UK-EU Common Understanding Negotiations

Debate between Simon Hoare and Nick Thomas-Symonds

Wednesday 17th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

In his white shirt and red tie, the Minister is doing a very good impression of Santa making an early visit. The announcements that he has made this afternoon are—I think—to be warmly welcomed, and he is to be personally congratulated on the good faith and patience that he has shown in his conversations with Maroš Šefčovič and others. That is clearly paying dividends.

Does the Minister agree that those of us on the Opposition Benches who last week voted against the idiotic proposal from the Liberal Democrats for a customs union have been proved right and then wrong, because the evolution of the relationship within the guardrails of the existing arrangement are the way to go, preserving those new free trade deals and seeing them extended while encouraging businesses to trade with Europe?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

Absolutely. As always, the hon. Gentleman has made a sensible, well-informed contribution, and I am grateful for his kind words and his personal congratulation, which is deeply appreciated. He is entirely right: there is a set of guardrails that constitute this Government’s democratic mandate not to rejoin the single market or the customs union, or to go back to freedom of movement. We are exercising that independent trade policy, as has been seen in recent days in respect of the deal with South Korea. Within that framework, today’s announcement shows that the negotiations are progressing and delivering tangible results for the British people.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Simon Hoare and Nick Thomas-Symonds

Consideration of Lords amendments
Thursday 4th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

As the Leader of the House of Lords has set out in the other place, immediately this Bill is on the statute book a Select Committee will be created to look at those issues of retirement and participation. The hon. Gentleman is talking about politics as they stood in 1999. This Government were elected on a manifesto that delivered 411 MPs in 2024, and this Government are following that manifesto.

Across both this House and the other place, there has been broad consensus that the hereditary route to the House of Lords should end. I also make it clear, as Ministers have from this Dispatch Box and Labour peers have in the other place, that this is not a judgment on individuals. It is not a judgment on the work and contribution of individual hereditary peers; it is a judgment on the principle. Let me also say that there is no barrier to any hereditary peers—in the case of the Conservative party, through a party list—being nominated as life peers, should the Leader of the Opposition, for example, wish to do that.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) mentioned the very long period of time that his party has been anxious for and agitating about reform of the House of Lords. Is the creation of a future Select Committee really the sum of all that anger and agitation? As my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) has said, we could have seen a full picture of a modernised, reformed and accountable House of Lords that works to deliver bicameral scrutiny, but we do not have that. The Minister is asking us to vest hope in the creation of a Select Committee, with no timeframe attached to when it would report and no promise of future legislation. Surely, he must be as disappointed and unhappy with that situation as I am.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

It is great to see that the hon. Gentleman is disappointed that House of Lords reform is not going far enough. If he wants to talk about the 20th century and the length of time that his party was in power, I would say that it had every opportunity to bring about full reform of the House of Lords. Not only did the Conservatives bring about minimal reform, at best, but they blocked every attempt at major reform. It is difficult, therefore, to take their 2025 position seriously.

The point about the Select Committee is that we have had on the one hand accusations that the Government are acting in a party political way and, on the other, requests for the Government to do things cross-party. That is precisely what the Select Committee will do: it will give the opportunity to consider issues such as retirement age and participation. The debate in the upper House covered those matters across different parties. The Select Committee will be established within three months of Royal Assent. The hon. Gentleman asked about deadlines, and I can tell him that the Committee will issue its findings by next summer.