Oral Answers to Questions

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I cannot comment on the individual case that the hon. Lady mentions, but I can say that we take seriously the issue of our ports, and indeed the juxtaposed ports in northern France. We have maintained 100% screening checks on those coming through. Our introduction of operational and technological improvements has prevented nearly 70,000 illegal entry attempts through those juxtaposed ports.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

7. What steps she is taking to promote co-operation between police services.

[The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)]

The Government are supporting local policing leaders to invest in cross-force capabilities and collaborative initiatives by protecting police funding over the course of this Parliament, using the police innovation fund to incentivise collaboration, and providing new transformation funding to drive further investment and innovation.

[Neil Carmichael]

That is a very encouraging answer, but bearing in mind the work of the ministerial taskforce on child protection, what steps is the Home Secretary taking to make sure that the police co-operate well with other agencies in schools, in the healthcare system, and in social work?

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend raises a very important point about the police’s interaction with other agencies in dealing with child protection. On Friday, I visited a school and talked to people there about the work they do with the multi-agency safeguarding hub in bringing together police and various parts of the school and the local authority to deal with those issues. We recognise the role that schools have to play, including through personal, social, health and economic education and through sex and relationships education. We also announced in March, when we launched our “Tackling Child Sexual Exploitation” report, that we will be looking at the training of staff, to enable them to be better able to spot the signs of where children may be being exploited in that way.

Home Affairs and Justice

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 28th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who made an excellent speech. I entirely concur with her observations about domestic violence and sexual abuse. Those are appalling crimes and are utterly indefensible, and action must be taken to put them under a spotlight. We need to be surer in future that we can prevent such things from happening—as urgently as possible—and that, when they do happen, we can pounce properly, accurately and firmly. The hon. Lady made some very powerful points that should land in a safe place, and I would certainly support her in promoting such a development.

Birmingham is a great city, and that is one of the reasons why I am determined to reopen a station in Stroud, enabling people to travel to Birmingham without having to change trains too often. If I have my way, people from Stroud will be going to Birmingham all the more often, and I hope that people from Birmingham will reciprocate by coming to Stroud. This is an important mission of mine, and I look forward to ensuring that commuters, business and tourists benefit from the initiative I am taking.

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay). Many Conservatives, at least, were particularly pleased by his election victory, which, as we know, had seminal consequences. I congratulate him on making a fabulous speech.

My constituency is very beautiful; I do not need to expand on that as I did so in my maiden speech five years ago. My constituency covers not just Stroud; all the other parts of it matter, too—the valleys and vales. It is not just beautiful; it is a place of economic vibrancy and good community spirit. It has a strong interest in manufacturing and the creative sector and all the rural characteristics we would expect of a constituency in Gloucestershire. I salute my constituency, and I thank the electors for returning me to this House.

The most impressive sentence in Her Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech was the second one, in which she talked about one nation. I have been a fully signed up supporter of one nation ever since I got involved in politics. It is a particularly strong theme that underpins all parts of the Government’s agenda—building a nation where everybody feels they have opportunity, fair liberty and the capacity to fulfil their lives, and where nobody from any part of the country feels excluded, and where anybody can express themselves properly, within reason. That is the kind of country I want to live in, and we keep on needing to make it because we come across challenges all the time. One nation Britain and a one nation Government is precisely what we want to see.

[Ian Blackford]

We are told as we come into this Parliament that there are four nations: Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will reflect on that, rather than talking about one nation.

[Neil Carmichael]

That is a good point and I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and of course one nation does mean a collection of the four nations in a United Kingdom.

One nation is really an expression of how we feel about the people in our nation—how we want to give opportunity, how we want to make sure they can propel themselves forward, how we want to make sure nobody is left behind, how we want to make sure our standards of justice are right for all and fair to everybody. That is the kind of one nation I talk about, and that is the kind of one nation the Government want to build—and the one nation is, of course, the whole of the United Kingdom, and I pay tribute to that. On devolution, which doubtless is to the fore of the hon. Gentleman’s mind, we want to see, and we will deliver, proper devolution to Scotland.

[Mr MacNeil]

I am amazed at what the hon. Gentleman says about the progress of four nations becoming one nation. Might he argue one day that one Europe should become one nation? Is that the path of progress he is following?

[Neil Carmichael]

Our values as one nation are, of course, ones we would want everybody else to follow. We are talking about the United Kingdom, and the current position is that this Government have capacity and dominance over this country, but I also want to emphasise that what matters is that sense of fairness, of equality and of inclusion.

