Awards for Valour (Protection) Bill

Debate between Stephen Doughty and Philip Davies

Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 24th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. New clauses 8 and 9, in many respects, go together. If we had a sunset clause, we would need to be able to measure the success, or otherwise, of the legislation, and the reporting set out in new clause 8 would help with that task. He is right to draw attention to the fact that, in many respects, new clauses 8 and 9, though not reliant on each other, flow nicely from each other.

I appreciate that that was a quick canter around the course of new clauses.

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I listened closely to the hon. Gentleman as he set out his new clauses, but I wonder whether he actually read the Official Report of the Public Bill Committee, where the Bill enjoyed strong support from Members on both sides of the Committee, including from former members of the armed forces. Many of the issues he raises have already been addressed, particularly those on mental health and family members wearing medals. Why is he continuing to frustrate this process?

[Philip Davies]

If the points had already been covered, my amendments and new clauses would not have been selected. They were selected because those points are not covered by the Bill. That is the whole point. I cannot table an amendment to do something that is already in the Bill, because it would not be an amendment. I am surprised that the hon. Gentleman has not grasped that basic point during his time in the House.

Let me now deal with my amendments. Amendment 1 seeks to remove clause 1(b). The Bill refers to

“something which has the appearance of being an award”.

It is one thing to have an offence relating to people wearing actual medals, but it is quite another to extend this to something with the “appearance” of a medal. The whole Bill is rather over the top, but this takes it one stage further. If someone can be guilty of a criminal offence by wearing, in an attempt to deceive, something that looks like something else but is not that thing, I worry where we are going with our legislation.

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[Philip Davies]

I thought that my hon. Friend was going to make a sensible point, rather than bandying about more accusations. I am trying to improve his Bill. The fact is that, by his own admission, he brought forward a Bill that was a bit of a dog’s breakfast, because he changed it radically in Committee. If he had had his way, his Bill would have gone through on the nod; no one would have said anything and it would have gone through in its original form, which he accepts was a dog’s dinner of a Bill; it is now half a dog’s dinner. I accept that he made some improvements in Committee, but just because he is on a tight timescale is no basis on which to pass legislation in this House. It cannot be appropriate to say, “Well, I know that it is not a very good Bill, that there are deficiencies in it and that there are lots of concerns with it, but, I tell you what, we are on a bit of a tight timescale so we will forget about all that, just nod it through and to hell with the consequences.” Are we saying that, if someone gets sent to prison and gets a criminal record when no one in this House ever intended that they should get a criminal record, then so be it—hard cheese? That might be the attitude that my hon. Friend takes, but it is not one that I take. We must take these provisions seriously.

[Stephen Doughty]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

No, I will not give way. The hon. Gentleman has not yet made any sensible contributions. He seems to talk a load of old nonsense, so I will press on with the whole point of my amendments, which is to try to turn this Bill into something worth while. We still have other days on which to consider other private Members’ Bills in this Session. I hope that we can conclude this if time allows.

[Stephen Doughty]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman.

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[Philip Davies]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Perhaps if the Bill had been drawn as narrowly as my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford is now trying to draw it, it may well have been acceptable to all concerned. Unfortunately, he did not do so, and decided to go way over the top to include all sorts of people who were never envisaged to be included originally. That is why we must try to sort out some of these issues.

[Stephen Doughty]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

No, I will not. I am going to crack on.

[Stephen Doughty]

You’re scared.

[Philip Davies]

The idea that I am scared of the hon. Gentleman is bizarre, particularly given that he did not even understand what an amendment was in his first intervention. He has a lot of learning to do.

I have dealt with the custodial sentence part of the Bill. Now, I come to the part on fines. I am trying to reduce the level of fines because they are disproportionate. With the way the Bill is drafted, it seems that somebody could be given an unlimited fine by the courts for this offence. Again, I cannot honestly see how an unlimited fine is appropriate for committing this offence, but that is what it would be in England and Wales following the changes to fines a few years ago. It would be rather different in Scotland and Northern Ireland, with a maximum of £5,000, which is still too high. Amendments 16 to 23 are about reducing the level of fine from unlimited to something more manageable. I have suggested a range of options. The lowest I have gone down to is £200, which is a level one fine in the courts, and I have gone up to a level four fine, which is £2,500. At least that sets a limit because an unlimited fine seems rather over the top.

