Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund
Debate between Steve Darling and Angela Eagle(5 days, 21 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Dame Angela Eagle
As I have mentioned, a predecessor fund—the UK seafood fund—was complained about massively because it was ringfenced and held at UK level. There were demands for it to be devolved, so we have devolved it and used the Barnett formula, and that is the way the allocations work. The Scottish Government can always spend some of their extra uplift—the largest uplift of a Scottish devolution settlement since devolution began—on supporting the fishing industry, should they so wish.
Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)
Brixham has the highest-value catch in England, yet it is in Torbay, which is the most deprived local authority in the south-west of England. How will local levels of deprivation colour the allocation of funding for England?
Dame Angela Eagle
Part of the fund and its use is certainly about trying to create a more vibrant and modern fishing industry that is resilient, and part of that must be social resilience. I look forward to any of the views of the hon. Gentleman’s constituents on how the fund could best be used, but we must remember that it is fishing-related, not general; it is there to modernise and make more resilient the UK’s fishing industry.
Asylum Seekers: Hotel Accommodation
Debate between Steve Darling and Angela Eagle(11 months, 1 week ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)
I am sure that the vast majority of Members accept that the new Government have inherited a complete and utter shambles of an asylum system, and are having to clear up another area of Tory mess. Part of that clearing up will involve sorting out and processing asylum applications promptly, so will the Minister give us more insight on how she is doing that? My area had asylum hotels imposed upon it by the last Conservative Government. How will the Government avoid principal holiday accommodation areas taking further such hotels?
Dame Angela Eagle
We certainly are having to get the system back up and running from a virtual standing start, as the hon. Gentleman rightly points out. That means that we have been able, as I said, to go up from processing only 1,000 asylum claims a month to nearly 10,000 a month. Those who have gone through the whole system and have received a grant, for example, need then to exit our asylum accommodation. That allows us to backfill and, in the end, to exit hotels. However, that is not an instant solution; the system has ground to a halt and we must redeploy resource to get it up and running again.