The dominant home affairs topic in the contributions of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the shadow Home Secretary was immigration. It is a critical issue and the Government rightly want to tighten things further in due course, but there is another side to the coin: the way in which we operate ourselves, which is partly to do with the other key issue in the Gracious Speech—productivity. We as a nation need to address our economic productivity. We need to be sure that we can compete well with our competitors in Europe and beyond. We need to address the significant productivity gap between ourselves and, for example, Germany or the United States of America. That is one aspect of this debate on which we should focus in this Parliament.

The skills agenda aims to equip young people with the ability to get the jobs and careers they need and that businesses need them to have. It is about making sure that our factories can produce goods competitively, giving us a trade advantage and delivering higher standards of living for people in those industries.

The key challenge of delivering a strong skills agenda is underpinned by what we do in our schools, so I am really pleased that the speech referred to a Bill to tackle coasting schools. There is a debate about the definition of a coasting school. A coasting school is one in which a child is not able to progress as he or she should or, even worse, is regressing; and we have measurements for that and can see where schools are failing. Too many children leave school without sufficient qualifications and learning capacity. That is captured by the long-tail-of-underachievement argument, and we have to stamp it out. If young people do not get a fair start in life early enough, we let them down—and we let everybody else down, too, because we are all in this together when it comes to the kind of society we build and the kind of economy we want. Skills are absolutely critical.

Another aspect of this debate is the way in which we structure our businesses and think about investment so that we have a clear pathway to develop the new technologies that will lead us to solve the problems of climate change and tackle the productivity gap. I want firms to think more about their long-term prospects and long-term investment needs, so let us alter the tax system to encourage such investment.

The speech refers to tax in another way: enabling hard-working people to keep more of what they earn. I am pleased that once we have passed the necessary legislation anyone on the minimum wage will be exempt from income tax. That is a fabulous encouragement to people to get jobs; it is a fabulous motivation for families to move into the world of work, if they have not done so in the past; it is also a great reward in terms of the idea that people should contribute to our economy, because the real issue is making sure that we as a country can deliver the lifestyle and opportunities that young and older people need to fulfil their lives. That is a really important part of the speech.

There are other elements that we need to celebrate and promote. I want more apprenticeships, which are a key part of equipping people to develop themselves, their interests and issues. The Government are absolutely right to aim to create even more apprenticeships than we managed to create in the past five years. That is what business wants to see and what we all need to see in our constituencies. In my constituency, nearly one in four people is involved in manufacturing and engineering, so they are an important part of the local economy. It is imperative that we have university technical colleges and the promotion of the skills we should have, and I will back the Government as they continue to make sure we have that range of educational provision. I salute the idea of more academies, but I also want to be clear that they are properly accountable, because accountability is crucial in any walk of life, and certainly when we are dealing with the teaching and wellbeing of our children. I want to enhance that further.

In summary, this Queen’s Speech is, as we have been discussing, about creating one nation—a nation that is proud of its people.

[Craig MacKinlay]

My hon. Friend mentioned the interesting topic of UTCs, which are springing up across the whole country. Does he have any experience of them locally, because they are certainly of interest to me?

[Neil Carmichael]

I certainly do, because we are going to have a UTC in my constituency very shortly. It will provide skills for people between the ages of 14 and 18 in the areas of advanced manufacturing, cyber-studies and so on. We have secured the commitment, the site and the sense of purpose, as well as all the necessary commitments from partners. It will be located at Berkeley Green, on the site of a former nuclear power station. It has facilities for precisely the sort of thing that my hon. Friend asks about and it will contribute massively to the pipeline of skills that an economy such as my local one, and the surrounding area, needs desperately. I urge you to pursue UTCs wherever you can, as necessary.

In summary, we want a country where people have opportunity and the capacity to thrive and lead fulfilled lives. We want people to be able to deliver for themselves and their families the sort of life that we all aspire to and can have within our reach. That is what this whole debate will be about. That is the general foundation of this Government’s plan for the next five years and it is well worth supporting and promoting in our constituencies.

