Oral Answers to Questions

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Solicitor General]

The CPS takes seriously its role in ensuring that prosecutions do come before the courts. As the hon. Gentleman will know, a cross-governmental review into rape and sexual offences is under way and has already completed its first stage of collecting evidence. We are now looking at the whole system for rape and other serious sexual offences to see how we can improve every stage, including getting more prosecutions and convictions.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I will not go into the details, but we have had a sensitive local case in which a victim of child sexual exploitation was not supported. A trial did not take place, through no fault of her own. What further action can the Solicitor General take to ensure that victims are supported at all stages of the process?

[The Solicitor General]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Last month, I visited the CPS areas of London North and London South and talked about those very issues. I also visited SurvivorsUK, a charity that deals with male victims of sexual abuse, to talk about how we can support people before, during and after the process, which is a critical time.

Oral Answers to Questions

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Thursday 23rd May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)]

8. What assessment he has made of the cultural importance of heritage to towns and cities throughout the UK.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

9. What assessment he has made of the cultural importance of heritage to towns and cities throughout the UK.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Michael Ellis)]

As set out in the Government’s heritage statement, heritage is an essential part of our cultural economy, our cultural landscape and our country. Our heritage is globally renowned and world leading. The importance of heritage to towns and cities includes the creation of a better place to live in, work in, and visit.

[Michael Ellis]

The Government’s comprehensive plans for high streets are a nationally co-ordinated initiative that will help high streets to adapt to change, and promote our heritage. Some £42 million of funding from the Government and Historic England will create dozens of high street heritage action zones, including Lowestoft, and £3 million will come from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and £15 million from the Architectural Heritage Fund to support social enterprise. Lots of money is going to heritage, as it should do.

[Victoria Prentis]

As it says in “As You Like It”:

“Time travels in diverse paces with diverse persons.”

Our cultural heritage is important. Banbury has a long cultural heritage, and I am delighted that the Government have pledged more than £60 million for the heritage high streets fund. How will we use local heritage to benefit our towns and cities?

UK Telecoms: Huawei

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

As the right hon. Gentleman says, our concerns about Huawei are at least in part due to the potential interlocking nature of what it does and what the Chinese state does. That lies at the heart of our concerns, hence the oversight mechanisms with which he is familiar. We will, of course, take full account not just of what he has said, but of all our other information when making our judgment. He will understand that the involvement of the intelligence and security agencies in that process is fundamental and integral, and it means that we can get a good sense of the sort of information he describes.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I am not encouraging my right hon. and learned Friend to comment on the substance of leak, but while that leak might become the subject of a criminal investigation, does he agree it is important that people both in and outside this House choose their words carefully when talking about what happened yesterday?

[Jeremy Wright]

I agree with my hon. Friend, as she would expect, and she speaks with experience on this matter. We cannot exclude the possibility of a criminal investigation, and everybody will want to take that suggestion seriously. We are all entitled to say what many of us have already said about the undesirability of this kind of leak, and it is perfectly proper for the House to express its concern in such a way.

Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) (Amendment) Bill

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 15th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

It gives me great pleasure to speak in this debate and to follow such powerful speeches. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) for the enormous amount of work that she has done. I was not able to speak on Second Reading, but she has made moving speeches on both occasions.

It is perhaps appropriate that on a Friday, we are talking about religion and its effect on our legal lives and our family lives. As I said in the previous debate, this is a very sad day for the world, as we have seen a horrific Islamophobic attack—it is a modern attack, and the unpleasantness of the filming as well as the planning really gets us where it hurts. It is good that occasionally we in this House can talk about religion and its effect on the way we live our lives, the way we love and the way we die. It is appropriate that we are talking about holocaust artefacts on such a day, though it is of course very sad.

As my right hon. Friend said, the Nazis wanted to annihilate a whole race, and getting at their possessions was a particularly pernicious way of doing that. Obviously, mass murder is the worst thing that can be done, but there are other means of annihilation, such as the non-registration of births.

[Bob Stewart]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend, but I want to reinforce the fact that the Nazis stole from anyone they did not like. Although they took mainly Jewish property, they also took property from other people; it is not just Jewish people.

[Victoria Prentis]

I accept what my hon. Friend says. One reason I became involved in the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism is my family’s Romany heritage. That is not something we talk about often, but it gives us a link in some small way to the horrors of what happened in Nazi Germany. I am also involved with the APPG for Gypsies, Travellers and Roma. It is important to think about what is done to races as well as individuals. Today, we are broadly talking about Jewish artefacts. The Nazis wanted to destroy the religion by destroying its possessions as well as its people. That is why it is important that, 70 years on, we are still thinking about this.

Possessions are very important to us. I have a ring that belonged to my granny, which she wore every day. I do not wear it every day, possibly because, as a jeweller once said to me, my lifestyle is slightly more hands-on than that of my granny. I do not think it would survive the wear and tear of the life of a Member of Parliament, but I enjoy wearing it, and it makes me feel close to her.

