Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Matt Hancock and Helen Jones(5 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Matt Hancock
I very much agree with my hon. Friend. The role will be cross-governmental. It will involve working not only across national Government, convening the policies that need to be pulled together from various Departments’ responses to support people in crisis and to reduce suicide, but with local government, which has responsibilities here.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
Suicide prevention plans have to be a key element of any mental health strategy, yet the Government are not monitoring the effectiveness of those plans or ensuring that they are fully funded. Will the Secretary of State commit to ensuring that the plans that are put in place are effective and that local authorities have sufficient funds to implement them properly?
Matt Hancock
The hon. Lady is right to draw attention to the need to ensure that funding for mental health services has parity with that for physical health services. Getting there is the work of a generation. We did not even measure access to mental health services until this Government brought that in, and we are working towards parity.
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Debate between Matt Hancock and Helen Jones(6 years, 5 months ago)
Westminster HallRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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Helen Jones
The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. There is much more to do, and I will come to that in a moment.
Media City has been a huge success and has boosted other creative industries in the region, although it took some time to convince certain people that there are nice places to live that are not in London and that northerners do not keep coal in the bath and ferrets up their trousers.
Helen Jones
The BBC’s natural history unit, which produces excellent documentaries, is based in Bristol. There has been investment in Birmingham and Belfast. As the hon. Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) said, there is a lot more to do. The BBC needs to do much more to reflect the diversity in this country.
The Minister for Digital (Matt Hancock)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. This has been a generally cheerful and thoughtful debate. I would first like to thank the tens of thousands of people who engaged with the petition process and ensured we are debating this issue today. Whether hon. Members agree with them or not, we would not be having this debate if it was not for people signing the petitions. E-petitions are a relatively new innovation in this House—they are less than a decade old—and the fact that we are having this debate and airing these issues demonstrates that the process is working and that our democratic institutions are responding to the citizens we serve.
The hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) is the embodiment of that principle. I thank her for her introduction. I was interested in how she would speak to the two petitions. She was clear that she did not agree with their thrust, but she faithfully set out the arguments and opened up the debate. If people a sign a petition, it is very important that their views are expressed, even though it is right that Members express their own views. The hon. Lady made an excellent speech. The Churchill quotation that she referred to—she said that the BBC is the worst system except all the others that have been tried from time to time—came up many times during the debate.
Most Members generously supported the BBC’s funding model. Others did so more grudgingly, but did not actually support the petitions. Some said that the BBC is full of lefties. That may well be true now, but it was not always so. The truth is that we fished out the best talent in the BBC, and they are now Conservative Members of Parliament. It is good to see so many of them here today. Perhaps there are only lefties left in the BBC.
Hon. Members raised the issue of diversity, about which every institution faces questions. The recent revelations, thanks to the transparency measures we introduced, demonstrated some of the concrete changes the BBC needs to make with respect to diversity and equal pay, but that is true for many institutions, including Parliament. It is a fact that, in this debate, there are as many white men from Chester as women.
Matt Hancock
My goodness! There are more people from Chester than women in this debate. What is it about the wonderful, great city of Chester that leads to so many people with an interest in one of our greatest national institutions? Chester, the city of my birth, is a great place. I was shocked to hear the hon. Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) describe himself as a leftie—he has never given any indication of that before. In this debate, like many others, he is probably closer to the Government position than to that of the leadership of his own party.
I am amazed at how much spare time the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) has to watch things on the BBC, to write texts about chaperoning Mrs Balls around the Labour party conference, to watch 1970s music programming and even to appear on Dave. I am delighted that he has spared a bit of time to turn up.
I am grateful that the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara) declared unambiguously the Scottish National party’s support for the BBC, but he made some unreasonable attacks because he was unhappy about what he perceived to be the BBC’s balance, which is a pity. He might be unhappy with the outcome of the referendum, but I think that the reporting surrounding the referendum truly demonstrated the impartiality to which the BBC is committed. When it comes to the BBC’s representation and its expenditure on programming around the UK, the clue is in the name: the BBC is the British Broadcasting Corporation, and it has a duty to spend money in—and, indeed, to reflect—all parts of the UK. Whether it is the west midlands or each part of Scotland separately, it does that. That is true for Wales, Northern Ireland, the west midlands and cities within Scotland—it is not just about Scotland as a whole. It is the British Broadcasting Corporation, and it rightly serves the UK as a whole.