Levelling-up Missions: East of England

Debate between Priti Patel and Jerome Mayhew

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend, the chair of the GEML rail taskforce, has hit the nail on the head: this speaks to a fundamental failure in Whitehall, and my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney repeatedly highlighted that. This is the core message that has to be taken away, and that is just on rail. Of course, rail supports economic growth. The west Anglia line is another classic case. With four trains an hour to Stansted airport, it feels like “Mission Impossible” right now. Some proper work needs to be undertaken, and the Government need to support that. We have been successful in getting Emirates into Stansted. We want to get other international airlines, as my hon. Friend said, including from India.

On roads, I have again secured funding, as a Member of Parliament, for feasibility studies on the A12 and A120, but yet again we are going round the merry-go-round of not getting the commitment from central Government to proceed with those schemes. Quite frankly, that is down to inadequacies with National Highways, which fails to operate in a transparent way, to engage with local community or the county council, which has responsibility for the strategic road network, or to engage with the Department for Transport, so we are not getting the road upgrades we need in the county. Those road networks are the economic arteries of the east of England.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

Integration in the planning of infrastructure goes beyond just roads and rail; there is the integration of offshore wind into the national transmission network. Only in East Anglia are there radial connections from offshore wind to the national transmission network. The rest of the country benefits from the holistic network design. Does my right hon. Friend agree that East Anglia should be included in that design and that we should move away from these radial connections?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come on to energy shortly for another reason, and I will pick up on that point after I conclude on the issue of roads.

Essex is a net contributor, and the A12 and A120 are literally roads from the dark ages. They are deeply unsafe roads. If we care about road safety and the people who get up every day at the crack of dawn, such as lorry drivers and commuters, to service our public services or to come to London to provide services for major hotels and the UK’s service sector, we must upgrade these roads. It is becoming a joke right now—it really is. It is an insult to commuters and the people who use the roads who have to navigate the potholes and poor quality of the roads every single day. They feel, by the way, that they are getting an unfair deal when they fill up their cars because of the cost of fuel at the pump. This is not a criticism of the Minister’s Department, but it shows the breadth of issues that need to be grasped across Government on integration to provide those levelling-up outcomes. Otherwise, levelling up will just become a slogan.

I would like to touch on a couple of other areas, which are both linked. One is skills and education. I am proud not just to be the Member of Parliament for Witham, but to represent Essex and the east region. When I became the MP for Witham, the majority of my schools locally were in special measures or required improvement. I am pleased to say right now that we have great schools—good schools and outstanding schools—and, as a result, Witham is now a commuter town. People want to live and work there, and some schools are outstanding—that is a great thing. We need not just to give our youngsters great educational opportunities through our schools, but to ensure that they can get jobs and that they inherit skills for life. That could be skills within the region for the great energy coastline that we have developed over the past decade, which has been remarkable, and previous Ministers in Government should be thanked for their hard work on that matter.

Essex is a county of entrepreneurs, and I never tire of saying that. We are the home of small businesses and innovators, and R&D is big in Essex. However, our prosperity masks challenges when it comes to deprivation, as we have heard, but also skills, opportunity and aspiration. We need businesses to work with our schools and get their foot in the door to talk to pupils at an earlier age. I have a careers fair taking place on 24 March on Witham. I never tire of being a champion of those skills fairs, and we are bringing in businesses from former industries I have worked in to those schools. I want to see Government embrace that, because the apprenticeship levy is, quite frankly, not delivering the outcomes it was originally set up to deliver. I maintain that it needs reform. Of course, by getting those skills locally, we can create jobs with skills that focus on areas that Members have touched on already. I feel very strongly about that.

I want to touch on health, which has been raised. My hon. Friend the Member for Waveney said that we do not have a technology campus in the east of England—I agree, and we should work to achieve that—but we do have a university medical school. I was involved in the original bid to do the business case for that, and I am proud that we achieved it. However, I am afraid that our health infrastructure across the east of England is inadequate. Our patient-GP ratio is one of the highest in the country, and we are not training enough students in our medical schools. We need to do much more. When he was Health Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) worked well with us to deliver some good health outcomes, but there is much more that needs to be done. We are an ageing part of the country, but we must work with our young people to grow skills in health and social care. I pay tribute to Essex County Council for the work it is doing in that area.