Passport Applications

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Wednesday 18th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House expresses concern at the experience of constituents applying for passports at HM Passport Office, including lengthy delays and consequential cancellations of holidays and business visits; notes the Government’s response to the Urgent Question from the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford of 12 June 2014, setting out emergency measures to deal with the passport backlog after an increase in demand; further notes that HM Passport Office is taking over responsibility for issuing an estimated 350,000 passports to citizens overseas from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office this year; believes that the Government failed to properly plan to meet the level of demand this year; calls on the Government to expand its emergency measures by compensating passport applicants who had to pay for urgent upgrades in recent weeks because of internal delays with HM Passport Office; and further calls for the Secretary of State for the Home Department to publish monthly figures for passport applications from within the UK and abroad compared to previous years to monitor performance at HM Passport Office.

The Opposition have called this debate because we are still not getting answers about what is happening to get people the passports and travel documents they need. In answer to a question earlier, the Prime Minister suggested that the Home Secretary might have more to announce today. I hope that that is the case, because the action taken so far is clearly not enough. It is disappointing that we get answers and action only when the Home Secretary is called to the House of Commons. Nevertheless, this is an opportunity to make further progress.

Since we last heard from the Home Secretary, MPs have had yet more constituents get in touch to raise their concerns and problems.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

Will the shadow Home Secretary join me in wishing well my constituent, Jordan Frapwell, at the European triathlon championships in Austria, and extend her thanks to the Passport Office for making sure that he could get there in time to compete?

[Yvette Cooper]

I certainly wish the hon. Gentleman’s constituent all the best, and I am glad that he got his passport in time. I also hope that he did not face undue stress over any delays. Other hon. Members have constituents who have been attending international sporting competitions and have had to drive halfway across the country to Durham the night before they were due to fly out to make sure that they had their passport on time.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

T7. With reference to the growing rural economy, what reassurance can my hon. Friend give my constituents that we will have 90% rural broadband roll-out across Stroud by 2015?

[Mr Vaizey]

I am delighted to update the House on the significant progress we are making. We are connecting more than 10,000 homes a week. Half the projects that are under way are already ahead of schedule and we are bringing in 4G two years ahead of schedule. This is a triumphant programme.

Proposed Europol Regulation

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

One thing is clear: most of us think that we should be in Europol. My hon. Friends in the Liberal Democrats, the Opposition Front Benchers and the Minister are all clear on that. It is good that we have all come to that conclusion. It is fundamentally right that serious crime can be dealt with internationally across Europe, and Europol is the right tool to do that. I expect Britain to remain in Europol. However, the questions about data management, national security and so on that the Minister drew to our attention need further reflection and debate.

As for the Association of Chief Police Officers, the central point is not so much what it would like as an outcome regarding our membership of Europol, but how we get there. The important point is this: can the British Government be absolutely sure that they can have sufficient influence during the negotiation period?That is the central question, and it is one to which we will return in relation to a number of other issues, as we consider our future relationship with the European Union as a whole and various aspects of it. However, I would put down the marker that it is important for us to engage—as I think we will, based on what the Minister said—because we have to protect our interests in the ways that he described and that get us the right outcome.

Let me conclude this relatively short speech with this observation. During the forthcoming period of negotiation, it is critical that we negotiate through appropriate mechanisms. I fully recognise the point the Minister made about qualified majority voting, but it is important that we ensure that natural allies to our causes are also embraced and included in the process.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

The right hon. Gentleman will also know that the NAO has said that we have some of the best and most transparent processes for evaluating the work going on in this area, so I would encourage him to read the full report.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

Good progress is being made in Gloucestershire on broadband, but does the Secretary of State agree that it is important to work with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in promoting local small businesses in places such as Stroud, Dursley and Nailsworth?

[Maria Miller]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We must ensure that when we have access to superfast broadband in local areas, businesses understand its value, and that is why we have always said that this is not only about investing in the roll-out of this infrastructure, but about ensuring that businesses understand how it can help them.

Immigration Rules: Sponsors

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

No, the hon. Lady misunderstands me, which I am sure is my fault for not explaining the situation. The point is that if someone comes here and we say they have no recourse to public funds, they do have access to the NHS. I think the hon. Lady was arguing that because someone on a modest income who brings their family member here could not access public funds, that would not place a burden on the taxpayer. My point was that if, for example, that person needed to access the NHS, they could, and of course that burden would fall on the taxpayer, even though the income-earner’s contribution to the Exchequer may be very modest.

The other, wider, issue concerns the way our welfare system works. The presence of the partner may of course increase the benefits that the British national is entitled to. Although the migrant might not be entitled to housing benefit, for example, their presence may well increase the amount that the UK citizen is able to claim. That may give rise to a genuine issue about how our welfare system works—that is another debate—but given how it works, it is not quite as simple as saying that because there is no recourse to public funds there is no burden on the taxpayer from their presence.

