police officer, without carrying out the most extraordinary amount of surveillance, can possibly know whether various households are appropriately linking to each other, particularly if one of the households has multiple adults in it.

We may have reached the point where the Government should think—particularly because there has been such high compliance with even the parts of the rules that are guidance only—about whether we want to set out our thinking, publish the advice and guidance to people, and allow them to implement it themselves without having legal sanction underpinning it.

These regulations expire at the back end of September anyway. It may be worth the Minister saying what the Government are doing: whether they are going to keep the legal framework in place until then, or whether, at an earlier point, there may be some sense in moving to a model where we deal with this through guidance and advice, not the power of the criminal law. That would be a tribute to the British people. They have largely followed the rules very, very fully and the evidence is that they can be trusted to follow the guidance pretty comprehensively, even if it is only guidance and not backed by criminal sanction.

On the specifics in the regulations we are debating today—this is my final point, Madam Deputy Speaker—regulation 7 makes it very clear that a gathering of more than six people outdoors is unlawful and that somebody attending such a gathering is committing an offence. I mention that because there is a proposal in my constituency to hold a demonstration this coming weekend on the subject of black lives matter. Now, I am very firm in my view that I abhor racism of any kind. In normal circumstances, I would welcome people demonstrating that they, too, were against racism of any kind. I hear people say we have a right to protest in this country, and normally we do. However, under the regulations, which I suspect the House will approve this evening, we actually do not have a right to protest if there are more than six people—it is an offence. The Home Secretary made it very clear that it is an offence. She was very clear, in her exhortations this past weekend, that people should not come to London and should not protest, because the regulations are in force because we are trying to deal with a pandemic.

That is very much the view of most of my constituents about this particular demonstration. My own view is that I would welcome such a demonstration to take place in the future when the coronavirus regulations are no longer in force and we are no longer trying to deal with the pandemic, but it would be an offence at the moment. There is a decision taking place this evening. The local trust that runs the recreation centre is having to make a decision about whether to approve the demonstration. I have been very clear that people attending the protest would be committing a criminal offence, which is punishable by a fine, and it should not take place. If it were to take place, my advice to people would be not to turn up but to express their views in other ways—there are plenty of ways that people can express their views on social media and so forth—and to hold over a protest until it is lawful.

In any other circumstance, if a Minister proposed abolishing the right to protest, people would be outraged. We would think that this House would absolutely have to vote, debate and decide on such a provision, but that right to protest was effectively extinguished by the stroke of a Minister’s pen and has been significantly changed in the regulations again by the stroke of a Minister’s pen. It is only today that the House will take a decision. I would say to Ministers that it is in their interests to bring the measures to the House, have them debated and then have the House give its backing, so that it is Parliament that has approved them and not just them. Until the regulations are approved, the ban on protests is purely on the basis of the signature of the Secretary of State for Health, as the Minister said. I am sure that he does not really want to have all to himself the fact that he personally has abolished the right to protest in England. That is actually what he has done without the sanction, yet, of this House, because the regulations have not yet been approved.

[Craig Mackinlay]

As ever, my right hon. Friend is making a forensic analysis, particularly of the timeline, to which I think we will all refer over the days ahead. He makes the very good point that we are considering regulations that are backed up by criminal records and fines, and that we are doing that rather rapidly and belatedly. Would he hazard a guess as to how many people will actually be fined for having a barbecue with seven people next week, when they see that there will be no fines or sanctions for big gatherings of people who are passionate about what they stand for? I wonder if he might hazard a guess.

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend has a point. The reason why I have been clear in the view that I have expressed in my constituency about these protests is that I fundamentally believe that we live in a country governed by the rule of law, and one thing about the rule of law is that it applies to everybody in the country. Of course, one of the arguments that many of the people attending these protests are making is that they want everyone in our country, whatever their race, to be treated equally under the law. We already have laws in this country that protect the way people are treated and guarantee, under equality legislation, that we treat people of different races the same. It is difficult for someone to argue that they want the law to be applied to protect people of different races and guarantee their rights if, at the same time, that person is conducting a protest that in itself breaks the law. It is not a very consistent position to have.

Election Law Reform

Debate between Mark Harper and Lord Mackinlay of Richborough

Monday 11th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Craig Mackinlay]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, as he has encapsulated the issue in a few brief sentences. I will be expanding on that in the remainder of the debate.

The Supreme Court decision ruled that under section 90C free goods, services or facilities for the “use” or “benefit” of the candidate, arranged either by them or on their behalf, must be included in an election return. In addition, and this goes to the point made by my hon. Friend, authorisation or even, it would seem, full knowledge of the candidate or agent is not required, and only active refusal might—I stress might—be the only possible defence. It is difficult to see how that could be done if the candidate or agent is unaware of the matter concerned or the costs involved.

The Electoral Commission does not come off unscathed by that Supreme Court judgment. Paragraph 28 of it states that

“the Electoral Commission's helpful guidance documents issued over several years, whilst they certainly both address the question of apportionment of expenditure between party and candidate, and deal with the concept of free or discounted services, nowhere appear to alert readers to the possible link between them, nor to the application of the notional expenditure rules to what must sometimes be a difficult exercise of separating local from national expenditure.”

