Business of the House

Richard Fuller Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I clocked earlier that the SNP’s theme of the week was Brexit. The hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn) made the same point yesterday when he invoked the metaphor of an SNP lifeboat saving the good people of Scotland from Brexit. Leaving aside the fact that, based on the SNP’s attempts to procure ferries, any lifeboat that it procured would be likely to cost three times the contract price and never materialise, I would say that Scotland does not need such a lifeboat. Rather, Scotland needs a Scottish Government whose main modus operandi is not talking down their own nation; it needs a Government who take responsibility. The hon. Lady invites me to talk about economics and wishes that Ministers had better economics lessons, but the Scottish Government have not even managed to spend their planned budget. Instead, they have an underspend of £2 billion.

I do my homework and I am always interested to learn, so I went on to the Scottish Government’s website to see what they say about the economy. Clearly, growth levels have not been what they were in previous years, so I wanted to look up what they thought the reason for that was. According to the website, it was:

“Due to the requirement for many industries to cease trading during the lockdown for COVID-19”—

nothing about Brexit or us rotters in the UK Government. It was down to covid, as the hon. Lady knows well.

The hon. Lady also knows that the UK shared prosperity fund has maintained funding to Scotland post Brexit. She knows about the Edinburgh reforms, the Financial Services and Markets Bill, and the reforms to Solvency II, which will mean so much to financial services firms in her constituency. She knows that figures reported in autumn last year show that exports in Scotland are up by £3 billion since 2018, in current prices. She knows how the green freeports will help to drive growth, and she knows that we will shortly open up an enormous, multitrillion-pound market for producers in Scotland through our accession to the CPTPP.

The whole UK has been through the mill, but we are coming through it and the future is bright. There are massive opportunities, and I invite the hon. Lady to talk them up and to talk her nation up. If the SNP was coaching the Scottish Six Nations team, it would have told them to stay in their dressing room and tied their laces together. I encourage her to be a little more positive about the future, as her constituents should be.

[Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Since November 2021, I have been assisting my constituent, Mr Paul Barford, regarding his concerns about the quality of care that his late father, Joseph Barford, received from the NHS and about the way in which the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman dealt with his complaint. Indeed, I, too, experienced an unacceptably slow response from the PHSO. The ombudsman plays an important role in dealing with complaints about Government Departments, but there is too little accountability to Parliament. In the light of the concerns raised by Mr Barford, I would be grateful if the Leader of the House could find the necessary time for a general debate on the standards of the PHSO and, more generally, the accountability of ombudsmen and regulators to Parliament.

[Penny Mordaunt]

I am sorry to hear about that case and the difficulty that my hon. Friend and his constituent, Mr Paul Barford, have had in raising concerns about his father Joseph’s care. My hon. Friend will know that the ombudsman is accountable to Parliament through the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which holds an annual scrutiny session to evaluate its performance. If he agrees, I shall write to that Committee and to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to let them know about the case and to see what can be done to improve scrutiny.