Debate on the Address

Debate between Neil Coyle and Robert Jenrick

Wednesday 17th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

May I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle) on her maiden speech? It is clearly a real achievement to be the first to make a maiden speech in this Parliament, and I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will join me in congratulating her and wishing her well in the years ahead here in Parliament.

I welcome all new Members to this House, not least because some of them make me look older, which I have been looking forward to for some time. I remember when I was first sworn into the House. I entered at a by-election and so swore in on my own, in a class of one. There was a real heckle on that occasion from the beast of Bolsover. He asked if I was here on work experience and everyone laughed. I have a few more grey hairs now, 10 years on, and have just been through a difficult general election in north Nottinghamshire. I want to begin by saying a special thank you to my constituents for doing me the great honour and privilege of re-electing me, all the more so on what was clearly a difficult night for my party. During this Parliament, I will represent my constituents with all of my vim and vigour.

Having served as a Minister under each of the last five Prime Ministers, I know what a special privilege it is to serve as a Minister, so I wish our successors in office all best wishes and good luck in the years ahead. As patriots, we all know that this Government’s success is our success, and we want them to tackle the great challenges facing our country. I want them to enjoy their time in ministerial office as much as I did.

The general election made a number of things clear to me. I am deeply proud of many of our Government’s achievements, which I will fiercely defend in the months and years ahead. We took a bankrupt country and righted our public services and public finances. We ensured a decade of good employment after inheriting high unemployment, particularly among young people. We led Europe in the defence of Ukraine. We reformed our education system, and we now outstrip countries all over the world in the literacy and numeracy of our children. We were one of the world’s greatest countries in tackling environmental challenges, decarbonising faster than any other G7 country. For those and other reasons, I will always defend the record of the last Conservative Government, but I will come on to some of the lessons I have learned from their failings.

[Neil Coyle]

Is the right hon. Gentleman suggesting that voters were ungrateful on 4 July?

[Robert Jenrick]

I cannot quite hear the hon. Gentleman. If he is asking whether the electorate were wrong, the answer is no. No politician should ever doubt the electorate, but it is right that we defend the things we did well in government so that there is a proper diagnosis of what we got right and what we got wrong.

I think we did get some things wrong. We promised to get Brexit done when we stood in 2019, and we did. We got Brexit done and restored our sovereignty as a nation, which is a great and lasting achievement, but we also promised that we would secure our borders and that we would ensure a strong economy, lower taxes and a strong NHS and public services, which the public rightly expect. On those counts, we did not deliver the public services, the lower taxes, the economic growth and the migration system that we promised and the public rightly expect.

The baton now passes to this Labour Government. Where they succeed, I will welcome and support them; and where they fall short, I will challenge them. We want to ensure that the great issues facing our country are properly addressed. We live in one of the greatest times to be alive, but it is a time of immense change. There is a power shift from west to east, and new technology, like artificial intelligence, is upending old industries. It is an age of mass migration, which is challenging the pace of change in our country, creating huge pressures on housing, public services and integration, and making it harder to build the united country that we all want to see.

I worry that this King’s Speech falls short on some of those great challenges. There are undoubtedly Bills that I welcome, and I am delighted that the new Government are taking forward the Bill for a Holocaust memorial, a project in which I have been involved for many years. Some of the Bills are radical, such as the changes to our energy policy, and I worry that they are radical for all the wrong reasons. Despite having decarbonised faster than other countries, and despite being responsible for only 1% of global emissions, we now find ourselves with a Government pursuing, for ideological reasons, a net zero policy that will make it harder for our own consumers to afford their bills. The policy will further erode our industrial base and leave us in hock to Chinese technology. We are trading dependence on Russian hydrocarbons for dependence on Chinese electric vehicles, smart meters and solar panels that will despoil our countryside. New quangos, such as Great British Energy, will spring up, serving no apparent purpose and taking inspiration from predecessors such as Robin Hood Energy in Nottingham, in my part of the world. That failed project wasted £50 million of taxpayers’ money.

I worry that 200,000 jobs in the oil and gas sector have been put in danger in the first few days of this Government, at a time when they are rightly saying that they want to fuel our economy, create jobs and change the dynamics that the country has seen since the 2008 financial crash and after 20 or 30 years of low productivity growth and unsatisfactory economic growth. We should all be working to find ways to do that and to make that possible.

I worry about the message we are hearing on the economy. We want economic growth, but economic growth is founded on harnessing the entrepreneurship of our people. It is about creating a start-up country and helping small business people to found businesses around their kitchen tables, like my parents did. It is not a statist vision of this country. It is not about using new quangos or a national wealth fund, which is an oxymoron because it is going to borrow the money it seeks to invest. It is not about changing our employment laws, which will make us less competitive and drive the kind of higher structural levels of unemployment we see in Europe that we have mercifully avoided over the last 10 years.

And I worry about immigration, because we live in an age of mass migration. I have been honest—painfully honest—about the failings of the last Government on this topic, but I worry that the same or worse mistakes are about to be made again. What we are seeing in the channel is a national security emergency. We are seeing tens of thousands of people about whom we know next to nothing crossing into our country, breaking into our country, in flagrant abuse of our laws. Some of them are subjects of interest being followed by our security services. This has to stop. Scrapping the only known credible deterrent, with nothing else to put in its place, is going to surrender to the people smuggling gangs. That is wrong, it is a mistake and I worry that we are going to rue the day that we did that.