Clause 1(4) provides that the Secretary of State may change the schedule of medals at any point. Amendment 24 would mean that the Secretary of State may not change the schedule of medals. When my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford introduced the Bill, he said that the challenge in drafting it was knowing where to stop. As I have said before, he may know where he wants to stop but, as with many things, where the legislation stops and where other people might want to stop are the most important. We should not encourage legislation giving the Secretary of State unlimited power to change the schedule willy-nilly. It obviously has the potential to apply to many more medals and other awards for non-armed forces personnel—and, in many cases, why not? But we should not be giving the Secretary of State that power. Amendments 25 to 27 are consequential amendments to that.

Clause 1(5)(b)(ii) states:

“The regulations may add an award to the Schedule only if it is awarded in respect of…a level of rigour significantly greater than might normally be expected in a non-operational environment.”

If the right to include medals in the future remains, it should only apply to those involving danger to life from enemy action, not

“a level of rigour significantly greater than might normally be expected in a non-operational environment.”

I am not sure who would be the ultimate judge of or who would determine the phrase

“greater than might normally be expected”.

Amendment 28 would deal with that issue.

Amendment 29 would delete the wide-ranging provisions regulations. Why do we need to hand over all these powers to make regulations that are in the Bill? Surely these things should be on the face of the Bill. Amendments 31 to 34 would delay the Act coming into force by two months, four months, 10 months or a year and 10 months respectively.

I have been through my amendments as quickly as I could. They would all make the Bill stronger and deal with some of the potential unintended consequences that were not envisaged when the Bill was conceived. I hoped that my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford would have taken them in the spirit in which they were intended. I could have gone on at greater length on every single one of those amendments, but I went through them all as quickly as I could. I hope they are helpful because I worry that if we are not careful, we will end up criminalising not the people who my hon. Friend wants to criminalise, but people who we never had any intention at all of criminalising. That is all I seek to avoid in this legislation, and that is a duty that we should take very seriously.

Giving someone a criminal offence is a serious matter; it is not something that should be taken lightly—it can have devastating consequences for people—and the same is true of sending people to prison. Yes, of course we want to expose Walter Mitty, but do we really want to criminalise and imprison Walter Mitty? That is where I draw the line with this legislation. If we think we are sending too many burglars and robbers to prison, surely the solution cannot be to send these people to prison, too.

[Gareth Johnson]

The main purpose behind the Bill is to protect veterans. It is intended to ensure that when anybody sees someone wearing medals proudly at a remembrance service or in any other sphere, they can have confidence that that individual is the legitimate article. That has always been my intention.

I find it grotesque in the extreme that certain individuals—we have had numerous examples of them—can parade in front of others and cause deep upset, hurt and ridicule to those who have actually served and those who have lost loved ones. It is grotesque to see that bravery undermined by those who do not have the courage to put their own neck on the block for our country.

It is because of that that I put forward the Bill. Legislation has worked very successfully in many countries around the world, and it worked successfully in the United Kingdom; in fact, legislation was originally introduced by Winston Churchill after the first world war. He said that when anybody sees a person wearing medals, that should radiate an opportunity to say, “There is a man in whom we can all have confidence and pride.” That is exactly the motivation behind my Bill.

I leave it at that. There is very much more that I could say, but I hope that we can make it at least to Third Reading.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Stephen Doughty and Philip Davies

Friday 5th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

Absolute rubbish.

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Gentleman says “absolute rubbish” from a sedentary position, but there is lots of evidence that that does happen. In fact, he makes my case for me. If he thinks it is rubbish, then let us set up a body to prove that it is a load of rubbish. What his party and the Government fear is a body that points out that these things are happening, and so they have done away with it, because it may be embarrassing for all these things to be out in the open. We should have a body, which this House voted for on Second Reading, to scrutinise objectively what the Government are doing to ensure that the money is being spent wisely. How on earth can anyone disagree with that? What is there to disagree with about ensuring that the money is spent wisely and for the purposes for which it was intended? Why does no one have the nerve to stand up and disagree with it? They would rather slouch in their seats and try to railroad this Bill through Parliament.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North mentioned the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. Chief Commissioner Graham Ward said:

“We saw very little evidence that the work DFID is doing to combat corruption is successfully addressing the impact of corruption as experienced by the poor.”

