Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Nick Timothy and Angela Eagle(1 day, 8 hours ago)
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Dame Angela Eagle
This is a matter for the University of Cambridge, but having visited the veterinary school at Harper Adams University, I am all too aware—as clearly the hon. Gentleman is—of the importance of having enough well-qualified vets in our country. We need to ensure that the supply and the opportunities to train are there, but this particular decision is one for the University of Cambridge. I am happy to talk to the university, but I am unsighted on the reasons. If the hon. Member wants to talk to me afterwards, I would be more than happy to hear what he has to say.
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)
The Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs (Dame Angela Eagle)
Modelling has shown that food prices are driven by the interaction of domestic and international considerations, including farm gate prices, import prices and exchange rates. Modelling from industry and Government expects food price inflation to fall gradually over the next two years.
Nick Timothy
Happy Christmas to you, Mr Speaker, and to all Members and staff of the House.
At the Liaison Committee this week, the Prime Minister admitted that some farmers will take their own lives because of the family farms tax, but he repeated the claim that three quarters of farms will not be affected. According to the National Farmers Union, the opposite is true: three quarters of commercial family farms will have to pay it. The big idea now is to drive up profitability, but as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) said, the family farms tax is killing investment. Does the Minister think that Baroness Batters was wrong when she said in her report, on page 4, that the closure of the sustainable farming initiative and the family farms tax have left farmers
“particularly in the arable sector… questioning viability, let alone profitability”?
Dame Angela Eagle
I do not think that the hon. Member’s characterisation of the Prime Minister’s remarks to the Liaison Committee is entirely accurate, but I am working on introducing and making available in the first half of next year a sustainable farming incentive scheme that will hopefully be more available to smaller farmers, easier to engage with, and much simpler than the mess delivered by the Government of which he was a part. Let us face it: 25% of the money in the SFI scheme goes to the top 4% of farmers. I want to see a different distribution.
Immigration
Debate between Nick Timothy and Angela Eagle(6 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Dame Angela Eagle
When we discuss migration policy, net migration and legal or illegal immigration, it is really important to remember that we are talking about human beings, that we should treat them as human beings and that all human beings have human rights. We should not perpetuate narratives that dehumanise people. Too often—
Dame Angela Eagle
Let me finish the sentence. Too often, the Opposition parties—some of the Opposition parties; not all of them—perpetuate a narrative that is increasingly dangerous. Let us not dehumanise fellow human beings.
Asylum Seekers: Hotel Accommodation
Debate between Nick Timothy and Angela Eagle(1 year ago)
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Dame Angela Eagle
I agree that it is about doing the day job effectively and efficiently, and if it cannot be done effectively and efficiently, redesigning it so that it can be, rather than having huge rows with the international community, threatening to leave the European convention on human rights, and setting up a parallel scheme that was not agreed by anybody, which spent vast amounts of money and ground the system to a halt. That is not the way to achieve success in this area. Considering the use of a wave machine to somehow send boats back to France just about sums up the reality of the Conservatives’ attitude to what is a difficult situation.
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
The Prime Minister has pledged to smash the gangs, and the Minister appears to be very confident in her position, so can she tell the House which metric we should use to judge whether the gangs have been smashed and the channel crossings ended, and by what date that will happen?
Dame Angela Eagle
I will answer in my own way. The Conservative party allowed channel crossings to be industrialised. We are now facing a very sophisticated set of international supply chains that need international co-operation to be taken down and disrupted. We have established the border security command, we have announced the investment of £150 million, and we are getting 100 additional investigators to look at this matter. We managed to achieve a very significant arrest of an offender just the other week, which will begin to degrade the capacity of international organised criminal gangs to smuggle people on to our shores. The hon. Gentleman will see when the numbers start to go down, as will the rest of us.
Illegal Immigration
Debate between Nick Timothy and Angela Eagle(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Dame Angela Eagle
We have to do what we can to disrupt this trade. We have already seen that the boats are becoming more unseaworthy and that more people are getting on them. Just because that is happening, it does not mean we should do nothing to get in the way of the supply of boats and engines that criminals use to facilitate this trade. Even though they have not agreed on the wherewithal, all Members in the debate have agreed that we should be doing our best to stop this trade. No Government would not want to be in control of their external borders—I think we all agree on that. It is therefore important that we take a much more sophisticated and integrated approach to dealing with these increasingly integrated cross-border gangs.
We must not leave the gangs to flourish or organise, reaching even deeper back into places such as Vietnam, but instead harass and disrupt them and their financing. My hon. Friend the Member for Dover and Deal (Mike Tapp) was spot on to say that this has been done before in different contexts, particularly drugs and international crime, and it can certainly be done with this trade. We should try to be a bit more optimistic about the potential for concerted, cross-border action among states to deal with the issue.
A different approach must be workable. We believe it must respect international law, which is why the Government scrapped the partnership with Rwanda. The Opposition, and particularly their Front-Bench spokesperson, the hon. Member for Stockton West (Matt Vickers), have been acting as if the Rwanda deal was somehow a deterrent, but from the day it was agreed to to the day it was scrapped, more than 84,000 people crossed the channel in small boats. That does not sound like a deterrent. Since it was scrapped, the number of small boat arrivals has gone down 24% compared to the same period last year, and down 40% compared to the same period in 2022. If it was a deterrent, it worked in an extremely odd way.
Nick Timothy
Can the Minister explain why, in calculating the figure the Home Secretary presented to the House of Commons—as part of the claim that scrapping the retrospective element of the duty to remove would save £700 million a year for 10 years—the impact assessment assumes absolutely no deportations to Rwanda at all? In a letter to me, the Home Office permanent secretary said that the cost of removing people to Rwanda is included in the number.
Dame Angela Eagle
I have not seen the letter to the hon. Gentleman, but I am happy to write to him if he wants a further explanation. We must remember that in its three years in existence, the Rwanda scheme cost hundreds of millions of pounds. We were going to pay £150,000 per person deported to Rwanda; that was part of the agreement. In those three years, only four people were sent to Kigali, and they went voluntarily, so I do not think the Conservatives’ view that the Rwanda scheme was an answer to all their problems and prayers was borne out by the experience of it. Scrapping it has not made a blind bit of difference to some people’s desire to get into this country.