Holocaust Memorial Bill

Debate between Simon Hoare and Matthew Pennycook

Committee of the whole House
Wednesday 22nd May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook]

I thank the Father of the House for his intervention. I certainly agree that that is one of many considerations that need to be taken into account when determining the application, but many of the contributions to this debate have raised matters that engage planning considerations, and this Bill does not engage planning considerations, even though it will affect the ability to submit a planning application in future. However, those are matters that should be rightly dealt with by the local authority, and by the Planning Inspectorate if the application were to be called in by the Secretary of State.

I turn lastly to those amendments that concern expenditure relating to the memorial and centre as authorised by clause 1 of the Bill. The Select Committee is right to highlight that the true cost of the project has not been established and to emphasise the need to consider the appropriate use of public money when progressing it. Concerns about expenditure have also been highlighted by the National Audit Office, which has made it clear that there is a risk that the contingency is not enough to cover further cost increases. Perhaps most worryingly, the Government’s own Infrastructure and Projects Authority has red-rated this project. In other words, the Government themselves are clear that—I quote here from the definition associated with a red rating—as things stand,

“successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable”

and that it may, to quote further from that definition,

“need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”

While the Opposition would not support the imposition of expenditure caps as proposed by amendment 1, it is clear to us that the Government need to do more to ensure that the project will deliver value for money and to provide appropriate assurances in that regard, in respect of both capital and recurrent costs. As such, I would welcome a robust assurance from the Minister when he responds that the Government have accurately estimated the cost of the project, will apply proper cost control throughout the construction period and will ensure that running costs are sustainable.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Simon Hoare)]

Today in this Chamber, we have been united on the welcome return of my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay), and the House has been united on security measures on pub licensing for the Euros—probably not the most contentious piece of legislation before the House—and now on this Holocaust Memorial Bill. For all the debate that we have had on the Bill, I am grateful to all right hon. and hon. Friends and Members who have contributed to it.

We have been discussing how, we have been discussing where and we have been discussing when, but the House has never been discussing why. For reasons more than tellingly amplified by my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis), my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and others, the why is clear and demonstrable. That is a sad fact, but it is. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), who speaks for the Opposition, for his support, as I am to the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald). I shall reserve my general thanks for the Third Reading debate.

Let me turn to the amendments. I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends and Opposition Members to reject any of the amendments that might be pushed to a vote, for reasons the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich ventilated extremely well. Let me set out why I think that is the case. I might just pause here, if I may, to remark that I think—I am not necessarily an expert on these matters—that this is probably the last substantive piece of innovative business that this Parliament—this 58th Parliament of the realm—will be discussing. It is an honour for me to be taking part in it on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, because it allows me to pay fulsome and personal tribute to three right hon. and hon. Friends on my side who will not be seeking re-election to this place.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), who I did not know before I came here in 2015, has been a stalwart friend and colleague, and he will be hugely missed across the House, more than he will probably know because he is too modest to even consider that assessment. Likewise, I did not know my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole, but his wit, his humour and his ability to cheer up any situation have warmed many a moment. Again, he will be missed.

I save for last, but by no means least, my hon. and darling Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken). We have known each other since we were 18 or 19, and it was the joy of my life to see her join us here at the 2019 election. She spoke today, in possibly her last contribution on the Floor of the House, in the same way that she has spoken from her maiden speech onwards, with knowledge, passion, clarity and certainty on behalf of all her constituents.

My three retiring colleagues have served their communities well. They have run the race to the finish, and I hope that they enjoy the next chapter of their lives to the full, whatever it offers them.

Education is key to this proposal, to make sure that subsequent generations do not repeat the past. As so many Members, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole, have noted, that is why the symbolic juxtaposition of the memorial and learning centre and this place is so important. There is an emotional and romantic intertwining of Parliament, freedom and democracy, and how dimmed those lights were during the period of the Holocaust.

Many have rightly mentioned security, which is a key issue. I suggest to my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson) that the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich is right to say that it would not be sensible or prudent to put into the public domain either the security assessment or, indeed, the remedies for what it throws up. It is slightly analogous to having a burglar alarm installed in one’s home and posting the deactivation code on social media, so I will resist that amendment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle and others have spoken to a key issue. The security and peace of mind of those who work in the centre, of those who visit the centre, of those who merely walk past and, crucially, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster and my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) referenced, of those who just use the park as a park is paramount.

The overriding point is that the argument that we cannot have the memorial and learning centre in Victoria Tower Gardens because of security fundamentally undermines a key tenet that supports the proposition. Given the issues surrounding both the Holocaust and the fairly fluid and dynamic situation in the middle east, security will always be an issue for such an institution. Security would be an issue were it to be located at the Imperial War Museum, in the middle of Hyde Park or on the third floor of Harrods. Security will always be an issue, but I entirely take the point, which I echo from the Dispatch Box.

If security concerns, a fear of the mob and a fear of those who seek to disrupt and intimidate suddenly become the trump card that is used to determine where and how we locate such a facility, the mob will have won and we might as well all pack up and go home now, raising the white flag. That is why I think all of us in this House, and particularly the two Front Benches, although we are absolutely concerned about security, are not prepared to bend the knee to bullies, thugs and anti-democratic mob rule.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Simon Hoare and Matthew Pennycook

Tuesday 12th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook]

I am going to make some progress.