When the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) says “rubbish”, he is at odds with what the ICAI chief commissioner said about corruption. Indeed, the chief commissioner went on to say:

“Indeed, there is little indication that DFID has sought to address the forms of corruption that most directly affect the poor: so called ‘petty’ corruption. This is a gap in DFID’s programming that needs to be filled.”

When we have the ICAI making that point for us, it is perfectly obvious that signing up to a blank cheque of overseas spending needs to be properly monitored. The ICAI has made it clear that the Government are not doing that effectively at the moment. Now it seems that the Government do not want anybody to judge how well they are spending the money. It is completely unacceptable to taxpayers to expect them to hand over money without any proper scrutiny.

New clause 5 requires a calculation of overseas aid spending for the purposes of clause 1 and asks that the calculation of ODA includes the amount paid by the UK to the EU, welfare benefits paid to foreign nationals and welfare benefits paid to UK nationals living abroad. All those things should be included in the 0.7% target, as I do not see how they could not be described in one way or another as overseas aid.

Let me give an example to illustrate. We as a country hand over to the EU just short of £20 billion every year and I think that we receive back about £8 billion a year, although my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North is the expert in these matters. One purpose of the money that comes back to the UK is for it to be spent in the areas of greatest deprivation in the UK. That is what the European Union does and, fortunately I guess, the UK clearly does not have that many areas of mass deprivation in an EU context, which is why we get so little back compared with what we put in. The extra money that we have put in is then diverted around the rest of the EU, in effect to prop up the poorest countries and to try to bring their economies up to a level similar to that of the rest of the EU. That is the purpose of how the EU is funded: it is about taking money from the richest countries and handing it over to the poorest. If that does not constitute overseas aid, I do not know what does.

If the Minister had had the courtesy to speak for more than five seconds flat, we might have known his opinion on this, but I thought that the purpose of overseas aid was to take money from the richest countries in the world and transfer it to the poorest. That is exactly what our funding to the EU does on a European basis. That seems to me to be overseas aid, without any controversy. It therefore seems quite extraordinary that everybody now argues that that is not overseas aid, that it should not be counted as such and that it should be paid on top of it. That means that our overseas aid spending will be not 0.7% but considerably higher— probably 2% of GDP by the time we add in all these other factors.

There is a clear case that our money to the EU should be classed as overseas aid and therefore form part of this target. Then, of course, we have welfare payments paid to foreign nationals. In recent years, far too many people from other countries have come to this country and, to be honest, migration is at levels that we cannot cope with. We are regularly told by people who are in favour of all this immigration that all these people will not stay here but will go back so we should not worry about it at all. I do not believe that, but I am humouring those people. That is their argument, but if that is the case it is perfectly clear that people are coming over here to get some of our British money, as we might want to describe it, to take back to their much poorer country. That seems to me to qualify as overseas aid by anybody’s standards, because in some cases the money is passed back to the country of origin while the person is in the UK. We are basically handing our money out to benefit the economies of those much poorer countries and we give a considerable amount in that way.

The third part of the new clause involves welfare benefits paid to UK nationals living abroad. Again, this is a considerable amount. I cannot find the figures offhand, but from recollection I would say that in the region of £3.8 billion a year is given by the Department for Work and Pensions to UK nationals living in countries around the world. That money does not benefit the UK economy in any shape or form. It benefits the economy of the country where those people reside, so that is clearly UK taxpayers’ money going out to benefit the economy of the other countries around the world. It seems to me that that is also overseas aid according to anybody’s reasonable definition.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill (Money)

Debate between Stephen Doughty and Philip Davies

Monday 3rd November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise to support the money resolution and the case made by the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke). I am disappointed listening to Conservative Back Benchers, because it seems that they are attempting to undermine the clearly expressed will in this House in a vote on a Friday and to use this debate to pursue other agendas. That is disappointing because DFID helps some of the poorest people in the world, who are suffering from diseases such as Ebola and so on—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) is waving her report at me. I have read many reports about DFID’s effectiveness over the years, and the fact that those reports are available, that they are read by Ministers and by the Opposition and that questions are asked is testament to DFID’s openness and transparency in its programme. It is very misleading to quote selectively from those reports and not refer to the vast majority of DFID’s programmes, which are extremely effective in delivering poverty eradication and tackling some of the big challenges in our world.

