Covid-19: Road Map

Richard Holden Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I direct the hon. and learned Lady to what I said earlier about ensuring that people get the ability to see a nominated visitor, and I remind her of the sad reality of the infection that we have seen in care homes and the need to protect against it. There is a balance to be struck, as she knows.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

I thank the Prime Minister for his statement. Everyone—especially young people, small businesses and the hospitality and pubs sector—in North West Durham and across the country have made massive sacrifices to achieve the huge progress in tackling the pandemic. As long as the Government’s world-leading vaccine programme continues, the road map means that we will be out of almost all restrictions by late June, with the certain approach that the Prime Minister is pushing for. May I extend an invitation to the Prime Minister, his fiancée Carrie, Wilfred and Dilyn to visit North West Durham this summer, to see some of Britain’s most beautiful but least well-known countryside?

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend. Wild horses would not keep me away from North West Durham.

Armed Forces Bill

Richard Holden Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 8th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder). I was down at Bovington not that long ago with the armed forces parliamentary scheme and my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Antony Higginbotham). My hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset and I share a separate connection too: both Dorset and County Durham are Rifles recruiting grounds. I associate myself with his comments regarding the sad death of Captain Sir Tom Moore.

I am delighted to speak today. It is so important that we recognise what an important role our armed forces play in our country. As a former special adviser in the Ministry of Defence, I witnessed the actions that they take—overt and sometimes covert—on our behalf across the globe, and at home in their support to the civil authorities in dealing with coronavirus and various other issues.

I am particularly delighted that the Bill delivers on our manifesto pledge, ensuring protection for our armed forces and putting responsibility on public bodies at the heart of what we are doing. It is great to see the Minister for Defence People and Veterans, my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer), on the Front Bench. I know that he has campaigned for this for so long. Other hon. Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for Bracknell (James Sunderland) and for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), spoke very well today, but I think the whole House recognises the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Stuart Anderson), who made a superb speech.

Turning to the contents of the Bill, I am particularly glad to see clause 8, which moves towards enshrining the armed forces covenant in law. It is also superb to see clause 9, with the flexibility around commitments for our reserve personnel. More broadly, schedule 1 and clauses 2, 3, 5 and 6 help to deliver better justice in the armed forces for our serving personnel.

My constituents in North West Durham are more than patriotic, but it is not a jingoistic patriotism. It is much deeper than that; it is much more personal. As I mentioned, my constituency is a major recruiting ground for the Rifles, formerly the Durham Light Infantry, and for the Royal Marines.

I was delighted on the 14th anniversary of the Rifles to speak to Major General Charlie Collins, who is currently the commander of 1st Division and commanded British forces abroad not long ago. He emphasised to me the importance of our armed forces’ regional connections. In County Durham, we have seen in recent years the sad loss of the DLI museum. I really hope that we can get it a new home as soon as possible, because it is such a key part of recognising the deep personal relationship that so many people across County Durham have with our armed forces.

Finally, I would like to speak up on behalf of the professionalism and dedication of those who put their lives on the line for us. I have met several families with young people going through basic training at the moment. It really is amazing to see how those young people develop so quickly in our armed forces. I want to put on record the thanks of all my constituents to them for what they do. They are there for us. They are the hard edge of Britain’s global power. They deserve our respect, they deserve our support, and they deserve a Government behind them every step of the way. I am glad to hear that the Bill goes some way further to delivering on that.

Covid-19: Winter Plan

Richard Holden Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

If the hon. Gentleman looks at the guidance on travel in tiers 2 and 3, he will see that it sets out clearly that in tier 2 people should reduce the number of journeys that they make and avoid travelling into tier 3 areas, and that in tier 3 they should avoid travelling out of the area altogether. There is more detail in the guidance, which he might care to study.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

I welcome the changes today for gyms, God and golf, opening in all tiers, but will the Prime Minister confirm that the hospitality sector, forced to close in tier 2 and tier 3 areas, will continue to receive grant support in the future?

[The Prime Minister]

Yes, indeed. I can tell my hon. Friend that local restrictions support grants are still available—£3,000 for every 28 days that a business is forced to close.