This is a message to central Government: we cannot have people working in silos in Government anymore. When I was Home Secretary, the Health Department said to me, “Please do much more on health and social care visas,” which I am pleased that we have done—I did that as Home Secretary. However, there is more that we need to do in that area, and we also need more home-grown talent.

Finally, planning is the biggest issue in my constituency casework. Witham has become a building site over the past decade. We are building homes, and it is right that we do that. The question is, are they affordable homes? We have already heard of the high income ratio that is required to live in our fantastic part of the country. This point is specific to the Minister’s Department. Planning is contentious, and we are not getting it right in this country; there is no doubt about that.

In Essex, and in my constituency in particular, we stopped the West Tey development, a proposal for a garden community of 45,000 new homes—which, by the way, was without any infrastructure at all. The entire concept was an absolute scandal and a disgrace. I pay tribute to campaigners such as Rosie Pearson and others in my constituency who worked together to bring that to the Planning Inspectorate and get that proposal overturned. Five-year land supply has also been a problem, along with local councils that have no neighbourhood plans. I want to put on the record the fact that I think it is deeply disappointing that the Department, in its former guise as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, used taxpayers’ funds to boost and beef up that concept without working in a considered way with the local community on the kind of housing that was required.

I am afraid that this is not specific to the Minister’s Department. We are going through this all over again with another project: pylons. It is less about housing, but it will become a planning issue. The development of pylons across the east of England will, frankly, have a detrimental impact. We are pioneers in offshore grid wind farm development and renewables, and we must absolutely look to invest in that capability, rather than putting up more infrastructure that will bring great blight to our local communities and, I am afraid, agitate them even more.

I know I have taken up a great deal of time, Mr Davies. In conclusion, there are great things about the east of England. We are net contributors to His Majesty’s Treasury, and we cross-subsidise much of the United Kingdom through the hard graft of the great men and women of the east of England, but we are lagging behind on these key assets that are of national significance. My hon. Friend the Minister can only do so much with her remit in her Department. My wider message is about devolution and local government reorganisation, as well as about the size of the state in Whitehall; how bloated and unaccountable that has become, and how detached it is from the good men and women of the east of England who, as taxpayers, contribute to the bureaucracy of Whitehall and get very little back. That is where reform has to start. The devolution train is well under way now—certainly in our part of the country. In Essex, I back it. Quite frankly, we need reform of the core of Whitehall to start delivering for the good people of the east of England.

Global Migration Challenge

Debate between Priti Patel and Jerome Mayhew

Tuesday 19th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

That is exactly why we are proposing safe and legal routes, as we have done with Syria and Afghanistan. These are bespoke routes that help those fleeing persecution. There is an important point that the hon. Gentleman has made in there, which is also why our case-by-case approach and assessment when it comes to those seeking asylum is absolutely applied in the right kind of way. The new plan for immigration and the Nationality and Borders Bill are trying to do exactly that by bringing efficacy to our asylum system to make sure that we can help those in genuine need.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

The EU uses Rwanda for refugee settlement. The United Nations uses Rwanda for refugee settlement. Even the Labour Government legislated to use safe third countries to process asylum claims. Given this, does my right hon. Friend agree that exactly the same approach lies behind this partnership with Rwanda?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It goes without saying that it seems to be fine, depending on your political persuasion, to say it is fine for the EU, it is fine for the UN, but it is not fine for the British Government. That is simply not acceptable. This has worked in the past. I come back to the fundamental principle that doing nothing is not an option while people are drowning not just in the channel but in the Mediterranean. People are taking dangerous journeys, often through Libya, making difficult and dangerous crossings across the Mediterranean and then across the channel. That is what we want to stop and we have a moral duty to do everything we possibly can to break up that model.

Windrush Lessons Learned Review

Debate between Priti Patel and Jerome Mayhew

Tuesday 21st July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

I would like not only to restate my commitment to delivering the compensation for those who became victims of the Windrush scandal itself, but to say that it is absolutely right, and it is my focus, my determination and my resolve, to ensure that the individuals whose lives were blighted and shattered as a result of a series of measures that, to quote Wendy Williams,

“evolved under the Labour, Coalition and Conservative Governments”

receive the compensation that they deserve.