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Gentleman seems to be missing the point of the money resolution: the Government are already spending the amount of money that he wants spent on overseas aid. That is not at issue here; we are being asked to sign a blank cheque to create a new bureaucracy and organisation which does not give any money to poor people around the world.

[Stephen Doughty]

It is more bluff and bluster from the hon. Gentleman: the type of rhetoric about blank cheques and throwing money at problems. If that is the view, would these Conservative Members say we should not be supporting the efforts against Ebola in west Africa, or we should not be helping to immunise children across the world, to educate people or to strengthen the Governments who need to be in place and to be strong to tackle the very corruption these Members are talking about?

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Stephen Doughty and Philip Davies

Friday 12th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right.

[Stephen Doughty]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether you could provide some guidance. Is it not the practice and the courtesy of the House for Members to give way to Front Benchers who wish to intervene? The hon. Gentleman does not seem to want to let anybody on the Opposition Benches intervene and there is a Front Bencher indicating—[Interruption.]

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[Philip Davies]

No, I will not.

The other point I want to make is that we ought to bear in mind the money that is spent versus gifts in kind. We as a country should be encouraging people to give money privately. Private money that is spent, where people raise money for particular causes, should be taken off the amount that is spent by the Government. There are lots of people who raise money for very good causes around the world.

[Stephen Doughty]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

No, I will not.

I can mention two organisations in my constituency in that regard: Mpika Relief Fund does a fantastic amount of work helping people in Africa, and there is one in Burley-in-Wharfedale that does a similar job. They raise money for very worthwhile causes. I very much support what they do; I have even made donations to them in the past. What they spend their money on is much more worthwhile than these grandiose schemes that the Government come up with, where Ministers like to go out and say how wonderful they are because they are indulging their largesse everywhere. I prefer the smaller schemes that are run bottom-up from organisations like the ones in my constituency.

It might even be a good idea for the Government to offer tax relief for people who want to go out to other countries to help with particular projects. I would welcome that.

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[Stephen Doughty]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

No, I am not giving way again. The last intervention was so poor that I do not think it justifies another one.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden mentioned opinion polls and public support for these things. A YouGov-Cambridge poll in 2011 made clear the public’s opinion. The following question was asked:

“Along with spending on the NHS, the international aid budget is the only area of government spending that is not facing cuts. The government has promised to increase this budget by one third to 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) in line with international agreements signed previously. Generally speaking, how favourable or unfavourable are you towards this policy?”

Some 56% of those asked were unfavourable, and only 9% considered themselves to be very favourable to it.

When asked if they would support or oppose a freeze on spending on international development—at the level as it was then in 2011—69% of people said they supported a freeze. Also, 69% of respondents said international aid fails to reach ordinary people in the developing world and is wasted by corrupt Governments; 49% believed international aid enhances the power of bad Governments in developing countries; and 55% thought it discourages Governments in developing countries from spending money on their own people.

Those statistics mirror the feedback that I get from my constituents when we talk about spending on overseas aid. They understand the fact that this country has no money, that we are borrowing and spending way beyond our means and that we have to tighten our belts. They therefore find it extraordinary that we are spending about £4 billion a year more on overseas aid than we were in 2010. That is completely nonsensical and unjustifiable.

The Bill proves that overseas aid does not work. I remember going to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) to discuss these issues a few years ago. I told him that I would have more sympathy for overseas aid if he adopted a policy in which we considered the situation in every country individually and decided how we could help it to better itself by establishing a programme that would last for a certain number of years, after which we would expect it to have sorted out its governance and corruption. After that point, our assistance would eventually tail off and the country would stand on its own two feet and head off into the future.

If that were the Government’s policy on overseas aid, I would have some sympathy for it. I would want to scrutinise it, of course, but it seems pretty reasonable. However, the Bill does not propose that we do that; it proposes the exact opposite. It says that we are going to spend the same amount of money every single year in perpetuity. That is basically an acceptance that our assistance will fail, that it will not turn around a country’s fortunes or deal with the causes of poverty, and that it will just be a hand-out to make a few middle-class, Guardian-reading, sandal-wearing, lentil-eating do-gooders with a misguided guilt complex feel better about themselves. It will do nothing to alleviate the real causes of poverty in those countries.

We know that the current system does not work. We have been pouring tens of billions of pounds a year into Africa, year in, year out. How much further forward is Africa today, compared with when we started pouring in those tens of billions of pounds? It is barely any further forward at all—