Covid-19 Update

Richard Holden Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I hope very much that people will not have been laid off in anticipation of the end of furlough, because there is the job retention scheme and the bonus as well at the end of the year. To discover exactly what entitlements people have under the extended furlough scheme, they should get on to the website. I think that most people appreciate that the Government have done a huge amount to support people throughout the crisis and are continuing to do so in the latest phase, as well as supporting the self-employed.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

My constituents in North West Durham understand the very difficult decisions that the Prime Minister is having to take and the very difficult balances he is having to strike, but will he confirm to them and to the House that the tier 4 measures will end on 2 December? Also, will he confirm for the many local parents who have got in touch, concerned that schools could be closed, that schools will remain open throughout this period?

[The Prime Minister]

Schools will indeed remain open. I thank the teachers, parents and pupils of this country. I can confirm to my hon. Friend that these measures will end on 2 December in exactly the way that I have set out.

Oral Answers to Questions

Richard Holden Excerpts

Wednesday 21st October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

As I say, it is so important that we get the economy up and running again, and we can do that only by people joining us and working with us on hands, face, space, to ensure that we reduce the transmission rate and save as many jobs as possible. We have launched a job support scheme, and that, plus universal credit, means that the lowest paid employees can have around 80% of their salary covered between those two schemes.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

What discussions she has had with the Secretary of State for Education on ensuring equality of opportunity in the education system.

[The Minister for Universities (Michelle Donelan)]

As our Prime Minister often says, talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. This Government have made it our mission to rectify that, and equality of opportunity lies at the heart of the work by the Department for Education, including opportunity areas, access to higher education work and reforms to further education such as the flagship T-levels. We recognise that education has an unparalleled ability to create and unlock opportunities across the nation.

[Mr Holden]

In North West Durham, we see lower educational outcomes, especially among white working class pupils, who are getting disproportionately poor results. What measures are the Government taking to ensure better attainment at the ages of 16 and 18 and in later life, and not only to deliver greater opportunities for individuals, but to level up all our communities?

[Michelle Donelan]

It is vital that we raise school standards and outcomes across the education sector and that we raise and level up our country. That is why we established Opportunity North East, and tomorrow I will chair a board meeting to discuss that work. My hon. Friend is a tremendous advocate for his constituency, and I and other Education Ministers will continue to work with him to ensure that the young people of North West Durham get the chances and choices they deserve.

Covid-19 Update

Richard Holden Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Yes, indeed I will.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

I thank the Prime Minister and the Chancellor for the £200 billion they have already put in, which has supported employers and employees in my constituency, but North West Durham constituents in events and hospitality are under severe pressure at the moment, with restrictions already hammering their bottom line. In County Durham, what support is available for businesses? Does the Prime Minister know when the negotiations on whether we will be in tier 3 or tier 3 will be determined with local authorities?

[The Prime Minister]

For the implications for his constituency, my hon. Friend should look at the gov.uk website. He should be in no doubt that the Government are committed to supporting businesses, jobs and livelihoods across the country. That is why my right hon Friend the Chancellor unveiled the job support scheme, and it is why we have uprated universal credit and put in many other measures, including cuts in VAT and business rates, that will continue for a long time to come.

EU Exit: End of Transition Period

Richard Holden Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Equivalence is decided by the EU. It is an autonomous process separate from but occurring in parallel with the negotiations. As I mentioned earlier, with the Prime Minister having drawn attention to the slow pace in these processes, we have seen an acknowledgement of that on the EU side. The EU is obviously a sovereign equal and will make its own decisions, but I should say that it helps EU businesses to have access to the broad and deep capital markets that we have in this country. Were the EU to cut itself off from our capital markets and financial services, the cost of EU businesses’ transactions would increase and their shareholders would lose out.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

This Government were elected with an overwhelming mandate to get Brexit done. In fact, substantially in order to ensure that the 2016 vote was respected, constituencies such as mine and others across the blue wall returned Conservative MPs for the first time ever. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that, in order that to give businesses clarity and to respect the will of the people of North West Durham, there will be no extension to transition?

[Michael Gove]

Yes. My hon. Friend is a brilliant advocate for the people of Consett and the whole of his constituency. There will not be an extension.

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Richard Holden Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 14th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

When I went to the Table Office a few weeks ago to pick up this Bill I picked up the wrong one, and I was reading it and thinking, “This is a particularly good Bill and it seems very reasonable and sensible,” and then I realised it was actually a private Member’s Bill from a number of Conservative Members. So better suggestions have been laid here in Parliament, and it is such a shame that the Government do not take more heed of their own Members. But let us talk about the content of the Bill before us today.