There has been a considerable amount of debate over the past 16 months about what is meant by a “meaningful” vote. Any member of the public watching our proceedings today will struggle to understand how a vote on the draft withdrawal agreement that simply takes the form of “take it or leave it” could in any sense be genuinely meaningful. In reality, it would be anything but. It would be meaningless, not meaningful. It would be a Hobson’s choice.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I will give way one final time.

[Simon Hoare]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I put it to him gently that his proposition presupposes that the European Union would wish to re-engage in negotiations. Were there to be a meaningful vote and this House were to veto the deal, we would be likely to crash out without a deal and not deliver the pragmatic common-sense Brexit that I think he and I would like to see.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I disagree with the hon. Gentleman. Crashing out of the European Union without a deal is exactly what this amendment is designed to prevent. [Interruption.] Yes, it is.

Energy BILL [ Lords ] (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Simon Hoare and Matthew Pennycook

Tuesday 2nd February 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Simon Hoare]

I am just coming to a close, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me.

Rather than jiggery-pokery such as applying for two turbines in a 22-acre field to establish the principle and then coming back for more through variations to consent, which the amendments from the hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill sought to protect, we may well find that local communities and their planning authorities will see the whole picture at the start of the planning process rather than planning by salami-slicing, having established the principle.

The Government are absolutely right in their approach to the subsidy. My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry spoke wisely about the civil war. I must say that I would probably have found myself more of a cavalier than a roundhead, but there we are. However, there is an important point to make. If the civil war was about the proportionate balance between Crown and Parliament, the clauses inserted in the other place are, without over-egging this particular pudding, potentially as significant. If the Salisbury convention is to mean anything, something that passed the survey of the general election and a policy that commanded strong public support should not be challenged by the other place. I hope that we do not get involved in an overly long game of ping-pong with their lordships, because the view of the democratically elected House, certainly on this matter, must prevail.

[Matthew Pennycook]

When I drafted my notes for this speech earlier today, I did not comprehend that it was quite on an English civil war-type level of debate, but I will do my best.

Before I move on to my substantive comments, I will refer to the very interesting debate we had earlier about variability and balancing. It is worth returning to because—like so much of the debate on this issue, and not only in Committee and on Second Reading—we hear less about the costs of particular subsidies or how onshore wind forms part of our energy mix and more about the politics of onshore wind, which is really not what we are discussing when we consider what is the contentious part of the Bill.

Earlier, the hon. Member for Daventry raised the issue of intermittency, but I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde that he did so in a way that did not shed much light on the subject, because the notification of inadequate system margin event that he talked about—I believe that it was a NISM event in November, and incidentally it does not mean that the lights are about to go out, but merely that the National Grid would like to see a larger safety cushion of spare generating capacity being brought on to the grid, which is not an unusual practice for the industry—was not caused just by an extended period of low wind, although that was part of it. It was also caused by unexpected plant faults and losses, so it was not just the fault of wind. When one drills down into the costs of that NISM event, one finds that it was in the hundreds of thousands, and not the calamitous figures that we got in the press.

Similarly, I am sure that we can have an extended debate about base load and about whether the idea of large coal-fired or nuclear power stations for base load is outdated, as Steve Holliday, the CEO of National Grid, has himself argued.

However, what cannot be denied is that onshore wind is a flexible technology that helps National Grid to balance the network quickly, by ramping output up and down at times of constraint or system imbalance and, as the Royal Academy of Engineering has estimated, it requires no specific extra back-up until we hit 50 GW of onshore wind, which is five times the current level on the system.

When it comes to the costs of balancing to account for the increased variability, which is a product of moving towards a more decarbonised and flexible energy system, gas is far, far more expensive than wind. For 2014-15, 7% of the costs of balancing the grid were due to payment to wind. In the equivalent year, the balancing costs associated with gas amounted to £240 million, which is five times as much as the costs associated with wind. So we need to bring some sense to the debate about what these technologies do and, in a sense, approach it—as I hope the Government still do—in a technology-neutral manner.

By bringing the Committee’s attention to this point, I am only drawing attention to what I believe is actually the driving force behind the early closure of the RO and the Government’s insistence on reinserting these clauses, which is not a hard-headed calculation of what is required to balance the energy trilemma, or to meet the costs of controlling the levy framework; it is about the politics of the windy caucus and the understandable anger of constituents in parts of the country who have had onshore wind projects foisted on them when they do not support such projects.

As we have heard, onshore wind has been a success story. It is proven; it is mature; and its costs are coming down. That is precisely because of the conducive framework for investment that was provided by 10 to 15 years of energy policy consistency and a large degree of consensus about that policy. It is that consistency and the investor confidence that comes with it that the Government have played fast and loose with since May 2015.

The hon. Member for Daventry said that this whole debate turns on this point, and in a sense he is right to say so. However, to label it dancing on the head of a pin does him a disservice, given the number of people who have invested substantial amounts of money over long periods of time, because—as we heard from hon. Members before—the lead-in times for these projects go back years. Those people invested in those projects in good faith and they did not invest to see them close early.

I am very clear about the manifesto commitment. We are not talking about the localist aspect; there is no dispute about that. The manifesto is very clear that local people will have the final say. On the nebulous wording

“we will end any new public subsidy”,

it is clear that the renewables obligation is not a new public subsidy. It is an existing subsidy that was legislated for by the coalition Government in 2013, and investors were right to think that it would continue. As recently as 13 October 2014, the then Minister—now the Secretary of State—said that

“the RO will be closed to new capacity from 1st April 2017”,

and there have been other similar statements.