Let us overlay that statement about the Electoral Commission with some of its own written output on the launch of a consultation on a new draft code of practice on 10 September 2018:

“We hope these Codes will make it easier for you to submit your own or your party’s returns, simplifying the process and removing any blurred lines that there might have been”.

It goes on:

“In responding to this consultation you’ll help us to further demystify the process and remove any confusion that you or your party may have over the process of campaign reporting.”

So, we have an acknowledgement by the Electoral Commission of problems in election law and it was admonished, to a degree, by the Supreme Court.

The only reference in the draft code published in September last year to the Supreme Court judgment is a single paragraph on page 4 of a 23-page document, which is as yet without statutory force. That single paragraph says:

“This notional spending falls to be declared as election expenses in the candidate’s return even if the items provided have not been authorised by the candidate, the candidate’s agent or someone authorised by either or both of them, R v Mackinlay and others (Respondents), UKSC 42, 25 July 2018.”

That is it: this fundamental change in interpretation encapsulated in a few lines in a draft code of practice, with no guidance as to what it might mean in practice. If the hope was, to use the Electoral Commission’s words, to demystify and remove blurred lines, the Electoral Commission has comprehensively failed.

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

I think my hon. Friend has answered this question, but to pick up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), did the Electoral Commission suggest in the draft code of conduct how a candidate was supposed to know, or to be able to account for, that information in any practical way? Or did it leave that open?

[Craig Mackinlay]

My right hon. Friend highlights exactly what he might have expected, but I am afraid he will be disappointed, because that is it. There is not one additional word of guidance as to how this change of interpretation might be administered on the proper battleground of elections.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

I approach this matter with care, as I have been in my hon. Friend’s position in the past and know how complex this legislation is. May I just probe her on the answer she is giving to my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay)? I thought that his solution was not actually making a fundamental change but putting the legislation back to what we all thought it was, and what I think Members had thought they were doing when they legislated in the first place.

[Craig Mackinlay]

indicated assent.

[Mr Harper]

I see that my hon. Friend is nodding. I do not think that he is suggesting using order-making powers to make a big change but saying that we should use those order-making powers to put the legislation back to what we all thought it was before the justices in the Supreme Court made their decision last July.

Finance Bill

Debate between Mark Harper and Lord Mackinlay of Richborough

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, that is why the Financial Secretary to the Treasury set out a number of important areas in the Bill that deal with those issues.

I want to pick up on an issue that, interestingly, has been referred to by a number of colleagues. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) touched on the question of public sector productivity, and the hon. Member for Aberdeen North, who speaks for the SNP, also alluded to productivity. I think the hon. Lady got it a little wrong, however, when she talked about improving productivity by giving people higher pay. It is actually the other way round. We all want our constituents to get a pay rise—I think that that unites everyone in the House—but the only sustainable way to drive up pay in the public and private sectors is to improve productivity in both sectors. I shall set out a few areas in which we could do that.

First, however, I want to make a slightly humorous point to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. I do not want to see an increase in the productivity of the parliamentary draftsmen in Her Majesty’s Treasury. Producing Finance Bills as thick as this one is perhaps not what we ought to be doing. I understand the complexity of these matters—I declare an interest as a non-practising chartered accountant—but I know from talking to colleagues in the business that they do not enormously welcome Finance Bills this thick. Much as this might upset them, I have to say that creating jobs for tax accountants is also perhaps not something that we ought to be doing. Slimmer Finance Bills with simpler, less complex legislation introducing lower tax rates from which we collect more revenue are the way to go. If we were to do that, we would be doing everyone a service, and those in the tax business could perhaps find more productive things to do. This gentle chiding is perhaps directed less towards my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury than towards officials in his Department.

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Harper]

I shall give way to a fellow chartered accountant.

[Craig Mackinlay]

I declare an interest: I am a practising chartered accountant, when I have the time. My right hon. Friend said that lower rates can produce more revenue. Is that not exactly what has happened since 2010 with our reduction in corporation tax rates, which is paying the dividend of a greater return for the Treasury?

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and he is exactly right. This was one area in which the debate about corporation tax rates during the general election campaign became rather confused. The Opposition kept saying that we were cutting corporation tax, and making it sound as though we were therefore going to collect less revenue. What we were doing, of course, was to reduce corporation tax rates. The purpose of doing so was to collect more corporation tax revenue, both to attract more businesses to locate in the United Kingdom and to enable the businesses that are already here to be more successful. That is an admirable aspiration but it is, as my hon. Friend said, what has happened in practice.

One of my concerns about the Labour party’s plans is that an increase in corporation tax rates would lead to the collection of less corporation tax revenue; and we would have less money, rather than more, to spend on our public services and our hard-working public sector workers. [Interruption.] I see Opposition Members, including those on the Front Bench, shaking their heads, but since we cut corporation tax rates, we have collected more corporation tax—