Climate Change Policy

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Claire Perry]

The hon. Gentleman is inviting me to make funding bids to my colleagues in the Treasury. Of course, I would want to make that bid. Innovation funding and co-partnership on innovation is a huge success and one we need in order to drive down costs and drive up deployment.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

None of us can doubt the energy and determination of the Minister to deal with this issue, but could I encourage her to take an hour out of her week to watch the fabulous Channel 4 documentary, “The Street”, about the very innovative way Cherwell District Council is allowing people to self-build houses in Bicester? I think she would be as surprised as I was at the way eco credentials become very important when people build their own home. Will she watch this documentary—it’s Kevin McCloud, so it won’t hurt her—and think more carefully about how to encourage people and local councils to embed eco values when they build?

Oral Answers to Questions

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Tuesday 20th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

14. What progress he has made on meeting the Government’s ambition to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a business.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

15. What progress he has made on meeting the Government’s ambition to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a business.

[The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Greg Clark)]

Our business environment is among the best in the world for small businesses. We have 16.3 million people employed in small businesses and the British Business Bank is supporting small businesses with over £5.5 billion of finance—and colleagues on all sides of the House will wish to support small business Saturday on 1 December.

--- Later in debate ---

[Greg Clark]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to suggest that microbusinesses, and indeed start-ups, sometimes face challenges in accessing finance. The British Business Bank has a programme to focus on microbusinesses. Start-up loans, from which 44 businesses in her constituency have benefited, are also important.

[Victoria Prentis]

Late payments are a real problem for small businesses. What steps is the Secretary of State taking to tackle that?

[Greg Clark]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and she will know that we are taking steps to reinforce in statute some of the measures that have been good practice across the industry. Indeed, the small business commissioner has been appointed to the prompt payment code compliance board to help with that.

Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Bill (Second sitting)

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Wednesday 7th February 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Andrew Griffiths]

I do indeed, Mr Gray; thank you for your sage advice.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

As always.

[Andrew Griffiths]

“Elders and betters” is the phrase that springs to mind.

Clearly, at that stage hon. Members will be able not only to question me, as the Minister at the Dispatch Box, about the content of that consultation, but if they so wish, to table their own amendments and make their case to the House. I think that is the most equitable way for us to proceed and it shows an understanding of the real and positive intentions behind the amendments tabled today. I am just getting some divine inspiration; I need to clarify something I said. The consultation will actually be launched on Third Reading in May, so the Government’s report will be published before the Bill completes its passage through the House. I hope that is clear, and that I have clarified my position.

Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Bill (First sitting)

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Patricia Gibson]

In the light of the Minister’s assurances, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

Schedule

Parental bereavement leave and pay

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I beg to move amendment 16, in schedule, page 2, line 15, at end insert—

“Such relationship with the child may include—

(a) the mother as identified on the child’s birth certificate,

(b) the father as identified on the child’s birth certificate,

(c) the step-parent of the child, by virtue of marriage or civil partnership with the mother or father at the time of birth, and

(d) the adoptive parent of the child.”

This amendment would give specific examples in the definition of a ‘bereaved parent’ for the purposes of taking parental bereavement leave.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 21, in schedule, page 2, line 15, at end insert—

“Such relationship with the child may include—

(a) a person with parental responsibility, as defined by section 3 (Meaning of “parental responsibility”) of the Children Act 1989, for the child, and

(b) a person who is the child’s foster parent.”

This amendment would give examples in the definition of a ‘bereaved parent’ for the purposes of taking parental bereavement leave. This would include foster parents.

Amendment 22, in schedule, page 2, line 15, at end insert—

“(2A) For the purpose of this section “foster parent” means—

(a) a local authority foster parent within the meaning of the Children Act 1989,

(b) a person with whom a child has been placed by a voluntary organisation under section 59(1)(a) of that Act, or

(c) a private foster parent within the meaning of section 53 of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006.”

This amendment is consequential to Amendment 21 and provides a definition of foster parent.

Amendment 17, in schedule, page 5, line 26, at end insert—

“Such relationship with the child may include—

(a) the mother as identified on the child’s birth certificate,

(b) the father as identified on the child’s birth certificate,

(c) the step-parent of the child, by virtue of marriage or civil partnership with the mother or father at the time of birth, and

(d) the adoptive parent of the child.”

This amendment would give specific examples in the definition of a ‘bereaved parent’ for the purposes of taking parental bereavement leave.

Amendment 23, in schedule, page 5, line 26, at end insert—

“Such relationship with the child may include—

(a) a person with parental responsibility, as defined by section 3 (Meaning of “parental responsibility”) of the Children Act 1989, for the child, and

(b) a person who is the child’s foster parent.”