It is a fact that the injustices will not be resolved or fixed overnight, and I have levelled with the House on that point on a number of occasions. The mistreatment that the affected individuals endured was simply unacceptable. I will continue to do everything within my power to lead the Home Office in delivering on compensation, and to ensure that through the lessons learned review and Wendy Williams’s work, we right the wrongs and properly compensate those who were affected. That will not happen overnight.

I have already expanded the compensation scheme so that people will be able to apply to it until at least April 2023, but we have to go beyond that, and I would be more than willing to do so. We have made the criteria more generous so that people can receive the maximum compensation that they rightly deserve. I have said that £1.5 million of compensation has been offered to individuals, but of course I want compensation payments to be sped up. The scheme has already received 1,342 applications. Final offers have been made to more than 154 individuals. Urgent and exceptional payments have been made to hundreds of individuals—in fact, more than 1,400 individuals have been supported by the vulnerable persons team—and a significant number of cases have been closed.

As I think I said at the Select Committee just last week, a vast number of cases—I will say it now: 1,000 cases —are not just led by the Home Office, but split across other Departments, including Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions, in terms of ascertaining information and data. As I have said on previous occasions, outreach and engagement with people across a wide range of communities, including other Commonwealth countries, is vital. We simply, partly due to covid, have not been able to continue direct face-to-face engagement with community organisations and representatives in the way we had planned, but only by doing that can we identify others who have not even applied to the compensation scheme. More work needs to be done—I am very honest and open about that. The hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) speaks about scrutiny. He is more than welcome to continue asking questions and we will provide answers where we can. At the same time, we are subject to not full data and not full information and I would be more than happy to continue working with colleagues across the House, and all political parties, as I have done, to ensure that more people do come forward. That is something we should all collectively step up to and encourage.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

The cross-Government working group has a key role to consider the changes needed to support the Windrush generation, as well as a wider scope to address the challenges faced by black and ethnic minority people across the country and society, in education, work and health. Can my right hon. Friend update the House on how she sees that group developing? Does she consider quarterly meetings sufficient to make good progress?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend asks an important question. Not just through my time at the Home Office, but even now, every time I look at Windrush cases and read the details and backgrounds of the hardship and suffering, I fundamentally believe that there is much more we need to do as political leaders, individually and collectively, to ensure that we celebrate our differences, but remember that we are one nation and one community. The outreach and stakeholder groups that we have established are critical to ensuring that we drive change in our practices and policies, and that we communicate in a compassionate and humane way and reach out to individuals in the right way.

My hon. Friend asked whether quarterly meetings are enough, but we do not just have quarterly meetings. I am in regular contact with representatives and chairs of stakeholder groups, and that will continue. I intend to leave no stone unturned, and although I appreciate that individuals in the House might focus more on the number of cases, I believe that we need to fulfil cases and deliver on compensation. We must also look at people, not just cases, which means that we can consider the wider policies that we need to explore—my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is doing that through his new race and equality group, too—to get the right policies in place so that we can address many of the injustices that people constantly speak about.

Reading Terrorist Attack

Debate between Priti Patel and Jerome Mayhew

Monday 22nd June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

A great deal of work is taking place on the particular issue that the hon. Gentleman has raised. I am very happy, in the interests of time, to write to him and outline more on that.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

While the police and security services continue in their vital work to track down and prevent lone actors tempted to carry out an attack, does my right hon. Friend agree that there is no community in the UK that even tacitly condones an outrage such this—that the perpetrators are typically loners and misfits who are mentally unstable and socially inadequate, and in no way representative of any community view?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend makes important points. He is right that these individuals do not represent any community or community group.

Public Order

Debate between Priti Patel and Jerome Mayhew

Monday 8th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

It is important to understand the facts and figures around deaths in police custody. In 2018-19, there were 16 deaths in custody of whom 15 individuals were from a white background and one was black. It is important that the Independent Office for Police Conduct looks at all investigations in the right way and holds to account police forces when deaths in police custody take place, and that is exactly what happens.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

It is the dehumanising of the other that makes it okay to violently attack a stranger, whether that stranger be black or white. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we should listen to the peaceful voices of the BAME communities, celebrate our civilian unarmed police who look after us all, and celebrate our common humanity?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about celebrating our common humanity, the diversity of our great country, and the people who have taken to the streets and expressed their views in a balanced, proportionate and peaceful way. When it comes to our police, I absolutely stand with them. They showed great courage and determination over the weekend.