I want to say something about a change relating to integration, albeit briefly as it does not fall within the category of finance. We think English language skills are very important, which is why, from October, we are increasing the level of English language skills we expect. That is partly to give those who come here the best possible chance of integrating—participating in the workplace and being part of the community.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

The Minister is making a really important point. People are welcome, providing they can contribute to the society they are joining. That is surely good for them, too. Does the Minister agree that the central point regarding language and income is that they feel comfortable, involved and included?

[Mr Harper]

I do, and that goes back to the central point of the debate.

I was about to give a little background to how we arrived at the particular sums of money involved, because that is helpful—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend is right. If people have married or are with a partner, they are looking at a particular route. It is worth saying, and her intervention highlights this, that there are alternative routes for people under the immigration rules for some of these difficult cases.

[Neil Carmichael]

May I go back to the qualification period, for both savings and income? Why did the Government choose six months?

[Mr Harper]

It was to ensure that people could not abuse the system by holding the money for only a day or two, making the application, succeeding and then giving the money back. It is to make sure that the money is genuinely under someone’s control and available to them rather than their borrowing money that belongs to someone else for a short period. We felt that six months met that requirement without being overly burdensome and putting unreasonable requirements on individuals.

Perhaps I will follow up the point made by the hon. Member for Slough if she speaks to me about the specific case. Inspiration has told me that the savings do not count in that way with self-employed people. If she has a specific case, which it looks like she has, perhaps she will draw that to my attention and I will look at it and see whether I think the rules are sufficient to deal with it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 15th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I say to the right hon. Gentleman that the Opposition really need to get their story straight on the cost of PCC elections. On the one hand they complain about the cost, but on the other hand they ask for the cost to go up by putting in extra provisions. I note that a number of my right hon. and hon. Friends have risen to comment on the excellence of the Conservative candidates. On the Opposition Benches, however, it has taken the right hon. Gentleman to stand up and speak for himself, because nobody else has been willing to stand up for their candidates.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

T3. To continue with the theme of police and crime commissioners and the elections, does the Home Secretary agree that the introduction of democracy and transparency will help to achieve the right balance between rural and urban policing, as exemplified by our excellent candidate in Gloucestershire, Victoria Atkins?

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)]

My hon. Friend is precisely right. In areas such as Gloucestershire, striking the right balance between urban and rural pressures on the police will be an important task for the police and crime commissioner. One significant difference is that only 7% of the public are aware that they can go to a police authority if they are unhappy with their policing. By the end of this campaign, I am sure that a far higher proportion of people will be aware of their police and crime commissioner candidates.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I repeat to the right hon. Lady that, under the plans for the contingency numbers during the Olympics, there will be an increase in the number of staff at the borders. We will be manning all desks at peak times during the Olympics. The numbers will be there to do that. It is important that we ensure that we are providing security and a good experience for people arriving at Heathrow, and I was very pleased when I was at Heathrow a couple of weeks ago to be able to welcome five members of the Chinese team and ensure that they were put through the games family member lane.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

T5. With long-distance crime and our resource allocation in mind, what are the Government doing to improve collaboration between forces, especially given the forthcoming police commissioners?

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Nick Herbert)]

My hon. Friend is right that collaboration is important. That is the case in respect of not only back-office functions, but operational functions, particularly to deal with serious and organised crime. That is increasingly what forces are doing, as the inspectorate of constabulary confirmed last week, and we have placed forces under new statutory duties to consider that.

Family Migration

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 11th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. The European convention is absolutely clear that the right to a family life is a qualified right. What we are doing today and will do in due course when Parliament has its debate—and, I trust, supports the motion the Government will propose—is saying very clearly to the judiciary, “Here is the framework and the balance you should be striking between the public interest and that of the individual.”

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

I warmly welcome the statement. On the question of sham marriages, is it not conceivable that a forced marriage could fall into that category? What measures does the Home Secretary have to deal with that and what are her thoughts on that subject?

[Mrs May]

As a Government, we are very concerned about forced marriages. We have decided to take the step of criminalising forced marriage, which we believe will send a clear message to people that it is wrong. It is right that the Government send that clear message because forced marriage is wrong, it leads to abuse and we should ensure that it does not take place.