The question is, of course, what is in a number, because the reality is that a percentage does not really matter. We are talking about building blocks that are numbers, not percentages. We do not say, “In this ward there is 5% of the population”; we say, “In this ward there are 3,000 voters.” That is what we are working on.

So let us talk about practicalities. In the average metropolitan borough or London borough, the average ward size is 9,800 people—about 10,000 people. A 5% variance at the moment excludes all of those borough wards. It does not affect nice shire counties where, of course, Government Members predominately come from, because their average size is only 3,000. So of course they are able to build coherent communities in those places more easily, but it is harder in urban areas and we divide and rule communities there with this 5% variance. If we had a 7.5% variance, we would of course avoid that, because then the variance is 10,000; the vast majority of our urban wards would be able to be included as a whole, and there would be very little problem.

I think there is actually an argument to review how we do boundary proposals in their holistic nature from bottom to top, and say that the boundary commissions for local government should be creating wards of smaller sizes, so they fit into the shape of what we want the variance to be. There is an argument for doing that to get the building blocks right, but the Government have not come forward with such a proposal; they have rejected the idea of talking about local government reviews at the same time as parliamentary Government reviews. Since that is off the table, we need to accommodate ourselves to the situation that we have.

[Mr Holden]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

Diolch, Madam Deputy Speaker. I welcome the opportunity to speak on this very important Bill; I will keep my comments brief because I know that we are short on time.

It will come as no surprise that I have concerns about the restrictive 5% electoral quota and the impact that it will have on constituencies such as the area that I represent in the heart of the south Wales valleys. Creating constituencies that make sense to the local communities is even harder with our local geography. I know that this has already been eloquently explained by the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Ben Lake), but locals in my patch in Pontypridd and across Rhondda Cynon Taf will tell you in a heartbeat that it would make no sense for constituencies to have more than one valley and a mountain range in between. Indeed, during her evidence session, Shereen Williams of the Local Democracy and Boundary Commission for Wales said:

“I think the valleys will present a unique challenge for us, because you do not really want to split a valley and have half in one seat and the other half in another seat.”––[Official Report, Parliamentary Constituencies Public Bill Committee, 18 June 2020; c. 20, Q35.]

I completely agree. It is clear that our stunning valleys should be given greater consideration than the 5% variance in drawing Welsh boundaries, and I urge colleagues to support a flexible and sensible approach.

Naturally, I also have general concerns that Wales will be hit most by the loss of constituencies in the next boundary change, because of the large population shifts in the area over the past 20 years, which colleagues have alluded to. I have also been shocked, frustrated and actually quite tamping, for want of a better word, to read the incredibly reckless comments from colleagues in the Senedd, most notably from Mark Reckless MS, about abolishing the Welsh Parliament. It is clear, now more than ever, that the Welsh Parliament plays a vital role in scrutinising policy that has an impact on communities across Wales.

I urge colleagues on the Government Benches to stand with me and commit to strengthening, as opposed to weakening, Wales’s voice, both here in Westminster and in the Senedd. It is vital that the boundary commissioners be given greater flexibility to take into account our unique geography, particularly if we are to ensure that representation in Wales is not forgotten here in Parliament.

[Mr Holden]

I rise to speak to new clauses 1 and 3. New clause 1 is perhaps the biggest piece of contention on both sides of the House. When I read through the Bill Committee’s proceedings, I noticed that at the very start and the very end—in sittings one and eight—the Opposition Front-Bench spokesperson really pushed the point about 5% versus 7.5%. I cannot understand how the Labour party, which historically has campaigned for one person, one vote, can now be campaigning for something that would make that less likely. It is totally logical to want as small a variant as possible between populations.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) talked about wards being the building blocks of our communities. I totally disagree with the point, which he made in an intervention, that church halls and polling districts are not the building blocks. Church halls are the heart of communities in our constituencies; they are were people gather, where the scouts and brownies go, where people have coffee mornings, and so on. They are the building blocks of our communities, and the Bill should be based on them, not on arbitrary boundaries.

