John Bercow
Main Page: John Bercow (Speaker - Buckingham)
Jonathan Ashworth
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Last Tuesday, in the urgent question on clinical waste, the Minister of State explicitly denied that the scandal was a result of a lack of incinerator capacity. When I asked him whether there was enough incinerator capacity, he said:
“The answer to that is, yes there is.”—[Official Report, 9 October 2018; Vol. 647, c. 35.]
You will have seen subsequently, Mr Speaker, in your copy of the Health Service Journal, that according to the minutes of a meeting of NHS Improvement officials held in August, they
“acknowledged there appeared to be a national market capacity issue”.
It turns out that the Environment Agency had said something similar back in August. This suggests that in fact the Government were aware of this and do accept that there is a clinical waste incinerator shortage. Has the Minister given you notice that he will come to make a statement to clear up this apparent contradiction and correct the record?
Mr Speaker
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that point of order. Of course I remember the exchanges to which he has referred. I have not, to date, been advised of any intention by anyone to come to the House to make a statement, but of course, as the hon. Gentleman knows well, every Member in this place, including every Minister, is responsible for what he or she says in the Chamber. In the event that anybody feels that there is a need for a correction, that Member must take the lead in bringing about that correction in the Official Report. I think that we had better leave it there for now, but meanwhile the hon. Gentleman has made his point forcefully.
Mr Speaker
And I have a feeling that it is about to be buttressed and reinforced by a Member with a notable constituency interest.
Yvette Cooper
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. The evidence that we have seen is that there is a growing gap between what the Minister told the House and the reality that we are seeing on the ground, including rumours that Mitie has neither the workforce, the sites nor the lorries to deal with the majority of this waste. We now have shipping containers in place at Pontefract Hospital, with no clarity about what will be put in them. The workforce at the Healthcare Environmental Services site in Normanton are being told nothing at all about whether they will be TUPE-ed, whether they have to carry on with existing work, or what will happen to their jobs. I am sure you will agree that that is deeply unfair on the workforce. Given that the Minister promised to make things better, and it appears that they may be being made worse, what other advice can you give us on how to get the Minister to provide more clarity to the House about what is happening?
Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady. The Minister will have heard what has been said, or if the Minister has not yet heard what has been said, the information about these exchanges will be transmitted, I think, extremely quickly.
The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) is a very experienced Member of the House. I will not say she is a veteran, for that would be wrong, but she is a very experienced Member—we came into the House together—and she will know that there are ways to ensure that a matter can be addressed as a matter of urgency in the Chamber. That cannot now happen today, but I rather imagine that the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), and the right hon. Lady will be expecting an update tomorrow. In the expectation but also potentially in lieu of such an update, they know what mechanism is available to them.
Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I wish to place on record that I omitted to declare an interest when I questioned my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on the 5G West Midlands bid. I asked what the benefits were for my constituency, but I failed to declare that my husband is the CEO of the company. While he is working as a volunteer, he receives no remuneration, but it has been brought to my attention that I should have mentioned that connection. I wish to correct the record, with your permission.
Mr Speaker
I very much appreciate what the hon. Lady has said. She has corrected the record extremely quickly, and I am confident that that will be accepted by the House in the spirit in which she has offered the correction. I thank her. I will leave it there for now, but I look forward to seeing colleagues erelong.
OFFENSIVE WEAPONS BILL
Bill to be considered tomorrow.
Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am grateful for you taking this point of order. I want to know why the House was not informed at the earliest opportunity that the Offensive Weapons Bill, a very important Bill, was not going to be moved. We have just found out that it has been rescheduled for tomorrow. I wonder why we and the business managers were not informed in a timely manner.