I also hope that the Government will take legal migration seriously. We have to accept that the public in most parts of our country have been voting for 20 or 30 years, in elections and referendums, for Governments that promise to control and reduce the level of legal migration, only for Governments of all political colours to do precisely the opposite. That is immensely corrosive to public trust and confidence in politics and in democracy. As one of our colleagues said earlier, about the rise of far-right parties around the world, if we centrist parties on the left and the right do nothing about this, we will see the rise of far-right parties in this country. That would be a great mistake.

I hope the reforms I started, to reduce the number of people coming into this country legally, are taken forward, and that we further reduce those numbers. We could have used the King’s Speech today to implement a legal cap on net migration, embedded by Parliament in law. We have not done that, which will mean further pressure on housing, public services and the pace of change.

Let me close with this: the Prime Minister has said he wants this to be a new era, in which politics is defined by service. I think we will all agree on that point—it should be—but the question is who do we serve. I do not think we come to this place to serve the interests of new quangos, commissions and reviews, the legal fraternity in contested notions of international law, or the new and worrying rise in sectarian politics, represented in this House for the first time in my lifetime, which again should worry us. We are sent here to serve the interests of our constituents. I choose them; I choose to ensure the working people of Newark and Nottinghamshire are always represented. They sent me here with a few clear messages: secure our border; reduce immigration; lower our taxes; stop the crime; build homes; build a more united country, cohesive and integrated, not riddled by the poison of left-wing identity politics. That is what I am here to fight. Where this Government do that and live up to that test, I will support them. Where they do not, I will fiercely challenge them.

Illegal Migration Bill: Economic Impact Assessment

Debate between Neil Coyle and Robert Jenrick

Tuesday 27th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I do not support allowing asylum seekers to work in this country. The approach that we are taking under the Illegal Migration Bill means that individuals who come here will be processed swiftly—in days and weeks, not months and years—and then either returned home or sent to a safe third country such as Rwanda, so that issue will not be relevant. Let me also point out that the hon. Gentleman recently opposed the proposal for a number of asylum seekers to stay in his constituency, despite having said that it was a place of sanctuary.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

Excessive cost for nil result—does not that assessment sum up not just the Minister’s flawed Home Office plans, but the incompetence at the heart of the whole sinking Government?

[Robert Jenrick]

No. As I have said on many occasions, the approach we are taking is to introduce one of the most creative and robust systems of any country in the western world.

Hotel Asylum Accommodation: Local Authority Consultation

Debate between Neil Coyle and Robert Jenrick

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we must power through the backlog, which has been allowed to reach an unacceptable level. We will do so by raising the productivity of teams and improving the management that oversees them. We will also look at how we prioritise cases, because some will have much higher grant rates than others. Anything further we can do to improve the situation, we will do. Improving the backlog is not the source of the issue; the source of the issue is the sheer quantity of people crossing the channel illegally. As much of our effort as possible needs to be focused on that, rather than on the symptoms of the problem.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Ind)]

The Minister may say that this is a new problem, but 16 months ago hundreds of Afghans were moved into Southwark with zero advance notice, including into hostel accommodation that Public Health England advised the Home Office not to use. Will the Minister thank Southwark Day Centre for Asylum Seekers, Southwark Council and all the volunteers who have worked so hard to provide a welcome to such a large group of vulnerable people? Does he recognise the cross-party consensus today that the Home Office has failed on this issue among many others? Will he consider passing asylum accommodation provision to local authorities, with full resources to cover all associated costs, including those of emergency children’s services?

[Robert Jenrick]

We want to have the most productive relationship with local government that we possibly can. As a former Local Government Secretary, I know just how effective local government can be in dealing with challenging situations. The task for local authorities now is to respond to our request for full national dispersal, which means working with the Home Office to find decent accommodation in all parts of the country and, with respect to children, helping us to find state or private foster carers or care home places so that we can ensure that young people are taken out of unacceptable hotels and brought into communities where they get good-quality care as quickly as possible.

Building Safety

Debate between Neil Coyle and Robert Jenrick

Wednesday 10th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I honestly do not know. The Scottish Government have, as far as I am aware, done nothing with the very significant sum of money that the Chancellor has given them through the Barnett consequentials process. I am not aware of what the Welsh Government are doing. I think those questions are better directed to the Scottish Government and the Welsh Labour Administration.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab) [V]]

The Secretary of State has said that his mission is safety and fairness for leaseholders. How do today’s proposals protect a leaseholder who has been paying £50 a month but still has a large loan outstanding on their home at the point of sale, because of the cost of removing unsafe cladding? Is the truth not that the Secretary of State has failed to deliver on his promises of fairness, and that he is choosing to leave thousands of leaseholders facing massive costs?

[Robert Jenrick]

The hon. Gentleman, for whom I have great respect, misunderstands the scheme that we have just announced. For buildings of between four and six storeys, where the risk is much lower, leaseholders will have the opportunity, if they wish—there will be no compulsion—to take advantage of the financing scheme. That loan scheme financing arrangement will sit with the building, not with the individual. It will not affect the individual’s personal credit rating, and it should not have a material impact on the value of their property. It will be akin to paying somewhat more on their service charge every month. As I say, it will be capped at £50 a month, which is similar to the average service charge. Of course, in many buildings the service charge is already far in excess of that.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Neil Coyle and Robert Jenrick

Monday 5th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I do not agree with that analysis of the actions that we have taken as a Government. We are bringing forward the biggest change to building safety regulations in a generation. We have outlined plans for our £1.6 billion fund. Of course there is more that we could do. This is one of the most challenging and difficult issues faced by the Government today, or indeed any Government, and has built up over many generations, but we intend to tackle it and to provide support for those in need.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

Covid regulations prevent homeless shelters from opening, so will the Government extend the severe weather emergency protocol to cover all areas affected by any lockdown, both to protect homeless people and to prevent the virus from spreading?