Oral Answers to Questions
Peter Fortune Excerpts(1 week ago)
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Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)
I am asking this question on behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Julia Lopez), the shadow Secretary of State, who cannot be here today, but wants the House to know how important this issue is to her. The lobular moon shot project is a plan to fund critical research into lobular breast cancer. It is a disease often missed by screening and with no targeted treatment. A total of 463 Members of this House, including the Leader of the Opposition, support this plan. The Health Secretary says that there is no political disagreement on this, yet nothing has materially happened. His Department now says that it is for DSIT and UK Research and Innovation to comment on budget allocations and spending research priorities. I ask the Secretary of State this: is the moon shot project a research priority for her, as it is for 463 of her parliamentary colleagues?
Liz Kendall
Anything that deeply affects the lives of thousands of people is a priority for me. I am more than happy to work with the hon. Gentleman and others to reach a resolution here. My understanding is that we need to get right the quality of bids, but I would of course be happy to meet to discuss this further.
Peter Fortune
I thank the Secretary of State for that response. She should know that, on 22 April, vigils will be held across Westminster for the 22 women diagnosed with this insidious disease every day. I thank her for that commitment to work with the Health Secretary between now and then so that we can highlight this issue. Will she agree to come back to the House and update us on the comments and discussions that she has had with the Secretary of State for Health?
Liz Kendall
Yes, because I always believe in action, not just words.
Digital ID
Peter Fortune Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Julia Lopez
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he spoke powerfully in his contribution. I am sure that today we will hear no answers from the Minister, because behind this policy sits no plan at all. No Minister has any idea how much it will cost—the OBR reckons it will be £1.8 billion.
Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree with me and the thousands of people across Bromley and Biggin Hill who signed the petition that at a time of rising taxation and spiralling debt, the fact that the Government cannot even tell us how much this wretched device will cost exemplifies their irresponsible approach to our economy?
Julia Lopez
I completely agree. On the one hand, the Government claim there is no money left. On the other hand, they can suddenly find billions for bizarre schemes or the Chagos islands, or create policies on the two-child benefit cap that they could not previously deliver. They are just so intellectually inconsistent.
The OBR, as I say, reckons the scheme will cost £1.8 billion. Privately, Ministers are briefing that that is completely inaccurate. We have not even begun scoping it yet. I am told the Treasury and the Cabinet Office are now in a stand-off with one another about who will pay for this dreadful thing. Neither wants it, particularly as the Cabinet Office will then have to make cuts to other, much more effective digital projects, the kinds that would actually deliver better services.
No one will answer straight questions about how secure the digital ID will be, or into which areas of our lives it will creep. The Prime Minister tells us that digital ID will be mandatory only for anyone who still wants to work in Labour’s welfare Britain. Yet in the next breath he suggests that childcare, welfare and wider service access will all require it. This is precisely how state overreach begins: with reassurance in one sentence and expansion in the next.
It was very interesting to hear hon. Members making points about the police being able to access digital ID, or even about people needing it to go to the cinema. There have been no answers on the robustness of the Government’s cyber-security. This Government could not even keep their own Budget secret, and now they want us to trust them with this new system. Ministers point to Estonia and India as models, yet Estonia has suffered repeated breaches. India’s system, the largest ID system in the world, led to the largest ever data breach in the world, with citizens’ data sold on the dark web for the equivalent of £5 or £6. AI is now giving cyber-attackers the upper hand.
We have been given no sense of the extent to which digital ID will stem illegal migration, which was the Prime Minister’s excuse for introducing the idea in the first place. Ministers cannot even give an estimate, and that is for a simple reason: because it will not reduce migration. Can Ministers explain why those who enter the country by dodging the rules will suddenly become models of civic compliance, or why European ID schemes have done so little to stem illegal migration on the continent?