Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Michael Ellis and Anna Soubry

Monday 20th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)]

There is an unsatisfactory anomaly whereby war widows can keep their pensions if they remarried before 1973 or after 2005, but not in between. That is an unhappy and unsatisfactory anomaly for war widows, so will the Secretary of State or the Minister look at it?

[Anna Soubry]

We have a new Secretary of State, and he, I, and other Ministers, continue to consider that issue. Notwithstanding how much sympathy—perhaps that is not the right word—but support we might have for the argument made, there is a real legal problem and difficulty with retrospection, and that also occupies our minds when deciding what to do.

Forensic Science Service

Debate between Michael Ellis and Anna Soubry

Monday 27th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Ellis]

There is a very big difference there. Hon. Members will do well to recall that under the McFarland review the previous Labour Government effectively accepted a move towards privatisation but botched the job. There is no point in trying to get away from the fact that the FSS is urgently in need of change, and the Government’s move is the right one for the wider interests of forensics.

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree—perhaps this has not been understood—that before a so-called expert can give written or oral evidence to a court the judge has to be satisfied that they are indeed an expert in the field in which they say they are an expert? It matters not where they have come from. What matters to the judge is that they have qualifications, experience and so on, so that it can be determined that they are an expert in the field in which they are giving evidence.

[Michael Ellis]

I agree absolutely with my hon. Friend—I have made that point already. The reality is that the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Crown Prosecution Service would not seek to put a case before a judge and jury that relied on someone who was not actually an expert. Therefore, pursuing that argument is clutching at straws.