Even more precious personally, though certainly not in terms of money, is a coral necklace owned by my daughter that was passed down to her after being owned by seven generations of my husband’s family. We have a portrait of the lady to whom it first belonged. It is a rough and ready portrait, doubtless done by a jobbing painter, of a little girl wearing this very same coral necklace, with a cat. This is a lady whose name I do not even know, but I know that we feel close to her because of that artefact. Things mean a great deal to people, and that is moving for members of my family. The connection is very real, but it is so much more so when we know that that ancestor was murdered and that we can never meet their children—say, those of our great-aunt—because they never existed.

This Bill is on an issue that really gets us where it hurts. The Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act 2009 is clearly still needed. These artefacts are all over the place. When a race or group of people are destroyed, so many papers and documents get destroyed, and the people who would have inherited many of those artefacts are not born, so it is very difficult to prove ownership. People alive today may not even be aware that they have ownership of these articles, but it matters, and it is important, so I commend this Bill.

Oral Answers to Questions

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Solicitor General]

The hon. Gentleman knows that the Attorney General and I, as criminal litigators, have a long and deep interest in this issue. One of the newer challenges has been the rise of technology and the proliferation of telephones and other instruments that have to be examined in many cases. I will chair a digital summit in the months ahead, to try to develop innovative new ways in which we can assist the process. The disclosure issue, I am afraid, is a cultural issue of long standing. Not only the CPS but the police and other agencies have to change their ways and improve the position.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

What steps is my hon. and learned Friend taking to ensure that victims do not feel afraid or concerned about reporting crimes?

[The Solicitor General]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. She knows, in the context of disclosure, that we must be very careful to strike a balance so that it does not become a box-ticking exercise. In particular, in every case the necessity to seize telephones and other items from victims should be assessed very much on the evidence, rather than as a matter of course. I think we must do everything to make it clear to victims that they will get support and encouragement, rather than feel that the process is working against them in a way that can be just as traumatic as the crime itself.

Oral Answers to Questions

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)]

Nick Clegg seems to have landed on his feet since leaving this place and is now the government affairs officer or director or vice-president of Facebook, earning a million or two I understand—

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

A bit more.

[Michael Fabricant]

A bit more, I am told by a colleague sitting in front of me. Nick Clegg seemed startled at the idea that Facebook has any responsibility in this area when asked about it on television recently. Does my right hon. and learned Friend have any plans to speak with Mr Clegg about this—or is it Sir Nick? [Interruption.] Sir Nick.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

Tourists come to north Oxfordshire for many reasons, not least to shop in Bicester Village. Does the Minister agree that a tourism tax would not be beneficial?

[Michael Ellis]

I do. My hon. Friend may have seen an article by the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum. I was surprised that the director had time to engage with the subject of a tourism tax, on which I think he is wrong, but of course he is a former Labour Member and Labour MPs do like to tax as much as possible. The reality of the matter is that Bicester and other parts of this country benefit hugely from tourism, and we want to encourage it, not discourage it. There are 1.5 million jobs in tourism in this country, and Bicester attracts visitors from all over the world.

Leveson Inquiry

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely powerful case for just how much the Leveson inquiry looked into everything in this area, and it was followed by three police investigations. My central point is this. We looked into these things as a society. We had a comprehensive Leveson inquiry. We spent £48 million of taxpayers’ money doing so. As he said, there were criminal convictions as a result and some people were jailed. My job now as Secretary of State is to look at what the country needs for the future.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

Can the Secretary of State reassure me that the new regulatory framework is working well for victims and is much cheaper and easier than those regulations that were in force at the time of Leveson?

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, absolutely. I can tell the House, first, that we have a new independent self-regulator, IPSO; secondly, that it has introduced a low-cost arbitration scheme; thirdly, that it requires corrections, including multiple front-page corrections; and that we would like to see further action in strengthening it. What matters to this House in terms of having a free and robust press, whether we like every story or not—frankly, I do not like some of the stories about me, but I still want people to be able to write them—is that people have to write to hold the powerful to account. That means scrutinising this place in the robust way that the press does.

Oral Answers to Questions

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Trudy Harrison (Copeland) (Con)]

3. What steps his Department is taking to improve broadband and mobile phone coverage in rural areas.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

5. What steps his Department is taking to improve broadband and mobile phone coverage in rural areas.

[The Minister of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Margot James)]

Our ambition is for the UK to have better digital connectivity wherever people live, work and travel, which very much includes rural areas. Superfast broadband is now available to 95% of UK premises, and roll-out will continue to cover the majority of remaining premises. By 2020, the universal service obligation will give everyone the legal right to high-speed broadband at 10 megabits per second or faster.

[Margot James]

We are doing a great deal to help businesses and people in rural areas. My hon. Friend might like to campaign for greater awareness of the access that people in her constituency have to the internet, because it is now at 93%. As in many other constituencies, however, people are not taking that up, and I urge those who live in rural areas, where the access is there, to take it up.

[Victoria Prentis]

Last week, I held a meeting of larger employers in my constituency, and it became clear that one thing they feel is holding them back is the lack of a mobile signal between junctions 10 and 11 of the M40. Will the Minister work with me to improve that?