Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Pat McFadden and David Mundell(3 days, 2 hours ago)
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Pat McFadden
I am not sure I will. While Ministers should attend on occasion, Ministers having to be in a certain place just to keep up with a published record is not the best use of their time. I very much welcome civil servants working in Wolverhampton. The Cabinet Office has a fantastic building in Glasgow, which I have enjoyed visiting and working in on several occasions.
David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) (Con)
I was disappointed that the UK Government did not go ahead with proposals for a Glasgow campus for UK Government offices. One reason behind that proposal was upgrading the facilities available to Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office staff who are located at Abercrombie House in East Kilbride, which had been assessed as lacking the facilities required to be a second FCDO headquarters. Will the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster work with the FCDO to ensure that that investment goes into Abercrombie House so that it can be a second headquarters?
Pat McFadden
If the right hon. Gentleman’s ambition is to move the staff out of East Kilbride, he should perhaps have a word with my hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride and Strathaven (Joani Reid). We have good locations in both Glasgow and East Kilbride, and we welcome them both. To refer to the previous question, I recently spent time working in the East Kilbride office. I hope that it is a good home for civil servants for some time to come.
Storm Éowyn
Debate between Pat McFadden and David Mundell(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Pat McFadden
We do not have plans to revise the Bellwin scheme right now, but we are working very hard to restore power to people in my hon. Friend’s area and in any other area where power has still not been restored. A huge effort has gone into this work in recent days and hundreds of thousands of homes have been reconnected, but the worst of it is still in Northern Ireland, where some 60,000 are without power.
David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) (Con)
My constituency was very significantly impacted by the storm, and we were just grateful there was no loss of life. That is why I was particularly sorry to hear about the young man in Mauchline; my condolences go out to his family. I pay tribute to all the emergency services, local authorities and everybody at ScottishPower who has done so much to restore the network—I will be even more grateful to them if they abide by their promise and get the village of Skirling back on the network tonight.
The one issue that has come up in this emergency, as in so many others, is the importance of contact with the elderly and vulnerable and of having an effective system for that contact. Inevitably, people who have not previously been identified do emerge. However, despite all the lessons from previous incidents, I do not believe we have a sufficiently effective system to identify the people who will be most in need in such circumstances.
Pat McFadden
The right hon. Gentleman is quite right to say that contact with the elderly and the vulnerable is important. The priority services register is a pre-registration system for emergency events such as the storm, and I encourage anybody in that category who has not used it to register in advance. It gives the power companies much better information about exactly who is vulnerable in situations where the power is cut off.