Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who raises a very important point. I have an answer of fantastic complexity here before me, but the gist of it is that at present HMRC would be forced to rely on all sorts of information that it would not be able to verify very easily in order to comply with his wishes. I am happy to discuss it more fully with him and to write to him in detail.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

Q15. In front of the Liaison Committee last week, the Prime Minister was clearly shocked to learn that many migrants living and working lawfully in the UK have no recourse to public funds. Without support, many have been forced to continue working in unsafe conditions or have been pushed into extreme poverty. He promised the Liaison Committee that he would do all he could to help. Scrapping the policy would be the best step, so will he update the House on his progress?

[The Prime Minister]

What I can tell the House is that everybody knows that no recourse to public funds is a long-standing condition that applies to people here with temporary immigration status, but it is a term of art; it does not mean that they are necessarily excluded from all public funds. For instance, they may be eligible for coronavirus job retention scheme funds or self-employed income support scheme funds. Indeed, if they have paid into the benefit system, they may be eligible also for certain benefits.

Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about this. Let me pay tribute to Secretary of State John Kerry for the incredible work that he did, and also to the Foreign Secretary, who was by his side all the way through the negotiations of what was a very tough and difficult deal. The adoption day for the deal was in October. Since then, Iraq—sorry, Iran—has started shipping 12.5 tonnes of enriched uranium to Russia. Now we are getting close to what is called the implementation day for the deal. The key point is that Iran has granted the International Atomic Energy Agency unprecedented access to ensure that it is doing all the things it said it would do in this deal. As I said at the time, it is a good deal, in that it takes Iran away from a nuclear weapon, but we should enter into it with a very heavy heart, a very clear eye and a very hard head in making sure that the country does everything it said it would.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

Q11. When the Government pushed through their changes to undergraduate funding four years ago, they said that providing maintenance grants for the poorest students was key to those students’ participation in higher education. No mention was made in the Conservative manifesto of ending those grants. Is it not therefore completely unacceptable to make that fundamental change tomorrow in Committee by the back door without a vote in this House?

[The Prime Minister]

This issue has been fully debated and discussed in this House, and it is absolutely right because our changes have shown, despite all the warnings from the Labour party, that more people are taking part in higher education and that more people from low income backgrounds are taking part in higher education. I am confident that that will continue to be the case.