I actually agreed with the hon. Member on his point about looking at wards more generally. I would be very much in favour of single member wards. Some parts of my constituency have one member, while some people are represented by three councillors. It is bizarre that in one part of my constituency someone can ask three people to represent me, but in another part only one. We dealt with that in this place in the 1950s. I think we could deal with it on a council level as well and would support any moves the Government make in that direction.

The switch to 7.5% is not a price worth paying to keep wards together. On that point, there is a fundamental disagreement between the two sides of the House. I am very happy to go with polling districts. I listened to the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory), who is the co-chair with me on the all-party group on local democracy. We represent a lot of town and parish councils. Such things are much more important and should be recognised where possible. If the Minister could speak to that, it would be really helpful. I generally agree also with my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell), who is not in his seat, about this obsession with metropolitan wards being large contiguous units. It is not true. Some of these wards have 15,000 or 20,000 people in them. They are not one community and could easily be divided up.

On new clause 3, the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) mentioned this idea that we should want to try to estimate things. I remember what happened to her colleague, the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), in the 2017 general election. The Lib Dem counters on election night mis-estimated his votes and thought he was about to lose, which was why they left him in a car park for several hours when he was leader of the party. We should not bring estimates into this. The current situation is sensible. The electoral roll has been the basis for some time and is the right basis.

In conclusion, I urge hon. Members to support the Government today and back this excellent Bill, which is not before time.

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)]

I speak in this debate with previous experience of the process of making electoral boundaries. As I referred to on Second Reading, I used to work for the Local Government Boundary Commission for England on periodic electoral reviews of local government boundaries, and I must declare an interest: some of my friends and colleagues moved on to work more recently for the Boundary Commission for England on parliamentary reviews.

I am pleased the Government have accepted our call to scrap the plan to cut the number of MPs to 600. A reduction would have weakened the role of Parliament to the benefit of the Executive, and recently we have seen the value and importance of a breadth of scrutiny of Government during the covid-19 pandemic. I am pleased also that the numeration date changed to 2 March 2020 to ensure maximum reflection of the electorate, rather than one impeded by covid-19.

I still have concerns, however, about the Government’s intention to remove parliamentary scrutiny from the boundary review process and the imposition of a restrictive electoral quota, so I am speaking strongly in favour of amendment 1, to remove clause 2, and of new clause 1, both tabled in the name of the Leader of the Opposition. Effective democracy is reliant on transparency and public confidence in the structures and processes, so removing parliamentary scrutiny and approval of the structure from the process raises questions about the integrity of our democracy. It would give the Government of the day unequal influence over the process, but the most important point is the one made very eloquently put by my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle). The point about democracy is that our constituents can hold us to account for the decisions we make, and the proposal takes that away.

The Government’s intention to impose a 5% electoral quota will have a detrimental impact on the democratic representation of our communities.

Flexibility must be central to our boundary review system in order to recognise community identities and connections, and to facilitate the accurate representation of different geographical areas.

Civil Service Appointments

Richard Holden Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Yes, absolutely. If advice comes from the agencies, then that advice will always go, absolutely direct, to the Prime Minister and to the relevant politician. The record of previous national security advisers in the United States of America, from Condoleezza Rice to Henry Kissinger, is a distinguished one. Having people of that stature reflects well on the Presidents who appointed them, and it makes the case that a national security adviser of the kind that David Cameron introduced is a welcome innovation.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

In 1987, David Frost was appointed to start his career in the diplomatic service. He served there for a quarter of a century. He has since served in senior appointments both in government and in the private sector. Does the Minister agree that it is exactly people with this range of experience that we need in senior government positions?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend, who has served in government as a political appointee, knows absolutely whereof he speaks. As I say, I find it somewhat curious that Opposition Members who have themselves supported the Government on many, many political appointees are now having a fit of the vapours at the idea that there should be a political appointee.

Ministerial Code

Richard Holden Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend gets the balance absolutely right. Effective government, whether by Conservative or Labour Prime Ministers, has been driven by having strong Ministers who are exacting and demanding, and by having robust and professional civil servants who provide impartial advice with full integrity.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that allegations, when made, are just allegations—allegations that must be carefully investigated—and that, at all costs, we must avoid any sense of a trial by media?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. When there are briefings and counter-briefings, the most important thing is to ensure that the facts are established and that we, as a Government, uphold the highest standards in public life and ensure that the public whom we serve have the manifesto pledges they want to see implemented, implemented energetically and in full.