This amendment would give examples in the definition of a ‘bereaved parent’ for the purposes of taking parental bereavement leave. This would include foster parents.

Amendment 24, in schedule, page 5, line 26, at end insert—

“(3A) For the purpose of this section “foster parent” means—

(a) a local authority foster parent within the meaning of the Children Act 1989,

(b) a person with whom a child has been placed by a voluntary organisation under section 59(1)(a) of that Act, or

(c) a private foster parent within the meaning of section 53 of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006.”

This amendment is consequential to Amendment 23 and provides a definition of foster parent.

[Victoria Prentis]

Given that this is the first opportunity I have had to speak, I pray your indulgence, Mr Gray, as, like other Members, I thank people for the enormous work that has gone into the Bill. I thank the Government for their support. I also thank the Treasury in the form of a former Minister who is sitting here. Some of my happiest moments during my time as an MP have been when I see “money resolution” attached to a Bill and think, “This is really going to happen.”

The Bill is very exciting for those of us who started the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss in the middle of the night in the Tea Room during our first months in this place, along with the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), who is not here. It was lovely to be joined later on in our journey by the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran. We were glad to have her on board. The Bill is an exhibition of what we have been trying to achieve. In some cases, that has gone on for many years outside this place. It is exciting to be here and to have got this far.

The amendments are simple. They merely seek to identify a parent. One might have thought that was obvious, Mr Gray. I do not need to explain it further. I had a brief conversation with the hon. Members for Swansea East and for Gower earlier. It is nice to see Swansea so well represented on this Committee. My grandmother, like Mrs Griffiths, is an avid follower of parliamentary proceedings. She and the Gower will be very proud that we are all here. She feels very strongly about this issue, too.

The hon. Ladies from Swansea make a powerful point that foster parents should possibly be included in the definition of a parent. I am happy to leave that to the Government. This is a framework Bill, and I am happy for the definitions in it to mirror those in other such Bills. I say that as the very proud Member for Banbury, who has Adoption UK in her constituency. I am particularly live to the issues faced by adoptive and foster parents, and it is important that we include those who should be properly included in the Bill. I, too, am sorry that we did not have the discussion far enough in advance to ensure that we had one amendment on the amendment paper. With that in mind, I ask that you consider the amendments together, Mr Gray.

[The Chair]

The answer to the hon. Lady is that amendment 16 is being considered alongside amendments 21, 22, 17, 23 and 24. They are all grouped together, which is practical.

--- Later in debate ---

[Carolyn Harris]

In the interests of the Bill, I will not press my amendment to a vote.

[Victoria Prentis]

I will withdraw my amendment, but I ask the Minister to consider carefully the complicated lives that people now lead, and to consult the relevant agencies, such as Adoption UK and fostering organisations, about the proper wording that should be included in the Bill.

[Andrew Griffiths]

I am very happy to make that commitment.

[Victoria Prentis]

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Kevin Hollinrake.)

Budget Resolutions

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) when she speaks so passionately about education. I must confess that her remarks about the Prime Minister have encouraged me to focus my speech on house building, which the Prime Minister and her Chancellor quite rightly view as the most important issue facing us.

For my constituency, the biggest excitement from the Budget is, of course, the funding to support Oxfordshire’s statutory spatial plan, which commits to 100,000 new homes by 2031. Cherwell District Council is the national leader in house building—an achievement only made possible by strong local leadership and the sheer hard work of the many volunteers who got our local plan adopted. I see a new finished house almost every day when I return home from Bicester North station, and three houses a day are currently finished locally. I built my own house; it is what we do in our area.

I hope that £30 million a year for five years will help to alleviate the pressure on our infrastructure by enabling us to move forward with larger projects such as the London Road crossing. When we talk about infrastructure, we so often mean roads and railways, but locally we are learning on the job that infrastructure means so much more than that. Those on the Treasury Bench will be pleased to learn that vast products and expenditure are not the only way forward when we look to build new communities. It is noticeable that the residents of well-built houses are happy, and more effort needs to be put into ensuring high standards in building across the board. This is a no-cost measure that the Government are working on.

Where we do need to invest for growth, it does not need to be in enormous, prestige products, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) outlined. House builders need to deliver on time. Even when they do, councils must be prepared to spend relatively small sums to alleviate the difficulties caused by enormous growth—for example, for around five years of stretched budgets while new schools are created. Children do not arrive in neatly packaged classes of 30 four or 11-year-olds, and existing schools also suffer while numbers are in flux.

