Business of the House

Debate between Richard Fuller and Penny Mordaunt

Thursday 6th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising this issue, which is similar to those that other hon. Members have raised. He will know that the next questions to the Housing Minister will be on Monday. I have also previously written to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to raise these concerns, and the Department is running bespoke surgeries for colleagues who have casework of this nature.

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

The recent transfer of the administration of Help to Buy equity loans from Target to Lenvi has been handled extremely poorly. Market participants and holders of loans were not advised of the change, and constituents who have loans advise me that they have made numerous calls and sent emails to Lenvi with no response. Remortgaging can be a time-sensitive matter. Can the Leader of the House advise me what steps I can take to raise the importance of this matter with the relevant Department?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for looking at this important issue. We have helped 837,000 people on to the property ladder through those schemes, and we do not want to see the further people whom we wish to assist discouraged from coming forward, or the people already on the scheme unable to make the financial decisions they wish to because of poor service by a provider. The next Levelling Up questions are on Monday, but, given the seriousness and the timeliness of this matter, I will make sure the Secretary of State has heard his comments in advance.

Business of the House

Debate between Richard Fuller and Penny Mordaunt

Thursday 20th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

Let me start by sending my thoughts and good wishes to the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock). I wish her and her family well. I thank the hon. Gentleman for stepping up and standing in, especially as it has been a painful few weeks for his party. For some time now, BBC “Politics Scotland” has resembled an episode of “Taggart”. I thank him for showing up today.

I have great sympathy with what the hon. Gentleman says about viewing the considerable recent Scottish sporting victories, and I will ensure that colleagues have heard that.

The hon. Gentleman raises the matter of the Foreign Secretary’s concern that the Scottish National party is spending so much time, effort and money on matters on which it does not have competency, in both senses of the word. He asks why the Foreign Secretary might feel that way; I suggest that it might be the hon. Gentleman’s own views.

The hon. Gentleman raises the small boats Bill, on which he has done a lot of work recently, making his views very clear. Making our asylum system effective is a compassionate thing to do. It is compassionate to break the business model of people smugglers and to enable us to use the finite resources that we have to help those in genuine need. We have to deal with the reality of the situation. The hon. Gentleman’s arguments against the Bill are drawn from fantasy. He says that our motivation is

“a legacy of our colonial past,”

or the fact we wish to profit from supplying “warring factions with weapons”. Is he talking about Ukraine? Ukraine is not a warring faction but a sovereign nation under attack. I am proud of what this country has done to support the Ukrainian people.

Let me enlighten the hon. Gentleman about some other things that we should be proud of in our country, rather than talking down. The Halo Trust, based in Dumfries and Galloway, is one. It has done more to de-mine and strip out weapons than any other organisation in the world. We should be proud of that. He says that the small boats Bill is a legacy of “our CO₂ emissions” and the impact they have had on

“many of the world’s poorest nations.”

No industrial nation has done more to cut its carbon emissions, or done it faster than the UK. It has done more than any G20 nation, and Glasgow played a huge part in that. The UK is more than halfway to meeting its net zero target.

I hope that the SNP will stop talking Scotland and the rest of the UK down. We will do what is necessary in the Bill and in other areas to protect the vulnerable and the planet and to promote peace. We do not pass the buck and shirk responsibility—that we will leave to the hon. Gentleman and his party.

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

Tomorrow I will meet homeowners at Brookside Park in Bromham, one of a number of park home sites in my constituency. They will raise issues such as the 10% commission charged when they sell their home, the fact that their pitch fees increase annually at the rate of the retail price index and not the consumer prices index, the general laxity of regulation for park homes, and the recent difficulties—now largely overcome, happily—with the energy support programmes. Can my right hon. Friend find time for a general debate in the House on the particular needs of homeowners in park home areas?

Business of the House

Debate between Richard Fuller and Penny Mordaunt

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.

Business of the House

Debate between Richard Fuller and Penny Mordaunt

Thursday 19th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I am sorry to hear that the bid from the hon. Lady and her local authority for round 2 funding was not successful. I understand that the Department is going to be in touch with her and her local authority to talk about the bid, give good feedback and, we hope, carry the bid forward, as it will be doing with other colleagues. This is the second round and there will be further funding rounds, and I certainly stand ready to help her and her local authority to access that funding. Of course, it is just one funding stream of many. Again, as I say, she can look on the Government’s website to see exactly where all those bids have gone, across every funding stream.

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

Promoting biodiversity is an important issue for many of my constituents, and companies can play a very positive role if they pay attention to it. Under this Government, companies are doing a much stronger job on their carbon reporting, but will the Leader of the House advise me as to what I can do as a Back Bencher to promote attention to biodiversity in our corporate reporting and get Ministers to move that forward?

[Penny Mordaunt]

First, let me thank my hon. Friend for all the work he has done to champion this incredibly important agenda. We have a real opportunity here at the moment, not least because the Environment Secretary is a fanatic about biodiversity and has championed it throughout her parliamentary career. He will know that Environment questions is not until 23 February, but I know that he will already have made contact with the Secretary of State on this issue. I hope we can also learn from the good practice set out by organisations in his constituency as to how to ensure that this is embedded in every organisation and every business across the land.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Richard Fuller and Penny Mordaunt

Thursday 16th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

This argument, I am afraid, is a false one, and it has also been perpetrated with regard to the Australia deal. The structures and kinds of regulations and laws that we are talking about are not equivalent. In Australia’s case, we are not talking about law or EU retained law; we are talking about guidelines that sit at state level. Obviously, the MOUs that we are agreeing with US states are not free trade agreements in terms of tariffs; they talk about our regulation, mutual recognition of qualifications and all of those things. Within those MOUs, we are actually doing partnerships between particular locations of the UK, which could include the devolved nations. Northern Ireland has such an MOU with other parts of the US, and I encourage the Scottish Government to get on board, because there would be massive advantages to people in Scotland if they did so.

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

I commend my right hon. Friend’s progress in her discussions with California, but she will know that many leading companies have left California for Texas because of that state’s low-tax, light-touch, pro-growth regulation. Will she update the House on the progress that she is making in her discussions with Texas? What lessons has she learned and passed on about the scope for regulatory reform in this country?

[Penny Mordaunt]

There is massive scope for such reform, which is one reason why we are pursuing this agenda. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that business is seeking out business-friendly states in the United States. There is now some competition to secure MOUs with us, and we are going after states that are really open for business and open to bringing people, ideas and money together to solve the world’s problems. Texas will be a trailblazer state; we have signed with Indiana; and Oklahoma, the Carolinas and others are really pushing the agenda forward. There are massive potential benefits for us, and for the United States too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Penny Mordaunt]

They should follow the hon. Lady’s example: I know that she attended the session with the Trade Remedies Authority. It is incredibly important that we get the message out to businesses that the TRA is an independent body with which they can take up issues. I thank the hon. Lady for attending and for enabling me to say that at the Dispatch Box today.

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

There are significant opportunities for British exporters to the Gulf states that are members of the Gulf Co-operation Council, not least because we already export a lot and because the barriers for our exporters are greater than those for GCC exports to the UK. Will my hon. Friend update me on what progress is being made on achieving such a deal?