I share the concern of my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) that GP services in high-growth areas need small amounts of additional funding to tide them over in times of enormous growth. My hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), who is on the Front Bench, will appreciate that people seem to need their GP more when they move to a new area, to sort out their existing medication and to deal with difficulties in changing specialists. We need to ensure that the infrastructure spending on such issues is readily available.

Mapping needs to be done before the build. Post boxes and street lamps should be provided without the intervention of an MP. Development can only be a positive experience if we bring hearts and minds along with us. I am afraid that closing maternity services at our local Horton General hospital at the same time as building 23,000 new houses does not sit well with us locally. Many new houses in our area have three or more bedrooms, and it would not come as a surprise to learn that some couples want to have babies to fill those new rooms.

Finally, and quite separately, a high point of the Budget for me was the announcement of a consultation into the horror of single use plastics. I encourage everybody in the Chamber to get out their phone, look at the App Store and add the Refill app; it tells users what to do and helps to get rid of single use plastics.

Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Bill

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 20th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

What an honour it is to follow the hon. Member for Lincoln (Ms Lee).

We are an example of employees, as it were. You are not our employer, Madam Deputy Speaker, but you are somebody with authority over us making adjustments to cope with grieving parents. We have very kindly been called at the beginning of this debate, because that really does help.

It is an enormous pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake). I am very pleased to have worked with my hon. Friends the Members for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach) and for Colchester (Will Quince), and the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), over the past couple of years on coping with the loss of a child and on how we can change the law, as well as change the conversation in society as a whole. It is therefore an enormous pleasure to speak as a co-sponsor of this Bill. I will not detain the House any more than I absolutely have to because we want to get on with it and get it passed.

My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester did a lot of the spadework last year with his ten-minute rule Bill. I am sorry that that did not progress, but very pleased that the Government have had the opportunity to make a manifesto commitment to bring about this area of change. To me, as a former Government lawyer, the most exciting word in the Bill is “pay”. It is great that the Government is going to put its money where its mouth is and really support bereaved parents and their employers to cope when something very tragic happens. This Bill is long overdue. Historically, it has been down to the employer to decide how bereaved parents are treated. Although I have had excellent and supportive care from my employer, I know that that is not the case for everyone. I was sorry to hear of the examples that my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton raised.

Grief can, to a certain extent, be managed. That is something that I was told by my consultant soon after I gave birth, and at the time I thought it was a ridiculous idea that anyone could ever put grief into a box and raise the lid only when it suited them. However, the similarity of experience among those who are bereaved is quite astounding. Grief is something that can be managed, and life can go on after something dreadful. It is so important that politicians and the Government put in place the legal mechanisms to enable that to happen as easily as possible.

In the early days, bereaved parents may well, depending on the circumstances, be suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder—they will certainly be suffering from shock—and they might need to tell and retell their story. They will have to deal with funerals and administration. They might have to deal with the police, inquests and all sorts of ghastly and unpleasant registration that no one thinks about before it happens to them.

It is particularly good that the grief of fathers is recognised in the Bill, because they have traditionally been overlooked. We know the very sad statistics about the high incidence of marital breakdown following a tragedy. Anything we can do to assist families to stay together must be done.

In the all-party group on baby loss we have worked very hard on the bereavement care pathway, and I am thrilled that we have brought the Government along with us. I think that counselling is a very valuable part of the recovery from a tragedy such as this, and anything we can do to build that into employment practice is worth doing. I was very lucky; I had a very supportive employer in the civil service. I had a job I loved, and I had sympathetic and imaginative colleagues. My own experience of grief certainly made me a better manager when the time came for me to help the people I worked with to manage their own tragic situations.

I do think that there is a role for good bereavement practice at work. I found it very helpful to know who knew what had happened, so one thing I introduced as a manager was to get everybody to sign a card that was given to the bereaved person as they returned to work, so that it was obvious that everybody knew what had happened and everybody acknowledged the extent of the tragedy. That enabled us all to move on and to have conversations, if appropriate—or not, if appropriate.

There are many things that employers can do to ease the burden, and I think the ACAS policies are a great place to start. It is important to recognise that members of staff will need extra support, possibly for many years. Anniversaries are difficult, although I think we often build them up in advance to be worse than they are on the day; they do not turn out to be quite as bad as we think they will be. We can all imagine scenarios that may be particularly difficult for those who have lost a child, including future pregnancies and the illness of other children in the family. A hospital visit of any kind can be very stressful for somebody who has been traumatised in hospital. I call on employers to do everything they can to try to imagine what it is like.

This is, however, a happy day for us. I offer many congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton, and to all of us who are supporting this Bill, I say, “Thank you.”